The Saz Report, July 2007

I'm not quite ready to get into regular podcasting, but for now I've thrown together some recent miscellaneous recordings as an archive.org collection.

It's mostly stuff recorded at Dominic's house one evening and excerpts from the (somewhat problematic) NuSphere collaboration at the EdensoundS party in East London. Also featured is a recording I was making of a new tune sketch one Sunday night when a massive thunderstorm blew in (worth listening to that one on headphones).

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Slow

This just turned up in Google. A little film called Slow made by Chris Deep in his back garden in Southern Scotland:

The music comes from this Ail Fionn collection which I recorded with Inge in the foothills of the French Pyrenees back in March 2005.

Lounge on the Farm

Lounge on the Farm, in its second year is "Kent's bestest music festival", apparently. Whoever's booking the music has exercised real quality control, in my opinion. I didn't necessarily like everything I heard, but I respected it all - everything seemed to have an integrity - very little posturing or showbiz vibes, just a lot of talented people really into their music (and a lot of appreciative people facing in the other direction, equally into it).

Not wanting to get too distracted from my current writing project, I decided to forsake the full weekend experience, and just cycle out for the Saturday. It was on Merton Farm, which hosted the Canterbury Summer Festival in 1990 (The Levellers played that, as well as a reformed Caravan). UK festival culture's moved in a really good, organic direction since then, and it showed. Rather than the usual one big stage with a succession of bands (and maybe a marquee for lesser bands), the site was subdivided into a load of little autonomous zones, with loads of different things going on - all vibes represented. A hip-hop/grafitti area, a kids area, real ale garden, DJ tent, several smaller marquees and stages, a bigger one (inside the farm's main cowshed).


The Furthur Collective's zone had a lovely feel to it. According to a small 'manifesto' I noticed pinned to a marquee pole, their main inspiration is the old 60's-70's Canterbury Sound. They're promoting Canterbury's current underground music scene, which draws on an even wider range of influences than the old one, trying to cultivate a kind of "New Canterbury Sound", I suppose. Zoo For You featured a horn section, kind of abstract funk that made me think of A Certain Ratio. Mr. Lovebucket had an amazing horn section, a superb bass player and keyboard player - in fact, just a brilliant band, playing exactly what the occasion required - some classic Skatalites and Fela Kuti material, mellow jazzy dubby sounds that had everyone dancing. JaberWok were my favourite, and probably the closest thing to a genuine 2007 Canterbury Sound (although I've since discovered that they're from Oxford!) - could hear elements of Gong, Hawkwind, Cardiacs-style ridiculousness...prog without pomposity, worth checking them out just for the keyboard/electronics player's facial expressions! He's the frontman, triggering all kinds of analogue electronic squelchiness by physically manipulating knobs and faders - none of that ploddiness you get with live bands where the rhythm's tied down to sequencers. They seem to have a dedicated following, which now includes me, I think. The Furthur tent was headlined by Syd Arthur (a band with an unfortunately daft name, not an individual) who seem to be the main crew behind the Furthur Collective. It was dark enough for the (properly psychedelic) lightshow to be fully visible, and they came on after an excellent bit of instrumental Caravan played over the PA - quite a self-conscious attempt at "New Canterbury"(?) - they, too, have a very enthusiastic local following, and I can't fault them - excellent musicianship, creative songwriting, quirky Englishness, some nice jazzy and dubby influences, but somehow the whole thing failed to really lift me.

Elsewhere on site...

Having the mainstage enclosed in a cowshed is a bit unfortunate, but with the recent weather, it could have been a saving grace. I only bother to see Billy Childish (and His Musicians of the British Empire!). Rock 'n' Roll! In silly costumes! Haven't seen Billy since a Thee Headcoats (and Thee Headcoatees!) gig at Democrazy in Ghent in the mid-90's. Good to see he's still rocking as hard as ever. His bass player is his current wife (from Seattle, I'm told). Just a trio on this occasion.

In the Arabesque tent, I caught half the set of a weirdly captivating band from Oxford called The Epstein. I'm guessing they're from Oxford, as the singer said something about the ground being drier in Canterbury than in Oxford. Kind of a dreamy countryish kind of band, but with interesting noisy guitar elements and an Eno-ish kind of orchestration in places. The singer had one of those rare, entirely uncheesy country voices (Thad Cockrell is another example...the sort of beautiful Gram Parsons-style country that even people who generally don't like any country music can appreciate). He also had a real passion in his voice and a general intensity to what he was doing. I kept thinking 'this is quite good, but it's not really my thing' and then the songs would unfold in these unexpected ways, and I'd get totally drawn in and my heart would be noticeably stirred and I couldn't leave. I can still hear one of their songs in my head as I type this.

