Image from @monsters_art on Twitter

This month, Nottingham plays host to a unique arts event – the Carnival of Monsters is coming to town! From 15th-29th October, if you trot along to the Bartons Buses site at Chilwell, you’ll find all sorts of amazing arty goings-on. From music to art to poetry to comedy, there’s a bit of everything

Over 30 artists living and working the East Midlands will be exhibiting. There will be 5 pavilions acting as art galleries, showcasing the artists’ work in a whole range of different environments, from warehouse space to disused offices. These are open from Monday-Saturday for the duration of the Carnival.

But wait, theres more! On Saturday 15th October, there are special events taking place to open the Carnival:

Black History Month is running from 1pm-5pm
MissImp, Nottingham’s improv comedy group will be performing.
And there will be live music from Chris McDonald.

And on Saturday 22nd, you can take your little monsters along to The Big Draw and let them go crazy with paint, pens and paper as they make their own monsters. Just make sure they’re not wearing their best clothes…

The same day also sees Oxjam take over Beeston for a live music event to raise money for Oxfam. This is a wristband only event, so sign up here: Oxjam Beeston Takeover if you don’t want to miss out!

The Carnival closes on Saturday 29th with more live music from the Denizen record label.

Find out more about the Carnival here: http://www.carnivalofmonsters.co.uk. Or follow them on Twitter @monsters_art

Image Credits: F.A.T Lab: http://fffff.at/ Brendan Oliver & Brendan Randall

Many thanks to those of you on Twitter this week who provided me with details of events for this links round up – see, there’s no need for nefarious spying techniques when you have Twitter. Oh dear that sounds like product placement doesn’t it? Let’s move on – this week’s round up brings digital glories, music, light shows and cake. What more could you ask for?

First up today! Eeek! Drop everything and get to Broadway for Making Future Work. What is it? I hear you say? Well:

The fusion of digital technologies, art and design has given birth to pioneering new approaches to creation that are playful, disruptive, functional and responsive. It has also enabled collaborative projects to be conceived and developed remotely across vast distances.

Chaired by Regine Debatty, founder of the award winning blog we-make-money-not-art.com, Making Future Collaboration (our final event) includes presentations from our commissioned artists alongside Evan Roth and Aram Bartholl from F.A.T Lab (The Free Art and Technology Lab), a Brooklyn-based open source technology collective dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media.

Starts at 11am so get down there quick! Details on this here website.

Next week, as part of the NotLost festival, the gloriously named Spanky van Dykes will be hosting a music-art collaboration called ‘On an Island.’ A series of local bands will be performing their own interpretation of the title accompanied by projections and a light show in what sounds like a fusion of Jean Michel-Jarre, Hemingway and the BBC Introdcuing stage. Of course it could just be one big rave up. Either way, it’s on Thursday 14th July, tickets are a bargain £3 and more details can be found on their Facebook page.

Finally, this is one of the more tenuous links we’ve put up but what the hey, I’m feeling generous. Just outside Nottingham, the village of Keyworth is holding its annual village fair on Saturday. All funds raised go to help fund local facilities and, while this clearly isn’t usually our type of thing, we just about get away with it by appealing to all you highbrow south-of-the-river types. The West Bridgford Opera will be there. I’m not sure if they’re singing but I’ve been assured that they are selling cakes. (Incidentally, Googling to find an opera that featured cakes it turns out that there is an Opera cake, invented in Paris in 1903. Here’s a recipe. But I still don’t know about the opera.) So there you go, 11-5 on the Keyworth Playing Fields.

That’s it, everyone! Enjoy your weekend

“We are not lost. We are Nottingham. This is our island.”

So says the website for the first ever NOTLOST Festival, launching this summer in Nottingham. It’s running throughout most of July (1st-23rd), and aims to bring together creative groups from all areas of the arts, including music, film, theatre, design and visual arts. Its focus is very much on being an “arts” festival, rather than an “art” festival, and on promoting all art forms.

The festival involves creatives from the Nottingham area, both emerging and established, and all events are independently curated. NOTLOST is made up of more than twenty events, taking place at venues all around Nottingham. So, when you’ve eaten your fill at the Food and Drink Festival, why not go exploring and see what you find?

