back from the not-so-frozen wastes....

Another inexcusable silence on my part, partly caused by a 3-and-a-bit week camping holiday in Sweden,(no sniggering; as I know that anyone of a certain age tends to equate this sort of thing with a naughty Sid James - ' Carry on' state of being...blonds, volleyball, healthy outdoor pursuits and high jinks in the sauna) and partly by an almost crystalline stasis of any of my higher mental functions, i.e., almost anything above lizard-level brain stem function.

This could be in part caused by me having become beardie guy over the holiday, as I didn't fancy shaving for three weeks with cold water (..I know...wuss...). No doubt the effort of forcing hair though the skin of my lower face took almost all of my psychic energy, not to mention creating a dangerously yang state of mind. And, to be honest, another contributing factor could have been my recent temporary abstention from any sort of strong waters in the evenings, which usually contributes to a state mildly reckless euphoria and well-being; a welling of hope and a readiness to share my lot and reach out to other seekers of the ox. This was precipitated by my sifu suggesting a temporary cessation of caffeine and the oil of the sun would result in a much better circulation of chi.. this, however, remains to be seen. I have mostly become very dull. (how can you tell the difference, you ask?)

So I had secretly hoped the beard would give that kind of slightly dishevelled George Clooney look as seen in The Perfect Storm,





or perhaps even the steely U-Boat commander looked sported here by Jurgen Prochnow from Das Boot



But it didn't quite work out like that. It was more of a 'Papa Hemingway' look as he progressed towards the bitter end:




Anyway, this sort of thing is all clearly explained at the mandatory website for guys

I really have to raise my game, among other things. There's been a lot of composing and cycling occurring as well, a solo cello piece, a prospective viola piece and now some settings for John Clare poems for a festival next summer.









more soon...

Job 2:7 metaphorical boils

Again, another hiatus in the progress of this blog; I've just finished term, had a run of good gigs, and done the TS Eliot festival. I had spent the last month and a half composing for that, and had arranged a rehearsal and recording session for the material with Ruth Padel and Grevel Lindop so as to release some of the current repertoire after the gig in Little Gidding.

It was not to be... more a rising crescendo of tribulation to try a Job, although the word YHWH never passed my lips. Nor did I think it was directed by Satan....(and of course you knew there had to be a YHWH.com) But do read the bizarrely lame exegesis relating the trials of Job to 'Chippy' the parakeet and his ordeal with a vacuum cleaner on the Job link...my life is more like that, really.

Ok - so this is how it went:

First, 5 days before the session, Russ did his back; ...badly, he was now out of action, and didn't know whether he could play the actual gig in two weeks, let alone the session.

Then Roger had a problem with the times on the day due to a misunderstanding; my fault. But there was confusion as to when he would actually be around, although I had someone to cover.

Next, the mixing desk at the ARU studio was still AWOL; there was a clumsy portable fix, but it is the sort of thing that makes engineers mutter dark thoughts and maledictions under their breath, especially when pressed for time.

Finally, the day before the rehearsal/recording, one of my poets bailed - there had been a major crisis (public rather than personal) and they felt it was impossible to go ahead.

ha ha ha .... all in all, interesting times. Session cancelled.

I had written, as threatened, a lot of stuff for bass clarinet. good stuff. Like "Forests are Falling"
and " Sighting the Tiger" for instance, to go with two of Padel's poems, along with a Rameau rip-off and other stuff. But it all went well on the day, as Grevel and Malcolm contributed to a great gig.

The one last thing that finished off this series of minor trials was getting run over very slowly while commuting into Cambridge one morning. I was on my old touring bike, purchased from John Pavey 20 years ago. we went back a long way, touring all over the continent... Alpine passes, the Mont Ventoux - and never mind the Pyrenees and the Tourmalet



... I was sitting at a junction next to a car on his left (as you would) preparing to go straight on. He, on the other hand, decided to try and take advantage of a very short break in the traffic coming from the right to make a rapid, clever left turn. He started gunning the engine (no indicator) and suddenly my front wheel was disappearing under his wheel arch, along with the rest of the bike as he started to roll... I flopped off as this was happening across his hood and started thumping it, while making observations to no one in particular about sexual congress, genitalia, procreation outside the church's sanction and his possible position on those issues. We then had a frank exchange of views which ended up with him giving me his phone number and driving me to work as I sat in a quiet fury. Of course, he was an Estate Agent.

hey - but the LeMans is taxed and on the road, Le Tour has started, and I've cycled 250k so far this week

aarrgh...

