we are just vessels through which passes the music of the cosmos...

From it's beginning with the uncanny resemblance to the badly acted overture of a porn film, to the final strange little curtsy that results from the fact that he's carrying just a bit too much beer-induced waist-related gravitas and can no longer quite bend over to bow in that particular pair of lederhosen, this is a humbling lesson to us all as performers. Yes, it's the King of the Yodelers.
So come on, watch how he kicks it up a couple of notches when he steps on stage, and does a mild Bavarian crowd-surf of the beirgarten benches. You can almost smell the sauerkraut and bratwurst, the sawdust and the crowd... and I'm half-way there already, having a particular Polish- mom induced love of pickled cabbage steeped in vinegar. Pierogi heaven. Although, I was thinking of the food; and butter-fried heart attack on a plate...with cabbage.

Somehow, I chanced across Franzl Lang (Der Jodlerkönig) singing "Einen Jodler hor i gern". Translated it means "I love to hear a yodel". This was in my usual late-evening-self-medicated state of chaotic lateral thought, having had an epiphany while watching a Jimmie Rodgers clip (aah-ha) thinking about the fact that no one talks about yodeling anymore. Yes, that heart-stopping rapid alternation between 'head' and 'chest' voices only a few master, and entered US popular music through the polka craze of the late 19th century has disappeared from the likes of popular consciousness such as the Tonight Show. But help is at hand, as the above website outlines, and is also probably grounds for a divorce. But I have noticed it re-entering the mainstream consciousness through a few tentative yelps by some various indie singers influenced by early Country styles

I realize I've been pretty quiet of late, having just gone through a fairly mad period of composing and rehearsing for the Grevel Lindop Riprap gig; of which I'll post some clips shortly. It was excellent, if under-attended....

attachments to material things: foodshark

The Foodshark in Marfa Texas; the first place we found a veggie, non-deep fried meal in a week of travel in the Southwest. It makes you realize how immersed you are in the material; who should care if you eat nothing but fried beans for a week? Certainly not achieving an unattached understanding; complete and clear, like water reflecting the moon. The mind in samadhi, like the sky, For ten thousand miles, not a cloud.
Certainly not thinking of salads, beer(s) or a secondhand cross frame to go trailstorming with. Or even a Yamie CL221 bass clarinet to open out some new textures in Riprap. No, nothing like that. Anyway, Marfa is an amazing hallucination that suddenly appears out of the distance after almost 200k of windswept high plains. A small town that grew up as the railhead for the area, it was once the wealthy, bustling world center of merino wool (cue Rapha clobber here). After that, it collapsed in the depression, and the town was left twisting in the wind, miles from anywhere, until Donald Judd, the New York Minimalist artist, arrived to begin buying up the town as cheap studio/exhibition space. What you see is an 'ironic' Prada shopfront in the middle of a very quiet space (200k quiet)

Apart from that, it's suddenly fairly mad times - multiple poetry settings required in two weeks, for a concert in Chelmsford with Grevel Lindop. It needs for one to just keep going to that little calm place. Plus a request for a piano reduction of an aria from 10,000 Things, and a duo that might look at an old sax piece of mine that needs radical re-editing. And, of course, trying to get in some time on the horns, teaching, marking, etc. Also, there's the Britten Sinfonia doing a workshop with Knussen this weekend, and the West Suffolk Wheelers Reliability Ride on Sunday. Not to be missed.

Strangely, the comments section attached below these blogs requests more high, lonely train pictures and such.

So.... my fave cheap motel, with the half-mile long freights with four huge throaty Union Pacific locos dragging it up the grade that rumble through every ten minutes, like a vibrating bed you put a quarter in, only free:



and Maria's, a great place to have scrambled eggs on toast with tons of chili sauce, (which only aids the Mel Brookes moments alluded to above) in a picturesque valley surrounded by mine tailings:



















and the beer garden of the above establishment:




















and of course, the final 'rails-into-the-distance' photo ( for a while), leading out of Marfa, Texas.,






















I think I've milked this holiday about as far as I can, and we haven't even arrived back up North yet.

You all have a safe journey now.

Back in the saddle again...

Cue the Sons of the Pioneers here, as we just got back from a week driving the back roads of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. However, this breathless update of our adventures in the wild Southwest, NYC art galleries and New Hampshire blizzards had to wait a few days as I arrived home to find mice had chewed through many of the cables strewn around my desk for the computer, necessitating a few days of soldering, cable purchasing and re-wiring.

This particularly iconic (yeah, I know, I hate the word too) motel sign, beckoning us all to our own personal Calvary of rusting bathroom fittings, static- fuzzy televisions and 'lite' American beers (unless you subscribe to some of the perhaps heretical views of the Ark of the Covenant actually lying under the true site at the Mount of Olives; thus making it your own personal martini buoy) was what drew us to the Motel Motel (it had no other name, so we'll just call it MM for the moment) in Fort Hancock, Texas, after a day of trickling down side roads along the Rio Grande. (I know, I put my hand up; I lied on the Facebook page by saying this was from Globe, but I uploaded the wrong one and couldn't be assed to change it... let's face it, Facebook sucks as far as extended, cogent discussion goes - although compared to Twitter, it's Adorno's Aesthetic Theory; and who doesn't love that book?

None the less, the actual motel at Globe, Arizona is here sub; and you can see, if you zoom the photo a bit, not only is it refrigerated, but there are room phones and a large, unexplained picture of Geronimo gracing the entrance. Add that to being surrounded, as I mentioned elsewhere, by green-tinted, worked-out stepped ziggurats of the abandoned copper mines which overshadow the town.

Needless to say, it was a real find. The whole town sat above five thousand feet in the mountains 100 miles roughly northeast of Phoenix, hard against the barren, high-altitude scrub-infested reservation the Apache had been forcibly ethnically-cleansed to at the end of the 19th century, after Geronimo's final unsuccessful uprising.

More on other things from this holiday as time goes on, but I must get to work on some settings for a gig in Chelmsford next month, where Riprap accompanies the poet Grevel Lindop. This should be interesting, as we have no idea yet as to what we're doing. Malcolm promises some suitable material soon...



El Rancho: it's refrigerated and very reasonably priced, and it's waiting there just for you and that special someone... you know you deserve it.