Pulsing at Henry's

Henry Drone and his brother Richard have recently been working on a CoTD side project called 'Pulse'.

It's a great concept - a kind of improvisational danceband. Henry's been training Richard up as a bass player, and between them they've been working out a number of relatively simple, but effective 'grooves'. A lot of these are built around basslines 'borrowed' from classic soul, reggae, funk and Latin tracks. It's almost like a kind of sampling.

Henry and Richard are the permanent core of the group, supplemented by a continually varying line-up of other Droners who improvise over the top of their grooves. A couple of low-profile gigs (private parties) have been great successes, and this coming weekend I'm part of a Pulse line-up which is playing two sets out at a little festival near Coleford (Saturday) and then again at the Respect Festival at The Phoenix here in Exeter (Sunday).

We ran through the sets at Henry's last night - he and Richard plus me (saz and percussion), Keith (electric guitar) and Rupert (percussion). Mark will also be joining us on keyboards, and we'll be rehearsing with him tonight.

It's sounding very fresh, and as Richard made a minidisc recording, I might as well make it available for listening:

set 1 (21:38)         set 2 (37:08)
It occured to me last night that various formats exist whereby bands can establish an extended groove to get a crowd dancing (funk/soul bands, dub/reggae bands, Grateful Dead-style psychedelic 'jam-bands', etc.), but they are always tied to song structures: Song starts, verses are sung, extended groove is established, more verses, song ends, audience stops dancing to applaud and await next song. But with the emergence of 'club culture', seamless house DJ'ing, etc., it has become apparent that the song structures are not really necessary. In fact they can be counter-productive, breaking the trance-like effect of the groove. With 'Pulse', the set (like a DJ mix) just keeps going - we use percussive interludes to morph from one groove to the next, and this is becoming increasingly effective the more we do it.

midsummer travels

A couple of days ago I got back from my annual bicycle journey up to the Avebury area to celebrate the summer solstice.


Me with saz and heavily-laden bike, about to set off from Oblique House. Just above the wall at the end of the street (where the big trees are) you can see Exeter's city wall and part of the Rougemont Castle, on the site of an ancient Gorsedd (druidic place of assembly).
My journey took me up over the Blackdown Hills to Glastonbury (the town, rather than the festival - although many people seeing me on my bike assumed I was going to the latter). I stopped off to play some saz inside the trunk of ancient yew tree in the churchyard at Creech St. Michael and atop Burrow Mump, both claimed to be on the 'Michael-Mary Line'.

After arriving in Glastonbury, climbing the Tor (and playing some more saz up there), visiting the nearby pair of ancient oak trees known as Gog and Magog and filling my water bottles at the Chalice Well spring, I cycled out of town to Stevie P's birthday gathering near Baltonsborough. I was pretty exhausted by this point, but very happy to be outdoors on such a warm summer evening in the company of Stevie and co. - various former members of 'Heathens All', Maya and Daygan from Dragonsfly, Mandy and Sam from 'Green Angels', etc. We didn't actually play any music, but Stevie selected some excellent Latin sounds, bebop, soul, funk etc. for the occasion. There was some very nice food, mead, the throwing of frisbees and general Avalonian silliness.

I woke up early, have slept outside (perfect summer weather, no need for a tent), and carried on up towards Avebury, only stopping to boil a kettle and make tea below the Westbury White Horse. I arrived in Alton Barnes early that evening, coming in along the Kennet and Avon Canal towpath. After a quick glass of cider at The Barge Inn (the established meeting place for crop circle enthusiasts), I went to visit the twin churches of St. Mary's, Alton Barnes (with a very nice yew tree in the churchyard) and All Saints, Alton Priors (with a spectacular 1700 year old yew tree and a sarsen stone under a trapdoor in the church floor). I sat inside the hollow treetrunk and played my heart out on the saz for what felt like ages.

