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"From out of the dark"

From Out Of The Dark

From out of the dark is a collection of 6 songs finished during the infamous Covid lockdown of 2020, drawing musical influences from many different genres and based on different themes close to my heart.

Some with a narrative, others about how I felt a particular junction in life, playing music, writing and recording songs has been a great outlet for me and helped me deal with and express myself in a productive fashion.

With no single genre over the six songs I decided to put them out as From out of the dark, to show how something good can come from the darkness. I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed making them.

I appreciate so much all the friends and family who have helped critique these tracks ready for public consumption. Thanks also to my younger sister, Hannah, for providing her vocal talents and lyric writing on two of the songs.

Please listen below and follow me on all of my social networks using the links above.

Matt x

#Jawbone Up Fitness Tracker - Review

Up, up and away...?

As anyone who has stumbled across my blog will know, I recently got very into maintaining a healthy lifestyle, dieting, eating the right things and doing more exercise, mostly in the form of walking more and a weight regimen.

Well, in this sudden uprising of fitness freaks comes with it a new wave of technology - fitness trackers or bands. They work by sitting quietly on your wrist and monitoring different things about your lifestyle. The version I have, the Up2 sleep and activity tracker, retails on Amazon for £69.95 (at time of writing), and was gifted to me for review purposes by a friend who happens to work for Jawbone. And whilst it's not perfect, for the money I think it's an excellent investment for anybody looking to add a technological twist to their fitness frenzy.

I got very OCD during my diet, becoming an extreme calorie and step counter, so what I didn't want was to get stuck in a rut again and return to these compulsions. Whilst the Up app does have options to do this, and it works with other third party apps such as My Fitness Pal, it's definitely not essential to using the band.



Mostly, it just sits there quietly on your wrist, monitoring how many steps you take, then when you go to bed, you set it to sleep mode, and it monitors the quality of your sleep - how often you wake, how much deep sleep you get in comparison to light sleep etc. And like I said, if you want to take it further and track workouts and calories etc, there are options for that available too. The sleep aspect is what I was most interested in, and actually the pedometer just does its thing in the background, alerting you with a simple vibration when you achieve your daily goal. The vibrate function can also be used as a smart alarm, waking you up within a threshold of time (mine is set to between 5 to and 5 past 7, where the band will vibrate gently to wake me up).

Since the most recent firmware update, it also switches to sleep mode automatically, meaning you really don't need to think about it at all, except for taking it off for washing and charging purposes. The band comes packaged as though supplied by Apple - a neat and modern affair, and comes simply with a magnetic USB charging adapter, less than 15cm in length. A full charge is likely to last around 10 days, which I thought was excellent.

The only downside I have experienced is that occasionally the clasp does come loose and I have had the band fall off a couple of times. I seem to have found the sweet spot for this now though and haven't lost it yet. Fingers crossed!

In conclusion then, a good fitness tracker with lots of app support, allowing you to be as involved or detatched from the tracking as you like. A firm 5 stars. * * * * *


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