Allsorts

The Allsorts project is a music progamme for young people based at Z-Arts in Hulme.

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Allsorts Christmas Showcase

Hey all, Tell your friends and family about the Allsorts Christmas Showcase!!

This year, on December 12th, the young people at Allsorts will be putting on a show at Z-arts!! The Allsorts Christmas Showcase is gonna be their last show of the year, don't miss it.

There'll be Mc'ing, singing, Incredible music from Hip-Hop to Rock, Funk and Soul. The show starts at 16:30, so come along and support these incredibly talented young people.

On the day of the show the young people will also be releasing recordings of some of the brilliant songs they've written throughout the year online here: https://allsortsmusic.bandcamp.com/

Get online and get to Z-arts on December 12th, it's gonna be a great show!!

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Double O'Connor's track from the Movement to Movement project!

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Movement to Movemnet a track by Flo-Jo from our dance project!

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Movement to Movement

Movement to Movement was our last musical movement project, which took place from the beginning of Oct 2014 to Dec 2014. This was our biggest and most ambitious project to date!

For this project we partnered with the very talented choreography Rhys Fagon and he worked very closer with our young people for 10 weeks. 

The brief for Movement to Movement was for the group to create music specifically for dancers to perform to and as this was the last of the musical movements we decided that all the pieces created would be showcased in a large scale performance at the end of the project. 

In the first session Rhys introduced the group to the project and got them to start thinking about the relationship between music and dance and encouraged them to think about how different musical & performance elements such as, tempo, rhythm, genre, improvisation and stage presence are essential when looking at how these two art forms relate. Rhys even got our participants to do a bit of dancing themselves to push them out of their comfort zone and to get them to start thinking like dancers. 

Our young performers then began working on their tracks and developing their pieces. Rhys came back for a review session halfway through the project and also led a masterclass session, where Rhys got the participants to think about their own performance techniques and how they could become better performers, Rhys also wanted them to incorporate an improvised piece in the final show, which they started to device.  

The final performance was held in the Z-Arts professional theatre space, which seats nearly 300 people. There were 4 professional dances, including Rhys himself who came down on the day and performed to the musical pieces. All the performances were completely improvised by the dancers, which added an element of excitement to the performances and the Allsorts group fully embraced performing the improvised pieces and really enjoyed themselves!

You can check out some of the tracks from the project, which we'll post up in the next few weeks and make sure you keep an eye for the Allsorts short film about Movement to Movement and the other projects!

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Another track from the Immerse project by Eleanor Every & Casey Birks inspired by the Shakespeare play Macbeth.

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An instrumental track from The Immerse project by Funny Bone on the Whammy Bar, inspired by the theme ‘Ocean’.

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Immerse

Immerse was by far the most challenging of all the musical movement projects for our young performers but it was good to see them doing something on the project that brought them out of their comfort zone. 

During the Immerse project we had the opportunity to work with the award winning design company 4D Creative:http://www.4dcreative.co.uk/ who specialise in the creation of immersive experiences, through creativity, design and leading technology.

They set our participants a brief to create music to feature in their 4D pop up, which they use for corporate events and in school workshops. Our young people had to create music inspired by different themes e.g. war, fairy tales, Shakespeare, etc.  

The first session was led by Ines and Lauren from 4D Creative who came in with the 4D pop up and our young people were able to explore it and get an idea of how their music would work in the pop up. They were also introduced to the different themes they had to work with and were encouraged to pick one or two of these themes and began storyboarding ideas and thinking about what images they were going to choose to feature along side the music they created. 

They spent the next few weeks searching and choosing images that were not copyrighted and you can check out some of these images which we previously psoted.  After they had chosen these images they began working on their musical pieces. Some of young people did struggle at first because like the Score project we wanted to push our young people to not just stay in their comfort zone and write songs with a normal song structure but to build on their composition skills and write instrumental and abstract pieces, which they did do very successfully.