After cycling up to Knapp Hill and playing some more music up there, I continued on up to Adam's Grave to watch the sunset, and then set off on a moonlit walk along the Wansdyke to Milk Hill. That night I slept under a wonderful, knarled hawthorn tree near Knapp Hill, to be awoken by bird song.


Adam's Grave - image from http://www.megalithia.com/sites/su113634.html
After a quick cup of tea, some more music and a bit of yoga atop Knapp Hill, I cycled down into Avebury, and spent the day exploring the stones, as well as less obvious features of the wider landscape. I encountered a few old friends, played a lot of saz, and headed up to Windmill Hill shortly before sunset.

My old friend Andy Bard was up there on one of the barrows. I met Andy ten years ago during the Newbury road protest campaign. Shortly after that he got together a most excellent funky/medaevil acoustic festival band called 'Jabberwocky', and then got a second Ph.D. (the first was in mathematical ecology, the second on bardism). Currently he's Oxford-based, finishing up a book on 'the cultural history of magic mushrooms', to be published by Faber next May. That evening we sat 'round a little fire having a bit of a jam with his friend Jim (another Newbury veteran) playing low whistle, and then talked through the details of my 1996 encounter with Terence McKenna regarding his 'Timewave' theory - something quite relevant to Andy's forthcoming book.

There was a lovely group of seven of us up on a barrow on Windmill Hill to witness the solstice sunrise - a monumentally beautiful sunrise, which was quite a treat after some recent grey, drizzly years. There was a thick blanket of mist below us, covering Avebury, and as the sun came up over the horizon, a thin mist started to waft up over the hill, dispersing the sun's rays to create a sort of pool of golden light. Meanwhile, we were being serenaded by a celestial choir of skylarks, singing with a volume and mass-harmonic intensity surpassing anything I have ever heard before. The risen sun then started to burn off the mist, but in the most extraordinarily non-homogeneous way - creating great 'mountains' and pillars of vapour - my old friend Dave Prentice, who arrived just in time for the sunrise, described it as a 'cloud factory'.

I met Dave on Silbury Hill exactly ten years previously. He plays some percussion and produces an eclectic array of dance music under the name 'Nusphere'. He's even done a kind of drum'n'bass-inspired remix of my saz playing:

Listen Here
Dave once brought his minidisc recorder with him, in 1999, when we were also treated to a fantastic sunrise from atop Silbury, in the company of numerous musician friends (I'd come up from West Cornwall with Inge, Joel and Stef that year). I've just half an hour of excerpts from those recordings to the IAA:

Listen Here
Back to 2005...After sleeping into the afternoon, I headed back into Avebury, and was greeted by Pok from the back of a van parked across the road as I was proceeding up the West Kennet Avenue. He grabbed his mandola, and we strode up nearby Waden Hill to have a rough, but super-intense jam with an Italian friend of his who had suddenly appeared from behind a hedge at the base of the hill. Up there, you can look down on the top of Silbury Hill, the place I met Pok and some other aspects of the Spacegoats entourage exactly twelve years ago that day (a morning which changed my life almost beyond recognition). The rest of the day was spent further exploring the Avebury landscape, playing my saz in various idyllic locations, and again sleeping up on Windmill Hill.

Last year I found myself wondering what drew me to these places, and why I felt the need to visit them and play freeform, meandering saz music. After years of visiting what are commonly known as 'sacred sites', I am less clear than ever about their 'meaning' or 'sacredness', but still find myself drawn to megalithic monuments, holy wells, earthworks, and ancient yew groves. I have encountered numerous theories about them, which I've absorbed, but never entirely committed myself to. It occured to me that playing improvised music was acting for me as a form of prayer. I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of prayer, but having grown up in this strangest of historical periods, I find myself floating without any clear belief systems (despite having a head full of information about and impressions of various religious forms, belief systems, mysticism, shamanism, etc.). The idea of prayer attracts me, and I'm almost certain that there's something in it...but I have no deity or deities to pray to, nor a vocabularly with which to pray. But music spontaneously flowing from my nervous system, while in a state of receptiveness and humility, feels like it is coming from the same place from which true prayer comes. It involves a centering of myself, and an aspiration to bridge the gap between the material and the immaterial. It comes from that place in myself about which I have no doubt.

