Yesterday (22nd Feb) I was on a panel at a Cardiff Blogs meet-up. I was invited along to answer questions about last year’s 365 project. The rest of the panel were great, representing a variety of blogging styles and content, they were Gemma Southgate, Elena Cresci, and Nathan Collins. The others that came along who put questions to us were a nice bunch, too. I answered some questions as best I could, but as is always the case with this kind of thing, there were things I think I could’ve put better, or things I just plain didn’t say that I should’ve, or ways that I could’ve actually tried to relate my experience from last year to actual blogging and that kind of thing, so what better medium to rectify this than a blog post? Read the rest of this entry
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Some Cooper365 Highlights
I made a video that was intended for the promotion of the ‘Perpetual Noise’ mix and in the description I started putting in some highlights. It got a little out of control and so I thought I’d also put them here as a kind of ‘link-dump’ post.
So I did plenty of other stuff this year, but these are some things that I’d consider to be some direct offshoots of this project of mine. I decided to write ‘Oh, hey remember…’ at the start of them all because I’m hilarious and nonchalant. Read the rest of this entry
The Cooper365 Project
This year I took on a project to release one original song for every day of the year. It was a reasonably ridiculous idea. I’ve been thinking a lot about why I did it, and I’m still not entirely sure why. I think it was partly down to boredom. It might also have been because I’d been writing songs for years and was interested to see how I’d do with song-writing deadlines. I had gone through a little spurt of song-writing towards the end of last year and wanted to see if I could take something on that would force me to learn how to write better songs, and just to see if I could do it. So I think that’s what it was at first: an experiment. I enjoy a challenge (which is helpful), and this project was certainly a challenge. The way I’ve always written songs is to play around until the beginning of a song emerges and to then commit to it and try and finish it in one sitting. It seemed like a natural progression to see how many times I could do that.
Today I finished the thing. So it was definitely a success in the most basic sense, but for someone who relishes in cynicism and self-deprecation I’m surprised at how much I feel like it was a success in other ways. Read the rest of this entry
Much needed firmer plans on this Video Album thing.
IF AT ANY POINT YOU GET BORED DURING THIS POST JUST COME BACK TO THE TOP AND CLICK THIS LINK AS IT’S BASICALLY WHAT I’M TRYING TO POINT YOU TOWARDS THE ENTIRE TIME.
As I’m hitting a point where I’m about half-way through the 10th month of this 365 project of mine I realised a couple of things:
1. There have been several points throughout the year when I might’ve muttered to myself ‘I’m almost there’ before having to correct myself that I most certainly wasn’t. However, now I feel like these mutterings are becoming increasingly truer. I am almost there.
2. This both pleases and saddens me. I cannot wait to finish because I’ll just be so proud of having actually done something on this scale. Having an idea and then seeing that idea through is just something I’ve always loved to do. There’s something great about having something inside your mind and then making it physical. It will, I think, be tied as my greatest achievement so far in this little life of mine (tied because I’m pretty proud of that novel I done). However, it’ll be really weird to not have to write a song every day. It’s become a pretty big part of my 2011 to make time every day between all of the other crap I do to sit down for at least half an hour and make something new. Normally it’s more than half an hour. Normally it’s late into the night. I am beyond tired this year. Read the rest of this entry
