Year: 2006

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forgotten influences…

It’s happening to me a lot of late – hearing things I haven’t listened to for a while, and realising how formative they were in me getting the ideas together to do what I do solo. Hearing Iona again was one, and seeing the Doug Wimbish clinic at the Bass Centre at the end of last year was another.

And now I’m listening to Iona again, and hearing Robert Fripp‘s parts on one track, and having a vivid flash back to his opening soundscape set at the ProjeKct one gig at the Jazz Cafe in London back in, er 98? 99? something like that… Anyway, he came down 40 minutes before the rest of the band, and set up all this soundscaping stuff, overlapping asynchronous loops of mainly synth sounds. The effect was mesmerising, and as someone who was already experimenting with looping (at the time, all I had was my old Lexicon JamMan, and an ART Nightbass processor) it was a big inspiration.

Not long after that I got one of his solo soundscape records, and was a little disappointed. Not in the musical ideas, but in the synth sounds, and it swore me off ever getting a MIDI pickup fitted – I’d had one for a while to demo it for Yamaha, but ended up sounding like a bad keyboard player. Fripp sounded like a much better keyboard player than I, but it still sounded like keyboards a lot of the time, and that to my ears lost much of what is magic about stringed instruments – the attack, the decay, the way we can keep moving the note after it has happened (especially if you’re using an Ebow or the Fernandes Sustainer circuit that Fripp uses in his guitars) – to use that to trigger a synth seemed a little disingenuous.

Still, it meant that I was less likely to end up sounding like him, which was a good thing I guess, but the influence is undeniable, and that gig was a pivotal moment for me. As was the rest of the night – watching the free improv of Fripp with Trey Gunn, Tony Levin and Bill Bruford, I got a glimpse of what was to become one of my main ways of making music – just getting up on stage and playing. The sense of each sound evolving from the last, in an instantaneous thought process, with the intentions of the players meeting, combining, clashing and melding into one another. It’s a magical thing, and the direct descendent of that gig (and in no small way, the interview I did with Tony Levin and Trey Gunn after the gig) is the Recycle Collective.

Soundtrack – James Taylor, ‘Hourglass’.

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Weekend away…

Just back from a weekend away teaching a bass and drum course at Lee Abbey in North Devon. Lee Abbey is a Christian retreat centre, and runs all manner of courses throughout the year, and I was approached over a year ago, I think, to be involved in this one. The idea was to have a Rhythm Section weekend – they do a lot of creative stuff there, but most of it is fairly mainstream church-music related stuff, nothing to out-there.

The drum half of the weekend was being handled by Terl Bryant, an amazing musician, who I’ve been a fan of for many years, and even played on albums with while never having actually played together. So that was an incentive.

After getting lost on the way there… well, not actually lost, just missing my turning off the M5, got there Friday night to find out that Terl was massively snarled up in traffic and ended up not making it there til Saturday morning. Which meant that our introductory improv sesh became a stevie-solo-gig. No problem there then. :o)

Overall, it was a really enjoyable weekend. ‘Twas slightly odd being back in an environment that I’ve not really inhabited for a while – St Luke’s isn’t really a part of the mainstream church culture in the UK – not that it’s consciously excluded, just that the people there haven’t really bought into the language and sub-culture that Lee Abbey is a part of. But as well as being odd, it was rather fun being back in that space again – it’s not somewhere I’d want to live – horses for courses ‘n’ all that, but the people were lovely, and teaching the bassists (many of whom I knew anyway) was a joy, as was playing two gigs and a bit in the Sunday morning service. I’m looking forward to going back there – apart from anything else, I didn’t get out of the building, and it’s set in some of most beautiful countryside in the UK…

this week is a week of teaching and tidying – we’ve got house-guests next weekend, so I’ve got a lot of work to do to get the house ship-shape. TSP did a load over the weekend, so I need to pull my weight… and with that, I’m off to clean up the hallway…

Soundtrack – Iona, ‘Beyond These Shores’; Imogen Heap, ‘Speak For Yourself’.

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Dancing for Chicken… but in a good way!

Had a fab gig last night, at the National Portrait Gallery. It was a corporate party, for a huge computer company in the City, playing solo ambient loveliness while business deals and schmoozing unfolded in the delightful surroundings of the Contemporary Gallery of the NPG.

A gig like this throws up all kinds of challenges that you don’t tend to face on a ‘listening’ gig, or even a normal function gig (not least of all playing continuously for 3 hours!).