The next morning, I continued my journey up the old Ridgeway to Wayland’s Smithy and Uffington. After an extended saz session atop Dragon Hill in rather intense heat, I walked back to sleep under a beech tree next to Wayland's Smithy. Waiting for my little kettle to boil on a tiny fire of twigs, for a last cup of tea, I decided to play a few more minutes, and a simple little tune emerged out of nowhere. Since getting home I've recorded a rough sketch (with Vicky playing harmonium), and decided to call it "Uffington Riddle'" since the whole chunk of land from Uffington Castle (with White Horse) down to Dragon Hill and the enormous, undulating coombe below, struck me as some kind of puzzle or enigma, the solution to which lay just beyond my grasp.


image from http://freespace.virgin.net/ancient.ways/uffingto.htm
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Just before I left Exeter, Vicky and I had finished reading Bruce Chatwin's book The Songlines. His descriptions of the Australian Aboriginal cultural infrastructure, involving 'dreaming tracks' or 'songlines' gave me quite a lot to think about during my travels along some of the most ancient tracks in Britain. Chatwin suggests that a similar system of 'songlines' would have been in place everywhere at one time, but that it managed to survive in Australia until the European invasion due to geographical isolation. I found myself wondering what possible pre-neolithic 'dreaming' stories and songs would have had to say about the Uffington landscape, and whether the strange, searching music emerging from my fingers there might have anything to do with these old songs (if they ever existed).

Last summer solstice (2004), after an extraordinary walk on Fyfield Down with Vicky, we got back to Exeter and a similarly simple tune similarly emerged from nowhere. I called it 'Pisci Cuspus' in honour of Vicky's classic misremembering of the term 'Vesica Piscis' during our walk. I made that one up on my balalaika, and similarly recorded a quick sketch so I wouldn't forget the tune.

Listen Here
I imagine these two little tunes will get developed into something a bit more substantial one day.

I've been doing this trip for the last fourteen years, and despite my obsessive tendency towards recording spontaneous music, have generally refrained from attempting it in this setting. This year I did actually take an old minidisc recorder with me, but felt quite relieved when it completely refused to work. Sometimes it's best to just let the music go, as a gift to the Universe, and a lesson in non-attachment. And fumbling about by a campfire with microphones, discs and batteries is one of the easiest ways to kill a delicate musical vibe.

In 1994 I did capture some interesting stuff on a handheld tape recorder, including Pok and Melski reading from A Midsummer Night's Dream in West Kennet Long Barrow on solstice eve, and a naming ceremony in the stones for Rosie's baby May Brigit, with much of the Dongas Tribe, as it was then, present singing, dancing and playing mandolins, penniwhistles and drums. I think that tape is in a box somewhere in Belgium, and there's even a chance I might recover it one day...


May Brigit's naming ceremony, Avebury stone circle
Since getting back to Exeter, I've been trying to track down online recordings of skylarks, since their singing impressed me so much during my time on the Wiltshire Downs. I have heard some suggestion that if you slow down their song by some factor or other it somehow resembles the works of certain classical composers. To my ears, it sounds like John Coltrane playing at 8x speed in a higher-dimensional space. A couple of years ago, Dave Prentice and I found some MP3's of skylark song and spent an afternoon experimenting with loops, etc.. I've no idea where those files ended up. I've only managed to find one five-second WAV sample (here) and a minute or so in Real Audio format here. I could listen to hours of this stuff. It's particularly interesting to hear several larks singing simultaneously. Up on that barrow on Windmill Hill, I had the distinct impression that I was listening to one thing, not a jumble of competing songs (rather like the sonic equivalent of the way flocks of birds fly with incredibly well-coordinated precision). I suppose I shall have to record some myself. For now, I've converted that minute of RA format skylark song into MP3 format, for your listening pleasure:

