Feel the Music: Woven Collaboration

Optimo posters
Sound of the Sea by Heston Blumenthal
The Perfect Meal by Charles Spence and Betina Piqueras-Fiszman
2013 TED MED event at the NASA museum

BY STU BALE

For as long as I can remember, music has been an integral part of my everyday life. When I was wee, we would go on caravan holidays round France and these were always soundtracked with various cassettes of Dire Straits, Eurythmics, Roxette and the like. Absolute bangers. I played viola for a brief minute in primary school, and started going to see bands pretty early into secondary school.

When I was 16, I started collecting glasses in this kind of bar/restaurant/nightclub thing in the Southside of Glasgow. I was instantly captivated by the DJ – how he was able to control the room and the guests eating out of the palms of his hand. And so began what has been a lifelong love of electronic music for dancing to. Although I definitely subscribe to the theory that there’s only 2 kinds of music – good and bad, I think it was Jools Holland that said it…

The older guys on the bar were more than happy to take me under their wings and lead me astray – I wasn’t complaining, I was having a fucking amazing time (ha)… They took me to a club night in Glasgow called Optimo – it ran every Sunday night and had the most wide ranging and intriguing soundtrack. It’s really hard to describe the vibe in there, and I’ve seen lots of attempts, but all I will say is that they played music for dancing to and that could be anything from Iggy Pop, Donna Summer to Green Velvet. Every night was a musical odyssey – we were taken on a transcendental intergalactic journey wherever the DJs wanted to take us. It’s a really special thing to be transported through your senses.

I’d been deep into bars for a while when Heston Blumenthal started bringing some of his, at the time quite out there, concepts to the mainstream. He had a pretty tight working relationship with an Oxford Professor Charles Spence who is one of the foremost experts in the world in multi sensory experiences. Together they created the iconic ‘Sound of the Sea’ dish at the Fat Duck, where you got a plate of sashimi, with a kind of salty foam thing like the tide, and headphones in your ears to play the, you guessed it, sound of the sea. Taken in isolation each of these parts were interesting – the sashimi was obviously top top quality, and the salt foam added a beautiful delicate extra dimension to the dish, the soundtrack was quite fun. However taken together and the dish as a whole was mind blowing.

This was the first of quite a few interesting experiments that I came across around that time. There was quite a famous one with 2 different soundtracks and you were given the same piece of chocolate to taste while listening to each track. One track made the chocolate sweet, and the other made it bitter… It’s fucking mad how your brain works. Similar things like drinking from a red cup makes the liquid appear sweeter, heavy cups make you perceive the liquid as ‘more expensive’, all kinds of witchcraft. Professor Charles Spence has a really cool book about all this stuff that is well worth a read.

In 2013, when I was working at Strange Hill, I had an idea for an event that would be my first kind of adventure tying my love for music with the world of drinks. I had read about how different kinds of music would correspond to different tastes: big, earthy flavours, like coffee, beetroot or chocolate, were more dubby, bassy music; bright citrus flavours would work well with kind of a twinkly trance-y tunes… I wanted to put together a whole event where the music would match the drinks and the food, and everybody would just have a nice time…

One of the guys I was working with, Dave, had a bunch of experience and connections in the music industry, and he also had this connection at a catering company in Washington. We ended up pitching this event as a concept of an afterparty for the TED MED series of talks. They went for it and all of a sudden we had to work out how the fuck to put this thing together for 1200 people in the fucking NASA museum.

As I said, Dave had some music industry connections, so I ended up working with Jon Klein, who is probably best known as the guitarist from Siouxsie and the Banshees. We produced this 2.5 hour piece of music that kind of went through 4 ‘movements’ that we assigned to each course. It ended up being an unreal event, definitely one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Because the timings had to be exact, I was running around between all these space ships with a stop watch and a walkie talkie making sure the courses were changing at the right time – there were trolleys of food coming out of lunar rovers & crazy light shows – fucking wild. We ended up winning the Young British Foodie award for the best experiential event that year. It was a lot of fun.


