MUSIC
YOSSARIAN
Yossarian is a London-based multinational collective formed by trio Ash Spencer, Joaquin Rodriguez San Pedro and Sam Wallace.
I was initially only supposed to fill in for one gig - a headline spot at the 'Frinje Festival' in Madrid; however after expressing my desire to give 110% to making music, a desire my fellow bandmates reciprocated, what emerged has been a 5 year long affair of writing music, playing gigs, recording music, and pushing our music down the throats of anyone who can scream it back out.
ALBUMS
LIGHT UP MY HEAD (2019)
The first recording I'd ever been a part of, 'Light Up My Head' gave me a thorough introduction into all the arms at play when writing, recording, producing, manufacturing and distributing an album. Crowd-funded through our fans, this album was made completely independently. Although we raised a modest amount of funds we still had to do a lot of it 'out of the bedroom'. This wholesome and enlightening period of my life gave me skills in:
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Budgeting
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Research and Analysis
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Recording
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Producing
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Rigging
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Marketing
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Distribution
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Press Release
As well as these, the general organisational skills needed to create a release plan, and to ensure this plan runs smoothly whilst keeping up to date on any publicity opportunities coming your way, is something that can only be picked up through experience.
ALL THESE FICTIONS (2020)
Set for release in the summer of 2020, 'All These Fictions' has been a completely different experience to 'Light Up My Head', with medical issues delaying the release of the album to a date where the record can be promoted through a live tour. Having already released several singles it has been important to keep fans up to date, through both our mailing list and social media platforms and letting them know, as best as we can, what's going on behind the scenes. It has felt like a much more personal experience, requiring lots of diligence in keeping track of messages, and has given us the opportunity to plan a release for the album, and organise a tour, with a much wider time span than the previous record. This has allowed me to expand upon the managerial skills I picked up from the last record, to contact various media outlets to ensure that when the album drops we have as much traction coming our way as possible.
Besides this expansion upon the last albums acquired skills, I also entered the world of music-video making: using the videos as a tool for promotion as well as another creative outlet.
MUSIC VIDEOS
With next to no professional equipment - using an iPhone as my camera and Final Cut Pro as my editing software, I created these videos in hope of using them to promote our songs; however I have now developed a lust for using recordings to manipulate the world in front of me, and I shall aim to always keep a film related project on the go.
There are four more videos ready for when the album is released.
One of my favourite tracks to play - thanks to the heavy drumbeat I was permitted to create behind its poignant lyrics and anthemic guitar riff. Released in September 2018, Red Paranoia was chosen as the first single from our (rather delayed) third studio album 'All These Fictions'. Being the first single we thought it appropriate to release some sort of video with it, and what I ended up creating was a lyric video with footage taken - and then manipulated - on my travels through South America.
This was the first music video I created, with its inception starting almost 2 years before it was complete. Starting off as a uni project which then got abandoned for another track, I kept coming back to this concept of jumping between different temporalities and trying to disorientate the audiences perception of what was fiction and what is reality - an ode to the album title. Finally released as our second single in December 2018, this is the only track on the album in which I didn't perform; though after the many hours of visualising, recording, editing and watching: I feel just as attached to this track as any other.
TOURS
The first thing I noticed when joining Yossarian was how polished and well produced the record they had in existence was, but how scarce their gig archive was, and how barren the diary looked. I decided to give booking gigs a go, and it wasn't long before I'd put together my first tour around the UK, and then at the end of the year I shipped us off across to Australia: to this day I have organised 140+ concerts, in 12 different countries, stretching over 3 different continents and put together two worlds tours.
Here are some of the highlights:
