Tag: venus vulture

venusvulture.com revamped site

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

The new venusvulture.com website is working a treat now.
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I figured out what I’d done wrong (see the bottom of this post) – I’d made the base of some images in Windows Paint, which capitalises the .JPG extension, and then the html didn’t like them because they were all .jpg. The joys of hand coding.
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Sure, there’s tinkering to do, but it’s looking better than the minimal look it used to have.

New index screen at venusvulture.com
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(Original post and graphic)
Gurgle and sad faces. My updates to the website seem to have gone squish (it’s a long story involving using two different computers, and being away from the other one as I post this). At the moment it looks like this:

Well that’s not working for anyone (though, surprisingly enough, the links do work). Somehow I think I’ve rushed Filezilla and missed getting some of the pictures uploaded. Will fix it later on. Yes, normal service will be resumed.

Ghosts in the trees, ghosts in the hall – new Venus Vulture track on Reverbnation

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I’ve just uploaded a new track to the Venus Vulture Reverbnation page. This is a quirky thing, with a slight beat, an odd melody. I think I like echo too much, but perhaps that suits the ideas of ghosts.

I had a couple of tracks – Ghosts in the Trees, and Ghosts in the Hall – with a similar feel and similar sound, but neither seemed to really work. So I made this track by taking elements of each and creating a new mix.

Sand under my toes, Dust in my hair – new 8min Venus Vulture track available on Reverbnation

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 1 Comment

My latest ambient excursion, and longest for a while, is now available for free download or streaming on theVenus Vulture page at Reverbnation. “Sand under my toes, Dust in my hair” goes through a number of changes. Really it’s an attempt at narrative through sound. The track begins with a walk along a beach at sunset, then the wind cools and picks up and we hurry along almost lost until finally descending into a cave in the cliff, just lit by the sliver of crescent moon. Well, that was the mood I was looking for. Perhaps you’ll hear something different.

Clarity Moss 1862 – new Venus Vulture track on ReverbNation

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

I’m gradually in the process of releasing new ambient tracks during the year, while I focus on writing. The new track Clarity Moss 1862 is a quiet seven minute excursion with some occasional drum patterns and low-key melodies. Hopefully interesting enough to be engaging, discrete enough to be ignored.

Clarity Moss is a fictional character, of Slovenian and Irish ancestry. As a child she came to Canada via the US in the early 1800s and went on to become a bookseller and keen amateur natural historian. She did a lot of work cataloguing of fish species in Canadian rivers, some believe the most comprehensive work of the time. The notes were never published, but found amongst her letters and documents by her children after her death in 1862.

The track, as with the others on the ReverbNation page, is available to stream or download for free.

(Thursday is usually my “reading for writing” day, but really I’ve been reading two things lately: student portfolios, and a review book which is kind of embargoed until the review comes out, so next week then. I’m going to take a little break from the blog over Easter – back on Tuesday)

phantomshadows available again

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

The Venus Vulture album phantomshadows, which was originally released on the Resting Bell netlabel, is available again. It can be streamed or downloaded (for free) on the Venus Vulture Bandcamp page. phantomshadows is a minimal ambient drone album of four tracks, each around 14 minutes. The release was combined with a set of images, which are available on the Flickr page.

The funny details:
The release went out of print because I, silly me, had joined APRA – the New Zealand branch of the Australian Performing Rights Association. I think they do good work, but they’re not really compatible with creative commons licences. Christian, who does an extraordinary job at Resting Bell, was faced with paying GEMA (the German equivalent of APRA) fees for releasing my music – even though it was never my intent to generate money from this release. My bad. I’m no longer a member of APRA, though GEMA’s rules are different, it appears possible that I will never be able to release music through Resting Bell or any other German netlabel.

Streamined website – why?

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to those who’ve given me feedback on the updated venusvulture.com website – I have made a couple of minor changes. I am certainly a fan of minimal and streamlined and tired of sparkly ads, flash player required, complex links and pages stuffed to bursting or that scroll forever. The index page is 1kb of html and 31kb of images. I’ve avoided Dreamweaver, etc. and just hand-coded the html (yes, typed it as a text file). Too old school? Probably. Anyway, this is the code for the index page, for those who are interested.

Ah, no metadata, no java. That’ll probably cost me hits too. Oh well. I do have a favicon, but I still can’t figure out why it’s not working – something missing in the code?

New venusvulture.com site is ready and working

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 4 Comments

New index screen at venusvulture.comWhew. It’s been a while in the making, but the new Venus Vulture/Sean Monaghan website is running. It’s tidier and more streamlined. The homepage probably goes against conventions, but I like the look – going for minimal. There are still some bits to update, but it’s always a work in progress.

I promised this a while ago – there’s a screenshot in this post from late last year of how the site used to look.

venusvulture.com clean-up happening

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment
This is the old site
How the site looks

My website venusvulture.com has been a little neglected, I must admit, probably in favour of this blog.

I do my own coding and uploading, which takes time and effort and I’ve been slack – there are some broken links (the Resting Bell netlabel releases are out of print now, and Bookhabit sold to Smashwords, so my eBook Habitat is also unavailable*), and my publications list is out of date, so there’s lots of clean-up to do.

I’ll be launching the new site in early January with a new look (which I’ve already designed and laid out) with active links.

*I did have the option to move Habitat to Smashwords, but the process is complex and given how little response I got through Bookhabit, I’m not convinced it’s worth it. I also think that Habitat is dated now, in terms of my writing, so it’s probably good to be out of print too.