The Message Tapes

This week I did a session for Stephen McCauley’s ELECTRIC MAINLINE show on BBC Radio Foyle.

For the next 7 days you can ‘Listen Again’ on the BBC iPlayer here.

Massive thanks to Chris McConaghy for playing with me on this, and for introducing me to ‘Camp Tuesday’ in Masons afterwards. (Did I say that out loud?)

And yes, my favourite band at the moment is…

Over the past few months, ‘Lucky Seven’ has won 3 very prestigious film awards  – in Spain, Ireland and Germany, namely:

• WINNER Gold Mikeldi Best Short Fiction 2011 *53rd ZINEBI International Film Festival of Bilbao, Spain
• WINNER Best Short Film Category Fiction 2011 *10th Clones Film Festival, Ireland
• WINNER New German Directors Showcase Saatchi&Saatchi 2012

And the film is now is nominated for Best Short Film at Studio Hamburg Nachwuchspreis. You can vote for it, and for a limited time watch it online right HERE. I think it will only be up until the 23rd May, so be quick!

To vote (go on, please) use THIS PAGE. The page is in German, but basically you tick the box, fill in the text thing to prove you’re human and then press the button at the bottom. If you can’t work it out, there are more detailed instructions on the Adam Leonard Music Facebook page which you can link to via the box on the right. Thanks!

There is also a short film portrait of director and writer Claudia Heindel HERE.

Finally, the official website for the film – http://www.luckyseven-film.com – has been fully expanded.

For the latest news, visit here.

Further to this post, ‘Lucky Seven’ will be premiered at the 19th Raindance Film Festival in London on the 4th October. The screening is at the Apollo Piccadilly Circus (Regents St.) as part of the “Vivid Chronicles” short films programme.

The film was selected from 3000 submitted short films. Congratulations to Claudia Heindel (writer and director) – this is a fantastic achievement.

You can book tickets here. £5 per ticket, and for that you get to see ‘Lucky Seven’ plus 4 other quality independent short films.

The film’s official website is: http://www.luckyseven-film.com/

I’m honoured to announce that my music has been used in a film by German writer and director Claudia Heindel for Nominal Film. The film is a coming of age story set in and around Derry in Northern Ireland, where I live. I’ve seen an almost finished version and it looks excellent. The film features part of the song “Spirit Photography” from the ‘How Real Is Real?‘ album and a couple of new things I did especially for the film.

I’ll post more news up here, or on Facebook when I have it – and hopefully some clips.

Photo by Ted Riederer.

This was a cool thing to be involved in. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to get a slot at the NEVER RECORDS exhibition/installation in Derry where I live.

“New York City based artist Ted Riederer has setup a record store in the Context Gallery on Artillery Street in Derry. But this isn’t a normal record store, Ted’s Never Records is an art installation in itself. Ted recorded a host of live performances from within the store, cut them to vinyl using a lathe and stocked the store with the resulting records. Each record is completely unique, sound and artwork.

Whilst Ted himself has gone back to NYC for now, the space is still very active”.

Here is a short film by my friend Seamus Hannigan about my visit to Never Records:

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The ‘record shop’ will remain in place / open to the public until the end of June 2011. There is a listening post.

Personally I think the pick of the bunch are the records by Derry electro-minimalists Strength, and the sharp-as-a-pin songwriting of Chris McConaghy AKA Our Krypton Son:

High quality Digital Downloads of older releases are now available at bandcamp. Click on the image above to see what’s there – some are free.