the old gods awaken...

There are two possible ways of re-mounting the auto-advance plate and cam lobe in the distributor on a Guzzi, and it's impossible to know which one is right without splitting the frame, dropping the engine and pulling out the distributor drive cam; so you have a 50-50 chance of getting it right. This morning, I stood next to the Guzzi's inert carcass and flipped a coin in the mild late-winter sunshine, full of hope for the immediate future.

On the one hand, hitting the start button is greeted with a throaty roar (and as a musician, I've begun to realize that the reason the sound of various V-twins is so attractive is because of the asymmetrical firing pattern - each one , Guzzi, Ducati, Harley, has a unique signature sound depending on the degree of that asymmetry; the, say, 135 degree da-dup of a heartbeat instead of the even, bland 180 purr of a BMW [sorry Rog...]); or, on the other , the engine produces a few strange poops and echo-y metallic burps as the ignition tries to fire on the exhaust stroke. Needless to say, the latter was the outcome at lunchtime, after a morning spent stripping out the old electronic ignition system I now knew to be dead, and re-installing a pair of standard breaker points.

It took two clumsy hours to install the first time, but only 30 minutes to change over for the second try; and the fact that it was the right way around was announced by a hellish, rising open-pipe din as one of the carb sliders stuck and I frantically stabbed for the kill switch. Whey-hey.

Next, some time spent trying to getting the timing, points, valves and carbs back in the ballpark, as I've changed the whole set-up between all the mismatched parts from the two bikes..


In the meantime, I've been spending a lot of time sketching some Arias for the opera project Holy Goof while I'm waiting for some text from Malcolm. The idea of Cassady's adventures, first with the Beats, later with Ken Kesey, to his last mad walk of into the freezing night along some railway tracks to his death is beginning to get exciting. If I can get a couple of arias into some kind of orchestral suite form for Peter Britten's orchestra next year, it could serve as a launching for an entire opera production. All I need is (sigh) money.

Also, I'm spending some of the weekend going over the AHRC composition grant for the Riprap project, and starting to think about the Ruth Padel gig this June 27th, and setting up a companion gig in Cambridge for her as well, and I've just gotten a green light for one in November as well. I'll have to organize a recording of the new stuff once we play it in a bit.

Still thinking about bass clarinets.... when will they come into my life?

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.

enso on..

This is just a quick note to say that I've put up a download of Malcolm doing his poem "My Poetry is Jamming Your Machine" on the website for your listening pleasure and edification. I'll get a few more clips converted and uploaded as well in the next few days.

I've spent the last few days re-doing Newset for Piano and Violin, as Mifune and Paul are playing it again on December 12th. I was never happy with the last section, it seemed a bit abrupt; and so it was, as I merely stopped the piece, like Wile E. Coyote stopped in mid-air after running off a cliff, because I had exceeded the specified time limit for the gig. So I went back and re-wrote much of the last section, prying bars apart and adding great gobs of stuff, trying to work out the material in more leisurely transitions. It was kind of fun, and you realize that you always throw away too many ideas without really developing them. To come back to something even just 6 -8 months later makes you look at it very differently, as you've now completely forgotten what you were thinking at the time.

Dalhaus points out that after the triumph of technology here in the future, (the land of food pills and aluminum-foil disposable clothing) we now view works of art as an on-going process (like Steve Reich would say) rather than a finished, free-standing autonomous objects, and as such, always open to technological innovation. The temptation for me, rather than doing new stuff, is to keep trawling over old pieces, thinking I can somehow rescue them. And somehow, it's also much easier than trying to start something new, facing that terrifying blank sheet of paper on the piano. But it's more like having to accept it when the Vet says that there's no way your pet is going to get any better, and needs to be put down. The thing might just be crap.

The next big thing is to start on a piece for Peter Britton's orchestra; I'm thinking it could be a test bed for a chamber opera I've been planning with Malcolm about Neal Cassady. Something about the leap from the hot-wired cars of On the Road, the Magic Bus of Ken Kesey, to the last manic walk down the railway tracks on a freezing night after a week-long bender in Mexico. One fast move and I'm gone...

And things move forward here as well, if slowly - I had a couple of good couple of days - lots of compositional sketching, and, finally, I got the electrics of the Guzzi wired up and functioning: turning it over on the battery, a spark appeared at the plugs, lights work, there were no huge arcs of light with accompanying funny smells. The only thing that prevented me from starting it today was the fact I had no oil in the crankcase; otherwise it only would have run for a very short time. So a good weekend, adding that to a daily run on the fixed through the winter showers - I think the word for it is "bracing."

However, it's always two steps forward and one back - the bread I was making on Sunday collapsed, the Wonderdog has a more-or-less permanent limp, and Ruth Padel couldn't do February. But probably Grevel Lindorp is going to do the gig in Chelmsford... more as I find out.

Two more weeks to home in the States for Christmas; fingers crossed that the Arts touring grant comes through for the Riprap project.

k

A Fresh Start.

Normally, life out here proceeds with the infinite calm of 'silver mountains, iron cliffs', as beloved by the sages in the Shobogenzo. However, after the entropic events surrounding the organizing of the last couple of gigs, and my resultant somewhat over-wrought and fried playing, I have felt there might be other ways to make a living - so what could be more fun than taxidermy? Why the original author of the manual used an illustration of a mounted bat's head for his dust cover on the left here is something we'll probably never know. Perhaps this is the taxidermist's equivalent to putting small ships in bottles, (how do they do that?) another lost art. Disturbing imagery, perhaps, but humor me for a moment; especially as one could now always reside with ever-faithful companions, such as the former wonder dog Bonzo, (admittedly, after 12 years in the ground, not really a good prospect for stuffing) or even surround oneself with friends (and not-so) that one has outlived? Imagine the fun, as you regale them with stories, or even draw hilarious toothbrush mustaches and Frankenstein-style scars on them that they never would have put up with in this realm?

