uplifting Crediton session

A more electric Children of the Drone session than we've had in a long time last night. Thoroughly enjoyable. I left feeling like I'd just been to a really good, intensive yoga class.


John's electric Drone setup
Henry - percussion
John - electric guitar, bouzouki, mandolin, voice, low whistle, percussion
Richard - electric bass guitar
me - saz, balalaika, acoustic bass guitar, percussion

Last Saturday I was over at Henry's for a Pulse workout, Richard working on some new basslines, including Bob Marley's "Lively Up Yourself" - surprisingly tricky, that, to the initiate. It seemed to me at the time that if he could really "get" the rhythmic subtleties of that (deceptively simple) line, he would "get" reggae as a whole. Henry's getting really into reggae and dub dub rhythms at the moment. He was recently reminiscing about an old girlfriend introducing him to King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown, which inspired me to dig some Tubby's out and get inspired. During this session he heard my balalaika amped up with a bit of delay on it, half-jokingly suggested a reggae vibe, and suddenly we were off on a dub excursion. The particular sound I had somewhat accidentally ended up with suggested to me someone playing balalaika in a geographically distant reggae band down a less-than-perfect-quality phone line from Russia. There was another dubbed-out piece in the second set, and more time spent in major keys than usual (James T pointed out that the last session was entirely minor key).

We also got louder than ever before in a "non-live" Drone session - wild thrashy electric guitar playing from John, with Henry pounding his kit at one point. This allowed me to get fully into playing my darabuka, which at normal Drone volumes requires a sensitivity and subtlety that I would have to warm up extensively first to achieve.

One piece sounds a bit like John's borrowing the riff from Compay Segundo's "Chan Chan" (familiar from The Buena Vista Social Club).


Henry and John, before Richard arrived
I played some (acoustic) bass early on, before Richard arrived. It felt embarrassingly weak at the time, but not that bad listening back to it. Still, I really need to spend more time familiarising myself with the bass fretboard.

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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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Red Dog Green Dog

Saturday night saw the third annual barn dance at Cannings Court Farm near Pulham in Dorset. My friends Heather and John put this on (between growing organic vegetables and raising a young child) as a fundraiser for a sustainable technology charity called Practical Action. This year it featured 'Primaeval' (Cliff Stapleton - formerly of Blowzabella - playing hurdy-gurdy-driven Breton music with his new band) and Red Dog Green Dog.


Barn Dance flyer
RDGD were originally Jo and Joel (with whom I used to travel in Cornwall playing a lot of French, Breton and other folk musics) together with Mike and Jim, a couple of Liverpudlians we met at the Saint-Chartier festival in 1999. They recorded one acclaimed album in 2002 and quickly got quite a following on the French folkdance circuit. Mike left after a while (he's a bagpipe maker living in Somerset these days), and Jim and Joel now live in France, so it's become something of an occasional entity. The full RDGD line-up was not to be this night, though, as Joel and Sarah were stuck in the Pyrenees, their baby Perran recovering from whooping cough. This was a terrible shame, both because everyone would have loved to have seen them all, but also because Joel's a sensational hurdy-gurdy player, which gives the sound a real kick. However, Nuala (of Headmix, and formerly the folkie-punky-squat-festie band Tofu Love Frogs) stepped in at the last minute and did a thoroughly excellent job playing fiddle and replacing the irreplaceable.

It occured to me during the set that I saw Nuala playing with the Tofus at Whitstable (old) Labour Club back in 1992, a year or so before I met any of my many friends dancing in the barn that night. She and Jo did a few tunes on their own to supplement the set, and that was a real revelation. Jo's a truly dedicated, disciplined musician who has been steadily improving her melodeon playing over the years since we travelled in Cornwall, and Nuala's fiddle-style is the perfect complement to her playing. They've been gigging in Brighton lately as "Four Legs Good" (great name), so if you're down that way, do check them out - superb. Jo's also been busy setting up her own youth music therapy project called "100 Monkeys" (another great name.).


Jim (soprano sax), Mike (bagpipes), Jo (melodeon), Nuala (fiddle)
I got their whole two hour set (minus 10 seconds) on MiniDisc. It's really very good, especially considering they hadn't played together for months (and never in this configuration) apart from a casual bit of rehearsal in the campsite that afternoon:

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Jim (concertina), Mike (bagpipes), Jo (melodeon), Nuala (fiddle)
I'd put my bike on a train to Sherborne and cycled in on the Thursday to help Heather and John set things up. It felt good to be there as everyone arrived. There was a very lively campsite scene, huge amounts of food, and our friend Ian was there circulating his legendary mead (I got a bottle of the 1999 elderberry - amazing stuff).