The tiny "Festival Folly" stage hosted a few interesting things I caught bits of (but none of the names of) as well as the utterly hilarious North of Ping Pong, a kind of comic hiphop crew of sorts (with quite a serious looking and skillful DJ), the MC having the twin genii of Ian Dury and Marshall Mathers perched on either shoulder. Can't begin to describe beyond that...

Best of all, though, were the cloud formations! The weather forecaster on Radio 4 that morning had told us to "look out for architectural skies". I'd never heard that expression before, but liked the sound of it. And we got them...not just a proper summer day (after the most meteorologically miserable English summer anyone can remember), but a continually shifting hemispherical performance from the most diverse set of cloud formations I can remember witnessing in a single day. 'Architectural' is just the word. Before nightfall, whenever I was standing inside one of the marquees, I felt like I was missing something, had to keep stepping outside to see what the sky was doing.

Calais Hill jams

I've been over at Dominic's jamming on a couple of occasions since our serendiptious meeting.

Wednesday night I stopped by in the evening and we played a whole range of stuff - Cuban and other Latin-influenced sounds, reggae, some proper old blues, modal jamming. I was really impressed by his range of styles and influences.

The next evening I was there for a party (some of his friends having just finished drama degrees...I got to meet Jen who directed that Gertrude Stein piece, as well as another of the actors involved). Dom's friend Duncan, another highly versatile young guitarist, was also there and together they were playing an even wider range of styles. They have a shared love of Django Reinhardt, so we got into an extensive gypsy jazz thing, but also an Orchestre Baobab piece, some Leadbelly, more Cuban stuff, flamenco-y jams, "Cuanta la Mera", "Bella Ciao"...even (why not?) "Rocky Raccoon" with everyone singing along. I really needed an evening like that, and was on good form - one of those occasions where my fingers seemed to know exactly what to do, and I could just watch them, with a sort of detached amusement. Overall, a good blast of Manu Chao kind-of-vibe global resistance party music, bringing to mind scenes I've witenessed in Ghent (Sven's Son/Raï fusion band "Son Rai" playing at The Trefpunt) and Cork City (Toby, JohnJohn and a couple of Italians playing at The Yumi-Yuki Club as "Calle de Suenos".). And just a 5 minute bike ride from where I'm staying (or a walk through the woods and across a meadow)!

I recorded a some of all this (more on the Wednesday, only a tiny bit from the party) from which I've extracted a few excerpts:

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seeking the nightingale...but finding Puck instead

Wow. An astonishing serendipity last night. I awoke this morning wondering if it had really happened.

I've recently been recording solo saz noodlings with the evening birdsong in the woods near where I'm living (examples here). Dave (my neighbour, not Nusphere Dave) has enthused about this, as well as pointing out that there are nightingales who regularly sing a short distance away in the evenings. May is the best time for this, so by this point in the summer it's a bit more sporadic, but I resolved to get down there one clear, still evening, and make a saz and nightingale recording (there is a precedent for this, in the form of a BBC field recording involving an opera singer duetting with a nightingale in the 1940's - I read about this in a Sunday magazine years ago but have not been able to find anything online about it).

Yesterday evening was warm and still, and just as I was settling into a bit of saz practice (playing along with drum and bass loops of Orbis Tertius? material), Dave came to my caravan to say that the nightingales were singing. I grabbed my MiniDisc recorder and we headed down through the woods to the spot.

When we arrived, there was no nightingale song to be heard. A bit of traffic rumble, some sheep bleating and what sounded like some lads shouting over in nearby Tyler Hill. We waited for a while, and I played a bit, thinking perhaps my music might have the desired effect on the birds (if indeed they were even there).

We kept listening out for the nightingales, and what we'd thought was young men shouting gradually came into focus as someone singing. But it was strange. He had a good voice, but it was in random bursts. Was it English? Dave thought it was some kind of African singing; I heard soul music. I pictured a jovial, somewhat drunken Sunday evening barbeque in a garden in Tyler Hill, but Dave pointed out there were no other voices audible. He reckoned it was someone on their own, down at the far end of the same (very long, thin) meadow. The long periods of silence and then sudden bursts of indecipherable song led us to think it might just be "a mad person" sitting in the corner of a field on their own, just singing their heart out. We decided to get a bit closer to see if we could work out what they were singing. It struck us as quite funny that we'd come seeking a nightingale, and got some rare form of human singing instead.

A bit closer and I started to hear Elvis, South African-style Kwaito singing, scat, all kinds of things...We just had to find out by this point, so we struggled through the long grasses and thistles to get even closer. Maybe twenty metres away, Dave spotted a dark shape off in the vegetation ("That's him there!" he whispered) as the sound of an accompanying guitar suddenly became audible. This immediately explained the 'random' nature of the singing – the singer's voice was carrying much further than the sound of his guitar (as we approached, I’d been starting to think he might be singing along with something he was listening to through headphones). And the voice and guitar together were extraordinary – I immediately thought of my reggae-busker friend Alan – a steady, solid skank groove, and a torrent of improvised lyrics – he was really belting it out, clearly really into his music.

