This Must Be The Place – R’n’D

This Must Be The Place

Ah, Grassington. Lovely Grassington. Where would we all be without Grassington with your bleak moorside, chocolate box village square, dog and walker friendly country pubs and your AMAZING FESTIVAL!!! We’re working with the awesome Grassington Festival once more this year on a new project “This Must Be The Place”. We’ve a good relationship us and Grassington Festival, we’ve arrived atop an double decker, we did our first “A Band Anyone Can Join”, worked with schools through to what they use to call “Old Folks’ Homes” and played the festival bigtop. This time, we’re back to do something a bit different for us.

Turns out, thinking’s tiring!

This week we’ve been squirrelled away in a bunk-barn, mainly thinking, but also busily writing new music, working tech out, speaking with todays locals, and to those who have left the area, orienteering around Grassington’s favourite places, and working out how to make a thing (not simply “a song” or “a record”) about this place. Funded by Great Place, and with support from Grassington Festival, “This Must Be The Place” will capture a moment, and through the roots to Grassington’s very soil, take festival-goers through a sonic portal to another time.

We don’t want to reveal too much before we’ve got the thing finalised, but here’s some snippets of binaural location recordings we made this week. “Binaural!?! What’s that?” Binaural recording is made with two microphones positioned where human ears are, either side of a real, or dummy head. This takes advantage of the acoustic properties of the head (ear shape which causes a cancellation of high’s from the rear, time differences between sound arriving at left and right ears and the frequency cancellation of a human head (head shadow). Binaural recordings give a 3 dimensional representation of space.

N.B. Binaural recording effects only work on headphones!

Other things

We’ve lots more to tell you about… we’re soon to be choiring ourselves joyous working with Dumfries Community Choir for our re-scheduled Big Burns Supper show, Bring The Happy is back off to Kazakhstan, we’ve got more festivals to talk about, and a tour in the autumn… but that’s for another blog. For now, why not pop on some headphones and have a listen as you flick through the image gallery we’ve carefully constructed to exclude all the photos of us in the pub.