I'm sorry if this blog does languish from time to time; but, like standing quietly for a period of time, things around you begin to emerge. If, for instance, you were to practice Three Circle Stance at dawn by the stream you'd become aware of a deer walking quietly behind you, rabbits emerging from the brush and going about their business as if you weren't there, small birds pecking around the ground near your feet and a sparrow hawk alighting in the branches in the oak above you. Or you'd start to wobble around like the poor sod in the video. But, to be honest, it has been anything but quiet for the last month: college stuff rises to a crescendo of mild hysteria towards the end of term...exams, marking, recitals...not too mention trying to remember how to play saxophone again, catch up to some looming compositional deadlines. There's a series of Ruth Padel settings to finish and rehearse in the next few weeks. I've got about four sketches on the go, and I'll post up some clips soon

Apart from all that, I've been poring over the score of Ades' Asyla every afternoon for the last week.... damn. Superb handling of orchestral color, which makes me realize that I didn't grow up performing, conducting or just being immersed in the 19th century canon. The beginning, with two pianos tuned a quarter step apart, chromatic cowbells and high string harmonics make for a unique gesture in the opening. The whole thing seems quite humbling and reinforces the fact that I'm arriving at this quite late having started out as a jazzer... it keeps sending me back to the drawing board with Holy Goof. It's the adroit use of color and gesture that I envy. The people who I admire for this seem to come from a French brilliante kind of effortless use of texture, which I know is always much harder than it sounds; folks like Takemitsu or Dutilleux.

Life goes on here - Spring has arrived with a vengeance - there's a pair of buzzards nesting in the next field, I hear them mewing at dawn when I'm out emptying the wonderdog (who is limping badly these days - best not to think about it yet). The daffs, cowslips and primroses are up and the snowdrops are finished. The hawthorne is beginning to blossom, and the tawny owls nesting next to the house have finally shut up in the mornings. I've been able to practice in the meadow for the last couple of days in the evening, which is always a special thing - I love to hear the sound bouncing off the hill opposite.

So...trying to re-learn sax again for upcoming gigs, recording and such in the summer.. ..depressing; I used to be a contender. Things feel more and more like a one-way ticket to Palookaville lately. It seems that my tenor concept is particularly crap at the moment; I've been making myself listen to recordings of my gigs, which I always avoid as it is sooo depressing. The fact that I now don't have the time to spend hours on my horn seems to be the most evident on tenor; most days for the last few years I come home and put in as hour or so just trying to keep my fingers and embouchure intact. This now shows up in an improvising concept that seems to consist primarily of tired stock phrases I've been calling on for years and fluid scales which are ok, but nothing to do with music. Time for a re-think, or at least a Glenlivet.

The header photo is one of the latest distraction here at the Lazy K, a Guzzi Le Mans - someone gave this to me as it needed a good home and some fettling. The poor guy didn't have the time to work on it, and I think after 5 years in the garden shed it was precipitating a major domestic in a small-ish terrace with two young kids.

onward

slobbing out.

Slobbing out on the sofa, slightly the worse-for-wear because of my special grape nerve medicine, I ended up watching a sober (unlike me) adult (ditto) documentary about Hokusai instead of my more usual Pimp My Ride for once. Through the mild fug of post-teaching exhaustion, there was suddenly a discussion of how Hokusai's technique (and I include here not the usual print of Hokusai's Great Wave but one made years earlier with more or less the same view of OFuji-san, but without the frantic humans to give it scale and facing in the opposite direction, which gives it a completely different feel) with his use of repetitive visual units both in details and structural layout was not unlike the contemporary concept of fractals. And with that, I suddenly made one on my usual chaotic lateral and-not-terribly-original leaps to think of Cage's use of small number series (4:3:2:3:4) to generate both global (overall structure) and local events in his piece First Construction (in Metal) about which I had had to gabble for two hours at my second year guys earlier in the day. I'll bet they are so glad we didn't start on fractals.

That would have almost been as bad as my experience yesterday of trying to explain stasis in minimalist compositions and contrasting it with an 19th century Romantic narrative-based aesthetic by getting spun off on a riff that eventually ended up with me discussing my imminent arrival in the warm-ish nether regions according to most Western Judeo-Christian narratives versus the never-ending enso of many Asian systems, while a group of open-day 18-year-old six-formers embarrassedly stared at their shoes. They were embarrassed for me... Uh-uh - not going there again.

For my own composing, of course, anything quite so organized is liable to break down as rapidly as a 30-year-old Italian motorbike's electrics, something I have considerable experience of. But I take comfort in Adorno's dictum about intentional objects ("art") in that they are not necessarily aesthetically validated by "instrumental" behavior; i.e. the mimicking of physical processes modeled and tested through reductive scientific reasoning. You can breathe a sigh of relief right there and get on with stuff..

I always start off with the best of intentions, but find myself soon wandering around grabbing at shiny sounds.... but we are so not talking synaesthesia here.

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?

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....