A few years ago one of my oldest and dearest friends, Dunc, launched a revolutionary Whisky Brand called Woven. Whisky – and particularly blended whisky – has been seen forever as a kind of old, outdated category, not helped by the extremely rigid rules of the Scotch Whisky Association. As such, there have only been a few young brands doing some exciting new things. Woven are at the forefront of the contemporary blended whisky movement. They have all kinds of weird and wonderful experiments going on with whiskies from around the world and are combining them to make delicious delicious things. They’ve ripped up the rule book and they’re doing their own thing. It’s great to see this kind of true innovation in the hunt for tasty things. My personal favourite is the fact that one of their whiskies, for some obscure reason & because the computer says no, can’t be bottled in Scotland so they have to bottle it in England.

As part of their activation strategy for last year they took over a small site in London for a few months and Dunc asked if I had any ideas for a closing party… We used to live together in Edinburgh, so I have a fair idea of the kinds of things he’s into and was pretty convinced I could do something fun…

Another long time friend and collaborator at Crucible is the enigma Brian D’Souza aka Auntie Flo. I first crossed paths with Brian probably about 20 years ago in the Glasgow party scene where he was playing records in some of my friends’ bars. He was also running a successful club night called Highlife. We didn’t really see much of each other for quite a few years, although we both lived in London. While I was doing my thing, Brian was building up his own company Open Ear Music – it supplies music to all kinds of consumer facing businesses – Selfridges and Wahaca were both clients, and he was in charge of creating and maintaining the vibes in these places. It helps that he studied psychology, so some of the ways in which the venues were sonically managed were really clever.. I remember chatting to him about a sort of automatic counter that would know how busy the bar was and adjust the volume and tempo of the music automatically, while still keeping within the set genre of music for the site. Witchcraft!

I’ve had Brian over at Crucible a few times over the years to give presentations to bartenders about how they can manage their own venues’ music better, which was always well received. Anyway, over the pandemic, like most of us in our own ways, Brian went slightly off the reservation and was out in nature, in the wilds recording all kinds of sounds and sonic landscapes. He went right in at the deep end and was using this technology called biosonification, which is a way of converting the electric signals in nature to electric midi signals that can make music. A lot of the soundscapes he was putting together were for things like wellness retreats and spa – really relaxing places, where the sounds of nature would help you unwind.

So for the Woven closing party, Brian and I hatched this plan where I would make some drinks and Brian would make some live music from the corresponding plants / botanicals / mushrooms that were in the drinks.

We were slightly constrained in that we had to have a live sample of whatever plant we were using in the drinks, so that sort of led the menu. We kicked off with a stinger type thing, using a mint liqueur that was made on the rotovap, which allowed it to retain a super bright fresh minty taste, without going in a toothpaste direction. The mint plant that we had was making some really nice refreshing noises and we thought it worked really well as a welcome to everyone at the Woven closing party.

Next up there was a drink using reishi mushrooms.. We’ve been using quite a lot of ‘functional’ ingredients as of late, both in drinks for bars, as well as for NPDs. There’s a lot of interest in how and why ingredients can change your mental state, especially with more and more people foresaking alcohol. Reishi is one of these ingredients that has been shown to promote a feeling of relaxation and help you sleep. It’s also pretty tasty and looks fucking mental.. The noises coming from the mushrooms were kind of extraterrestrial.

The third drink was a little bit like a Penicillin cocktail – with fresh apple and ginger. I was able to pick up a smallish apple tree from B&Q, so we had that hooked up to Brian’s machines and it made some pretty cheery beats.

And the final drink was an Old Fashioned style drink, using a tea syrup made from Rare Tea Co teas. I was able to find a small tea bush online that got delivered just in time. By this time the guests had had a lot of whisky in a relatively short period of time, so everyone was pretty merry to be honest.. Brian had put a drum machine over the top (Put a donk on it!) of the rather ethereal sounds coming from the tea bush, so everyone was just getting stuck in. Party time.

The drinks turned out great, the music was super fun and weird, but most importantly for us, the guests were all completely immersed in the moment. It was unlike any other whisky event I’ve been to. There is an undeniable synergy that goes on when all the elements tie together from the flavour to the sound and atmosphere. A kind of joyful wonkiness. Highly recommend. Hopefully we’ll be back doing a few more of these this year!

On a slightly separate tangent, probably the most exciting music related thing I watched last year was the Kneecap thing on Netflix. Inspirational.