Listen Here

Hawkwind pictures

I've just been informed by Tom Vinelott of www.triplica.com that his photos from last December's Hawkwind gig at The Phoenix are now online. That night Simon, Henry and I from the Droners plus Pok and Steve (a spacerock enthusiast and friend from my West Cornwall travels) joined forces to become "Children of the Sun", playing a one-off set of acoustic versions of Hawkwind songs in the bar. We were meant to play before Hawkwind played in the main auditorium, but because of organisational complications we ended up playing at the same time as them, for the people who couldn't afford a ticket into the main event. This was amusingly reminiscent of Hawkwind's legendary free set outside the fence of the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.

The pictures are here (bottom two rows, below the pictures of Hawkwind themselves - click on thumbnails for larger versions)

You can hear the complete set here (poor recording quality in places, but worth it for the Hawkfans)


me and Pok at home a couple of days previously, working out a Hawkwind bassline

Midsummer Crediton Drone

Last night saw the monthly session at the Rainbow Studio in Crediton. I'm just listening back to the discs now.

The Rainbow Studio isn't a recording studio, incidentally - just a simple, very pleasant space which we are able to hire for surprisingly little. All the sessions there tend to have a very open, uplifting feel to them, in my experience.

Some of the local cosmic types even claim that the space is intersected by the Mary Line. This is one of the two snaking energy currents that make up the 'Michael/Mary Line' and which are supposed to cross in the very nearby Crediton church - the remarkably named 'Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross and the Mother of Him who Hung Thereon', and the regional cathedral before the centre of ecclestiastical power got moved down to Exeter in 1050. I visited the church a couple of summers ago, even played some contemplative saz in the Lady Chapel for a while. One of the first things I noticed was that one of the side-chapels, dedicated to St. Nicholas, contained a small plaque explaining that it had previously been dedicated to St. Michael.

It was Vaughan, John, Keith, Henry and I. A very mellow, floaty, summery session, but also uncharacteristally LOUD (as well as extremely gentle) at times. Quite a lot of guitar (acoustic and electric) going on. Keith urged me to try playing my saz through his assemblage of effects pedals, which was interesting for a while, but I soon realised that it required far too much use of my conscious/rational mind, which normally has to be switched off for me to play music effectively. A hugely enjoyable Drone, though.

Listen Here
We even found there were some wild strawberry plants growing through the cracks in the concrete outside the door of the Studio and were able to pick a handful of tiny, but delicious strawberries to enjoy with our tea break.


image from http://canard.typepad.com/oslo_foodie/fish_seafood/

Opthalmologist Frogspawn

After far too long 'in the pipeline', the compilation Opthalmologist Frogspawn I've been piecing together from the earliest Children of the Drone recordings is finally done. These date back to 2002 when we were still using a low-quality mono microphone, and capture the early Drone sound, when it was mostly just me, Keith and Simon. It also features parts of our first proper public performance (if you don't count playing for Ben Bradshaw in the Exeter Cathedral chapterhouse!) which was at The Bowling Green on the Spring equinox that year, when Matthew S and Philip joined us.

Listen Here
I've attempted some more ambitious splices than anything I've done before. The idea was to 'sonically meld' pieces from different times and places by crossfading in combination with various types of flanging and phasing. The idea (and Melski immediately leapt to the same analogy when I started to describe it to her yesterday) is to create the sonic equivalent of the familiar TV/film visual effect used to indicate a transition into a 'memory' or 'dream' sequence, where the screen goes all wavy. Some examples are more successful than others, but I'm sure I'll get better at this sort of thing with practice.

