The Spring

Syd Arthur in Lille

2012-01-24T12:46:00.012Z

Saturday 21st January, 2012, MJC, Croix, near Lille

This was a spontaneous continental excursion encouraged by Sven in Gent. Having heard that Syd Arthur had arranged gigs in Lille and Amsterdam, he did his best to find them one in Belgium. It turned out to be a bit too last-minute, but he got some excellent responses taking their Moving World EP around the venues and squats, and then managed to talk me into coming over for the second Lille show.

I had a bit of a complicated journey. The cancelled train to Dover was replaced by a bus, which wound through all the little villages on the way down there... beautiful, but it meant having to run most of the way from Dover Priory station to the ferry terminal. I just made it in time for the last check-in, but then before boarding, we were told that the "Pride of Calais" would be delayed due to "technical problems". In the end we had to wait for the next ferry, but I was happy to see that it was the "Pride of Canterbury", quite appropriately. Katrijn and Sven were waiting for me on the other side, and we were soon whizzing along French roads to the outskirts of Lille. All of this meant that we missed the other two bands (apart from the last few notes of Le Duc's last song). But it was OK, since Syd played another mind-stretching, life-affirming set, worth a trip across the channel in itself.

The main feature of this was the presence of Joel and Liam's brother Josh on drums, filling in for Fred (sadly still out of action with tinnitus/eardrum problems). Not an easy set to learn, but they'd got it together in four days. Apparently the first night in Lille wasn't so great, the second night (up at a political "no borders" event in Amsterdam) was better, and by the Saturday evening they were on fire. The drumming situation meant that everyone had to be even more attentive and attuned, which gave the set an extra edge. Understandably, it was roughly the same material that I saw them play at Smugglers Festival and LOTF this summer (old favourites soon to be unveiled on the imminent album, Moving World material and some of the extremely promising newer pieces like "Edge of the Earth" and "Dorothy"). But as I've said before, these songs seem to have lives of their own, ever-changing internal structures, so it's not like listening to the same old stuff — there's a continuous process of reinvention at work here. Raven's wild violin work on "Exit Domino" was a particular highlight, momentarily turning the band into a thrashier version of Mahavishnu Orchestra, before (with their characteristically perfect dynamical control) they dropped back down to whisper-volume.

Excellent sound, no technical hitches. Sven pointed out that Liam had a bit more reverb on his vocals than usual, not sure if that was the band's choice or whoever was doing the sound, but it worked. I surprised Raven by appearing at the front just before they encored with "Ode to the Summer" (followed by its wonderful B-side "Black Wave" as second encore). The Lille crowd loved them, seemingly were familiar with some of the songs (possibly via the Le Duc connection). It was heartening to witness them so ecstatically received by a crowd that wasn't largely made up of friends and associates (the usual situation when they play in East Kent).

I noticed that Raven was using a "Face Lift" fuzz pedal. I'm not really up on my music technology, but I'd not come across one of these until a few days earlier, when Margate-based guitarist Mark Hewins showed me an interview he'd filmed with his collaborator Hugh Hopper, wherein Hugh discussed the various pedals he used. He starts off with the older models, and then moves on to the various innovations. "I'd like to think this was named after a tune I once wrote", he said modestly when introducing the Face Lift:

I mentioned this to Raven afterwards, and it turns out that they're the same pedal! Hugh's widow Christine has not only entrusted his famous Fender Jazz bass (and tape archive) with Joel, she's said that she's more than happy for the band to use any of Hugh's pedals.

Some kind of glossy "classic rock" magazine recently gave the band an enthusiastic full-page feature under the strapline "On the Threshold". I assume this is a feature for bands seen as being on the threshold of commercial success and recognition. This may be the case (time will tell), but personally I think Syd Arthur are "on the threshold" of something far more important than that. Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music which I've recently finished, identifies a certain quality of longing for some lost unknown something (Eden, a Golden Age, the "Garden" which Joni M told us we had to get back to) which runs through a lot of the music he writes about (Nick Drake and the classic Fairport material being particularly good examples). I think if he were familiar with Syd's music (and Liam's songwriting in particular), he'd pick up on the same current of feeling running through it.

We headed back to Gent for a lazy Sunday. Sven and I were tempted to head up to Amsterdam for the Sunday night gig at the massive ADM squat from which the Bucket Boyz (who Sven turns out to know) operate... but it looked like it was going to involve a lot of rushing around the next day, so we let that go. We attempted some guitar/saz jamming, but got distracted and ended up talking about various weirdnesses in the Old Testament until it was rather late! I did almost learn a new tune of his — he's written a song about waiting outside a squat with his friend Eunis for a taxi that never came. Out in the old city that night, we stepped outside the cafe where we were having coffee so that Sven could smoke, heard some live music from the cafe next door: a guitarist who seemingly wanted to play like Django, with a saxophonist who wanted to play like Pharaoh Sanders, creating a rather curious, ramshackle musical friction. But Gent just keeps on being Gent... I really must spend more time there.

