Polyvore was a creative hub full of people who artistic souls, some troubled and in need of the healing artistic endeavours produce,  who enjoyed fashion and home decor and art. We made collages which doubles as ads for the products they depicted in some cases.  Many of us made photomontage collage art - digital visual mashups ...not for profit but just to soothe our nerves. Polyvore had a contest every day where they picked the Top Art Sets, another for Top Fashion sets and weekly beauty Sets.

Then a Canadian company decided that Polyvore was somehow drawing people away from their webstore  - even though many of the 20 million users of Polyvore were not in the right demographic to afford a thousand dollar Balenciaga scarfs - no matter how good some were at putting said haute couture items into Vogue and Elle quality layouts.   When the company bought it out they shuttered the collage making function to the horror and grief of many Polyvore users.

Cruelly, they gave us zero warning. They shut it down before we received the mail that the axe was falling.   I have posted some of my artsets on Twitter as well as on Tumblr. Sadly,  these - and everyone else on Poly's sets are now pointing back to the company via a rediect such that what pointed to Polyvore now points to the company, acting as free advertsing for the company instead of dearly departed Polyvore.  ​

To have a company snatch what is precious away  - with no warning - and no time to say good bye to the community - and then utilize things you created  as a mashup in order to drive sales to their site without any recompense to those who made the sets, and  NOT for the company that bought Polyvore out is underhanded, manipulative and  ...evil. There I've said it.  Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity I hear someone cry - but I don't want to be that unkind - their CEO has received honours - he is not stupid by a long shot.  So either executed things very badly, and on the fly or... they are evil and trying for viral traction through the pain and anger and shock, to drive people to their brand and site. they are even using their competitors copyrighted images to do so. This cannot end well for them should they stay on this course.  

There are lots of plans in the works and a number of ongoing actions to find a way to bring the site back in some capacity.  But Lauren Coates' petition to get the collage functions back is top of my mind today. I have signed it - can you sign it as well?  

 'My partner in musical crime did a huge overhaul in his recording set up and now I am playing catch up. Given his champagne tastes - and my skim milk budget -  this has NOT been easy!  First I upgraded the microphone. It's no Neumann but it is a Rode and it's fabulous!  However that has created it's own problems because now the room in the new place is actually evident in any recording I send him!  The new place doesn't have the same set up as the old place; it lacks broadloom and also the cantilevered stippled stupidly LOW ceiling which was an audio blessing in disguise.  Mr. newly minted sound engineer then requested I get a ​reflexion filter to fix the room sound problems that he detected in the backing tracks I sent him.  


Alas ,my room has more problems than a simple reverb off the opposing wall to fix. After an immense amount of due diligence reading reviews (plus all my years of audio experience at CKCU-FM & my childhood love or physics :) I determined this was not going to fix the ALL of the new room's 'noise' problems. For one thing there is a mirrored closet. Terrible for acoustic - I leave it open when recording to minimize glass surfaces and I sing beside it to minimize it was well.  

You see, when you speak, sing - or whatever! :) - the sound travels out of your mouth in a sort of cone shape and proceeds to strike whatever surfaces are in front of you and then reflect back in a series of waves which then ricochet around the room. So room surfaces and treatments change the pattern of reflections.  With a more sensitive mic much more ambient would was being picked up despite the mic being a cardioid pick up pattern (see the side graphic =>>) 
All of my mics are cardioid from a ​Shure to a Rode). And the sound does come back into the pickup pattern area.

That's one problem but not the only one! The other is sound coming in from outside. Acoustical Surfaces suggested Green Glue might help depending on if the sound was coming through the glass or the space between the glass and the wall, i.e. around the windows. So after a humongous load of research into what would solve the problem I settled on what i could afford and now it is time to set the thing up.  Sadly I cannot do this alone and am waiting on my hyper talented but often ill brother to help me get the hardware attached to the ceiling.  I didn't get the track from the company below because of the amount of time it would take to make its way from Maryland here but I would still recommend the guys who make it. I'm doing a home made version of same. Then I will suspend some thick curtains and I have a mattress behind where I will sing plus I need to get a thick rubber mat, which Lowe's has, which should work fine to isolate the mic from the floor.  That can't hurt.  