The title refers to the title of the first track, recorded at The Bowling Green, where I used a dictionary to 'improvise' titles, opening it randomly, skipping about, stringing words together. For the rest of the titles, I've used the common names of various species of moths found in the British Isles (moths do have some excellent names).

Having finally dealt with this material, I can now get on with compiling some of the more recent (and perhaps more musically worthy) Dronings.

saz evolution

Last night Vicky and I met Keith Drone in the little room above The Globe Inn for a rather unexpected concert of saz music:



I'd heard a while back that there was saz player based in Totnes, who played traditional Turkish music, and this was he. He played two sets of songs on two different sazes, according to two different Turkish traditions (also including some instrumental pieces from Azerbaijan, etc.). We were given translations of some of the lyrics, and a bit of cultural background. It was particularly interesting to hear about the 25 million Alevi Muslims in Turkey and their beliefs and traditions.

In between sets, Keith and I got talking to Simon about saz tunings and traditions. It turns out that he plays in a trio called Bazigah with Russell Harris who I have seen playing as part of the duo Taaliqa.

It feels like a new evolutionary stage in my saz playing may be about to unfold. Three related events in 24 hours have had quite an effect on me:

Firstly, on Monday evening Vicky and I listened back to the session recorded on my birthday, which featured quite a lot of my saz playing, and this got me thinking about where I want to take it, about the development of technique and the need for a more disciplined approach.

Then, yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon, I put on a a saz instruction video-CD (which appears to be an English edition of this, given to me by James T Drone as a birthday present - his parents had just brought it back from Turkey. Watching the first section on the correct method of holding the instrument brought home to me the rather striking fact that after eleven years of owning and playing this instrument, I have made almost no effort whatsoever to find out how it is "supposed to be" played. This was partially a conscious decision at first, in order to allow my own style to develop, but now I think it might be time to learn some traditional Turkish technique which I can integrate with everything else I do on the saz.

A few hours later, I was sitting listening to Simon Cassell, struck by the amount of effort and discipline which must have gone into learning to play and sing traditional Turkish (and central Asian) songs from several different traditions. This didn't undermine my confidence in the value of my own approach to the instrument, but it certainly added another perspective to the picture.

Birthday session

birthday card, handpainted by Vicky
It was my 35^th birthday yesterday, celebrated with an extended outdoor session involving various Droners and friends.

Simon arrived early with Alison, played a bit of harmonium with my saz, but had to leave early too.

Sam and Sym stopped by on their way from Glastonbury to Dartmoor - Sam's band 'Green Angels' (currently her plus Stevie P and Mandy - both of whom were once part of 'Heathens All' - mostly playing traditional French and Breton folkdance music - bagpipes and bouzoukis) were playing at the "d'Accord Summer Picnic and Bal/Fest Noz" at Leusdon near Poundsgate that evening. Sam played a bit of clarinet with us.


clockwise - me, Keith, James, Vaughan, Sym and Sam
This sort of social occasion is generally not very conducive to recording music (people talking, moving about, etc.), but I still managed to set my minidisc recorder up discretely amidst some plants and capture about 90 minutes of sounds. The neighbourhood sparrows contributed quite extensively, often in a quasi-rhythmic mass-squawking. The session was much more saz-oriented than most Drone sessions, and I remember feeling a bit self-indulgent in the extent to which I was playing. Listening back, though, I'm quite happy with the way it came out.

Listen Here
Keith and some of the others had kindly pooled their resources to get me a copy of Julian Cope's book The Megalithic European, an excellent choice after last year's gift of JC's The Modern Antiquarian. One of the first items that grabbed my attention was the section on the sacred landscape of Weris in Belgium which I visited in 1994.

This dolmen was the first thing Inge and I came across when we arrived there, so we sat atop it in the sunshine playing our guitars. The local self-appointed 'druid' (one of very few 'druids' in Belgium, without a doubt) turned up shortly thereafter and introduced himself.


