very-nearly acoustic Drone session at Vaughan's

This was last Tuesday night, in Vaughan's barn out by Sherwood Cottage. Very mellow session, all acoustic apart from Keith's (very textural) electric guitar. Twinkly lights, twinkly music.

Vaughan - acoustic guitar, mandolin, dan moi, accordion, percussion
John - acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, whistles, voice, mbira, xylophone, percussion
Keith - electric guitar, acoustic bass, backward vocal samples, percussion
Philip - assorted bowls, bells, percussion, mbira, xylophone, acoustic guitar, harmonica, iPod, dan moi, etc.
me - saz, acoustic bass guitar, percussion


the gardens of Sherwood House (Vaughan's the gardener)
Annoyingly, the very delicate first 45 minutes or so, which ended with the music sort of 'evaporating' and then a perfectly-timed owl cry, didn't get recorded (I was using a borrowed Zoom H2 recorder, and wasn't quite used to it). But over two hours did, which I've edited down to 68 minutes (the long third track's the most worthy, I think):

Listen Here

Polish translation

I managed to get a translation of that recent Polish COTD writeup from the blogger (Kamil Wegrzynowicz) himself:

"You can call this music this way or other other but the guys are good in
what they do. Their idea for music is simple, very simple one may say -
to gather in some place and improvise. Reccord the output and put in on
the net. The most important is that it works.

What do they play? Answer is in the title. They remind me Acid Mothers,
Trees and other hippie communities, Skullflower, Hawkwind and especially
free improv elements being at the same time very easy on ears of less
experienced listeners. Sometimes they go into noise psychedelic
freakouts and I like them even more when do this. If I would take an
acid or smoke a joint this would be my only music to do this."

The comment says something like this:

"My main beef is this noise word. It makes me reluctant because my ears
can't expect anything good from noise.

Happens. Even though psychedelic calms me it won't do. If you would link
to some zip I'd download it. But the link transfered me to Archive's
main page so I decided that the god's watching for my good and
apparently it's not worth it."

...to which Kamil answered:

"Yup, I like noise very much. But when it comes to Children of the Drone
noise is only one of the elements, less important when compared to
others.

Also, you got to know that this is selection of the best parts from the
whole session and a lot depends on the mood of the musician at the
moment.

Second thing, I don't know your resistance to noise. I'm used to like a
lot so CotD are pretty light to me."

Messiaen's last work

I heard the debut performance of Messiaen's unfinished Concert a quatre this last night, from the Proms series on BBC Radio 3. I ended up plugging headphones into my little radio and sitting outside in the evening light, listening intently. Amazing stuff.

As with a lot of his compositions, this one was partly inspired by birdsong. The presenter read a list of 16 birds involved, almost all European, but I noticed that New Zealand's bellbird was also involved. You can hear real bellbirds in the background of this recording I made with Alan and friends in Motueka in late 2006. (Or were they tui's? No one I met could tell them apart.) Lots more tui's and bellbirds audible here.

The concert also involved some pretty far-out works by Varèse and Jonathan Harvey (including a tribute to Messiaen, a newer piece based around orchestrations of human speech patterns, and an older one involving taped recordings of the biggest bell in Winchester Cathedral and the voice of Harvey's son, a chorister there in the late 70's).

Tragic Roundabout and Gadjo

At the Komedia in Brighton, last Friday (15th August). Fantastic! A bit strange seeing Gadjo in such a 'mainstream' venue (usually an old marquee on a festival site). Perfect sound though (apart from Sam's vocal mic, but he only sang briefly). The new rhythm section's working nicely - the drummer...

"Jerry is an Italian-Argentinian with the face of a Chinaman and the soul of an Indian. His elbows flap about gleefully when he plays a drum solo." (from the Gadjo website)

...is excellent, although perhaps a bit too subtle for my taste (Stefan's bif-bang-pow drumming was just perfect for the band, but these things take time) and George (formerly in Stevie P and Sam's Green Angels) seems to have slotted himself perfectly into the lineup after Red went back to the States and he moved to Barcelona.

Hoping to see them again on the tour (probably The Bell in Bath, where I saw them last summer).

Climate Camp

It seemed a bit frivolous to take an instrument to the Camp for Climate Action (near Strood this year), but I suspected that I'd regret not bringing it if I didn't. Indeed, there was a place for acoustic fireside music in the evenings (as well as the bicycle-powered sound-system pumping out dubstep/punk/ska up by Gate 5, etc. on the Thursday night and Matthew Herbert coming to play a DJ set in the main marquee after Saturday's day of action).

The first evening I spent there involved a massive thunderstorm, so I never got to leave my hastily-erected tent. The next evening someone by the South Coast Barrio fire was complaining about the lack of music, so that seemed like a good reason to go and get my saz. I played a few things, then someone asked for something everyone could sing along with. I opted for "Scarborough Fayre", but of course everyone was lost after the first verse (rather like the National Anthem)...except a Finnish protestor lurking in the nearby darkness who kept going. It turned out that she knew a lot of medaevil songs, as well as Swedish and Finnish epic poems/songs, Irish Gaelic songs, etc. After a few attempts we found something she could sing and I could play (a medaevil piece called "Corpus Christi").

On the Saturday night, the designated post-sound-curfew acoustic jam tent got picked up by the strong winds and flipped upside-down onto a barbed wire fence - so that never came together. But I managed to have an excellent jam with a guitarist called Johnno. He'd just got back from six months in Egypt experimenting with stringed instruments out there (and had done a similar stint in India messing about with a sitar prior to that). He tuned a borrowed guitar to some kind of open G tuning and we were away (his playing reminded me a bit of Voice of the Seven Woods, who was recently brought to my attention).