Author Archives: Art_Rat

Fender Squire rebuilt 2016 – 1999 Fender body, 2004 Squire neck

Delighted with my latest rebuild

1999 Fender (body) with a 2004 Fender Squire neck.

All bits fitted together like they were made for each other. Just waiting for the correct 8 hole scratch plate. Very low action and sounds like a ‘strat’ should.

Custer’s Last Stand

Free download of a track recorded by This Window featuring Jake Bright on guitar. The lyrics to this song were written in 1979 and was a song performed by T34. This is a totally different version to the original.

Free Download

 

In 1982, the Squier brand was reactivated by Fender to become its brand for lower priced versions of Fender guitars. Squier guitars have been manufactured in Japan, Korea, Mexico, India, Indonesia, China, and the United States.In the late 1970s and early 1980s Fender was facing competition from lower priced Japanese made guitars. The higher priced Fender guitars were made in the United States and could not compete with the lower prices of Japanese made Fender copies. In the early 1980s, Japanese labour and production costs were much lower than in America and to compete with the Japanese made guitars, Fender moved the lower priced Fender guitar production from America to Japan.

Fender was also losing sales in Japan to Japanese guitar brands such as Tōkai, Greco and Fernandes and the establishment of Fender Japan would benefit Fender sales in Japan, as well as overseas. Fender began negotiations with several Japanese musical instrument distributors and reached an agreement with Yamano Gakki and Kanda Shokai to establish Fender Japan.

Squier. (2016, November 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:32, November 14, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Squier&oldid=749371757

‘The Search Begins’ 1981 – recorded on a Tascam 144 Portastudio

PURE AUDIO AND VISUAL MAYHEM!

Published on 28 Sep 2016

The good ol’ days of home recording in anolog . 4 track recording with early VHS video. It is meant to look like this and the intro is meant to be pure audio and visual noise!!!!

From Garry Smout‘s Facebook Page

Peter Bright (AKA This Window) recorded the music on a Tascam 4 track cassette in 1981 and I crash edited the video between two VHS machines and a titler around 1982 or 83. Early home recording all round! It ‘won’ me three silk handkerchiefs at the Tokyo Film Festival (they even sent the VHS back!) and totally baffled the BBC on how it was made. Which was odd as it was the early intro to the BBC’s Doctor Who that is the inspiration! And yes, that is Gene Kelly at the beginning but the fine, thin figure with the long ponytail (OK, mullet) is me running in my Bristol living room. Blistering track from Peter and yes, it is meant to look like that. Only 2016 addition is a credit/copyright at the end and I sharpened the image a little.

New video – This Window live in Venice 2016 #jazz #experimental

Venice – a live Performance by This Window is a very rare occasion

 

A rare performance in Venice. The bells are the actual sounds of Venice in full voice. Piazza San Marco (in English = St Mark’s Square) is the main public square of Venice, where it is locally simply known as “the Piazza” and is the key part of the social, religious and political centre of Venice is a cacophony of sounds.

Venice Highlights:

There is so much art in Venice to see – I must admit I neglected most of the galleries except the Guggenheim (Palazzo Venier dei Leoni) where Peggy Guggenheim lived and which has a couple of great Pollocks, my favourite being Two, 1943–45 and a typical Bacon (Study for Chimpanzee) in the European Art exhibition. It was also great to see a slashed canvas of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968). The simple act of slashing a canvas would now be a pointless exercise but during his time this was a dramatic statement about art and painting.

 

Venice

These views have been represented in paint and photographs a billion times – they are common to generations of travellers and the walls in galleries around the world groan from the weight of their presence.


We all have bigger audiences and the distribution of music is cheap but the question we need to ask is – Are we better for it?

 

The democracy of releasing material has punched a hole right through the mainstream record industry, the business models of the 20th century no longer apply and ironically the ‘Home Tapers’ philosophy and strategy of DIY has suddenly become the mainstream itself. It is no longer viable for major labels to invest and promote new stars. YouTube, SoundCloud, ReverbNation et al, have enabled the artist to become creator, producer, distributor and manager. The object as product and art, the cassette, has become replaced by the file. The freedom we craved in the 1970’s has now actually happened. We all have bigger audiences and the distribution of music is cheap but the question we need to ask is – Are we better for it?

Free download

Cassette Culture 1989 – 2009 by This Window

Videos

Below are videos featuring This Window

This Window downloads

Click on image below for free download

Free download

Recycled postcard that was originally a promo for ‘Cassette Culture

Cassette Culture 1989 – 2009 by This Window

Still number one in local charts and still in the top 150 in the UK – not bad considering  Cassette Culture 1989 – 2009 was released in 2009.

In 2009 a free download of ‘You Have The Power‘ by This Window was made possible by Microsoft. There were 1,000s of other FREE songs available to download. These free downloads (m4a and mp3) were all from ReverbNation artists and made possible through the Sponsored Songs program. These songs were EXCLUSIVE to the program, which meant you would have to pay to get these downloads from anywhere else.

This was a fantastic success with thousands of copies of the track being downloaded, which helped sell other tracks.