The Grand Dolmen of Weris, with me just visible off to the right
Back to my birthday...As the evening drew on and it got a bit chillier we lit a little fire in a brazier, and I got into some very nice saz and percussion jamming with Rupert, who I hope will be droning with us quite a bit more in the future.


Keith and I, framed by Vicky's garden at it's midsummer best
Rupert, Vicky and I then wandered down to the North Bridge Inn to meet Keith and partake of Future Sound of Exeter's '70's prog and 60's psychedelia evening', enjoying some excellent local ale accompanied by old favourites from Atomic Rooster, Pink Floyd, Focus, Led Zeppelin, etc., as well as some fairly obscure stuff that none of us could identify.

We also managed to informally negotiate a slot for 'Pulse' (Henry and Richard's dance-based Drone spin-off project) at the Sunday of the July 2-3 Respect Festival, the music for which is being organised by FSOE. On the 2^nd, we're supposed to be playing two sets at a little festival out near Coleford, so I'm hoping I'll be back in time to see Misty in Roots and Baka Beyond at the Phoenix that evening.

photos from France

Just got a package from Inge in S. France, including some recordings of her band 'Farat El Moultazov' and some photos from my recent visit.

me and Inge, Les Hourquets, March '05 - Listen Here
Colin (drumming on bucket), Inge, me and Joel - Colin appears to be having his life-force extracted through his right eye by the alien entity which has caused the lower-left corner to burst into flames with a swooping energy-ray. Or were we just sitting around a fire?

We all travelled together with the Dongas in Cornwall from 1997 to 2000. Joel and Sarah (not pictured) have now bought a place in the Pyrennees, and Colin was visiting to lend a hand sorting the place out, so we went up to visit and play some music. Despite being pictured with a guitar above, Joel is an absolutely fantastic hurdy-gurdy player, once part of Red Dog Green Dog, and winner of various prizes at the San Chartier festival (hurdy-gurdy Mecca). He's now teaching traditional French hurdy-gurdy to French people, as well as playing in Inge's band.

Joel, foot-on-monitor, heavy metal style (actually it's his hurdy-gurdy case, I think)
These pictures reminded me that I had a few rather nice minutes of saz and hurdy-gurdy which we recorded in a caravan in a muddy field in Dorset very late one night last December, so I've uploaded them to the archive:
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New CoTD 'logo', possible festivals

Simon has created a sort of 'logo' for Children of the Drone:


It's Korean text generated by some kind of translation software, and has actually come out as (when translated back to English) Child of Pilotless Plane which I find wonderfully appropriate, considering the way we operate, musically and otherwise. He's even been talking about making some semi-ironic merchandise available (with no cost to us) via CafePress. So you never know, there might be some Children of the Drone baseball caps floating about some remote corner of the globe by the time the year's out...

He also got in touch this morning about an intriguing-looking, reasonably local mini-festival the organisers of which he's approached about us possibly playing. Henry, Richard, Mark, me and possibly one other Droner are meant to be playing a similarly small-scale local festival-type event near Coleford the weekend before, in more 'festival danceband' mode, so there may be some potential to develop this side of things.

'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.

Omar Sosa Trio at the Phoenix

I'm still recovering from the most remarkable gig I've seen in the five years I've been in Exeter - the Omar Sosa Trio at the The Phoenix last night. Utterly electrifying. They received a standing ovation - a very well-deserved one.


image from http://www.eyefortalent.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/artist.detail/artist_id/83
There's a description of them here, which is pretty accurate. A Cuban pianist with all the best elements of Sun Ra and Thelonius Monk in his playing and general aura, a Tunisian oud master (Dhafer Youssef) who also unleashed freeform 'devotional'-type vocals with a power similar that of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Van Morrison, and Miguel 'Angá' Diaz, one of Cuba's finest percussionists (i.e. about as good as percussion can get).