The rules are, there are no rules, as it were! Each gallery, artist, or group involved can do their own thing. NOTLOST simply brings all these things together. Artists benefit from cross-promotion, and visitors benefit from discovering exciting new talents.

The first event opened last Thursday with a private view, but it’s open to the public from 1 July. Entitled “Banality & Big Questions”, it’s “an exploration of the knotted relationship between the two paradoxical themes.” It’s presented by a group of artists called the 1%ers, who have been brought together from various groups and collectives by artist and curator of the event Allan G. Binns.

Banality & Big Questions is on at the Hideout, Unit 11 Fisher Point, from 1-15 July, excluding Mondays. Find out more by emailing curator Allan Binns on info@notlostfestival.co.uk.

If this event doesn’t sound like your thing, there’s plenty of other bits and pieces going on, from one-day workshops and talks to shows and exhibitions running for a couple of weeks. Why not try the Surface Gallery’s “Open Show”? Or, for the foodies among you, how about Backlit’s “gastro-performance event” at the Walk Cafe?

To find out more about what’s on, have a look at NOTLOST’s listings page, which contains information about venues, times and dates, as well as a handy map for those who (like me!) don’t know the city too well (or, more accurately in my case, have no sense of direction!).

You can see videos of Jake Bugg at Glastonbury on the BBC Glastonbury 2011 page.

Or have a look at his Myspace page for news and information.

As if there wasn’t enough to do this weekend already, the world-famous Dot-to-Dot festival returns!

We don’t cover much music here on Creative Nottingham, with good reason; there are many passionate people who cover the music scene much better than we could ourselves, and there’s so much going on here on a weekly basis that, were we to attempt to report on Nottingham’s music scene, the music to other category ratio would quickly dwarf the rest of the site! Phew. So, we tend to leave music coverage to the professionals. Occasionally, though, there’s an event that warrants inclusion. Dot-to-Dot definitely falls into that category.

The festival was set up in Nottingham some six years ago, and has grown steadily since, to the point where Dot-to-Dot now runs across venues in Nottingham, Manchester and Bristol. The festival also secured ongoing sponsorship from Fred Perry in 2010. Previous lineups have included Mumford & Sons, Ellie Goulding, Liars, Little Boots, Klaxons, Friendly Fires and many more. If none of those names mean anything to you – don’t worry, suffice to say that the youth have always attended and had a jolly good time…

This year, headliners Hurts, We Are Scientists (fun fact – I actually played with We Are Scientists a few years ago; they’re thoroughly nice chaps), The Naked and Famous, Guillemots and …Trail of Dead will preside over a full day of mayhem and music across five venues – Rock City, Rescue Rooms, Trent Union, Stealth and the Bodega. So, if you have any interest in the bleeding edge music scene, tickets are available from alt-tickets.

Some of these responses would be best followed up by the Monty Python team – with added humour and zeal – but in their absence, I will do my best to continue this thread in ‘honour of Creativity’.

It is noted that the question of ‘happiness’ poses an interesting challenge for us all – especially in these dreary times of political wrangling, austerity and wars.  To keep our costs down, many of us have tried to seek comfort in the TV – sat with a bag of munchies and a beer – but we can’t rely on that either – there’s nothing cheery on that any more – it’s all doom and gloom. And otherwise, if I have to watch one more episode of The Sweeney, I’ll ****?!@**….!!!  

Anyway, it’s really doesn’t sit right with me, to feel so led by TV or media. Artists are very individualistic, and like to lead themselves – be it in ‘tribes’ sometimes – (don’t we?)  So, I’ve stopped watching the news and TV generally, and have started reading back issues of The Dandy to get my laughs instead – much more informative.

I’m sure that most of you out there in the creative community would agree, that creative people are often under-estimated for their valuable contribution to business, and ultimately, our impact on society.  But do you think maybe it’s because we don’t make ourselves heard enough? Do you think maybe it’s because we don’t always realise our true value either?