Woven Superblend
Dunc & Stu circa 2007
Brian D’Souza
Reishi mushroom: antler phase
2013 TED MED event at the NASA museum
2013 TED MED event at the NASA museum
Woven Superblend Closing Party

Feel the Music: Woven Collaboration

BY STU BALE

For as long as I can remember, music has been an integral part of my everyday life. When I was wee, we would go on caravan holidays round France and these were always soundtracked with various cassettes of Dire Straits, Eurythmics, Roxette and the like. Absolute bangers. I played viola for a brief minute in primary school, and started going to see bands pretty early into secondary school.

When I was 16, I started collecting glasses in this kind of bar/restaurant/nightclub thing in the Southside of Glasgow. I was instantly captivated by the DJ – how he was able to control the room and the guests eating out of the palms of his hand. And so began what has been a lifelong love of electronic music for dancing to. Although I definitely subscribe to the theory that there’s only 2 kinds of music – good and bad, I think it was Jools Holland that said it…

The older guys on the bar were more than happy to take me under their wings and lead me astray – I wasn’t complaining, I was having a fucking amazing time (ha)… They took me to a club night in Glasgow called Optimo – it ran every Sunday night and had the most wide ranging and intriguing soundtrack. It’s really hard to describe the vibe in there, and I’ve seen lots of attempts, but all I will say is that they played music for dancing to and that could be anything from Iggy Pop, Donna Summer to Green Velvet. Every night was a musical odyssey – we were taken on a transcendental intergalactic journey wherever the DJs wanted to take us. It’s a really special thing to be transported through your senses.

Optimo posters

I’d been deep into bars for a while when Heston Blumenthal started bringing some of his, at the time quite out there, concepts to the mainstream. He had a pretty tight working relationship with an Oxford Professor Charles Spence who is one of the foremost experts in the world in multi sensory experiences. Together they created the iconic ‘Sound of the Sea’ dish at the Fat Duck, where you got a plate of sashimi, with a kind of salty foam thing like the tide, and headphones in your ears to play the, you guessed it, sound of the sea. Taken in isolation each of these parts were interesting – the sashimi was obviously top top quality, and the salt foam added a beautiful delicate extra dimension to the dish, the soundtrack was quite fun. However taken together and the dish as a whole was mind blowing.

Sound of the Sea by Heston Blumenthal

This was the first of quite a few interesting experiments that I came across around that time. There was quite a famous one with 2 different soundtracks and you were given the same piece of chocolate to taste while listening to each track. One track made the chocolate sweet, and the other made it bitter… It’s fucking mad how your brain works. Similar things like drinking from a red cup makes the liquid appear sweeter, heavy cups make you perceive the liquid as ‘more expensive’, all kinds of witchcraft. Professor Charles Spence has a really cool book about all this stuff that is well worth a read.

The Perfect Meal by Charles Spence and Betina Piqueras-Fiszman

In 2013, when I was working at Strange Hill, I had an idea for an event that would be my first kind of adventure tying my love for music with the world of drinks. I had read about how different kinds of music would correspond to different tastes: big, earthy flavours, like coffee, beetroot or chocolate, were more dubby, bassy music; bright citrus flavours would work well with kind of a twinkly trance-y tunes… I wanted to put together a whole event where the music would match the drinks and the food, and everybody would just have a nice time…

One of the guys I was working with, Dave, had a bunch of experience and connections in the music industry, and he also had this connection at a catering company in Washington. We ended up pitching this event as a concept of an afterparty for the TED MED series of talks. They went for it and all of a sudden we had to work out how the fuck to put this thing together for 1200 people in the fucking NASA museum.

As I said, Dave had some music industry connections, so I ended up working with Jon Klein, who is probably best known as the guitarist from Siouxsie and the Banshees. We produced this 2.5 hour piece of music that kind of went through 4 ‘movements’ that we assigned to each course. It ended up being an unreal event, definitely one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Because the timings had to be exact, I was running around between all these space ships with a stop watch and a walkie talkie making sure the courses were changing at the right time – there were trolleys of food coming out of lunar rovers & crazy light shows – fucking wild. We ended up winning the Young British Foodie award for the best experiential event that year. It was a lot of fun.

2013 TED MED event at the NASA museum

A few years ago one of my oldest and dearest friends, Dunc, launched a revolutionary Whisky Brand called Woven. Whisky – and particularly blended whisky – has been seen forever as a kind of old, outdated category, not helped by the extremely rigid rules of the Scotch Whisky Association. As such, there have only been a few young brands doing some exciting new things. Woven are at the forefront of the contemporary blended whisky movement. They have all kinds of weird and wonderful experiments going on with whiskies from around the world and are combining them to make delicious delicious things. They’ve ripped up the rule book and they’re doing their own thing. It’s great to see this kind of true innovation in the hunt for tasty things. My personal favourite is the fact that one of their whiskies, for some obscure reason & because the computer says no, can’t be bottled in Scotland so they have to bottle it in England.

