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And there’s a hitherto unpublished review, by Bill Stephens, of Quantum Leap’s show My Sister, My Brother in the online Canberra journal the riotACT.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.