I'd seen a poster a couple of weeks ago, and thought "Cuban-North African fusion, hmmm...". These things can sometimes work, or sometimes just be a contrived attempt to fuse traditions in a kind of annoying 'world music' way. But my friend Sven (who I recorded with in Belgium recently) plays in an occasional Moroccan-Cuban fusion group called 'Son Rai', who are brilliant, so I was more curious that usual to check out this trio. A few days ago, I happened to be passing BBC Radio 3 on the dial, and a programme called In Tune, as well as playing bits of opera and Segovia, had the Trio playing live in the studio. As well as being impressed by the music, I was struck by what nice people they seemed to be, and how much fun they were obviously having playing (mostly improvising) together.

On stage, this was even more evident. There was a wonderfully playful, almost pixie-like quality to the three of them, the way they played, communicated and generally interacted. Omar and Dhafer were messing with various bits of electronics, making properly dynamic use of effects and interesting/inspring/weird samples (NO cheesy dance beats, thank God! This use of electronic was more in the spirit of classic period Gong material, or something like that). Omar was playing percussion directly on his piano strings at one point, Dhafer was playing jazz-type basslines on his oud, beaming out huge smiles. At the end, you just wanted to hug them all...

Omar even looks a bit like an Afro-Cuban version of Sven!

I'd almost given up on trying to get a ticket, but then got a last-minute phone call from Richard Drone offering me one, and rushed down to the Phoenix just in time, adding to overall excitement and spontaneity of the experience.

After that Miles Davis experience a couple of days ago, I didn't imagine I was going to witness any improvisational music that could come close to it for quite some time. I'm glad to say that I was entirely wrong. And I saw it happen right in front of me, a ten minute walk from where I live.

This brings to mind an experience I had one night in S.W. Ireland when I was over there in March. Sitting by a fire in a cottage in the mountains, lost in a saz trance, I started to get a visual impression of the music emerging from the movements of my fingers on the fretboard. There was a distinct sense of the playing of spontaneous music as a constructive activity; it was as if I was creating a sort of elaborate organic 'architecture' in some kind of mental hyperspace. This architecture took the form of intricate jewelled, fractal towers, bridges and pathways emanating out in endless dimensions. After many hours of this, I felt a pleasant exhaustion similar to that after a period of reasonably hard physical labour, like I'd just finished work in some kind of metaphysical building site.

In the days that followed, this image stuck with me, and I started thinking about all the music going on around the planet, and about the various successful and unsuccessful attempts to 'fuse' different traditions. I now had a visual metaphor for this, and could see crude attempts to weld various types of these intricate constructions together in some cases, and masterful, organic 'dove-tailing' of structures in other cases.

I talked a lot with Sven about this when I visited him in Belgium a couple of weeks later - about the need for genuine, as opposed to superficial-'World Music'-style, fusion. His angle on this was that you can't properly fuse two musical traditions until you've thoroughly immersed yourself in and properly understood both of them, found the common root, perhaps. My experience of mathematics, coupled with this new visual metaphor, made this all very clear to me.

We concluded that this is what the world needs more than anything. It fascinates me that at a time in history where the auto-extermination of humanity is a very real possibility, when the human race faces the very real threat of irreparably damaging its own ecosystem, we also have the first opportunity for all cultures to experience each others' music. I'm left with a feeling that musicians around the world have a huge amount of work to do to build some kind of mysterious unifying 'structure' in the 'hyperspace' caught a glimpse of that night, if we're to stand any chance of survival. The Sosa Trio were one of the most perfect examples of this kind of thing I've ever witnessed - full power to them!

St Stephens Drone

Another Drone last night, this time one of our monthly sessions at St. Stephen's Church in Exeter High Street.


This was the smallest assemblage of Droners for quite some time, certainly the smallest at St. Stephens - just Keith, James T and I.