Last time I was visiting the farm, Joel and Sarah were living in a yurt there with their newborn baby. Joel and I recorded a little bit of saz and hurdy-gurdy jamming. This time I didn't get a chance to play much. On the Sunday morning I had a bit of badly-played-saz and percussion jam with Matt SpaceGoat sitting by a smoky fire in intense sunshine with a mild hangover - not recorded, thankfully. Made me want to practice more (and drink less). Matt's been busy setting up (with John Martineau, who published our little reference book) Pond Life, Ltd. - a sort of mobile studio project and online music portal - as well as playing sitar and bouzouki with Camel Nitrate and Transglobal Underground.

After RDGD had finished, Nuala had expressed an interest in a nearby bass and the possibility of getting a jam together. "Anyone got a guitar?" she wondered. I'd seen her playing bass on dub and ska tracks with Headmix at the Lizard Eclipse Festival in 1999, in the Burrow Hill Cider tent, so the idea of a spaced-out saz/dub jam seemed very appealing at the time. By the time I returned to the barn, though, Sam, Stevie P and Sunny were busy keeping the people dancing with more French tunes - probably a good thing, as I'd had a good part of that bottle of elderberry mead by that point.

Another very positive thing to have come out of this event was that Stevie P heroically turned up with the best existing copy of the "Rainy Night in the Bell Tent" session from Ventongimps, 1997. I've been trying to track this down for years. Fortunately, when I last saw her, Maya (from Dragonsfly, and who used to be in Heathens All with Stevie) mentioned that he'd made her a copy of this tape, which is how I came to know he had it. Some very badly-processed fourth or fifth generation copies of some of these tunes have been online for a while here, but I shall now be able to upload a much more worthy set of audio files to the IAA (coming soon). That session was originally recorded on Howie's top-quality portable cassette recorder, but the original (typically) got lost in the post between Cornwall and Belgium. It was undoubtedly the best recording made of the Cornwall period Dongas music.


Apparently I missed a good Drone session back in Exeter on Saturday. Henry's wife Lucy was exhibiting her ceramics at their home as part of the regional Nine Days of Art event, and he invited Droners 'round to provide background music. Phil and Matthew S made it (which doesn't happen so often). Henry reckons it was a particularly good one - "mythologised", though, as he said, since no one recorded it.

weekend discoveries

I was over at Henry's for a bit of a session with he and his brother Richard on Saturday - drums, bass and saz - quite a good workout on the fretboard. Richard's bass playing just keeps getting better. Henry's wife Lucy joined in with some additional percussion for a while.

Henry also mentioned a few interesting-sounding things coming up at The Phoenix soon: The Parallax Beat Brothers (percussionist Pete Lockett with electronic innovator Scanner), The Philip Clemo Band, Acoustic Ladyland and The Bays. The Bays sounded particularly interesting, as they're an entirely live, entirely improvised phenomenon with a dedicated fan-base and a "no product"/"performance is the art" ethos. I checked out their website and really liked the concept. There was a free download available of a set they played in Haifa last January. Listening to it wasn't quite as exciting as reading about the concept behind the group - it's very much dance-oriented, and although it's all live drums, guitar, bass and keyboards, I kept forgetting I wasn't listening to an eclectic DJ set. Still, I think I shall check them out when they pass through Exeter. It's nice to know someone else has realised that trying to sell recorded music as a product has just about had its day.

Vicky and I took a load of stuff to the local recycling centre on Sunday, and I found a few gems amongst the old vinyl there - The Cardiacs Big Ship E.P. as well as three mint-condition LP's of 13th-17th century music by an ensemble called The Consort of Musicke. Quite a bargain at 10p each! Despite my enthusiasm for that period of European music, I've decided that the commonly-used description "Early Music" is just as ridiculous as "World Music", considering that we now know humans were playing wind instruments at least 45,000 years ago.

"If anyone's aware of anything which isn't 'world music', then please get in touch - I'd be very keen to hear it." (John Peel, paraphrased, early 1990's)

The rest of that afternoon was spent painting window frames, listening to Coltrane and Tom Waits (Raindogs is a great album to paint to, I discovered!)