Without creative people where would the world be? For example, without music we could not sing or dance, express our emotions – happy and sad, anger or exhilaration – the things that help us to get through the events in life – good and bad. Without a good book to read, or a great picture to look at we might have nothing to see, ponder or inquire over – to make us feel delight or disgust!  Without video games we might never get the chance to be an ace race-car driver or fly a space ship.  Whatever it may be, we can say that everything about everything, somewhere down the line, has involved ‘creatives’ and creative deeds.

From this I have decided, that for me, the time to do something different is NOW!  To make better use of the creative freedoms I have, and investigate how I can put my ideas and practical skills to use – to enhance my life, and the lives of others.

I’ve made a start by ensuring there’s now always something good on my TV – (I don’t mean the headless Buddah – that isn’t good, that’s just bad photography!) I was going to skip my old set, but a friend of mine has improved it – and now it makes me happy, so it will stay.  Even though there is a small tear on the face of the clown, I see this as my reminder to make the most of my day.

This is also my contribution to the reuse-revolution, in readiness for the post-digital switch-off….

The first thing was for me and Harry, who plays bass, to record 4 minutes of harsh, horrible feedback to go over the top of a sample we’re dropping in the middle of the last song.  It basically involved standing next to our amps making piercing squeals with our guitars and grimacing as it soon became hard work to endure.  The was a point where it became almost cosmic (dude), and I couldn’t tell if the noises I was hearing were from the speakers or in my head resonating as tinnitus.  I imagined the noise would fit well in that part of 2001:  Space odyssey where the main character is traveling through deep space and visiting alternate universes.  Or something.

After that far out experience I laid down some more guitar tracks and Chris did the vocals.  It was around here where we wondered why we’d written songs that go beyond the 10 minute mark as listening to them over and over and over again, soon became tiresome.  I think we were all relieved when it was time to go home.  Sounds good though.

Anyway, this is my last guest blog entry for Creative Nottingham.  Thanks to Charlotte for asking me to participate and for whoever read this over the last couple of weeks.  Feel free to check out http://www.stevelarder.co.uk or http://stevelarder.wordpress.com if you like.  I’m hoping to update the latter link a bit more regularly from now on.

Here’s a dragon eating a sandwich.  Tara.

The first obstacle was a noise we noticed on the guitar track which was a pain in the arse to sort out.  I’d changed my strings to a lighter gauge the night before, and something to do with the brightness of the new strings combined with the settings on my amp, made this weird ‘popping’ come through.  A trip to ‘Hot rox’ amp shop and some more new strings later, the problem remained after mucking about with the EQ and what not.  We decided to persevere but the next thing wrong was a dead fret on my guitar.  Fearing the neck was warped, our ‘tech’, Phil fooled around with a spanner until he identified the problem as a slight kink on the 5th string, which when straightened out, seemed to do the trick.

We recorded the songs again and carried on the rest of the day getting stressed out (well, I was, anyway) when a bung note was played or whatever stopped us getting a decent track down.  We left around 8pm, ready to give our ears a rest…

Oh, before the recording we met up for breakfast in ‘Homemade’ in Hockley.  Whilst waiting for everyone else to turn up, I drew dinosaur pictures whilst drinking too much coffee.

1.  Judas Priest – Breaking the law

2.  The Spits – Amor de cha cha

3.  Worm – False world over

4.  Black Sabbath – Tomorrow’s dream

5.  Normal man – Flamingo Land

6.  Mind Spiders – Ripped

7.  The Sword – Trej Brujas

8.  Potential Johns – Sit quietly

9.  Spider – Boozetown

10.  Shang-a-Lang – Summertime

11.  Off with their heads – Their own medicine

12.  Shellshag – Rock and roll ruined my life

13.  Shrinebuilder – The architect

14.  Venom – Welcome to hell

15.  Johnny Cash – Drive on

Illustration work today, including more portrait and zine stuff.  Will hopefully have something up to catch up the blogs this evening…

The zine page I mentioned was documenting a US tour I took part in last year.  It reminded me of somewhere we stayed after a gig in Sioux Falls, South Dakota where our host had a earwig infestation in his basement and more importantly, a Futurama boxset in the shape of Bender’s head.

Anyway, here’s a an illustration which will accompany Nardwuar’s interview page in the newest Razorcake zine -

http://www.razorcake.org