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.

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.

Filling ratholes with cement.

It's that kind of provocative title, isn't it? Almost like the beginning of a bad metaphor in what will turn out to be a cringingly boring sermon as you slump, hungover, further into the pew. ( "...of course, we should try and understand that we've all had to fill ratholes with cement; each and every one of us. We cannot stand in judgement. But this should always bring to mind the parable of Jesus among the money changers in the temple... [ I had just typed 'Monet changers', which looked far more interesting... that proximital slip of the T and Y being adjacent each other on the keyboard creates a whole different tangent that is tempting to follow..anyway...])

So as I laid in bed at 3 am listening to an ongoing rodent Summer of Love in the walls, it brought to mind Gary Snyder's concept of 'porosity' from The Practice of the Wild, the idea of allowing our surroundings to move freely through our lives, a kind of practice of interpenetration and embrace of Rattus norvegicus. After all, they are sentient beings. .... Right. All that went out the window yesterday, when it was discovered that the furry bodhisattvas had started chewing on Jane's green, un-fired pots, as she had been using coconut in the clay body to open the texure of the surface during the bisque firing. Madam was not pleased. So it's a Friday evening, and I'm gripping a beer (sadly not a PBR , as suggested elsewhere) and filling ratholes with cement.; not off to interesting gigs, fashionable parties, or an evening filed with scintillating, Wildean repartee.

Anyway, sorry for the digression - the header photo: more holiday snaps. Lordsburg, New Mexico; a bypassed godforsaken railway town that was once a major hub of activity. It was the place that the 'Ringo Kid', John Wayne, had to get to in his early film Stagecoach, by John Ford. Standing in the middle of the high plains on the border of Arizona at over 4,000 feet, you can now stand on the main street at rush hour, all six lanes of it and take photos at your leisure. The early sun shows gold off the rail tracks that every 10 minutes a what seems miles-long freight labors over the imperceptible incline, four locos in front, two in the back, laden with containers of white-goods soma from China.


This vast space seems haunted, and indeed it was; we had spent the day driving up from the Mexican border through a long, high valley that was all pasturage, about four miles wide flanked by 1,000-2,000 foot ridges hemming in each side. This, compared to the landscape before and after, had seemed relatively lush in a high-plains-kind-of-way. We stopped for about a half an hour, alone, just outside a place called Apache, and listened to the impersonal, autonomous wind that had blown forever, irregardless of our presence, and would always continue to do so. The sense it gave was one of something lost, you kept scanning the ridges for some sign of the reasons why. The effect was entirely otherworldly, though you knew you were on a road, in the USA, in a car, participating in the shiny, almost-new Third Millennium.

The reason became clear at the next crossroads (to glorify one house by a dirt track by that name) - there was a stone cairn which, after seeing nothing for the last 60 miles, we stopped at. It was composed of spooky recovered stone quorns the women had used for grinding corn and local rock, with a small bronze plaque that announced this was the place that Geronimo and the exhausted Apaches had finally surrendered to the horse soldiers. Geronimo and 35 warriors had held off 5,000 cavalry for almost a year, (who they knew would only ever increase in number) and had finally been split up and ethnically-cleansed to reservations hundreds of miles away in Florida, while others had been sent to the extremely unpromising scrub land tracts that white guys decided they couldn't use for anything else. I found later it was called Skeleton Canyon; it had been their valley.


The thing that occurred to me was that all the valleys had been someone's long before they were driven from them.

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.

White Christmas

Just a quick note to say that I will soon be back amongst the lumpy New Hampshire landscape for a couple of weeks, and, as you can see here from last year's expedition with Jane in the Notch, it's somewhat different to Suffolk. But not much; there's always that 100 meter rise out of Clare to deal with.