West Cornwall 1997-98

I've just uploaded some more Dongas archive material to the IAA - sounds I recorded on various lo-fi analog cassette recorders at a number of locations in West Cornwall during the autumn of '97 and spring of '98: Boscawen-Ûn stone circle, Truro Cathedral, The Jacob's Ladder (a pub in Falmouth), Maverick's Cafe (Falmouth), Constantine Village Hall, and the One Big Family Festival held in St. Piran's Round, near Perranporth.


Boscawen-Un stone circle - image from http://www.megalithia.com/ sites/sw412274.html
They're all Breton or French tunes, sometimes fairly brief excerpts. Unfortunately all the original tapes have long since disappeared, so these recordings are second generation or worse. I've done my best to improve them using various noise removal software, EQ and dynamic processing. Some sound better than others, but ideally the vibe comes through. It should be pointed out that we weren't really a band, as there was no clearly fixed line-up, and we never rehearsed. We just lived and travelled together, and played music together a lot. So a repertoire sort of emerged organically. These should therefore be taken more in the spirit of "ethno-musicological field recordings" from a curious late 90's UK micro-subculture than live recordings of a "folk band".


Joel, Jo and Lisa playing at The Jacob's Ladder
It was often a bit of a challenge trying to be heard with my saz amidst the sound of bagpipes, noisily enthusiastic dancers, etc., but I can just about be heard bashing out the chords on most of these tunes. In some cases, I was simply guarding the microphone amidst the chaos and not playing at all.

Lisa - bombarde, bagpipes, recorder, wooden flute, voice
Jo - bombarde, melodeon, wooden flute, voice
Stef - mandolin, biniou, concertina
Sarah - recorder, voice
Joel - hurdy-gurdy (+ possibly bombarde, biniou)
Josh - percussion
Colin - percussion
Selena - mandola, percussion, voice
Kel - recorder, voice
Heather - recorder, voice (+ possibly concertina)
Inge - mandolin, percussion
me - saz, percussion
[and possibly others]

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Stef, Jo and Lisa playing biniou and bombarde, One Big Family festival, 1998

second St. Stephens vocal/Drone collaboration

Keith - electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar, mandola, piano, percussion
Henry - percussion
Rupert - percussion, slide-whistle
me - saz, balalaika, acoustic bass guitar, percussion, piano (just a few notes)
James T - piano, percussion, poetry, water
Vaughan - acoustic guitar, mandolin, voice, slide-whistle
Jo, Jenny and Pete - voices (Pete had to leave at half-time)
two anonymous characters who wandered in off the High Street - sinister mumblings


a curious feature on the south wall of St. Stephens church
Another excellent Drone session at St. Stephens church. This was the second time we've collaborated with some of Vaughan's vocal improvisation group, and it worked even better than the first time. The singers were presumably more at home and familiar with how the whole Drone thing works. James played some lovely piano, and Rupert and Henry's percussion output is becoming increasingly well meshed.

During the last, very long, jam, a couple of drunks wandered in off the High Street, and sat in the corner mumbling in increasingly loud voices. This was quite disconcerting at the time, but shortly after that, Keith's friend Gordon, a.k.a. DJ Bush Telegraph, (a no-nonsense Northerner) wandered in to listen for a while, which for some reason made me feel less disconcerted. The drunks eventually left of their own accord, but their rather sinister sounding mumblings, indecipherable in the church acoustic, add to the recordings quite interestingly (rather like the voices on parts of Dark Side of the Moon, except you can't hear what they're actually saying, which is probably a good thing).

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Another sonic serendipity, which I hadn't noticed on previous St. Stephens recordings, was the sound of the last few Wednesday night buses passing by - a kind of 'wooshing' sound which in some instances sounds like an intentional part of the music.

wholly excellent weekend

An inexplicable Saturday morning bad mood was very effectively swept away by a Saturday afternoon session at Henry's. I was feeling so unmotivated that I almost didn't go...but, fortunately, I did. I was just expecting to go around to jam over one of Henry and Richard's rhythm section practices. When I got there, though, I found Keith with electric guitar plugged in, and Rupert arriving with congas. It wasn't an 'official' Drone session, since it just sort of came toether at the last minute rather than being announced and open to all, nor was it a Pulse rehearsal, as Richard wasn't sticking strictly to bass 'loops'. We just jammed, with Henry encouraging his brother to explore on the bass a bit more. We ended up playing some rather wonderful psychedelic dub-type sounds. I'd love to hear what it sounded like, but I didn't record this one, not expecting anything quite so special.

I was planning to leave early to catch a bus, but when I mentioned where I was going, Rupert offered me a lift to my destination, so I was able to stay for the full session - and left feeling fantastic. Some of the pieces felt like a single mind or organism creating the music.

