Avene | Video, Beats & Techniques

Ok, a bit about my music and creative background. I became interested in hip hop and breakdancing around 1984 at age 12, mostly from watching a few of the movies around then and seeing guys around my area breakdancing. But 1985 is when I really got involved in the music side of things listening to Tim Ritchie’s ‘dance show’ on JJJ. That lead me to buy a dj mixer at Tandy for mixing tapes and records together, and I’ve been buying gear ever since. Including my first ever sampler that I received from my parents as a Christmas present in 1986, a Yamaha VSS100. Which I still have.

Around the same time from 1986 to the early 90′s I was partaking in a bit of graffiti and aerosol art also. Mostly legal work of course! I’m planning to make a video eventually featuring photos of all the work I’d done.

This also explains how the name ‘Avene’ originated. Back in late 1987 I was trying to come up with a new graffiti tag. For some reason I thought I’d write ‘Advent’, but something didn’t look right and I removed the ‘d’ from it. So it then became ‘Avent’ (for a few minutes), but since that sounded too much like ‘event’ and the ‘t’ at the end wasn’t working for me, I changed it to an ‘e’ and it became ‘Avene’. The name has stuck with me ever since, I guess because it was an original name that I made up myself.

Getting back to the music, I first started properly recording tracks around 1988 once I’d left school and started working. Actually, probably more so 1989 when I’d accumulated more gear. Later I began helping out a number of hip hop artists around Sydney including Brethren & Voodoo Flavor and in 1995 released an EP called ‘Deadbeat’ with DJ Soup which was possibly the first instrumental hip hop release in Australia? But don’t quote me on that one!

From then on I had a few more tracks on compilation albums, but pretty much lost interest in releasing tracks due to the shady business side of releasing music, splitting royalties and being scammed. It just didn’t seem to be worth the effort, but I still worked on tracks.

Of course I’m still recording new music even, but anything I do these days normally becomes a backing track for my videos. That’s pretty much my focus. I’ve dabbled in shooting a couple of short films as a DOP, but to be honest, I still much prefer the music based stuff. There’s nothing like banging out some hip hop beats and chopping together a bunch of video edits over the top. Or even shooting and editing music videos for other artists.

On the personal side of things, I’m happily married to a lovely girl by the name of Lydia. Visit Lydia’s website here. And yes, she records music and does videos also.

Another thing I’ll mention is that I’ve been vegan since January 2003. I won’t go into my reasons, but can strongly say there is no way I could ever go back to eating dead animals, fish, or consuming any dairy products from a cow that weren’t intended for human consumption to begin with!

I should also add that I’m a huge fan of doing more with less. Or just making the most of what I have or can afford. This extends throughout pretty much everything in my life. Instead of carrying around a big digital SLR camera or even buying one, I prefer cheap consumer cameras I can fit in my pocket, but can still get great results from. Instead of spending money on something over priced like a Mac, HP or whatever, I build my own computers for a fraction of the cost. The same goes for music and video gear – I’m using a cheap tools that I know inside out. Even haircuts, I’ve been cutting my own hair for a number of years and can get it looking exactly how I want it. Which is a whole lot better than a hairdresser making a complete mess of it and then me having to pay them!

Anyway, enough about myself. I hope you enjoy what I have here on the website.

Glenn