I couldn't resist. I had my saz right there with me and was in tune, so I joined in with his strummings as I wove my way through the meadow grasses to the epicentre of the sound. The singer was slightly taken aback, but not so much that he stopped playing. We locked into the most fantastic groove and jammed for about 20 minutes, with him throwing in some freestyle lyrics about how nice it was of me to have come and joined him in the field that evening. We could have gone on for hours (the groove broke down into gentle twinkly string-interaction and then built back up into another groove, and so on...), but eventually we wound it down, shook hands and introduced ourselves, in a state of mutual disbelief and wonder.

His name's Dominic. I called Dave over (he'd been listening some distance away in the dark) and we all got chatting. Dominic's studying drama over at the University, lives in a houseful of likeminded creative types in Tyler Hill. And then I suddenly recognised him – a few weeks ago, I’d seen a poster advertising a production of Gertrude Stein's Reread Another. Being intrigued by Ms. Stein, I suggested to Dave that we go along (it was a small audience, and I’m quite sure we were the only ones there who didn't know someone involved in the production). I asked if he'd been in the play, and indeed he was – one of the four characters representing various art forms, he had been (quite appropriately) "the music guy".

   
a nightingale;Puck (as painted by Arthur Rackham)
It then transpired that earlier that day, he'd been up in Essex, playing Puck in an outdoor performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream! Dave pointed out that Puck was just the English Pan that Pan played the pipes (being the original Piper at the Gates of Dawn). Dominic's Puck turns out to play the melodica on stage! Perfect! And then we got talking about Dionysus (who, Dominic joked, gave him his guitar) - one of Dave's favourite subjects.

We played a couple of other pieces so I could get something down on MiniDisc, just to commemorate this most wonderful bit of midsummer randomness...

Listen Here
He was, until recently, part of a local 10-piece band called "Eric and the Acoustic Alliance" which sounds like it sort of collapsed under its own weight. He's been thinking about getting another band together (and will be studying here for another couple of years) and I've been lamenting the lack of musicians in the area to jam with, so I suspect something good is going to come out of this.

NuSphere collaboration at 491 Gallery

Up in Avebury recently, Dave Prentice mentioned an EdensoundS party he was going to be playing at in East London on Sunday 1st July. Dave makes an eclectic range of dance music under the name NuSphere. We've attempted a little bit of electronic-saz fusion in the past, so we agreed to try playing a live set for this occasion. The venue was the 491 Gallery in Leytonstone, a squatted property which describes itself as a "nonprofit sustainable community regeneration art project". I'd not been in that part of London since the days of the M11 protest, and hadn't been to a squatted community centre since visiting St. George's Church back in the spring of 2005, so it seemed well worth checking out.

I got a series of trains up to Crayford where Dave and I had about half an hour to run through the set in his tiny studio room (mostly so I could have some idea what key each track was in). Then there was a mad rush involving more trains and buses, but we made it in time.

We were meant to be playing at 2pm, and I'd imagined this was a kind of 'Sunday chill-out session'; in fact, it turned out to be the aftermath of an all-night party, so most people had gone by then, and those that remained were largely asleep, or pretty 'mashed' (as they say these days).



This was just as well, I've since realised, on listening back to the recording. There was this strange time-delay effect I still can't quite understand. I plugged into the Dave's laptop and my saz came out through the PA sounding great, but it was as if the sound was reaching my ears faster than it would unamplified. And that seems impossible. Surely the process of amplification should involve some slight time delay – but it was if there was a reverse time delay. I'd play a note or chord, and it would be audible a fraction of a second sooner than I intended. The only way I can account for this would be that all my previous uses of amplification have involved a split-second time delay, so I've learned to compensate by playing notes just slightly earlier than I normally would (apparently, playing on huge pipe organs, there's quite a significant time lag, so that's really challenging). And somehow, this amplification setup had a considerably reduced time delay, so my compensation resulted in a consistent mistiming of my notes throughout the set. Listening back, it's like I was recorded on a separate track, which was then shifted back slightly. The strange thing is that I don't really remember struggling with this at the time – I got quite into it after the first track (Dave was having technical problems, and a central sample which set the key of the piece was replaced by something in an entirely different key, which created a bit of a problem for me), and remember feeling quite loose and in the groove. Fortunately, none of the couple of dozen people present (many sprawled on cushions asleep or half-asleep) was in any state to really notice this. And perhaps it's more noticeable to me because it's my playing.