Famous James at the Black Griffin

2012-01-19T13:09:00.005Z

The Black Griffin down in Canterbury High Street (having now returned to its venerable name after an unfortunate stint as "The Hobgoblin", thanks to a temporary takeover by Wychwood Brewery) has been putting on local bands on Monday night, I've just discovered. Last Monday it was Famous James and the Monsters (now a seven-piece with Phil Holmes on sax/accordion/chalumeau, Phil Self on mandolin and John on additional percussion). I missed Rob Gambell supporting, apparently an incredible set from him — I thought he'd moved to Bath to study stonemasonry, perhaps just back for the gig? "The Fruit Group" were playing when I arrived, sounded very competent, but I was immediately dismayed by the whole crowded, noisy pub environment. Hardly anyone really engaging with the music, the whole space set up wrong for live bands, the usual problems. So I got onto a bit of a negative one about it all, but was happy to see quite a few familiar faces, so I stuck around.

But FJ&TM rose above this. They surfed on it... A noisy crowded pub energy somehow got pulled in, channeled and redirected, and it was as if they were carrying us all along with them. The material helps: instantly catchy tunes (although often with quite intricate structures), warm, uplifting harmonies, lyrics that you don't need to fully hear in order to "get" where the band are coming from.... some of the time the whole place seemed to be singing along with songs they didn't know. Recent recruit Josh Magill's drumming was a huge part of the equation, but everyone was contributing (just a shame Jamie's vocal harmonies and Phil's mandolin were a bit lost in the mix, but overall the sound was remarkably clean). There was a timeless wildness about it all — the people of Canterbury have no doubt been drinking ale and getting merry to lively music in public houses for many centuries, and this slotted very comfortably into that tradition.

Will, Billy and Dave from Cocos Lovers were there to check out Phil's latest musical involvement (and signing to Smugglers Records), I had a good chat with Will outside afterwards about their latest direction, plans for a third album and how they intend to record it.

Three fashionable young Californians were standing near me, clearly amazed by what they were hearing and seeing around them. One of them asked me the name of the band, noted it down on his iPhone, and then said "This is a really cool country you've got here!". I suspect they were touring Europe and this was their first night in England, which they assumed was like this everywhere, all the time. If only!

Valley Sessions, November—December 2011

2012-01-19T12:48:00.004Z

More of this stuff, mostly sessions featuring Phil (and sometimes Adam) from Lapis Lazuli during the last couple of months of last year. A couple of tracks are just Miriam and Phil, from when I was away in Wales.

Listen Here
The weekly sessions thus far in 2012 (including an excellent one last night) have all involved our Canadian friend Paul Clifford playing percussion, bells, whistles, mbira, ukelele, harmonica, singing, and generally livening the sound up. We just need to sort Tom out with a decent battery-powered bass amp (playing off-grid, the best we've got right now is a "Honeytone" ukelele amp — my saz sounds rather tinny through it, but acceptable... it's just not a bass amp though!)

"The Anvil" and the Timeless Art of Recyling

2012-01-16T11:58:00.003Z

Another inspiring video from Sue Cross and friends in Normandy which uses music from the Dongas' Rainy Night In the Bell Tent tape (1997):

This is "The Anvil", an Irish tune. I can be heard bashing out rhythm on the saz, with Inge on mandolin, Ruth on fiddle and Jo on wooden flute.

Someone on a similar wavelength in Austin, Texas has been using Children of the Drone music for their website promoting a cultural community food-drive (collecting food for the poor and homeless). If you load this page it just starts playing — took me a while to recognise...stuff from one of the early compilations, I think, hadn't heard it in ages. One of the nice things about making our music available via a Creative Commons license is that like-minded people end up using it for creative purposes without necessarily asking, so these things turn up as pleasant surprises every now and again.

Free Range with Evan Parker and Matt Wright

2012-01-15T16:02:00.013Z

Thursday 12th January, 2011, Veg Box Cafe, Canterbury

Local jazz pianist Sam Bailey (I've seen him around, playing with the-quartet, also sitting in with local Afrobeat band Mr. Lovebucket) has started hosting a series of sixteen weekly avant-garde nights up at the Veg Box Cafe (above Canterbury Wholefoods) under the banner "Free Range". It's good to see the space being used in the evenings like this (they've just got an alcohol license up there, which makes it economically viable).

