Presenting the [NOIR.AM SESSIONS]

Well, hello there! I'm back again after another long Steemit pause. I'm really trying not to make these long pauses in posting on Steemit but work is work and sometimes it's just overwhelming. Anyway, I was thinking about quick posting here and there in the past couple of weeks but then I thought, it's about quality, not about quantity and decided to wait until I could really sit down and write a decent article. Some of you may remember my post about mixing a live concert (https://steemit.com/music/@grobens/how-to-mix-a-live-concert-original-music) I wrote a while ago. It was a show I played in Vinyl and apart from being recorded for a live album, it was also captured on film.

(here's a really kick ass still taken from the session)

Here's the story:

While preparing the show in Vinyl, I was called by a really great guy Toni Juričić, asking if I would be interested in doing a little something for [noir.am sessions]. Toni created the sessions on March 23, 2015. with a single mission of featuring the best of the musicians and storytellers from Croatia. As it says on their official Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/noir.am.session/): deprived of any color and shot in one-take camera techinque within the carefully chosen locations, we at [noir.am sessions] have dedicated our mission to give the best audio-visual treatment to talented musicians and storytellers. Indeed, the guys at noir are doing an amazing job of capturing the unique feeling and atmosphere of every individual artist and they are working their fingers to the bone to make it look and sound as amazing as it does. More importantly, [noir.am sessions] seems to be the only platform of that kind in Croatia, focused on less commercial artists and all kinds of oddballs.

The idea of the sessions is to make musicians work outside of their comfort zone, mostly stripping their work to the bare essentials - acoustic instruments and their own voice. Every session is filmed at a different location that fits the artist best. Different locations add to the overall atmosphere and the performance of the artist and also ensure that every sessions is unique just as every artist is unique. Their Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9_-Xpc4PsedgtnfDk88DvQ) is really a collection of the best of alternative Croatia and features amazing artists such as The Gentleman, Billie Joan, Lovely Quinces, Pi, Denis Katanec, NLV and many more.

[Noir.am sessions] also feature writers which makes them the only ones to recognize the importance of promoting young writers in Croatia as well as establishing the connection between music and literature. Writers are featured in speacial storytellers episodes where they read their own work and encourage viewers to really listen to what they have to say. Some of the featured writers include Andrija Škare, Srđan Sandić, Darko Šeparović and Sven Popović, all emerging and award winning young writers from Croatia.

(here's Vlado Kuzman, one of my favorite singer-songwriters and a great guy)

I was lucky enough to also be featured in what turned out to be a special [noir.am] episode.
When Toni called, I was preparing a show in Vinyl and I told him I don't really have the time to record anything anytime before the show. Since both of us really wanted to do it, he said he'd stop by on the day of the show and record something after we do our soundcheck. So we did our thing and I performed a new song called ''Make Up'' in a typical [noir.am] fashion - just an acoustic guitar and my voice.

Toni liked it so much he decided to stay and film a couple of more songs live at the concert. It wasn't planned and it wasn't something he usually does - it wasn't a location of their own choice and it was a full band performance. He filmed a couple of other songs (Grandead, Island Life, On Death & Other Problems and Everything), mostly new material played live for the first time. Since I was already planning on releasing a live album of that live show, I did the mixing myself and it turned out to be the loudest [noir.am] session ever filmed. I didn't know how it looked like on film and when Toni sent me the video I was really amazed by how it turned out. In Toni's own words, it looked like something coming out of a David Lynch movie. I couldn't have hoped for a better outcome. Here's the rest of the session:

I really encourage you to subscribe to [noir.am] because I feel Croatia has a lot of great music to offer and I also think everyone should support this kind of work because the guys at noir are doing it out of love for art and music and not because of money. They don't earn money of the sessions and they do it purely to promote great music and great literature and to help emerging artists reach more audience. I hope you will enjoy my session as much as the other sessions and I hope you will find more great music you can enjoy in the days to come!