COTD 5th birthday celebration

It's about five years since Simon, Keith and I first played together as "Children of the Drone". Last night we had a fifth birthday celebration - Vicky made an amazing lemon cake (topped with crystallised wildflowers!) which was distributed with tea during the half-time break of a very enjoyable session:


Vicky's amazing cake
Keith - acoustic bass guitar, mandola, keyboard
Simon - laptop, electronics
James T - keyboard, poetry, percussion
John - acoustic guitar, low whistle, mandola, bouzouki, vocals, percussion
Henry - percussion, vocals
me - saz, acoustic bass guitar, percussion, accordion drone

During the break we were listening to a random COTD playlist, and when we were almost ready to start the second half, James started reading one of his "found poems" over the top of some old, pre-recorded Dronings. I gradually faded this down on the stereo before joining in. We've talked in the past about using randomly selected loops of archival COTD recordings as a springboard for performance (since playing live can be quite problematic with an ensemble such as this).

Simon, having discovered that wireless Internet was available in Oblique House (presumably leaking through from a neighbouring house), made use of this to stream bits of audio he found on the IAA and elsewhere. What at first sounds like a US telephone error message (a prerecorded woman's voice saying "The number you have dialed is incorrect...") turned out to be something from a "numbers station" site - a recording of a phone-based cryptography key disguised as an inocuous bit of telecom infrastructure. He ended one piece with a strange noise from a field recording made in a tipi in the Haldon Hills (near Exeter) by the wonderfully-named local sound-artist Bad Sector.

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