Each of these nights is going to feature Sam playing a brief set of improvised piano pieces. This first time we got three miniatures and one slightly longer one. I feel like I lack the necessary vocabularly to describe free solo piano improv, but I remember being grateful to be there and grateful that everyone there was actually listening (the place was full, and everyone gave the music their attention, a welcome change from usual gig experiences).

The main act was Evan Parker with Matt Wright, part of the Trance Map project which involves sound artists manipulating Parker's free soprano sax improv to create new works.

Matt Wright's based at the music department here at Christchurch, and along with the ubiquitous silver Mac laptop and tableful of electronics, I notice a single turntable. My initial reaction, I must admit, was one of cynical suspicion. Ever since Babu from Dilated Peoples introduced the word "turntablism" (to give appropriate artistic status recognition to what were previously seen as merely subspecies of DJs), sound artists with no grounding in hiphop culture and no "skills" (the American pluralisation is acceptable in this usage!) have been making horrible noises using turntables and then calling it "turntablism". I saw a particularly bad example of this at The Phoenix in Exeter back in 2002, an event quite accurately billed as "Turntable Hell" (about a dozen different "artists", each abusing their own deck(s)). But from the moment MW put his hand to the vinyl my prejudices went out the window. The man has skills! I have no idea if he grew up as a hiphop kid and then got into sound art (he was born in '77, so quite plausible) or studied independently, but it had all the charge and excitement of seeing a cutting edge hiphop DJ in action, his hand on the crossfader was a blur... AND with the added feature of one of the world's great free improvisers sitting next to him, pouring forth a soup of what sounded like musical machine code interspliced with alien birdsong. There was nothing remotely funky about what was going on, no obvious jazzy breaks or anything particularly 'hiphop' sounding, and when I peered over after they'd finished to see what vinyl he'd actually been working with, discovered some ancient looking test discs with single frequency tones as tracks.

Wright and Parker, University of Surrey, October 2011 — thanks to Andy's Jazz Gig Photo Diary
I noticed later on that Matt Wright was sort of twitching with one hand in the air while he was engrossed with something on his laptop, engaging the use of his other hand. At first I thought that this was just him "getting into it", but gradually realised that he was interacting with some kind of theremin-like device. He was also occasionally creating acoustic sounds with bells and rattles, then processing these. To be honest, it wasn't that easy to work out where any of the sounds were coming from (apart from the obvious sounds from Parker's pre-amplified sax), but this was easily one of the most successful examples I've seen of a human-machine interface making music that couldn't otherwise be made (the other end of the spectrum from the keyboard player in some early 90's indie-dance crossover band spasming around to create the impression that he was actually doing something, when everything was clearly sequenced). The only thing comparable I can think of having seen was Leafcutter John with Polar Bear (the first time I saw them, in particular). And some of the footage of Venetian snares I've seen suggested a similar level of organicity.

I have no idea how long their set lasted. We were told to expect about 45 minutes, but it felt like it went on for hours, so the "trance" part obviously worked (or at least like me). There were so many textures and sonic spaces they moved through that I can no longer remember (being entranced, as I was), but I do remember parts of it reminding me of a more edgy, urban reworking of Jon Hassell and Brian Eno's overlooked 1980 classic Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics.

[Postscript:] Well now I know that the set was indeed just 45 minutes, as Sam's uploaded a recording to Soundcloud:

His solo piano set seemingly went unrecorded, but the next week's (which I was unable to attend has surfaced):

Valley Sessions, August—October edits

2012-01-14T18:33:00.003Z

Finally got around to editing a few months of Random Article weekly improv jams. This stuff's largely just me (saz) and Miriam (voice, violin, percussion) as Tom (bass) was down in Thanet and generally skint during this time. (He's now employed and regularly jamming with us again, we're glad to say.)

Listen Here

Sidi Caravan — Congé Payé

2012-01-10T17:24:00.010Z

Musical brother Sven over in Gent brought me a copy of his band Sidi Caravan's new album Congé Payé when he was over in the autumn, and I've been meaning to write something about it ever since. Waiting to get into the right unhurried headspace to give it a really good, attentive listen. Volume 2 of my trilogy is finally out (phew!), so now is the time.

Anyway, I'm now very familiar with this record. At least musically. There's a dimension to it which I feel rather on the outside of — as a Belgian, Sven's happily switching between numerous languages (Flemish, French, Spanish, Italian, English, various dialects of these, and even some Arabic I think). As a hopeless English person, most of this is lost on me. And there's clearly a lot of humour going on, a central part of the work, which I'm unable to get (unless explained to me). Knowing Sven, who was once in a band along similar lines to Ween, with the ability to parody just about any style of music/lyrics, I'm guessing that the sophistication of the humour here is on a par with The Simpsons or South Park (you'd not get a lot out of these if you didn't understand more than a few words of English). So I'm only getting a partial view here.