So I got a lift with Rupert out to a small, low-key music camp/gathering in an undisclosed location in rural Devon. This had been going on for a while - we were lucky enough to catch the end of it, getting to jam all night saround a big fire with a wonderful selection of musicians and singers - amazing in the diversity of their amazingness. I found myself playing along with old English folk songs, bluegrass, freeform didg jams, Iwan from the tiny German-speaking region of Belgium and his endless good-vibe, multilingual skanking guitar rhythms, some Portuguese language (Brazilian-style, presumably) berimbau, guitar and voice, the incomparable Jon E. Aris's heartwarming, absurdist positivity anthems, an extended "When the Saints Go Marching In" freakout with trumpet and sax, some Elizabethan lute music played by an instrument maker from the Totnes area on a little guitar-shaped mandolin he'd designed and built, songs by The Byrds, Neil Young, Lindisfarne, World Party, even a Cyndi Lauper song (don't laugh - Miles Davis covered it in '85! And Cyndi's cool in her own way...)!


the low-key music camp at an undisclosed location in rurual Devon
Jim (of the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet) was in fine form, doing his 12-string powered "human psychedelic jukebox" thing. At one point I stopped to try and remembered where/when I'd met him...it was during the aftermath of the 1995 Glastonbury Festival, introduced by our mutual friend and collaborator Pok Spacegoat. Jim was doing what he does best on that occasion, coming out with one perfectly chosen song after another. I can distinctly remember the subject of Nick Drake coming up, and being very impressed to have met someone who knew "Clothes of Sand". I thought I'd ask Jim to play that again, ten summers later, and having waited for the right moment (for it's a rather melancholy song, and the mood was mostly very 'up' during the night), found him to be tuning his guitar AT THAT MOMENT specifically to play THAT SONG. And this is a man who knows more songs than anyone else I've ever met.

I eventually had to give up at 4a.m., but I can't remember such a good night's musical diversity in a LONG time. There was such a good vibe between everyone, too - no sense of anyone's ego getting in the way or clashing with anyone else's. I didn't record any of it - that just wouldn't have been appropriate. But I found myself waking up in the morning desperately trying to remember all of it, not wanting to lose track of even a little bit of the magic that went down around that fire.

I noodled around some folktunes on my balalaika by the fire in the morning while people were making tea and toast, chatted with Dave the luthier about modal music, tempered scales, the influence of the Church on the development of western music, the difficulties of making a living as a musician or luthier, etc., gave away some COTD volume 4 CDs, and then headed back to Exeter with Rupert once the storm blew in.

Sherwood yet again

A really lovely Children of the Drone session last night - outdoors at Sherwood Cottage again, but with a considerably larger line-up:

Henry - percussion
Rupert - percussion
Keith - electric guitar, percussion
John - mandolin, bouzouki, acoustic guitar, percussion, voice
Vaughan - acoustic guitar, percussion, voice
Richard - electric bass guitar
James T - poetry, percussion, water
me - saz, balalaika, percussion

Vaughan had a fire lit, but we ended up playing in the barn again - less smoky and a better acoustic.


Henry, Vaughan and James prior to the session, which didn't occur around this fire
I'd had quite a difficult day prior to this, felt rather like I was disintegrating - this helped put all the bits back together. Rather appropriately, the last piece (a kind of semi-ironic blues-ish thing, like last week, but more subtle) involved James reading a poem involving some "found" text, the last bit being "sometimes I fall together" (repeated). That seemed to sum it up. I came home feeling whole again. One of the best sessions in quite a while.

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Truro Cathedral, December 1998

Another archive recording of the Dongas in Cornwall. This was from the second time we were invited to play in Truro Cathedral during one of their late-night Christmas shopping services. A bit of a struggle in the cavernous acoustic, and a rather lo-fi recording at that, but still worth a listen (particularly the bombard and biniou pieces).


left to right: Dave (our friend from Camborne), Stef, Colin, me, Jo, Inge
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In both 1997 and 1998 we were invited to play during special services conducted to coincide with late-night Christmas shopping. The first year we received a letter asking us to come and play "for the Glory of God and the Entertainment of the Late Night shoppers"! We were relieved to note that 'shoppers' had not been capitalised. Only one piece from that recording has survived, unfortunately.

The voice heard speaking at the end was our friend Banana Tom who indeed had come hundreds of miles for the occasion. As the other (unidentified) voice hinted, we continued later outside the Cathedral.


Truro Cathedral - image from http://www.cornishchurches.com