Mr Omneo Blogs…

When it comes to music I know there are genres out there that I’ve not taken the time to listen to. I’ll leave out my usual rant about how there are too many genres and sub-genres out there which I sometimes feel is done just to confuse the hell out of me. Oh who am I kidding? Of course I know record producers are not sitting there doing bumps of coke and hitting the bong thinking, How can we fuck with Mr Omneo today? Oh I know we’ll invent a genre called Black Metal and see how long he takes to realise it’s just that Thrash Metal shit he doesn’t like. Or maybe they do? I dunno…

Anyway, the other week I got an email suggesting I have a listen to an e.p. of a Mancunian Grime artist who goes by the name Skittles.  Now, when I hear the word grime I think of dirt and when I hear the word Skittles I think of  brightly coloured sugary treats. Grime+Skittles= Bright and dirty sugary treats? Hmm I wondered, is this someone fucking with me again? I read on and was told to imagine Frank Skinner and scroobius pip but more urban.  Whereas I might have hit delete I instead hit download.  My curiosity was well and truly piqued! Read the rest of this entry »

There is, it has to be said, a time and a place for everything and lately, for me, blogging has not been high on my list of things to do today/this week/anytime soon.  Please don’t ask for reasons why as the truth is I can’t think of one.  What I do know is that the thought of blogging has just left me feeling Blah! of late.

When I find myself in moments like this I usually retreat from the computer and find something else to kill time.  On this occasion I didn’t reject the computer totally, instead I honed in on one website, the one that would take me to Echo Bazaar!  Fiendishly addictive, I feel cheated if I don’t get to exhaust my daily supply of actions.

Other than that, not much else has happened that is worth reporting on so instead of me waffling on here are three tracks that should hopefully chill you out a little. Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

Look at Mr Omneo getting all multi-lingual, or at least trying, there is a reason I tend not to travel overseas.  When I get to France, I don’t so much speak Franglais as manage to blend English, French and Italian and to the untrained listener you would think I was a native Japanese speaker trying to practise all three after locking myself away in a darkened room with nothing but the BBC website for company

In actual fact, my inability to speak a foreign language is not through lack of trying.  Over the years I’ve invested heavily in books, cassette tapes (remember those?) and compact discs in an attempt to learn French, Italian, Japanese, Czech and Arabic.  Strangely I was told my Arabic and Japanese pronunciation was better than my French…go figure!

When I was 19 I went on a mini-adventure that took me to France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco and 1 hellish night and day in Gibraltar.  I returned to the UK with extremely fond memories of Portugal and I’m sure a girl called Virginie from Avignon still has a sliver of what passes as my heart, but that’s another story.  I ended my trip with a six week stint in Paris, or more accurately a suburb called Saint Michel sur Orge.  It wasn’t until much later I realised just how far away from the centre of Paris I really was so I left with pretty non-memorable memories.  Paris? I thought, Nothing special, what’s all the fuss about? On the recent Eurostar sponsored day trip I went on my opinion changed a little.  What little of Paris I did see, I saw through different eyes and I made a mental note to return, after all it’s less than 3 hours away from London which is about 2 hours less than a trip to Glasgow (my home town), another city where the natives speak a foreign language

Paris got bumped up my must visit list when I discovered a new website called Le Nouveau Paris which is a dream come true for a lazy planner like me.  Quite simply it’s a selection of over 250 venues: museums , monuments, unusual places and more than 700 events per year: festivals, concerts and exhibitions.  It also has a series of guides and routes to help you discover Paris according to your interests.  I love the personal folder option.  As you browse the site and see places you like you can add them to your folder so you don’t forget them and then create your own personalised itinerary.  The site also encourages your language enhancement, although I signed up in English, some of the emails and on site messages are in French.  No problemo for Mr Omneo and his vast collection of dictionaries

The Comité Régional du Tourisme of Paris Ile-de-France asked a selection of bloggers to conjure up their vision of that New Paris and to stop us going crazy set an imaginary budget of €1,000.  Now, I could probably spend that all by myself having dinner but they want it stretched out a bit further than the 20 meals I’d have in honour of Mr Jorrocks!  So using their site I planned a weekend break for myself and my imaginary partner where we’d spend our imaginary €1,000. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t worry, I haven’t taken inspiration from X Factor and recorded a CD of classic songs in the style of a tone deaf, talentless, fame hungry soon to be has been.

No, instead my Record Shop is stocked with some of the Sellaband albums that I helped fund.  Having thought for many a long month about designing a website to sell them I stumbled upon a site, Big Cartel, that actually provides in their free offering exactly what I wanted.  So in under 30 minutes I had it stocked to the virtual rafters with the limited edition Cd’s by Lunic, Julia Marcell and T-Ka.  Job done!

If you’re a fairly new reader of this blog you may not know about my involvement with Kaitee Page whose band is now called Lunic.  In a nutshell Kaitee is an artist on Sellaband.com, a site which aims to help fans fund albums.  The premise is quite simple.  Take a $50,000 budget and break it down into $10 shares, for each share you buy you secure yourself a limited edition CD.  Once all 5,000 shares are sold the artists go off and produce an album from which you earn a percentage of the profits from each one sold.  The limited edition CDs you can either sell or you can have them sent to you to give away to friends and family, or indeed to sell yourself if you’re so inclined.

I’ve helped fund a few albums in this way but my biggest investment so far is in Kaitee and Lunic which probably explains why I have a box of 45 CDs sitting next to my desk.  A few months ago I told myself I would get my finger out and construct a website to sell them on but as you can guess I haven’t got much further than thinking about it.   This will change but as I’m working on some client sites it’s probably going to be early 2010 before I get the time to do it. You can now buy it directly from my Record Shop Read the rest of this entry »