This is the first Sidi Caravan album, a long time coming, after numerous studio/mixing issues came up along the way. So they're primarily a live band (who I've not yet seen, although I'm in no doubt that they're hugely entertaining). But this means that some of the more repetitive passages, which I can imagine working really well in a live context, seem just a bit too repetitive on record. But if I got the jokes, perhaps not...

They weave in and out of reggae/dub vives, accordion-led Parisian cafe sounds, West African-style guitar music, Hammond-driven funk, raï, flamenco, drum'n'bass, ragga, with Sven singing, speaking sedutive lines in a presumed parody of bad 70's soul records, rapping remarkably well (for someone who generally dislikes hiphop), toasting, deliving Indian tabla rhythms vocally (as tabla players traditionally do), crooning, and at one point (on the title track) impersonating a priest delivering a Latin mass incantation.

That title track is nine minutes, consisting of numerous tableau-like sections, some rapping in Spanish, heavy funk, a percussion break, some weird noise, house-like beats...intriguing, but as I said, as a linguistically-challenged Englishman, I feel rather left out of the joke. Fortunately, Sven has explained (by text message): "The song is about the remarkable and strong duality in Italian society. At one side a tendency towards an easy going sometimes very romantic veiw of life and on the other a strong tendency twoards uniformity and norm (here personififed by the most popular black sheep: the Old Bill (Italian state police, properly named 'questura' = 'the questioners') and the Catholic Church." The title means "paid holiday" in a dialect of French spoken by Flemish people (or something).

There are a couple of songs that I'm familiar with from having played them with Sven a few times in recent years: "Fatima", and "De Plong" (you can hear rough campfire versions here and here)...the latter I knew as "When Diamanda Galas Sang 'My World Is Empty Without You Babe'". These are easily two of Sven's best compositions, and "Fatima" in particular deserves to be heard far and wide (yes even farther and wider than the open mic night at The Smack in Whitstable...) "De Plong" involves some effective accordion, a lot of thought has cleary gone into the production of this...big full clean sound, nice separation... and some weird, almost Moog-y, stuff going on in places.

"Tout Seul" starts off with an flamenco-like contemplative flourish, Sven managing to make his guitar sound quite oud-like before a D'n'B beat kicks in. The bass playing is super-solid throughout the album. This tracks's got a bit of a darker urgency about it than the rest, and a nice dub section with occasional returns to the oud-like flamenco bit.

"Fumeur" start with a bit of ragga chant, then a bhangra beat...sounds like a celebration of Sven's favourite herb. I have no idea what's going on lyrically, but Various kinds of chanting gradually give way to some kind of (no doubt intentionally) cheesy house beats supplemented by some awesome electric guitar (with a Tinariwen-like abrasive African lo-fi tone). Then a kind of "planetary disco" vibe takes over (sounds like the whole world is present), Sven toasting repeatedly over another dub riddim into the closing seconds.

The album packaging features some 50's B-movie comic-style art involving the band members, further evidence that they don't take themselves terribly seriously. This mix of silliness and seriousness is arguably both a strength and a weakness on this album (only a weakness to the language-ignorant such as myself, though). I'll have to get Sven to explain the rest of the tracks to me (or else learn a load of languages).

Mainly this just makes me want to spend more time playing music with Sven, and engaging with the creative multicultural energies bubbling away in Gent which, if I think about it, really isn't that much farther from Canterbury than London is.

Adam and Josh birthday jams

2012-01-08T14:31:00.007Z

On returning from the West, apart from a winter solstice sunrise ramble out to the little known neolithic long barrow known as "Julliberrie's Grave" a few miles west of Canterbury, I was completely immersed in finishing Volume 2 of the trilogy of maths books I've been working on for quite a while now. Matt T was due to visit after Christmas for the final push, and I had a lot to prepare in those few days before he came, so I worked right through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day... Actually, Christmas Eve I did briefly stop by The Unicorn in St. Dunstans to catch up with a cluster of Furthur/Dawn Chorus/Sondryfolk friends. I'd just been given a copy of Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, a truly wonderful present, by Miriam, so I had that with me... everyone very interested, as would be expected — Dawson spotted the Simon Reynolds quote on the cover and so we ended up discussing his "Hardcore Continuum" essays and recently 'created' genre which he's calling "hypnagogic pop".