Our young performers were able to come up with a mix of professional musical pieces, which they showcased in the 4D pop to invited family friends in July 2014. You can check out some of the tracks they created from the Immerse project, which we’ll be posting in the next few weeks. 

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Here are some of the images our young people have chosen to represent the themes they will be creating music to for Immerse project and which will also feature in the final performance. 

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Check out the picture from our Skatepark gig!!

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Pictures from the first session of the Immerse project!

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Skatepark

Skatepark was our shortest  musical movementproject, which took place from mid march to the beginningof May 2014.

For this project our young people were given the task of putting on a site specific performanc/gig at a Skatepark and they also had to write songs which wouldbe suitable for the show. We collaborated with Projekts MCR a local Skate park for young people, located underneath the Mancunion way flyover.

In the first week of theproject the participants took a trip to the Skatepark, to check out the venue and to talk to some of the skaters that theywould be collaborating with to get an idea of what type of music the skaters were into and what they enjoy skating to. They also did a mini recce so they could start thinking about where the stage would in relation to the audience members and skaters.  

This project was more intense than the previous two as the Allsorts only had five weeks to write and perfect the songs and plan the show, but this deadline just made our young performers work harder to finish their songs in time. Some of the young people even managed to finish two or more songs during the project.

They also decided that because of the kind of venue and type of performance they were going to put on it would be best if all of the songs were performed live with the band, instead of an acoustic set or using backing tracks. Although this did put more pressure on the band to learn more many songs, they rose to the challenge and managed to learn and arrange each of the songs by the performance day.

The day of the performance proved to be a huge success, with a good turnout of family & friends! You can check out some of the pictures we took at the gig in our next post!

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Make sure you don't miss the performance for our next project Skatepark, which will be taking place on 10th May from 6-8pm at the Projekts Mcr Skatpark. It's going to be great! Please reblog!

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Allsorts first visit to the Skatepark!

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Score

Score was our second Musical Movement project, which ran from January to March of 2014. In this ten week project, our young people were set a brief to write a film score or soundtrack for films that are out of copyright. This was going to be a challenging project for our participants, as we really wanted to push them in terms of their musical and writing abilities and get them to try something new!

In the first week, they were introduced to film composition by Mark Ashmore, a professional filmmaker who runs his own film company called Future Artists. In the session he showed them some examples of classic film scores,including Duel of the Fates (from the Star Wars soundtrack) and the Rocky theme. Our young people discussed what made these soundtracks and film scores  so memorable and the also considered what instrumentation and production techniques they were likely to use for their compositions, depending on the context of the film clip.

Also during this time we were searching for outdated films clips that were appropriate for our young people to compose to, which was proving to be challenging as quite a lot of the films we came across were not films we felt our young people would want to work with. However, we did eventually come across some films that we felt would work, which were Charlie Chaplin 'The Kid', 'Night of the Living Dead' (1968) and 'Brother from Another Planet'. These films worked really well with what we were trying to achieve on the project.

We also thought it would be useful for our participants to learn about the importance of sound effects in films so we decided to run a loop pedal session lead by our facilitators where they created soundscapes and sound effects to film clips. We also had a masterclass session with film composer Danni Skerritt who was introduced to us through Future Artists. Danni is an up and coming Dj and music composer with some of his work appearing on T.V adverts/series. He told the young people about how he got into the music industry and he also showed them his portfolio of compositions and gave them some tips on how to improve what they had created so far. This was a really useful session for our participants as it help them think about how they could take  the different musical skills they were learning on project and turn it into a career.

The project ended with another sharing event, where our participants performed their compositions live to their chosen film clips and we also screened the produced track alongside the film clips. The performance went down very well with the audience and our particpants received positive feedback from their family and friends who came to watch.

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An Irish Gaelic spoken word track by Double O’Connor

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Carry Me Home a song translated in French for the Mother Tongue Project by Eleanor Every & Casey Birks

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Demonios a track by the Allsorts band Funny Bone on the Whammy Bar for the Mother Tongue project. These guys had fun translating their song to Portuguese!