When I arrived, I was mildly alarmed to find a group of
Exeter City Council workmen replacing the paving slabs directly in front of the main entrance. There's been various work going on in the High Street on Wednesday evenings for months, sometimes involving pneumatic drills, which adds an interesting, if unwanted sonic element to the proceedings. (The only other group I'm aware of to have made use of pneumatic drills was Einstürzende Neubauten!) This time, they were just using some kind of grinding machine, so we ended up making a sort of unintentional 'industrial-acoustic' music. We also had a couple of young women wander in looking for a performance of 'Mexican Jazz' - we were unable to help either direct them to the correct venue, or provide any Mexican Jazz.

Keith and I took turns playing acoustic bass, with him otherwise playing mandola or electric guitar, and me playing saz. James did a couple of his poems, but mostly played piano. As Henry couldn't make it (dental infection) there was no overtly percussive element throughout most of what we did. This allowed a sort of rhythmic 'breathing' to occur more than usual, and James' piano playing worked particularly well in this context.

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One very strange footnote to this session: At the end of the last piece, Keith pointed out that one of the overhead heating lamps (a long electric element enclosed by a half-cylinder of reflective metal, and hanging by two chains, a couple of metres each, quite high above us) was swinging, very noticeably, for no obvious reason. There was no possibility of airflow being involved. The adjacent lamp was completely stationary. He had noticed this was happening several minutes earlier, and as we packed up, it gradually stopped. The only causal explanation I can come up with was that the workmen's grinding machine had set up some kind of vibrational resonance in the building to which the lamp happened to respond, by some freak of physics. But the idea of musical psychokinesis seems somehow more appealing...

I also found an interesting pamphlet from the Small Pilgrim Places Network in the church's literature rack. Seems like a very good idea, what they're trying to get together. My immediate thought was of some future collaborative project involving a musical pilgrimage around Britain, travelling on foot, recording sessions in various chapels and small churches along the way. I noticed that the Network's pilot project revolved around St. Tecwyn's church near Llandecwyn in N. Wales. Back in the summer of 1997 I spent a couple of weeks camped in a field near there. Zymbii the mule had lost a shoe, and we were waiting for a farrier to come out and re-shoe him, sharing the field with a llama and a Jacob's sheep. Inge, Andy, Peter and I recorded a concert for some local people and friends of Lizzie (whose field it was) one night, some of which I managed to record. Despite playing huge amounts of music during that summer, this was one of the few bits that got committed to tape, so I will get round to archiving it here very soon.


leaving Llandecwyn - photo by Lizzie Slater

visit from Pok

Pok Spacegoat turned up on Tuesday night, at relatively short notice, straight from the Kingston Green Fair. He, his new girlfriend Aurelie and I listened to some far-out, lesser-known Jefferson Airplane recordings I'd compiled - she's a complete devotee of the Airplane, probably something you come across more in France (she's French) than the U.K.

Pok and I babbled extensively (as we tend to do) about the new Dr. Who series, the musical genius of Jerry Garcia, his own ideas for a new kind of loop-based music which he's hoping to start recording soon, the future of recorded music, the weirdly cultish 'Mayan Calendar' scene which he keeps encountering within the N. London psychedelic trance crowd, etc..

Eventually we got 'round to watching part of a DVD I'd got out of the library that morning specially for his benefit - Miles Electric - A Different Kind of Blue, which deals with Miles Davis' late 60's transition into electronics/rock/funk which was so 'shocking' to the jazz community at that time. It was too late to watch the whole documentary, so we cut straight to the 38 minute "Call it Anything" performance from the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. Wow! Collective improvisation beyond belief. Aurelie had asked if I was in a band, and I'd struggled to explain what kind of entity Children of the Drone is. After she'd seen Miles & co. doing their incomparable 'thing', I was able to explain that, were we a million times better, we'd be something like that.

Pok and I then attempted our own saz and mandola jam, which felt pretty good at the time. I got it on minidisc, just a few minutes, which I've made available together with some older Pok-related stuff, some going back to 1996:
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