Josh Magill was down there too, along with most of the rest of the family, and mentioned a joint birthday party with Lapis/Delta drummer Adam to be held at The Bungalow on the Old Dover Road on the 27th, so I allowed myself to get out to that too. When I arrived, there was a thunderous two-drumkit jam going on in the rehearsal room, Adam and Josh drumming (naturally) with Cameron, Phil and Neil from Lapis respectively on bass, sax and guitar. I stuck my head in to listen and Neil (as always) immediately suggested plugging my saz in. So I did. I didn't realise this was being recorded, but Phil later sent me some MP3s, so I've made a little edit of the better stuff where I can be heard:

Listen Here
Matt was down the next evening, and we worked flat out to finish the book...which we did, achieving our end-of-2011 deadline with a few hours to spare! So we still got to enjoy New Year's Eve. Miriam and her friend Mark (who once came along and jammed with us during one of our Random Article sessions) were performing as a duo for a feast being held in the cafe part of the Goods Shed, the farmers' market near Canterbury West station, where Miriam sometimes works. So we dropped in to listen to the second set and furtively sip local ales in the shadows. They played a mix of jazz standards, Django, klezmer, a little bit of rebetika (Mark plays bouzouki as well as guitar), Miriam singing and playing violin. The highlight came right at the end, when Miriam made a little announcement and then suddenly they were singing an a cappella version of the revolutionary 17th century Diggers' anthem "The World Turned Upside Down" to the (presumably mostly well-off) diners. Ha! Wonderful... I know she learned that one from Chumbawamba's English Rebel Songs while working on a theatre piece about the Luddites some years ago. Then it was back up to the woods for a big fire, more ale and general merriment. Matt disappeared briefly at one point and reappeared with his bouzouki (Mark didn't join us)...at one point I (blurrily) remember him jumping over the fire while playing it. At some point both Miriam and I must have disappeared and reappeared with our instruments, 'cos at one point we were all playing together. I remember thinking "This seems in tune, in time, generally rather together, but I doubt that it actually is..." I'm glad some music got played anyway, regardless of what the wildlife made of it.

Matt and I also paid a visit to Muskie Studio, the little twinkly, padded caravan space our Canadian friend Paul Clifford has put together on a farm in the bleak, flat, cabbage-growing area near Ash. He and his wife Anne are always a joy to be around. Paul played us some of his recent solo recordings, he and Matt discussed studio technique and technology... I can't even begin to describe what his stuff sounds like, as it has a Beefheart-like refusal (or inability?) to conform to any sort of convention or expectation (without sounding like Beefheart). He also told us about his friend Michael J. Ward-Bergeman who he plays with in Groanbox who's just finished up a self-imposed project called "Gig 365" (yes, that's a whole year of gigging every day, without fail, a "gig" being defined as a public performance of at least half an hour to at least two people...and he succeeded, while travelling around the planet, playing in chip shops in Thanet, airports in Latin America...)

Paul also made it to a recent Random Article improv session for the first time in a while (we've switched our weekly night from Thursdays to Wednesdays so we can check out Sam Bailey and Evan Parker's new "Free Range" nights up at the Veg Box Cafe on Thursdays). That one was him, Miriam, Tom and I. Still haven't listened back. In fact, I've a huge backlog of RA jams I really must get around to editing. Sigh...

And even more recently, last Sunday, Andy R and I met up as usual to play Go at his house in Wincheap. Fellow resident Ash's newish band Famous James and the Monsters were rehearsing in the cellar, now with Phil Self from Cocos Lovers (also living in the house) on mandolin, Josh Magill from Zoo For You on drums, and a couple of other people borrowed from other bands filling out the sound. We were directly above them, in the front room, contemplatively placing black and white stones on a grid while Helen painted and collaged and told us about her experiences with the "Occupy" movement in London. From below came the sound of an incredible band, on top form, blasting through their set, punctuated by whoops and hollers and the usual ridiculous banter...but it felt like being at our own private gig (with the band, bizarrely playing from under the floor) than overhearing a rehearsal. Superb. They're more of a "good time" band than the various prog-psych-math-post-rock bands that have come out Canterbury in recent times, but there's nothing wrong with that. And I could sense some complex shifting polyrhythmic something creeping in there via Josh's excellent beats, so they may become far more than just a good time band. They've a gig soon at The Black Griffin — I expect I shall be there...