Anyway, things have gotten better over the last 24 hours: I no longer have to pretend that I'm Canadian, and have taken the red maple leaf off my backpack. (a later note - I now see that this little phrase is all over the Internet amongst ex-pat bloggers... that's me, always behind the curve) I always had a problem if anyone followed up with a question about Canada, only having hitched up there a few times in my late teens to circumvent the New Hampshire drinking age, therefore remembering very little about Montreal, or the trailer parks one inevitably ended up in. So I sat, in the small hours of election night, surrounded by half crushed tins of Co-op budget lager (the requisite bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon being unobtainable in Suffolk) getting a bit emotional.




So apart from my playing, the gigs went well, and Riprap were able to pull the settings together of Malcolm's stuff convincingly on the night. In a contrast to working with just music, I find that the text is a very useful structure - I think this has always been the case, now more than ever, when the lack of agreed templates or song structures makes it more difficult to handle larger spans of musical time coherently. I tend to try and compose a series of discrete 'triggers' that have their own particular texture for us to move away from and towards - almost a series of stones in a Zen garden.

I consider myself incredibly lucky to have accidentally assembled an ensemble with such a spooky level of space and communication. The thing I was always aiming for was the type of open-ended trigger-forms that early (and I must stress the 'early', it all went a bit off after say, 1974) Weather Report developed from Miles. That, and the concept of acoustic/analogue group improvisation that remained largely unexplored since New Orleans. What you see on above is a fragment of some of the triggers we use to take off from and return to, allowing the structure to be open enough to allow the ensemble to react to whatever pace the poet chooses to read at. The interesting thing I have already noticed is that Malcolm already feels confident and comfortable enough to depart from the strict reading of the text, and enter into the general continuum of improv. Only in a small way at present, but it's something we can develop.

So, we continue our mad search for kicks

friday week gig ... maybe laptop guy as well.

k

Life out at the Lazy K....

Things are, of course, never dull out here. Granted, although we are certainly not in the league of the Lazy K Dude ranch of Montana, (the original dude ranch seen at your right) but in our own small way we keep up our levels of duderino-ness, although eschewing White Russians and bowling, for the most part (if only to preserve my marriage). It's my own small way of making a difference to people's lives here in East Anglia.

I've been sitting around in a mild panic not quite composing a new series of settings for the kick-off of the next series of Riprap gigs. Suddenly the days consist of a series of minor crisis: the dog and I have a series of crippling problems about the right kind of mechanical pencil, whether I've already had too much coffee, where's my favorite eraser, should I make bread? Would I be better off sitting at the piano and going through all the scores I have out of the library for a hoped-for flash of inspiration (or at least just something to steal), or should I just sit down and get on with it? The phone rings, and I'm greeted by a pre-recorded foghorn blast announcing I have just won the 6th holiday this fortnight. The John Cale/La Monte Young Dream Syndicate drone CD is proving strangely irritating (I suppose you just had to be there, man: NYC '65). Perhaps I should just put on the kettle?

The day started out in a promising fashion: a short sitting, empty the wonderdog as the sun came up, doing Wu Dang Long Form while the dog ran around me barking every time I attempt to 'sweep lotus leg', (something he finds wildly exciting, strangely). Make coffee, nuke oatmeal, eat.

That's it then - I will have to go and sit in my room and actually do something. A couple of hours later, there's this stubborn passage that, after much fidgeting about, will probably serve as a basis to Malcolm's poem Singing Bowl. Now it's time to start the kettle again. The dog and I eye up the truculent cheap-ass Screwfix chainsaw, in lieu of doing anything. This of course leads to 15 minutes of cleaning plugs, yanking and swearing before I finally get the thing to start for the first time in months. While I stand around like a maniac cursing and revving the nuts off the little bastard as punishment, I realize the whole last part of this sorry episode has been quietly watched by a Polish painter who had come by to give us an estimate, and is now clearly having second thoughts about working for this particular household.

So, an attempt to regain mental balance is necessary, and of course this entails two wheeled conveyances. I pull my road iron (as opposed to the fixie) off the rack and start to effect a few minor repairs with a view to having a quick, brain-clearing hour circuit before lunch and more work. Pull pedals off, start to replace and the phone rings; back to the bike again, and the postie shows up waiting for a signature. Return to wrenching, phone rings and I've won another holiday. Damn... run into house to tog up in embarrassing roadie gear and get out before anything else happens.

Barn locked, bike out, I clip in and start to spin down the road in a low gear. Legs always hurt for the first couple of miles, for no explicable reason, but it feels good to be out, as always. A few hundred yards down the road I shift up, and stand out of the saddle to pump it a bit and get it up to cruising cadence.

Bang... I'm on the deck, flat on my back, winded, with the bike on top of me, like a starfish spread in the middle of the road. It was as if I stepped into a manhole : straight down, no warning. Lying there dazed, I realized I had heard that funny roadie sound, which was made by me, of a large, hollow whump of a leather bag being tossed and slid along the tarmac, followed by a sudden silence punctuated by birdsong and the quietly clicking rear wheel as it slowly stopped. This was going to hurt in a minute, I knew... road rash, bruises, general next-day-soreness. As I struggled to unclip, I could hear a car coming around the corner......great, just great.

I had forgotten to tighten up one of my pedals.

things just get better.

k