Live at WOMAD, Undead in London

You can now hear some audio from recent Radio 3 adventures with Tigran Aleksanyan, Andrew Cronshaw and Svetlana Spajic at this year’s WOMAD. Look for Track 6 at CronshawSpace.

And there’s a hitherto unpublished review, by Bill Stephens, of Quantum Leap’s show My Sister, My Brother in the online Canberra journal the riotACT. I wrote some music for the segment One of Us.

I’ve been recording the distinguished rhythm section of Liz Frencham (bass) and Jon Jones (drums) for a project involving Fred Smith and The Spooky Men’s Chorale in a collection of urban sea shanties. Which made a nice change from working on a chunk of sound art involving London’s most melodically inclined tube train driver – a unique intercom style – and the trains themselves, duetting with bass clarinet in a piece entitled ‘…the burning Thames I have to cross’, featured at Canberra’s M16 artspace in the exhibition The Gathering. The title alludes to the English ballad The Grey Cock aka The Lover’s Ghost – another spooky man who might have found it ‘quicker by Tube’… as they used to say in the old days, when in fact it wasn’t at all. Back then I appreciated the rattle and hum of those Northern Line trains when they did eventually turn up, reeking of warm dust and electricity, stale smoke and unidentifiable whiffs that set the reptilian brain a-thrumming…

Maintaining the range: Lynne Pilbrow’s early childhood music education project Fun Music for Little Kids is coming along nicely, providing an excellent excuse to play a lot of the studio’s instrument collection: mbira, banjo, bass clarinet, sax, ocarina, cittern, concertina, harp, zoob tube and ukulele so far.

self, regarding.

Brenda Cifuentes asked to be my SpaceFriend recently, congratulating me on my work with Ricky Martin: so I thought I’d better check up on what I’d been up to. I googled myself (we all do it but most of us don’t like to talk about it ) and amid the crowd of Ian Blakes up comes this producer fellow. Now, aren’t people going to get a bit confused if they’re expecting my brand of electrorganick era-bending chamber-folk-a-go-go and end up with la vida loca of this severely talented Pink Dragon?

Robi (Draco) Rosa chose the alias Ian Blake, which is interesting because it’s not a very interesting name of itself. For RDR it’s a composite monicker apparently expressing his admiration of William Blake (splendid!) and Ian Astbury of cult band The Cult.

And then there’s the mathematician, the crystallographer, the poet, the aeromodeller and the bloke who writes about magician, megabeast and mickeytaker Aleister Crowley. (Nice article on the LAM encounter: was this entity a ‘Grey’ on a trans-dimensional holiday? )

Anyway, there’s a lot of us about…

Freezing in Ely

I think it was Goethe who was responsible for the ‘architecture = frozen music’ equation. Ely Cathedral turns out to be a proper drink on a stick: here’s the Lantern, a feat of mediaeval engineering inspired by the previous tower’s demise and the need to be gentle with the foundations.

More Elystuff in a Facebook album.

I’ve been travelling in England over the past couple of weeks, visiting friends and being a tourist; plus a bank holiday weekend at the Towersey Village Festival, where the cast of thousands included Hand to Mouth Theatre’s Piggery Jokery (four seasons in under an hour – cue Melbourne gags) which deals with the unfolding of Life’s cycles. And sausages. Here you see Death/Winter monstering the Droning Crone.

There’s a very imposing Green Man who comperes the show from the top of the proscenium arch.

Apart from the mythical figures, there was a host of friends who I hadn’t seen for donkey’s ears. Mind you, some of us have been around long enough to be feeling a tad mythical ourselves…

Horse Play

Hooden Horses here: dancing at The Pavilion on the Sand in Broadstairs during the Folk Week. Minimalist horses, these – a rectangular head with a clacking jaw; button eyes; vestigial leather ears. Less obviously dramatic than yer Mari Lwyd, but somehow more ‘other’. Still amenable to a stroke on the snout, however. And they have an appetite for unguarded hats.

Read Richard Lewis’ account of being a horsey in The Magic Spring. Subtitled my year learning to be English, it’s a highly entertaining account of his exploration of those English ways partially buried ‘under a veneer of sherry and industry’. Amongst other things, it’s an affectionate look at the folk scene. Richard’s an adventurous bloke: he took it upon himself to tackle three instruments normally regarded with deep suspicion – the hurdy gurdy, the banjo and the accordion – and makes a fine sound. We had a grand time last year musicking in the bars of the rue de la Grange-aux-Belles…

Why Bother?

If any of you artists out there are going through a ‘what’s it all about, then?’ phase, here’s some food for thought:

Julian Burnside’s 2004 Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address: Why Bother?

Peter Garrett’s 2006 Currency House Speech: Arts & Public Life.

And John Carey’s survey of what it all maybe perhaps might possibly be about: What Good Are The Arts? – note that he comes down firmly on the side of literature as the alpha-artform… He’s helpful in his survey of research into what art is and does, and highly entertaining while he’s about it: have a look at the transcript of his conversation with Ramona Koval in Big Ideas on ABC Radio National, Australia’s sanest radio station.

Then there’s Ellen Dissanayake’s What Is Art For? if you’re still wondering.

While for the bigger picture, look at John Barrow’s The Artful Universe. Thus fortified, try the arty bits of How The Mind Works by that rascally reductionist Steven Pinker; and chew on V.S.Ramachandran’s ideas on The Artful Brain.

The Final Frontier

Being in London on Stockhausen weekend (early August: should be an annual national holiday), I went to the Prom: the one featuring Gruppen (so good they played it twice) and Kontakte in a feast of spatialised sound. Gruppen uses three orchestras with a conductor each. Some lucky prommers were wedged in the middle of them as the bands batted chunks of sound around.
Kontakte made great use of the available space at the Albert Hall: the whole hall behaved like an instrument. (It’s like that too, when the organ lets rip.) Compare David Hockney’s thoughts on A Bigger Grand Canyon – which hangs in Canberra’s Australian National Gallery:

‘…the thrill of standing on that rim of the Grand Canyon is spatial. It is the biggest space you can look out over that has an edge.’

The superwhizzyness of Kontakte does something similar for me soundwise.

As I left the Albert Hall there were three classic Routemaster buses parked outside in Prince Consort Road. Awaiting three conductors, perhaps?

the INDY gene?

Nice to see Pyewackett kicking off the list of favourite ‘P’ albums in the fROOTS forum with The Man in the Moon Drinks Claret.

Thanks, Diane and Irene: this sort of thing makes an old man very happy.