Canterbury Soundwaves Episode 15

2012-01-08T12:40:00.003Z

No particular theme this time, but a lot of tracks featuring the wind playing of Pye Hastings' brother Jimmy (so a lot of Caravan, but also some Hatfield and National Health, as well as something entriely unexpected from 2001). Also, Ollie Halsal at his finest, Hugh Hopper and Robert Wyatt (still) experimenting with tape loops in the late 90's, a Malian woman singing Wyatt's "Alifib", obscure hiphop beats based on loops of Canterbury material, and a drunk-but-functioning Whole World playing up a storm in London's Hyde Park, summer 1970.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 15

Quantic & His Combo Barbaro

2011-12-20T10:29:00.002Z

I just got my sister Kate and her family a copy of the Soundways cumbia compilation Cartagena! for Christmas. She's adopted a couple of Columbian kids and wants to expose them to their native culture so I thought this might be a good contribution! It's compiled by someone who Joel and Sarah know from their village of Batcombe in Somerset, along with Quantic. That's Will Holland, formerly of Quantic Soul Orchestra, now living in Columbia leading a mighty cumbia band. They played one of the most incredible sets I've ever seen on the Furthur stage at LOTF in 2010, that wonderful sunny weekend of musical amazingness I was involved in helping out with.

Here they are in Paris the previous autumn (skip ahead to about 0:35):

Ail Fionn live in Alan's mum's front room, Ballincollig, December 2003

2011-12-19T01:47:00.003Z

Alan's mum dug out a videotape when I was visiting just before summer solstice this year, Tim helped transfer it onto DVD, and I've finally worked out how to extract and edit the files. I'd completely forgotten about this session — Inge and I were visiting Alan in West Cork shortly before his move to Aotearoa (New Zealand), and we all turned up at his mum's in Ballincollig just outside Cork City one evening (she filmed this very enthusiastically).

There must be other bits of Ail Fionn footage floating about out there (I can remember a Swiss cameraman filming us atop Silbury Hill in summer 1995, for example). Hopefully more of it will come our way. At the moment there's just this, and the little clip of us playing at Pixies Hall.

bowed hurdy-gurdy and saz improvisations with Joel

2011-12-19T01:09:00.007Z

14th December, 2011. In Joel and Sarah's kitchen, Batcombe, Somerset.

Joel was playing his hurdy-gurdy with a violin bow in order to keep the volume down (it was past midnight, and we didn't want to disturb the neighbours). Lots of modal jamming in the key of G. He's not been getting enough sleep (studying osteopathy full time and bringing up a high-energy kid), so this wasn't us at our most energetic...in fact, the "clunk" you can hear at the end of the last track is the sound of his bow hitting the floor (he'd fallen asleep while playing)! An enjoyable session though. We always conclude that we should get together and play more, but life, you know...

Listen Here
I spent a couple of days in Batcombe between Bristol and West Wales (where I am now). The last night in Bristol was spent in Easton with Sophie (from Sondryfolk) and her sister Laura who've recently moved into a house there. When S and I came in out of the torrential rain, Laura was in the middle of learning some raags from Oshan of The Turbans (she on harmonium, he on open-tuned guitar). He had to leave shortly thereafter, was hoping to return with his bouzouki for a jam, but that didn't work out. As a result of this, I learned that Sophie's studied violin in Varanasi, where Joel once studied tabla, and Matt Spacegoat learned to play sitar. We spent the evening by the fireplace, listening to my selections from the stack of vinyl that the previous tenants had abandoned: Nic Jones, who I'd previously heard about but never heard, Tim Buckley's Starsailor, Jah Shaka, Astral Weeks and Captain Beefheart's Doc at the Radar Station. I'd always assumed that the latter was one of Beefheart's lesser works, but had been chatting to Simon, the husband of Maddie's friend Lucy, in a pub a couple of days earlier about music (he let slip that he'd agitated to have Wire's "I Am the Fly" as the first dance at their weddding reception (!), so I immediately liked him), and he surprised me by saying that he thought this was his best album. It was quite odd finding it so soon after (the first time I've ever had access to a physical copy I'm quite sure). He described having recently seen The Magic Band live (Keith from COTD had told me about seeing them in Falmouth when we were Droning a week or so earlier), also turned out to know Angelo Bruschini (who I saw numerous times in the Blue Aeroplanes between '88 and '92, now doing very well for himself as Massive Attack's guitarist) and spoke enthusiastically about Robert Wyatt's "Born Again Cretin". In the course of this conversation, we discovered that we were born five days apart! (and this wasn't so long after Maddie and I discovered that we were born ten years apart to the day.) Note to self: stop using so many parentheses!

two very different uses for "Ambee Dagez"

2011-12-12T10:04:00.005Z

Sue Cross over in Normandy was just in touch again about another of her "animated recipes" involving music from the Dongas' Rainy Night in the Bell Tent collection. This time it's a marmalade recipe, using the Armenian tune "Ambee Dagez" (featuring my saz a bit more prominently than most of the tracks on that tape). She says:

"...it is perfect because it conveys what I am trying to do with the recipe to show that organic food, cooking and traditional recipes know no boundaries, they all 'feed' into each other. As the Moors brought the bitter orange to Andalucia for perfume and medicinal use and then, as legend has it, a ship laden with fruit was forced into Dundee...marmalade is a true mixture of cultures. I think the music fits really well although I hope you don't mind I snipped off a little at the start to get it to time in with my dancing, whirling fruit. I also put a short piece of Chinese music in the middle when I make the ginger root part of the recipe — I used Chinese organic ginger."