Anyway, it felt like we’d done something really good, and we resolved to do more. There's a new trance label whose owner has approached Dave with a view to release some NuSphere material, and a psy-trance festival in Surrey sometime this summer (linked to last year's Psychedelic Beach Ball) where he'll be playing, possibly with a bit of my saz playing thrown in...

Certain tracks (the dubbier and trancier ones) seemed to work better than others, so we could take that into consideration.

If we can just sort this time delay business out, I think could lead to some really interesting creative output.

Despite the problems described, I've extracted a few excerpts from our set, included as part of a general collection:

Listen Here

midsummer adventuring

After a few more sessions in Exeter with Henry, Keith and various Droners, I bought myself a new (!) bike, the old one having been pretty well done in by the journey to Canterbury some weeks ago - it's called a "Presidio", which turns out to be the name of the place in San Francisco where the Internet Archive is based (and hence where all my archive recordings live).

I did the usual midsummer pilgrimage up to the Avebury area. The first evening I'd reached Glastonbury (having visited the old yew tree at Creech St. Michael, and climbed Burrow Mump, as usual), and remarkably hadn't been rained on, despite the terrible forecast. I stayed at Sam's new house - she and Sym and just about everyone else 'round there being in the midst of preparations for the Festival (Green Angels playing a few gigs there this year). I'd reached Windmill Hill by the next evening - Solstice eve - and, like last year, spent a far-out evening 'round the fire with Andy Bard, discussing various cosmic matters, making endless pots of tea, playing twinkly saz-and-mandolin music and waiting for the dawn...

Dave (NuSphere) and Candy joined us on the one of the barrows for sunrise, which (again, remarkably, considering this awful weather) we actually saw, followed by a vivid double rainbow that (without any actual rain) that stayed in place for a good twenty minutes, accompanied by a super-intense symphony of skylark song (so impressive that it felt almost rude to play our instruments).


Andy and I up on Windmill Hill, exactly a year earlier - photo by Darsha Doublespoon
Andy's just submitted a proposal for his second book A History of Alternative Avebury, which should be a very interesting read. Stef turned up a bit later that morning and between us, we dredged up all sorts of obscure anecdotes, literary references and bits of cultural trivia for this project. One thing I didn't know, which Andy mentioned, was that Roger Dean's cover for the Yes's Tales from Topographical Oceans double album contains an image of one of the Avebury standing stones. I haven't heard that (much-ridiculed) record for years, but it sounded like the music of the spheres to my teenage brain. Turns out Andy, Stef and I were all Yes fans at that age - in fact Stef had even been inspired to visit Yes Tor on Dartmoor by the cover of the (truly dreadful) Tormato album.

A vague plan is now afoot for a joint gig at the Glastonbury Assembly Rooms sometime this autumn - Andy's Oxford-based psych-folk band Telling the Bees together with Orbis Tertius? (and perhaps a local act?).

Andy had to head off, Stef and I spent the whole of 'the longest day' up on Windmill, making tea, discussing the issues of the day and noodling on our instruments (he's just got a new roundback mandola - and my saz, during the night, had developed a weird, multi-coloured set of concentric rings, the size of a penny, as if a tiny crop circle had appeared on it - possibly caused by an ember from the fire, but no indication of burning..."Perhaps it was a plasmic ember," suggested Stef, being familiar with the wackier end of the speculative cerealogy).

We reconvened over at Knapp Hill, tried to find the bee orchids which grow on the hillside - no luck there, but found an amazing selection of downland wildflowers which made the search a joyous failure. Then down the last bit of The Ridgeway to Alton Priors, to check out the 1700 year old yew (which Stef had somehow missed, all these years) and record a couple of hours of improvisations inside All Saints church. For the first time, it occurred to me to actually look for the trapdoor I'd heard about - the one in the floor with the giant sarsen beneath it - and it indeed exists, and is unlocked. We left the trapdoor open while we played, and a ray of sun came in through the window and illuminated it for a while - nice.

Listen Here
Camped up on Golden Ball Hill that evening, under my favourite old hawthorn tree up there, then recorded some more sounds over in the ancient beech grove on nearby Furze Hill the next day before I headed off down The Ridgeway. I stopped off at The Sanctuary, Fyfield Down (recorded a bit there) and Barbury Castle before stopping for the night at Wayland's Smithy. The next day I recorded some more solo saz in the little chambers there, and then further down The Ridgeway atop Dragon Hill (looking up at the White 'Horse' of Uffington,the body of which, I'd noticed on my way down, was awash with pink and purple orchids).

Listen Here
The rains really came in after that, and I had a long, wet, muddy ride down The Ridgeway into the evening. Comfort came in the form of a pint of ale, some surprisingly good chips and a rare kind of rural pub hospitality at The Four Points Inn in Aldworth, where they insisted I get my saz out and play for them (while I was still dripping all over the floor).