Autumn Equinox Drone

clockwise - James (stooping over water bucket) , Melski, Henry, me, Keith, John
This one was outside 'round a fire at Oblique House. Almost entirely acoustic, although I set up a keyboard for James. Very nice, intricate, flowing music, as I remember it. Melski did some singing of freestyle lyrics and read from some notes she'd scribbled earlier in the evening. James did another of his brilliant, but apocalyptic poems (describing the ultimate fate of the Universe as an entropic heat bath) as well as burbling away effectively on the Casio and evolving his bucket-of-water-and-metal-object-based percussion.

This was the third year in a row that we've had an autumn equinox session. Two years ago we were outside with Julia Barclay, a visiting performance artist, reading cut-up texts and bits of Joyce's Ulysses. A little bit of that session shows up on Compilation 4. That was also the debut session for Morris, the newly resident kitten who added to the sonic environment by scurrying about madly in the undergrowth, as well as trying to play Philip's psaltery. Last year Morris was showing off jumping about on a keyboard, playing atonal clusters. This time he contributes (rather tortured) vocals on track 3 (in conjunction with the neighbourhood cat he was confronting at the time).

We thought the astronomical moment of equinox was 10:23 and believed ourselves to be Droning right across the celestial equator on the last piece. But it turns out to have been 11:23 (we forgot about daylight savings/GMT) and everyone had gone by the time that happened...

John - acoustic guitar, bouzouki (incl. slide bouzouki), mandolin, acoustic bass guitar, voice
Keith - acoustic bass guitar, mandola
James T - keyboard, poetry, percussion, water
Melski - acoustic guitar, voice, percussion, flute, Tibetan bowl, poetry
Henry - percussion
me - saz, balalaika, percussion

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