Woven Superblend
Dunc & Stu circa 2007

As part of their activation strategy for last year they took over a small site in London for a few months and Dunc asked if I had any ideas for a closing party… We used to live together in Edinburgh, so I have a fair idea of the kinds of things he’s into and was pretty convinced I could do something fun…

Another long time friend and collaborator at Crucible is the enigma Brian D’Souza aka Auntie Flo. I first crossed paths with Brian probably about 20 years ago in the Glasgow party scene where he was playing records in some of my friends’ bars. He was also running a successful club night called Highlife. We didn’t really see much of each other for quite a few years, although we both lived in London. While I was doing my thing, Brian was building up his own company Open Ear Music – it supplies music to all kinds of consumer facing businesses – Selfridges and Wahaca were both clients, and he was in charge of creating and maintaining the vibes in these places. It helps that he studied psychology, so some of the ways in which the venues were sonically managed were really clever.. I remember chatting to him about a sort of automatic counter that would know how busy the bar was and adjust the volume and tempo of the music automatically, while still keeping within the set genre of music for the site. Witchcraft!

I’ve had Brian over at Crucible a few times over the years to give presentations to bartenders about how they can manage their own venues’ music better, which was always well received. Anyway, over the pandemic, like most of us in our own ways, Brian went slightly off the reservation and was out in nature, in the wilds recording all kinds of sounds and sonic landscapes. He went right in at the deep end and was using this technology called biosonification, which is a way of converting the electric signals in nature to electric midi signals that can make music. A lot of the soundscapes he was putting together were for things like wellness retreats and spa – really relaxing places, where the sounds of nature would help you unwind.

Brian D’Souza

So for the Woven closing party, Brian and I hatched this plan where I would make some drinks and Brian would make some live music from the corresponding plants / botanicals / mushrooms that were in the drinks.

We were slightly constrained in that we had to have a live sample of whatever plant we were using in the drinks, so that sort of led the menu. We kicked off with a stinger type thing, using a mint liqueur that was made on the rotovap, which allowed it to retain a super bright fresh minty taste, without going in a toothpaste direction. The mint plant that we had was making some really nice refreshing noises and we thought it worked really well as a welcome to everyone at the Woven closing party.

Next up there was a drink using reishi mushrooms.. We’ve been using quite a lot of ‘functional’ ingredients as of late, both in drinks for bars, as well as for NPDs. There’s a lot of interest in how and why ingredients can change your mental state, especially with more and more people foresaking alcohol. Reishi is one of these ingredients that has been shown to promote a feeling of relaxation and help you sleep. It’s also pretty tasty and looks fucking mental.. The noises coming from the mushrooms were kind of extraterrestrial.

Reishi mushroom: antler phase

The third drink was a little bit like a Penicillin cocktail – with fresh apple and ginger. I was able to pick up a smallish apple tree from B&Q, so we had that hooked up to Brian’s machines and it made some pretty cheery beats.

And the final drink was an Old Fashioned style drink, using a tea syrup made from Rare Tea Co teas. I was able to find a small tea bush online that got delivered just in time. By this time the guests had had a lot of whisky in a relatively short period of time, so everyone was pretty merry to be honest.. Brian had put a drum machine over the top (Put a donk on it!) of the rather ethereal sounds coming from the tea bush, so everyone was just getting stuck in. Party time.

The drinks turned out great, the music was super fun and weird, but most importantly for us, the guests were all completely immersed in the moment. It was unlike any other whisky event I’ve been to. There is an undeniable synergy that goes on when all the elements tie together from the flavour to the sound and atmosphere. A kind of joyful wonkiness. Highly recommend. Hopefully we’ll be back doing a few more of these this year!

Woven Superblend Closing Party

On a slightly separate tangent, probably the most exciting music related thing I watched last year was the Kneecap thing on Netflix. Inspirational.

Crucible
60-68 Markfield Road
London N15 4QA

Strictly by appointment only

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Crucible
60-68 Markfield Road
London N15 4QA

Strictly by appointment only