new year reboot

OK, so this blog had rather fizzled out, as any recurrent visitors will have noticed.

I started it in 2005 while living in Exeter, primarily to document and promulgate my own music. Gradually, I started including gig, festival and record reviews (which tended to be more gushing enthusiasm for the things I loved than critical music writing) plus general musings on musical goings-on. When I moved back to the Canterbury area a couple of years later, my own music-making took a bit of a back seat while I got to know and started documenting the local scene that was bubbling away at the time. This led to a whole network of new friendships and musical connections, for which I shall be forever grateful — so if it had had no other function, all that early blogging was worth the effort. In more recent years, I've been involved in organising and promoting gigs, podcasting, DJing, compering gigs and festivals, curating "respectable" musical events, providing hospitality for touring musicians, helping write press releases, being asked to publicly speak and to contribute an article for an academic tome on the Canterbury Scene of yore, etc. All of this means that The Spring has languished, with little more than my moonthly Canterbury Sans Frontières episodes being posted about here.

first post, April 2005

Rather than allowing this to be another source of minor background anxiety (something I "should" be keeping up with, but failing to), I'm going to switch to a slightly different format. Any recordings I make or DJ sets I record will get posted here, gigs attended will be logged (typically with an image of a flyer/poster or embedded video), but not reviewed. The "recent listening" stack on the right-hand sidebar will be discontinued (does anyone really care?). I'll carry on posting the CSF episodes for as long as I continue that series (although that may also undergo a reformatting in the next while...)

So, for now, here are my leftover "A Tiny Window" collaborative saz recordings from 2018:

Some late-night fireside jams recorded in early April with East Anglian acoustic guitar duo Namakai:

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Jams and sketches with Jacob "Yakobfinga" Brant and Luke "Pyramid Youth" Dodson, friends from the UKC Psychedelics Society crowd, recorded in May and June:

 

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Free-flowing acoustic guitar-and-saz improvisations recorded with Luke Dodson in the last few months of the year:

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A miscellaneous collection: a couple of solo saz sketches plus jams with Stella Homewood (Spacegoats), Yiannis and Roberto, Stewart Hughes (Cocos Lovers, etc.), Adam Brodigan (Lapis Lazuli), Jacob Brant (Bardo Thodol/Yakobfinga) and Dominic Conway (Little Bulb Theatre):

Listen Here