If you've not seen them, her animations for courgette cake and Christmas pudding are here and here, respectively.

Weirdly though, in between her contacting me the first time, and then sending me the Youtube link, I did a quick "Ambee Dagez" search to see if I could find it myself, and I found this, using a different version of the tune, this time played by me with Ryan Biesack (amazing percussionist) and possibly Vincent Miresse at an open mic somewhere in Wisconsin years ago:

It's a bit weird hearing your music and seeing swastikas, to say the least (especially when there are fez's involved) but this seems to have been uploaded by someone genuinely interested in historical film documents rather than some kind of Nazi enthusiast.

In fact I just found another clip whose soundtrack is 32 seconds of me playing saz, and this is the allies rather than the Nazis, so I feel better now...

...damn, there's more of this stuff:

first saz/mandolin jams with Phil Self

2011-12-10T13:33:00.005Z

Thursday night Random Article improv sessions have been continuing with me (saz), Miriam (violin/voice/percussion), occasionally Tom (bass, now living down near Ramsgate), and guest involvement from Phil, Neil and Adam of Lapis Lazuli, in various configurations. It feels like it's expanding into a bit of a collective. Almost all of this gets recorded and I'll get round to posting some edits when things settle down a bit with the new book, etc.

A couple of Thursdays ago, Phil from Cocos Lovers (living in Canterbury for a while doing a music course) came up, and it was just the two of us playing saz/mandolin jams. Rather nice — hopefully more of this to come...

Phil with Natasha (left) and Nicola (right) from Cocos Lovers
Listen Here

new summer solstice photos and Sondryfolk video

2011-12-10T12:35:00.004Z

These have been embedded elsewhere in earlier entries, but here they are anyway. Thanks to Sam B for the photos and Jason for the video.

Windmill Hill roundbarrow around sunrise

Silbury Hill as seen from Windmill Hill

our solstice fire

we didn't see a sunrise as such, but we did see this

video by Jason Brooks

Another St. Mary Arches Drone, on to Bristol

2011-12-10T12:20:00.007Z

7th December 2011, St. Mary Arches church, Exeter

I made a point of integrating a flying visit to Exeter into my current trip to Bristol/Somerset/Wales, timed with the December COTD session. It was worth it — a good one. A nicely mellow, soundscapey kind of session, not much bass (I played some acoustic bass rather badly for a bit before returning to saz) or sustained rhythm. James S did his thing mangling samples of radio evangelists and swallows in his farmhouse with his Kaoss Pad, as well as playing some rather lovely harmonica. Particularly good to see everyone again this time. James T did a couple of bits of poetry, a powerful one about the River Exe (a request from Lucy, who's working on a multimedia piece about the river with Vicky), and another poignant one about aging.

At one point a young woman came in during the middle of one of the three long pieces, whispered something to Keith, then went and unlocked the pipe organ, retrieved some sheet music and departed. He later told us that he'd told her she should join in with us &mdash if only! We've been tempted in the past, but the organ is always locked.

Lucy — alto sax, vocals
Annie — alto sax, flute, clarinet, vocals
Keith — electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar(?)
Brian — keyboard
James T — keyboard, percussion, water, poetry
James S — Kaoss Pad, khamak, glockenspiel, harmonica, acoustic guitar
me — saz, acoustic bass guitar

Listen Here

me (cold in there that night, hence the wooly hat!) and James S — photo by Keith

Annie and Brian — photo by Keith

Lucy and James T— photo by Keith

...then it was on to Bristol for Sondryfolk time, staying with Elise and co. at her new place in St. Werburghs (bringing back mad memories of mad times in the early to mid-90's, getting to know some of the Mina Road squatters). One of her housemates, Felicia (from Eigg!) also plays guitar, and another, Sara from La Rioja has been getting into didg playing, so we've been filling the front room with late night jamming sounds. Elise's guitar playing is all her own, really original, but still quite easy for me to follow. Felicia is more sing/song oriented, got into singing "Cocaine Lil" (a daft old song learned from a John Martyn record, one I know via The Mekons, although existing in numerous forms, this acoustic Grateful Dead version being my favourite, a barely recognisable version of the same thing), which then slipped into the old standard "Hit the Road Jack", one that can just go on and on and on...