Firstly, you’re there as part of the scenery – while quite a few people were milling around where I was playing (a good sign), there weren’t any chairs set out for people to sit and listen, no encouragement to be quiet, and certainly no dance floor (though the idea of all those city boys in their matching suits and sensible ties doing interpretive dance to my noodlings is marvellous – might have to make that into a video at some point…!). What’s more, because of the size and echoey nature of the space, coupled with the ambient talking volume, and not having the speakers pointing at me, I was basically playing blind – like doing a gig where all you’re hearing are the reverb returns (this is not unlike the last gig I did for the same company, with Theo). It’s rather un-nerving at first, but makes for a very different music making experience, like photographing shadows or painting with just water on paper… everything is done in gentle relief, and then you step out and have a listen whilst wandering round the room confusing people who thought you were the musician (‘hang on, the music’s still going on! is it all just a CD?’ etc.)

The response from the audience was great, ranging from ‘where can I hear more music like this – you and Brian Eno are the only people I’ve heard like that’ to an overheard comment of ‘my, what perfect music for an event like this’ which sounded like I’d paid them to say it, it sounded so much like ad copy!)

The great thing about doing a show like this is it brings every bedroom music geek out of the woodwork, ‘oh, I experiment a little with recording at home’ ‘yes, I play guitar a bit, and mess around with effects and stuff’ etc. much fun.

So, more of those please – any of you lovely bloglings who want to hire me for this kind of thing, my rates are exorbitant, but that’s the corporate world… ;o) Drop me a line and we’ll work something out.

Soundtrack – The Cure, ‘Disintegration’.

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the mess we're in

Britain is a strange place to be right now. In the last week or so we’ve had two people from the BNP (I’m not going to link to their site – you can find them on google if you want to know more) caught on camera spouting racist filth acquitted of stirring up racial hatred (so leaders of a political party referring to Islam as a ‘wicked vicious faith’ and asylum seekers as ‘like cockroaches’ isn’t designed to stir up religious hatred? hmmm).

Then we have the insane scenes in central London over the last week with some crazy Islamic extremists calling for beheadings, bombings and death to infidels over the publishing of some cartoons in a newspaper in Denmark. No one was arrested, though police are viewing the footage at the moment, and one buffoon who dressed as a suicide bomber has been returned to jail as he was out on parole for drug dealing. So, as Sid Smith points out, selling illegal life-destroying drugs is fine, drawing pictures is evil? The laws of moral equivalence have clearly shifted since I last gave them some thought…

And then we’ve had in the last day or so one English-speaking Saudi newspaper in the UK publish a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler… the mind boggles. And, unlike most of the other stuff that goes on, I’m actually offended. But more baffled than anything else – what on earth has a dutch jewish teenager killed at Belsen got to do with Danish cartoonists? Was the point just to be as offensive as possible to anyone? ‘Anything you can do, we can do better’? Are they willing to do a beheading swap – their newspaper lose their lives in exchange for the Danish cartoonists? What kind of morality is informing such things, or it is as I suspect, just an exploitation of one incident to peddle their own nasty racist ideology.

Let’s get one thing clear, racism is evil and pernicious in any form. The evils of the current Israeli government in no way legitimise anti-semitism, in the same way that the fucked-up actions of jihadists who don’t understand the central tenets of their faith in no way justify anti-Islamic sentiments. If they did, the behaviour of those who call themselves Christians over the last 2000 years could be used to justify a war on the church quite easily – from the Crusades to the well documented corruption of the Catholic church through the years, to the ‘biblical’ justifications for slavery, apartheid and the genocide of the British Empire and the foundation of the USA, right up to GWB’s own jihad rhetoric in relation to the current Iraq war. Surely if God told him to to do it, other followers of God are culpable?

Of course not, but what it does provide is a hook for those who seek places to express their hatred, bigotry, intolerance and a further excuse to refuse to attempt to understand, learn from and be enriched by other faiths, ideologies and cultures.

So the challenge is to do the opposite, to expose the powers at work in the BNP, the fascistic Islamic fringe groups, the right-wing church in the US and UK, the behaviour of the Israeli forces in the occupied territories, and all other places where oppression flows out from intolerance, and to live the opposite. It’s quite a challenge, but there doesn’t seem to be much of an alternative right now…

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Saving the vicar from a burning cassock.

Having not made it to a service at St Luke’s for quite a few weeks (three sundays in California, followed by nightshelter last night and a long lie-in today), I decided to go to the Soul Space service tonight – I often play at these services, and this was, bizarrely, the first one I’d ever been to where I wasn’t playing.

It was a beautiful service for Candlemass – the end of Christmas, and naturally, there were loads of candles in evidence. When it came time for the Eucharistic bit of the service, Dave-The-Vicar managed to position himself so the back of his cassock was right in the flames of a tea-light.

