Luke Lundin has been commissioned to write a piece of music about nature and the environment for Emergent: A music legacy.  Over the last couple of months we have been working together on developing his production skills, and exploring accessibility issues around his chosen software (Ableton Live and Reason).  We recorded the video blog below during a session recording his commission track.

A message from Luke

Hi guys, here is my video blog in its full glory. Please enjoy, and feel free to write comments if you like.  I will be performing this piece, called the Angle of Looking, at the Bath Festival on the 19th May.

Thanks to the Emergent commission, I am now, with the help of Drake Music, back on the social media circuit as @lukelundintunes.  I have recorded a series of videos of my tracks, with a tweet going out every week showcasing my work.  All retweets are welcome.

Peace.

Transcription

My name is Luke Lundin, and I’m 33 years old. I’m part of the the Drake Music commission programme on nature and the environment.  My aim from this commission is to gain recognition as a musician in my own right. I am a disabled musician, but my aim is to be recognised as a musician first, and not necessarily with a disability, although disability is part of me.

I’ve been working with music technology on and off since the age of eight years old. It’s very time consuming; it’s a method that I’ve developed myself. So what I’ll do is I’ll write the sections of my piece in blocks, let’s say, and, you know, like a melody here, a drum beat there, and I’ll combine them by mapping each section onto a key on a keyboard.  Then I will trigger those parts during the playing of the piece.

If there was any particular aspect I was aiming towards, I think I’d say the tension and discord that the particular subject matter of nature and the environment is creating at the moment.  Global warming is very emotive at the moment, and you see in the news with how much coverage it’s getting, how much difference of opinion it’s causing.  I’m not saying my piece is about global warming, but I wanted to get across that tension, that fear, that sort of pressure, you know.. that everything’s at breaking point.

The one way that tension is put across, is by the passion of the drums, and the just the pure strength that it gives across.  The power — it’s powerful.  But I wanted to balance that out with some gentle subtle bits in the track, where it’s..nature is all about delicacy, it’s all about beauty, it’s all about love..I wanted to put across that beauty, that fragility.

I have to confess that doing music practice such as this is very much an individual thing, so when you’re working, it can be very isolating. So why programmes such as this one help so much, and a commission as such as this one helps so much, is because I’m able to get the help and approaches towards working that I wouldn’t otherwise get. You know.. for example, a very basic thing was until recently I couldn’t get my work recorded so that once I’d done it, I couldn’t then record it, so it was there for all time. You know.. that’s what this commission/project has helped me achieve, and along with many other things hopefully that I haven’t yet found out.

Watch one of Luke’s  Twitter demos here:

Emergent: A music legacy is supported by Help Musicians UK.  It is designed to open up new opportunities for disabled musicians to develop their portfolios in terms of new commissions and training opportunities to work in music education.