Ed Alleyne-Johnson

Heard this joke from RayAlome, who heard it on Conan O’Brien:

What do you call a fight between Mike Tyson and Paris Hilton?
The battle of the man who blew 30 million versus the woman who blew 30 million

Now back to the main topic. I first heard of this artist song through this video: Awesome Electric Violin – Ed Busking Chester (from LilPsyduck)

Ed Alleyne-Johnson Busking Electric Violin in Chester UK – May 2006

Fantastic – This is perhaps the best street performance I have ever witnessed. Reminiscent of Jean Luc Ponte’s visceral fusion sound. This is in the city of Chester near Wales. Chester has perhaps the only double decker shopping plaza streets, with a second level up off the street within the buildings, balconies running all the way down the streets. jablesj comments – “They were made by the victorians so that rich people would not get wet while out in the rain.”

The sound is unaltered from the original and was emancipated at great volume in this old town.

Ed uses the looper and pedals to great effect. There are no overdubs. Incredible he commanded this fantastic show all by himself, I stood enraptured with all the hair on my body standing on end, grin stretched wide. You can see where he looked up to see my ebullient smile just before he grins and kicks in the distortion. This has been a tremendous inspiration for me. I had never heard him or heard of him before this performance. Ed is awesome! I got some albums of his from the web since hearing this. I hope I can see him again one day.

The song is just amazing! The instrument being used is a electric violin. LilPsyduck also linked me to this video: Vanessa-Mae Storm, stating that was a electric violin. At first I believed it without any doubts as they were playing in a big auditorium with just 3 violins. However, upon further inspection, it doesn’t have any wires. However, she is wearing a microphone on her head which conveniently puts it right above the violin when she plays. I guess you can call it an electric violin as all a electric guitar is a guitar with microphones where the strings to pick up the songs and send it to a speaker.

What’s cool about Ed Alleyne-Johnson is the set of electric violin gadgets he has, including a repeater and a distortion pass through (I just pulled those terms out of my ***, but they sound legit right?). But anyway, after posting this video in my irc chatroom, FuzzyWuzzy posted this video: Ed Allein Johnson Purple Electric Violin Concerto.

Better sound out of this clip krunky. No noisy pedestrians. His use of looping tracks bugs me though… because half the beauty of concerti and orchestral arrangement is the fact that you’ve got many different musicians so completely on the same page, interacting with each other. Especially with quartets, trios, etc where there usually isn’t any conductor involved… it’s 3 or 4 musicians talking to each other through the tone and tempi

At this point, I was determined to get his album. The track played in the televised recording is track 4 from Purple Electric Violin Concerto: Oxford Suite, 4th Movement. Unfoturnately, I wasn’t able to find it available for purchase. Even AllOfMp3 didn’t have it. So I resorted to my “backup” plan. That wasn’t easy either. Took me 2 days to even find a source, but I finally have the album, and all the tracks are pretty amazing.

You can read more about him at the unofficial web site of Ed and Denyze Alleyne-Johnson. You can even download a couple of his tracks in mp3 format to check out his music.

• Oxford Suite, First Movement
• Kanon
• Ultraviolet
• Fly Before Dawn
• 2020 Vision
• Liverpool Concerto, First Movement
• Classical Suite, Second Movement

He’s also going to be releasing a new album soon called Reflections.