‘you’re going to catch fire!’, I stage whispered,
‘dave, you’re about to catch fire!!’ stage whisper, slightly louder.

A quick swing round followed by a healthy step forward averted our vicar from morphing into St Luke’s very own twisted firestarter.

My good deed done for the day.

And The Rev. G will be most disappointed to know that Messiah Marcolin’s band, Candlemass weren’t present… have you ever actually used Candlemass music for a candlemass service, G??? If anyone can…

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I. Officially. Rule.

First up, big thanks to all techie geeks who attempted help with the router/hub/modem thingie problem – Lovely G, TH and Christian Renz, all fine peoples with some top advice.

However, in the end it was me who came up with the solution. Yes, me. I’m sat here thinking about the problem, and how everyone says ‘but ethernet ought to connect automatically’. TH in fact pointed out that I ‘must have had the ethernet connected to configure the modem in the first place’. And that’s the bit that sparked my next thought… My problems all seemed to stem from the fact that I’d configured it all via wireless, so it saw the Wireless as the primary internet connection, and wasn’t sending the right DHCP info to the ethernet side of things at all.

So, I do what every self-respecting geek-in-a-fix does, and restored the factory settings on the modem, turned off the airport on the laptop, plugged in the ethernet and started again.

This time, it worked like a dream. DHCP assigned LAN IP details (shark, ask TH) to the ethernet side of things, I was all hooked up in seconds, and could properly configure the wireless side of things to actually have a password on it! Yay for me.

However, more important than all of that, I could also then do the software update for the Looperlative, fixing a bug I found two days ago (Bob uploaded the fix yesterday – how’s that for customer service???), and cleaning up the audio even further (it already kicked the arse of every looper I’d ever used)… So scratch that title – Bob. Officially. Rules.

Oh yes.

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new modem/router update…

OK, this is weird – while the wireless connection is working just great, I can’t seem to hook up to the internet via the Ethernet port at all! The networking thingie on my mac tells me that I’m connected up and it’s all cool, but I can’t even access the web-editor in the modem itself via ethernet, let alone the web!

Any ideas on what it might be will be gratefully received – I can’t do the update to my looperlative until I get it working!

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Gorgeous Guitars on Video

Rick Turner just sent me a link to this video clip – it’s a trailer to a film called ‘Gourmet Guitars’ – it’s vol 2 in a DVD series looking at great guitar makers, and of course Rick’s in there. The clip itself makes for interesting viewing, but is even more interesting for the inclusion of Bill Walker demoing one of Rick’s guitars through the Mama Bear processor. Bill’s a fantastic guitar player, lovely bloke, and really ought to be a big star.

It’s also nice to see Rick and his son Elias on the video – the transition back to London life is made easier by seeing my friends on film when I get back here.

Soundtrack – right now I’m listing to an NPR recording of an interview/performance by KT Tunstall – KT’s just about the best thing to happen to pop music in the UK in years – in a year that gave us the rancid whinging loser that is James Blunt and a load more Pop Idol one hit wonders, KT has the skills and the songs to be in it for the long haul. Hurrah!

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Aged Feline Update

The ginger fairly aged feline has been up and down health-wise of late – a few weeks back the vet detected his tumor had come back, and so decided to switch chemotherapies to see how he reacted.

Yesterday he was in for the day, for an ultrasound, put on a chemo drip, and kept in overnight. The ultrasound showed that the tumor was once again barely detectible, and the little guy seems to be pretty perky. I’ve just picked him up from the vets and he’s happy to be home. He’s doing great all things considered.

Soundtrack – Sumitra, ‘Indian Girl’ (lovely singer/songwriter CD from a friend I met in California – will report back more fully when I’ve given it more of a listen).

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Hang on… That's my Car!!!

So I’m sat on the tube, heading up towards Arnos Grove – the bit where it comes out from underground and goes overground for about half a mile. Looking out the window, I see in a car park the familiar shape and colour of a Ford Fiesta, the same as the one I SCRAPPED last September… the number plate looks familiar too… and the KPIG sticker on the back. THAT’S MY OLD CAR!!!! How the hell did it end up in a car park in Arnos Grove? I sold it as scrap!

Anyway, after the initial weirdness of seeing it there, I’m glad that the bloke I sold it to was able to salvage it enough to resell it – I’m sure repairing and reusing it is a far more environmentally sound way of dealing with old cars that melting them down for scrap given that a) that’s going to give off a lot of pollutants and a whole load of bits in the car are just going to get chucked and b) whoever bought the car would’ve bought another car anyway, so it’s not like it’s actually a part of the process of reducing the number of cars on the road.

What an odd experience!

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