The short film “Still Life: London” by artists Wyllie O’Hagan, which I provided the piano music for, is being featured in the East End Promise exhibition in London from the 9th to the 24th October (see a short clip from the film on the right).

East End Promise is “a multi-media event documenting and exploring the explosion of artistic and cultural activity that took place in London’s East End between 1985 and 2000″. For more details on the exhibition, check the East End Promise website at http://www.eastendpromise.com

ITV1′s Real Crime television documentary series will be featuring my music throughout the episode “Bringing Down the Gooch -- Real Crime with Mark Austin” to be broadcast nationally this Monday 27th September on ITV1.

This episode focuses on the story of the specialist police team who took down the leaders of feared criminals, Manchester’s Gooch Gang. The show airs on Monday 27th September at 22:35 on ITV1 and you’ll hear my music throughout!

Update: here’s the first of three parts of the show “Bringing Down the Gooch -- Real Crime with Mark Austin” on Youtube (you should be able to find the other 2 parts of the show at the end of this clip, or just search for them on Youtube).

My music features throughout the documentary, alongside tracks from DJ Shadow and a few other pieces of music.

If you’re interested in licensing any of my music for your own film or documentary, please get in touch here.

For the next week until 14th September, 50% of all sales of music and licenses from thebluemask.com will be donated to UNICEF to help in their Pakistan Flood Children’s Appeal. 

The floods from July’s monsoons in Pakistan have left millions of people homeless and the health and sanitation conditions are now critical.

Hunger, skin disease, respiratory infections and other waterborne diseases are putting the lives of millions of people at risk, including nearly 9 million children who are among those most vulnerable to disease and dehydration. UNICEF are trying to raise £90 million to help with the immediate needs, so until 14th September, half of all sales (everything, including mp3 tracks, music licenses and royalty-free music collections) will be going directly to their Pakistan Flood Children’s Appeal.

Click here to visit the shop.

You can read more about UNICEF’s mission here and if you’d rather donate directly to the appeal, click the link below:

Donate directly to UNICEF’s Pakistan Flood Appeal.

This is the worst humanitarian crisis to hit Pakistan so even if you’re not interested in buying any music, please donate what you can to this, or any of the other flood charities (e.g. OXFAM, DEC etc.)

Just added to the shop are a range of limited edition sound logos for use in audio branding for your business or film company. Sound logos are an essential part of a brand’s image and generally used at the start or end of commercials, adverts, trailers, idents, DVDs, business presentations, promotional videos etc to give personality and branding to a company’s image (think of Intel’s famous 4 note ident for example).

Click here to listen to the sound logos in the shop.

These sound logos will be exclusively licensed to one licensee per logo on a first-come first-served basis. Once a logo has been licensed, it will be permanently removed from the shop and yours to use forever in all of your company branding. For that reason, they’re not available to buy directly from the shop in the same way that my other music is – contact me here to license any of the sound logos for exclusive and unlimited use for your business or personal logo branding.

I’ll be adding more sound logos to the shop in future and I can also create custom sound logos and audio stings for your business or branding – please contact me to find out more.

Another video in my series of movie trailers rescored with my own music soundtrack (for promo use only). This clip is from the cult 2004 Japanese futuristic fantasy movie Casshern written and directed by Kazuaki Kiriya.

The movie itself is a beautiful stylised mix of stunning CG and live action and is well worth tracking down a copy of. I got hold of the beautifully packaged 3 disc box set a few years ago and I’ve been wanting to do a track for the trailer for a while.

Similar in style to the orchestral music of Hans Zimmer, the track is a new orchestral action piece I’ve written called Titan which is available from my mp3 music shop to download or license for use in your own film or trailer:

http://www.thebluemask.com/shop/titan

The documentary that I wrote the music soundtrack for, Evolution: The Grand Experiment, has just won 3 awards at the Visual Media Catalyst Conference held in St. Louis, Missouri.

The show picked up Crown Awards in three separate categories. The documentary won first place awards in Best Youth Film, first place in Best Curriculum, and second place in Best Documentary over $50,000.

New promo video clip for my dark atmospheric ambient space music Through The Ergosphere.

The track is a dark and slowly evolving seven minute atmospheric ambient soundscape set to a film of ethereal dark space visuals and other worldly imagery from the European Space Agency Hubble Telescope project.

Quietly dramatic, the music is ideal textural underscore for films and documentaries or simply for fans of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Brian Eno’s ambient music, Biosphere, Stars Of The Lid and other similar ambient artists and drones. Put it on headphones and drift away to dark and atmospheric sci-fi landscapes.

Get the full mp3 track or license the music for your film or documentary from my music shop:

http://www.thebluemask.com/shop/through-the-ergosphere/

After being used last year in trailers for season 7 of Fox’s 24, my music is being used again in trailers for season 8! Check out the promo clip here for season 8 / episode 19 of the hit show starring Kiefer Sutherland featuring my music.

Zahara is a dramatic instrumental orchestral action track that is also available to license for use in other commercials, trailers and TV advertising spots. The track can be instantly licensed for non-broadcast purposes or contact me directly for broadcast licensing queries.

The full length music track is just under two and a half minutes long in total. More information about the track as well as a full length preview is available in my online mp3 music download shop here:

Download Zahara mp3 / license from my mp3 music shop

After my previous quickie promo video for my orchestral action track ‘Attack Of The Machines’, I decided to try and produce something a bit better looking. As I’ve said before, I’m no video editor; I usually leave that part to my clients and focus on the music but I thought it’d be good to try and improve my video editing skills. So I bought a copy of Sony Vegas and with the help of some trailer footage from Terminator Salvation, I’ve recut the video to try and fit with my music. It’s not perfect but hopefully my video editing skills are slowly improving.

As usual, download and license the orchestral action track for your films & trailers from my music shop:

http://www.thebluemask.com/shop/attack-of-the-machines/

Thanks to the joys of DVD boxsets, I’ve been catching up on loads of great TV shows over the last six months: Battlestar Galactica, House, The Wire. They’re all great shows but still nothing tops my favourite TV series of all time, The Sopranos.

I watched The Sopranos all the way through during its run on TV, and then watched the whole thing again when it came out on DVD. Apart from having the sharpest writing and dialogue of any TV show I’ve ever seen, one thing that really stuck out through the whole series was the use of music.

There’s no score, just songs, but they fit so perfectly it’s hard to imagine anything else working as well. The music supervisors did such an amazing job, some of the tracks feel like they were written just for the show.  Some of the music highlights for me were:

I could only find a few examples on Youtube, but the John Cooper Clarke track is one of my favourites. Sublime. Ever since watching the show, I started hearing songs that suddenly seemed perfect if I’d had the dream job of The Sopranos music supervisor. These would be a few on my list:

Man, I miss that show…