We were delighted to be involved with the Learning Revolution in October and were busy bringing carnival arts to people all over London. From knitting at the South Bank to carnival costumes in Brixton, samba reggae in Notting Hill to singing in Old Spitalfields Market we worked with a wide range of artists and arts organisations to bring participative opportunities to hundreds of Londoners. Find out more about by watching the audio slide show……

We’re finally coming down from our Fertilizer festival buzz, but luckily we’ve had lots of love from audiences about this year’s good s**t from Poland to keep us pepped up: “It was bloody brilliant!” “Killer show!” “I love Polish jazz”.
Want to re-live the atmosphere? Check out our podcast with the touring trio of Sing Sing Penelope, Jacaszek and Contemporary Noise Sextet and our short video interview with the amazing Pink Freud.

A big thank you to all of you who came to see us on tour or in London – you made our artists very happy. A massive thanks to all the artists too, it was great to have you at Fertilizer! And thanks too to our funders: Arts Council England, Sound and Music, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (IAM), not just for their money but for their all-round support in helping us deliver the festival.

As far as the future is concerned, we’re already plotting and planning in true Fertilizer style, keeping our ears to the ground for the latest underground sounds. We’ll keep you updated with our plans, but in the meantime if you have any suggestions for future Fertilizer outings, please do get in touch. Let us know if there’s good s**t anywhere in particular you’d like us to check out and bring back to UK. This is not a competition; there are no prizes to be won – but you might end up seeing your dream festival come to life and how cool would that be?!

Life as the hub’s Fertilizer Festival Intern has been fantastic so far, nearly 3 weeks in and I feel like I’ve been here 3 months! That is due to not only to being made to feel very welcome and at home by the lovely directors and hub ‘family’ but also from the fact that there’s been plenty of work to get stuck into right from day one! It is just what you would want from an internship, plenty of hands on experience and responsibility, lots of expertise and friendly advice to call upon and a fantastic network of contacts and organisations within the arts and creative world to tap into.

I’m really enjoying working on the Fertilizer Festival, it’s a brilliant project and is allowing me to combine all my interests; promotion, live music, marketing and online and digital promotional techniques. I’m really looking forward to the Festival landing in May, and experiencing some underground and slightly left field music from Poland!

I’ll leave you with a few of my favourite links from my first few weeks at the hub…

• Firstly my favourite band at the moment Strawhouses who I’m sure I am now beginning to annoy my fellow hubites with by talking about them so much.

• The Fertilizer Festival on Twitter… please follow us!

• hub operations manager Andi’s RT @Shunt project which I very much enjoyed at The Shunt Lounge.

Tom Johnson, hub Fertilizer Intern 2009.

In the third podcast, Deirdre Melvin discovers the artists reactions to the local audiences they encountered in Mangalia in Romania, a sleepy seaside town in the grip of Euro 2008 Championships and Mayoral Election Campaign fever. Dogus Bitecik is amazed how the dance piece Monday in the Sun “transformed” the young local football fans into fans of contemporary dance; Karena Johnson reflects on the reactions of the local people she has met during the SEAS arts adventure; Deirdre meets Romanian DJs and visual artists, and Chris Torch, artistic director, looks forward to SEAS in Istanbul in October.

For the second SEAS podcast Deirdre Melvin tells the story of the SEAS events in Bulgaria – Varna and Balchik. Venelin Shurelov describes the inspiration behind the Fantomat installation. Dave Parkin and Tom Adams from Metro-Boulot-Dodo discuss the highs and lows of their tour diet (sizzling meat platters and buckwheat porridge). Hear about the amazing seagulls of Varna which can be seen from outer space! Plus SEAS artists Karena Johnson, Safak Uysal and Bedirhan Dehmen speak about their impressions of the tour and the beautiful sea resort of Balchik.

Earlier this year the hub was commissioned by Sound Connections to deliver a podcast training project for young disabled musicians and producers. Over the course of five half day workshops we worked with the participants to develop their recording and production skills and to devise and record content for their own podcast. We also invited in some BBC producers to give them feedback on their work, and some pointers for the future.

As the project was all about podcasting, we decided to produce a podcast as part of our project evaluation. Featuring original sound material produced by the participants, footage from the training sessions, plus interviews with participants and our trainers, you can listen to it by clicking here.

(If you can not access the flash media player above, visit ovi.com to listen to the episode)

Check out our flickr slideshow and a selection of related blog entries. Feel free to contact us for more info.

Our Saturday morning podcast project at Stratford Media Circus finally came to an end this week. We were joined by two BBC radio producers who offered feedback to the participants and talked about how they could develop there skills.With bags of experience and enthusiasm, we all benefited from there received wisdom and we at times wished we were on the shoes of the participants once again!

The young people were each presented with a final mix down of the pieces they have been working on over the past 5 weeks. It included interviews, stories, sound effects, live performances, groups projects, individual projects and of course a range of indents.Overall, the young people enjoyed the project a great deal and got a lot out of it, as did we, and hopefully, there will be plenty more to come.

Big thanks to Lou & Alice for coming in and enlightening us as to the inner workings of BBC radio production, also to Stuart, Sound Connections, Stratford Media Circus and of course, all the young people who took part. Well done everyone!

With one more session to go, we’ve been busy tying up any loose ends and making sure we have recorded all the material we need to assemble all our shorter audio pieces into one big one. One big Podcast that is – made up of interviews, the groups favourite tracks, stories, sound FX, narration and more. We’ve also had a bit of a photo shoot so the participants can walk away with not just an audio record of the work shops, but a visual one too.

Next week, we will be making the final touches and presenting each participant with a finished product. Stuart has even promised to reward them with a bakewell tart each. We look forward vey much to these moments!

This Saturday saw the podcast group get to grips with creating an original story and learning how to jazz it up and flesh it out with sound effects sourced from the collective hard drives of Stuart and Tom. Hosting more participants than ever, we worked in separate groups to create two very different pieces of storytelling, including such edge-of-the-seat antics as police chases, trick or treaters, revenge and celebration parties that even we grown-ups couldn’t rival.


It was great to find focus with the young people and demonstrate to them how they could polish up their work using the editing suite – a kind of aural airbrushing! The addition of our in-house wordsmith Jasmine, meant the participants could really explore the relationship between writing stories and using sound effects. A rather extensive collection made it possble to add depth to their stories that featured Big Ben, horses whinnying, doorbells and more. We are building on the skills of the group and are moving towards a nice body of work.

This week, we have focussed on working as a group. After an initial brainstorming session, we came up with the name Music Mashup Podcasters which we think reflects what we have been up to in our workshops.

The next logical step was to create an indent for the group which was a lot of fun – you can see the photos by clicking here. For this, we decided to employ a good old box of percussion including shakers, triangles, djembes, marracas and more. After a lot of noise, we think we’ve come up with something.

We’ve also built on our interviewing techniques and generated reems of material. All in all, the group have got plenty to say so we’re looking forward to next week when we’ll be assembling it all into the form of a podcast.