The enactment of the plan is dependent on my friend with wheels helping me haul the quite heavy rubber mat over so I don't give myself a migraine (I get way too many of those!)  and my mechanical genius brother to help me install the hardware.   Wish me luck!   This is all way overdue.

This is one of a set of songs that I wrote for He Who Shall Remain Nameless, my evilest muse.  I picked this song to do the first 'live song' video because it is one of the shorter ones so I couldn't be too scared!

I even made a very silly sung introduction to the channel, which  features the resident miniature cat that my neighbour and I are time sharing. :-) To see that you will have to go to : https://www.youtube.com/user/Aqualyra

Here it is the last day of Christmas, Epiphany, and Have A Beautiful Life, the album I co-produced for Hannu Lepisto (and also sang female vocals on!), is STILL being featured on  ITunes Finland New & Noteworthy in the Alternative charts - as of January 4th! It's a Christmas miracle, at least as far as I am concerned. Hallelujah! :-)

What it's doing on any other ITunes chart is a mystery to me, though. Maybe someone who has an IPhone in Sweden or somewhere closer to Finland can tell me if Have A Beautiful Life has shown up on any other ITunes New & Noteworthy pages. 

You can hear me doing backing vocals on many of the tracks on Hannu Lepisto's brand new album, "Have a Beautiful LIfe" [Homeward Records. Oy] . I also co-produced the album.  3 of those tracks posted below!  I wrote almost all my own parts and am down as an arranger on those tracks.  Examples: Have a Beautiful Life & Trapped You Trapped me and Conquerors of the World.  I'm also the co-producer for the album.  The album drops December 10th, 2013!

Very pleased to announce that my friend's project that I did the backing vocals for on most of the tracks is finally being released on December 10th. 

Not sure why it is but every damned time I try to record this last 2 years I gum something up!  Everything takes for freakin' ever.  This time it was the lyrics.  Plus my throat was sore. My body said stop this. I try to listen to my body 'cos when I don't all hell breaks loose. 

But since it was going so well before the foul up I thought I would share it with you just to prove I really am working on the CD.  The song is a medley of 2 I wrote, one is called Cloak Of Kisses, the other is Dragon Rider.  I finally decided they should be together like Simon & Garfunkle's "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" or The Guess Who's "No Sugar Tonight / New Mother Nature". 

So here you go, just for you! and complete with the fouled up beginning and end. The beginning is actually supposed to be on recorder but one of the cast decided to sit on my recorder's mouthpiece. So I need to get some vodka to clean the thing and hope it doesn't damage the plastic,  So instead I'm singing the instrumental, go figure!

Now you would think that if an artist writes their own lyrics they would not forget them while singing.  Unfortunately it doesn't actually work that way in either a poet or singers brain, sadly, because every other lyric you ever wrote as well as any other you memorized is jostling around the old cranium, just waiting to knock the others around, sometimes.  To say nothing of clang association and other fun things.  Since I am going on 4 hours sleep (all I got this morning before waking up bolt upright, filled with energy and unable to go back to sleep. I went for a walk in the morning quasi-mist, which morphed into a grocery run and so before it was even 8 am there i was lugging groceries back home down a tree-lined road and the mist had descended from the sky to street level. fast forward breakfast, a (probably too brief) vocal warm -up and then the recording attempt.  

Much love to DD Rocker who played my song Rainbow (Into The Light) on her show "IRON MAIDENS" on CHMR-FM, 93.5 on July 27th!     Thank you, dearie - you rock!! 

If you dig the blues, DD Rocker does a fine rock and blues show right before it called "Rockin' The Blues In Canada" CHMR broadcasts and webcasts from St. John's, Newfoundland.