'quasi-stag night', Sherwood Forest

Saturday night saw a rather non-traditional 'stag night' in the midst of Sherwood Forest (really!). John Drone will be marrying later in the month, so Vaughan hosted a very civilised outdoor music party, thankfully devoid of any 'traditionally male' behaviour associated with such events. The persistent wind and rain just about left us alone to the extent that we were able to set up around a (rather smokey) fire and make music late into the night.

A few non-Drone friends showed up with guitars, percussion, etc., including Rupert who has percussed with us once before. After a few songs were sung (an rather ironic version of "Summertime", considering the appalling weather we've been having, and an Inkspots number among them) we got into more Drone-like material, with a nice supplementary percussion section.

Richard and Henry have been working on an improvisational danceband project called 'Pulse'. This is rather like the Drone-concept except that they play premeditated bass and drum patterns, with the rest of the (continually varying) group improvising over the top. As it was a party, we built one jam over the top of one of the 'grooves' they've been working on.

I set my minidisc recorder up in the shadows and managed to capture most of what went down. Unfortunately, setting the record levels by the light of a repeatedly-sparked cigarette lighter whilst having woodsmoke blown in my face wasn't that easy, so there's some minor distortion (plus wind on the microphone), but nothing too bad:

Listen Here
Vaughan mentioned that his Monday night improvised singing group (which meets at the Crediton Rainbow Studio) has been going very well, and he hopes that we can try a CoTD collaboration sometime soon, possibly at one of our monthly St. Stephens sessions.