#I guess you will note that I use different punctuation in Swedish

[annyinacastle]

Snippet (Swedish + English)

On Friday evenings I take the time and effort to, instead of writing, translate Blood of Destinies Rewritten into my native language, Swedish.

In part, this is because I want all of my work to be available in both languages (and I'll send the Swedish editions to publishers, while the English editions are going to be self-published, generally speaking).

It's also helping in making edits because I need to rethink sentences and sentence structure. I always originally draft in English these days. I'd probably do that for things like essays and such as well, even if I had to translate it later. (Note that I'm a translator though.)

So here's a snippet from this week's translation, in Swedish first, and then in English. The Swedish snippet is in its baby stage and is unedited and does need some work, lol, while the English got through some work once before I started my translation project, but obviously needs work too.

Swedish

Beröringen var förvånansvärt försiktig och häpnadsväckande kall, lindrande och smärtsam på samma gång. Trots detta var flickan fast besluten att inte visa någonting, för att inte inte förolämpa kejsarens klan. Prinsen tog hennes haka och lutade hennes huvud för att kunna se henne bättre.

»Vad obarmhärtigt.» Prinsen uttryckte sitt missnöjde och studerade den rött svullna kinden. »Sade fader kejsaren åt dig att du ska slå de vackraste flickorna? Att slå dem tills de är gräsliga att se på?»

»N-nej, självklart inte, Ers Nådiga Höghet. Det var ett misstag, ett misstag.»

Prinsen släppte flickans »Så bråttom han har att förklara att det var ett misstag.»

English

The touch was surprisingly gentle and astoundingly cold, simultaneously soothing and painful. Yet the girl was determined not to show anything, lest she offended the Imperial Clan. Taking her chin, the Prince tilted her head to get a good look at her.

“So ruthless.” The Prince tsked while studying the red and swelling cheek. “Did Father Emperor instruct you to hit the prettiest girls? To beat them until they’re ugly?”

“N-no, of course not, Your Royal Highness. It was my mistake, my mistake.”

The Prince let go of the girl. “So quick to declare it was a mistake.”

[makeitlookliketheydidit-blog]

one

GT: I want to tell you about four records that I bought the other day, why I wanted them and how I sampled them. Jesmond Oxfam is a draw, has been ever since I moved. Not sure why it’s so good; sometimes during the summer months a bunch of books that I’d have recommended in lectures turns up, or, even better, books on subjects I’ve taught but not yet acquired or read – that’s how I got my copy of Jay-Z Decoded, complete with its fancy sachet-packaging; I’ve not read it yet.

Yeah, so the section for pop music books often has really good stuff in it, so that tends to be where I head straight away. I’m really interested in recent mainstream pop star biogs at the moment – I’m not even sure why, to be honest; it started out with me searching for Nicki Minaj biographies, but recently I’ve bought one on Tiny Tempah (marketed for a pre-teen readership, I’d guess) and one on Lady Gaga which looks quite good, actually, written by a journalist (Helia Phoenix) whose chief interests are ‘experimental electronica [and] Kevin Smith movies’ according to the fly-leaf bio-note.

I almost never bother with vinyls these, however, although I still predominantly sample from them, usually sourcing from the records I have to hand (I’ve got a few hundred in the house that I acquired for nothing since the rest were carted to Wales for the Armstrong refurb upheaval). Occasionally, though, when the bookshelves have nothing new on them, I do idly flick through whatever is in the ‘New Stock’ section. The other day I did that and I found a handful of LPs by Soul/R&B singers from the ’80s, a period I loosely/lazily refer to as Boogie and Electro Soul. ‘Boogie’ is definitely a term that has become standard of late, maybe always was for people in the know. I absolutely love that moment in African American pop, the period where Hip Hop was rapidly becoming the dominant force and a market evolved for musicians and audiences who still wanted songs (rather than beats & rhymes), but also felt the need not to be left behind in that now-hackneyed post-Disco soundworld of high-cost studio productions replete with large orchestras directed by industry vets. Boogie was also responding to the rise of synth pop, so much of its sound was made up of futuristic arrangements with terse, angular synth-bass lines. I’d love to spend some time trying to investigate how and why the snare drum suddenly became such a preoccupation during this time. I treated myself to Def Leppard’s Hysteria the other day and the same thought occurred to me: those heavily gated, sometimes monster-reverbed snare hits became a synecdoche for ‘80s production’ per se, forever dating the music, yet clearly there was something about them at the time that really turned people on…

Anyway, I actually love this music to listen to for itself, but it’s also currently my favourite source for sampling beats to use in either my solo stuff, or, increasingly in YEAH YOU. When we started out in 2013, our first few weeks’ worth of sessions were extended jams with me on the Microsampler and Elvin (the Ekasilicon) on either a Casio or the Microkorg. Those recordings are insane and, even though they totally didn’t satisfy our needs at the time, they do now have a retrospective charm for all their unbridled chaos. Point is that after a few weeks we settled on the Monotribe + FX formula that has sustained us for most of the time since. Except recently, when we were being asked to play for a full 60 minutes at Borealis, I took the Microsampler on tour to Norway with us so that we’d have a source of material to leap into suddenly should the momentum decrease with the Monotribe/Kaoscillator set-up. It turned out to be a brilliant way of completely altering the vibe mid-set, even mid-song, while opening up the possibility of reference (sometimes ironic) such as the slowed down Calvin Harris/Rihanna ‘We Found Love’ sample we used for Counterflows, which went down well, and the Michael Jackson ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’ loop with Hip Hop scratches that dominated the Sensational art shop set.

My approach at the moment is very straightforward and is driven simply by the vinyls I happen to have to hand at the moment, namely those Boogie/Electro-Soul records plus a whole bunch of contemporary classical stuff (Classical Avant Garde) mostly by relatively unknown composers from the 70s and 80s who were funded and released either by academic institutions or Arts Council-style state funding; finally, some kind of vocal sample, either my own or from a folk record or something:

• sample a couple of loops from a given song (to provide punctuation, modulation or contrast); these will usually be on adjacent keys, for obvious reasons • on the next couple of keys I’ll bring in something from either the modern classical stuff or voice – the idea being that neither have a groove defined rhythm to interfere with whatever the other loop is

It’s not like it’s even a good method, just a lazy habit born out of having to rush or simple convenience.

All of which as lead-up to actually discussing the samples themselves. I want to tell you about four different grooves, and what kinds of resonance they have with me alongside a historical, contextual continuum that I’ve been a part of as a listener and player since whenever I started.

The first LP I sampled from was this thing by Madleen Kane, Don’t Wanna Lose You (Chalet, 1981). I went for this straight away probably for two reasons: the close-up portrait on the cover was of a white artist – everything else I bought was by black artists, significance being, I guess, that there’d be something slightly over-reaching or off-kilter about a project that tries to pitch a white artist into a very competitive field otherwise dominated by blacks because their audience was either predominantly black or the dance floor; secondly, the name ‘Madleen’ gives you a jolt of Europeanism – European dance music in a black vernacular is always a treat, from a semi-ironic perspective, I’m thinking Black Box, Technotronic, Milli Vanilli, Leila K etc.

So it turns out Madleen Kane was a Swedish model, 5’11” and blonde, who’d been fairly successful in the 1970s and had made the switch to music/Disco quite early on, her first three albums issued on US majors, thus getting industry backing which I guess didn’t pay off too well since her name is nowadays unknown and… her fourth record, this one, was clearly a bid to keep trying but now on an independent label, Chalet (based in California, their 22-release catalogue is almost all Madleen, 1980-82) and produced by a Giorgio Moroder who I guess by this stage was losing momentum?