Dark Dogs and the Dance of Death

As posy as it sounds, after teaching ended and prior to the post-Christmas recording session for Riprap, we (that is, myself and the cruel mistress who rules my heart, not the quartet) went to Madrid to visit a friend and get some R&R. The general plan was, to keep everyone happy, to alternate days in the surrounding hills with hard-core gallery-hitting days.

To that end, while Jane went all enlightenment, checking out the Ruebens, I wandered through much of the darker side of things (as usual). After an extended, cheerful period in a deserted room with Goya's Black Paintings from his late years of gathering madness in the Quinta del Sordo (typified by light-hearted themes such as this painting of a drowning dog on the right, which makes an intersting contrast to Hokusai's Kanagawa oki nami-ura), I found myself standing speechless and shaken while touring the Late Medieval sections of the Prado, looking at the Bruegel, Bosch and Fra Angelico paintings.

The thing I noticed in most of them, as in this detail below of Brueghel's (and the title brightens your mood just hearing it) The Triumph of Death, was that music usually had some very unfortunate outcomes in the grand scheme of things. As we can see here below, a fool plays a lute accompanied by a figure of death on lute as well, playing a counter-line, as the army of Death sweeps across Kings, Fools, and Beauty alike, disturbing the banquet, and the skeletons with scythes and swords literally reap the living, who, distracted by their little pleasures such as music, sex and drink, are oblivious to the approaching Apocalypse.

Hmmm.... not good, not at all the way I had planned things in my somewhat erratic career as a musician to shake out at all. I had always thought of music as something that would affirm life, (or at least get me some girlfriends) and, in a sense, could even be said to have transcended it for a privileged few, like Bach or Stravinsky, whose art is still tracing some kind of narrative arc, complete with unseen outcome, through our culture. Although it has to be said that it is questionable whether it makes any difference to their current state of being. Instead, I was presented with the stern Northern view (mostly Flemish) of the frivolous arts distracting us from the proper contemplation of memento mori, and that inevitable and inescapable conclusion of our affairs. Our time is short - don't waste it. Yeah, like I said, a short holiday. Check it out in detail online; especially scroll over to the lower right-hand corner in the link. Happy Days.

Anyway, I have been reading a couple of books of Hubert Dreyfus after an oblique recommendation by a local spiritual leader and generally lower-register guy. While sitting in a self-catering flat in Madrid, being too cheap to go out to eat every night, I was slowly working my way through All Things Shining, one of his most recent books, and came across the chapter on Melville's Moby Dick (which, by a strange coincidence, I also was in the middle of one of my bi-annual readings). One of his points is our loss of any sense of connection with wonder, exacerbated by our post-Cartesian mind/body concept of duality. He specifically un-picks the chapter where the crew has to collectively break down the finest oil of the sperm whale, the head oil or spermaceti, by plunging their hands together into casks filled with the cooling oil, and, as it starts to crystallize, to squeeze the lumps and break them up. Melville describes how, because of the many pairs of hands working in the still-warm, slippery oil, he lost any sense of his individuality with the others and they all created this spreading sense of well-being as they pressed lumps of oil and each others hands indiscriminately. This brought me back to the experience of the group of bass clarinets and low-pitched ambient noise we created, where I couldn't, for at least the last 10 minutes, tell whether I was making a sound or not; like the loss of self in the gentle pogo-ing within a mosh-pit.

We finally got a Riprap recording session done, and got some good, usable stuff after two solid days of playing. It could be that we need another, but that remains to be seen, and will depend on what the mix-down sounds like. It was strange, as my soprano sounded great, but I just couldn't get going on tenor, never mind bass clarinet. And we never got around to the Rameau rip-off. I might try to organize another day to try and re-do three or four tracks. It was the usual set of recording compromises, with great intros ruined by mistakes in the head, or superb solos rendered useless by a crap one (usually mine) following on its heels. I'm going to go into the mix-down to try and see if we can create some musical Frankensteins, perhaps grafting intro 2 onto take 5 sort of thing, or losing a section here and there.

The thing that seemed to work the best was, of course, one of the last things we decided to do for the sheer hell of it. Instead of doing the piece Old Year as a brittle, minimalist (more in the La Monte Young sense) twisted children's song we started from a Late Miles On the Corner inspired ride, and just blew the hell out of it. So much for being art-y.

 http://soundcloud.com/kevin-flanagan/old-year-final-mix

Imagine a membrane...

Imagine a membrane... a membrane say, a mile across and four or five miles long. This membrane is solid and crystalline, and perhaps a foot or so thick. Now imagine shining a heat source on it, like the sun, so that it begins to expand. But it is fairly rigid, being crystalline; how does it relieve the stress of expanding ever-so-slightly in the weak Scandinavian winter sun?

What we have created is something your average bass-box Escort driver with 10k+ watts driving 18" kickers couldn't even begin to conceive of.... and without the distortion.



My friend Magnus had taken me upcountry a bit inland from Stockholm to visit an archaeological site he was currently working at; in the summer there's a small ferry, but in the winter you walk out across the ice to reach the island. When we got about halfway there, the wind suddenly dropped, the sun came out, and the ice suddenly began to sing and reverberate with long groaning noises and rifle-like cracks. The video embedded above gives no idea of the kind of subsonic shudders that come up from the ice through your boots - something like whale-song, but felt in your bones. I was utterly and completely gobsmacked, and had to keep stopping to listen.

I can't begin to tell you how lucky I felt. I've heard it before; but faintly, almost as if I was kidding myself because I wanted to hear it. Not like this. The whole show finished when the entire valley echoed with a sound like rolling thunder that lasted about 20 seconds as something major re-arranged it self the length of the lake. The old Gods awaken. (try pasting that last phrase into Google for a positive embarrassment of sad Goth/Fantasy/New Age sites... something else to explore, I suppose)

I've now spent days trying to find the sounds again, but I'll just have to go back....

I have now put up some of the tracks from the Chelmsford gig on the brand shiny-new Riprap site on Myspace for your listening pleasure. The strange thing about that gig was how well it went compared to my playing a week later trying to run some in-character straight post-bop for Chris Ingham's Rebop effort. I just couldn't make the switch in styles fast enough. More on this soon.

More soon - just trying to do something with the Holy Goof... it seems like marimbas are go.

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

I suppose I'll blame Phil

It was Phil who suggested this state of affairs..."you should have a blog" , so I promised to have a go. So this is just a bit of an introduction, hopefully buried by subsequent posts.

Anyway, this will mainly be about the trials and tribulations of trying to get something a bit left-field off the ground, namely the poetry project. I have spent about a week in total over the last month going through revisions of an endless grant proposal process to help try and offset the costs of the first half-dozen gigs, as this is, as usual, somewhat unprofitable music, and will of course have to be helped along with the taxpayers money. Little do they know.

I am extremely lucky to have an interesting crew along for the ride on this one: so think of this as an opening credits-sort-of-thing.
-Phil: arty punk (you're never an ex-punk, really) web guy who has been incredibly supportive/hectoring over time.
-Malcolm: poet, biker; aka the 'Rocking Rev', the only man I know who still owns a fringed leather jacket, non-ironically.
-Brownie: bass player, cyclist, stoic and vicar?
-Dave: too talented and well-dressed by half, keyboards, closet maths genius.
-Russ: the wild card, pulse, sifu, large and small sounds.
-Jo: who will probably learn a lot from this, namely not to work on 'edgy' projects.

so off we go...


k