So it's the White Mountains and, on the coast by my Mom's house, Lupo's Bar and Grill, which of course doesn't have anything so jejune as a website, (hence no link) and has non-stop ice hockey on the tv above the bar. It tends to score fairly low (if at all) on foodie indices. Imagine, in a place far away, a small place right on the ocean that's boarded over the windows with a sea view, with plastic lobsters in fishnets over the bar, and choppsy 60-year-old waitresses your mom is on first name terms with when they bring her that first scotch on the rocks, along with slightly left-too-long-in-the-fryer clam rolls.


heaven

ho ho ho


k

another get-off....recovery drinks needed

Sunday... a freezing cold morning here at the Lazy K; got up, made coffee, looked out at the amazing lightly hoar-frosted landscape showing gold as the sun rose. Too much excitement for attempts at satori - so the wonderdog and I went out and slid around on the ice for 15 minutes up the path by the stream amongst all the fresh deer tracks, while the lazy sun came up and showed through our steamy breaths. Stood like a tree while the dog emptied, then back inside, tea brought up to she-who-toys-with-my-heart, nuke oatmeal, then light up the wood stove. We're leaving for the States at the end of the week, so I had to spend some time getting in firewood for the folks who will be house & dog-sitting while we're gone. Skating (literally) across the still-unsalted road with the dog, I was torn between wanting to get out on the fixee all day in the blinding winter sunshine with the chain gang, and knowing that we'd all be sorry as soon as we hit the first corner that the sun hadn't reached. I've been there before... A & E... stitches...picking gravel out of my head for the next few months...

Sooo.... fire up the chainsaw without guilt, knowing I'd have a ride to somewhere exotic like a 50 mile jaunt to Bures after the ice melted. Cut up the poplar I collected in the spring and split it. The day stretched before me - chainsaw stuff, cycle to Bures through damp, ancient sunken lanes and have a coffee, work on the Guzzi, do some composing. Soak in a bath, aided by grape nerve medicine - Perfect.
Come 10:30, togged up in roadie mode, complete with sunglasses, (sad) soaked the fixie down with WD40 and hit the road. Hmmm.... ice everywhere on the verges. Blew through Clare feeling good, cold sunshine on my face and climbed (gently, only about a 100 meters up) into Essex. Legs limbering up and cadence rising - what's that white in the shade of the hedge on the other side of the road? Into a corner for the junction at Belchamp which I notice is also shaded; I also notice the looming solid white road, slow down to have a look; but the rear wheel kicks out down the camber, I'm facing at 90 degrees to my direction of travel and still (momentarily) upright. This isn't supposed to happen on a fixed. One more time.

Limp 5 miles home.

So to the Guzzi, best to end the day on a high - all I needed to do was fill the crankcase with oil, screw in a pair of plugs,drag it out of the barn and hit the start button. Various pops and bangs scare the dog back into the house, and a sheet of flame blows out the open, silencer-free pipes; phooarh...I've got a spark, anyway. I'll see about getting it to actually run when I get back. It just so looks better now, and, as we all know, that's half the battle. Back to that wiring diagram.

The afternoon was spent trying to capture a sound in my head, an initial gesture to start an aria for the Neal Cassady thing. I kinda managed to find a start, and it's going to be low... cellos, basses, bass clarinets, that sort of thing. And woodblocks....lots of them. Neal is going to have to be a tenor, I think. I can hear the voice counterbalanced against the orchestra's low register unison lines. Who's the baritone, should it be Kerouac? I seem to hear him even higher, for no good reason. Countertenor? That would just be just plain silly. But he really doesn't come across as a baritone for me.

The strange thing is that lately, more and more, I am struggling against how my head keeps getting invaded by the musak tracks I can remember being piped into all the environs of my childhood. 2-feel perky electric bass played with a felt pick, banjos, unison male choirs a la Mitch Miller and the Gang, shimmering strings - that kind of thing. Spooky. Since the mice ate my mp3 player's earphones about a month ago (another story sometime soon) I have been struggling with this rising tide of banal dross running in my head. It's a bit like zombies taking over the malls.

So, today was good, apart from a red and blue rash along my right side. Time for a recovery drink, mmmm...probably a Slipstream Cream Ale would hit the spot and aid tissue repair.

So, with the sound of Mitch and the Gang echoing in our ears, sweet dreams.

k