And then Saturday night, Melski suggested coming along to the Full Moon Orchestra at the Arnolfini Arts Centre. This is a monthly (well, lunar) open improv session, facilitated by Jesse Morningstar (who comes over from Paris every month for it) and various guest "conductors". Some of the "conductions" worked, some were farcical, but the whole experience was entertaining. Musical coughing, musical pingpong, a "score" based on the timings of coloured balls being potted in a snooker video, etc. Mel got up and took us through a four-part minimalist thing in the Aeolian mode which she called "Steve Reich Eclipses the Moon with His Great Big Cape" or something (there had been a lunar eclipse that afternoon, but unfortunately not one visible from Bristol).

Afterwards, in the cafe/bar, Melski wanted to introduce me to Jesse, in a slightly forced (but hilarious) kind of "psychedelic man, meet psychedelic man" way, but he's lovely and we had a great chat about what he's doing with his wife (a.k.a. This Is The Kit), potential Kentish connections, a Krautrock-obsessed friend of his in Canterbury who I've never met, and Jesse's days back in The Moonflowers (late 80's/early 90's psych band who I'd completely forgotten, but then suddenly remembered — John Peel sessions, controversial opposition to the Poll Tax and 1991 Gulf War, tours with The Levellers, etc.)

Then home to sit up pouring over some number theory literature at 3a.m. listening to Pharaoh Sanders ("Astral Travelling", etc.) with Felicia, Sara and friends, in late from a party...Sarah's boyfriend Jack is deep into his late-period Coltrane and delighted me by putting Thembi on. Oh, and a really good robotics/neural nets/parapsychology/philosophy-of-science conversation with the German roboticist next-door neighbour that afternoon, too — I like Bristol.

Canterbury Soundwaves Episode 14

2011-12-08T08:37:00.004Z

...in which I explore Canterbury connections with Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd (mostly Soft Machine related, but not all), including some remarkable Floyd recordings you've probably never heard. Also, some very free jazz from Lol and Didier, more incredible autumn '67 Soft Machine from French telly, Kev and Daev reunited, Matching Mole live, a beautiful two-part cover of "O Caroline"... and Caravan playing with an orchestra and getting away with it (arguably).

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 14

Arlet—Cocos Sandwich (and thoughts on Will Varley's Advert Soundtracks)

2011-12-06T12:21:00.009Z

St. Mary's Church, Sandwich (deconsecrated, now a community arts centre), 3rd December, 2011

This was another excellent event brought to us by the Smugglers Records crew from the nearby town of Deal. The church was entirely unknown to me, despite being enormous on the inside (you'd never know from the outside), and really quite beautiful. Will Greenham from Smugglers had only found out about it a few weeks earlier, but by the end of the night was describing it as "Kent's best venue". I could almost agree — the acoustics were just slightly soupy, but this was made up for by just about everything else about the place.

Canterbury's Arlet collective, who play in a kind of 'chamber-folk' style and are one of my very favourite things in the world these days, started things off with a 45-minute set of utter gorgeousness. The first piece was perhaps a little tenuous, but Rosie (violin) explained that they'd played it for the first time that afternoon in Owen's kitchen, so fair enough. They performed as the full six-piece (Cameron Dawson having recenly got involved on double bass, despite being in two other Canterbury bands and studying music in Brighton!), with some pieces played as a five-, four- or three-piece. Aidan Shepherd, who plays accordion and writes all the material, seems to be moving more in the chamber direction than the folk direction with pieces like the superb new "Para Lucia" (a demo version of which I played on Episode 14 of my Canterbury Soundwaves podcast recently). Something about the use of reed instruments in his compositions really reminds me of Lindsay Cooper's work, both within Henry Cow (e.g., Western Culture) as well as her solo compositions (e.g., The Golddiggers soundtrack). I have no idea how familiar Aidan is with Lindsay Cooper, but if he isn't, I'll make sure he gets to hear some of her stuff before too long!

I may have had Canterbury music on the brain, having just been working on the podcast, but during one piece (the name of which I missed), Aidan took a brief but imaginative accordion solo over a colourfully pulsing minimalist backdrop and I could hear (indirectly, filtered through my particular neural pathways) Dave Sinclair tearing into another wonderful organ solo over the classic-era Caravan groove. Interestingly, Libby leaned over afterwards and mentioned that she could hear Vaughan Williams. "Very English music," added Dave (meaning that in the best possible sense). And that's something you often hear said about Caravan's best stuff ("pastoral", "quintessentially English")... so arguably there is a line through all of these points.

Ben (acoustic guitar) was subtly amplified (the others played unamplified), which meant you could hear him a bit better than usual, Thom played the whole set on euphonium (he usually plays trombone in the Zoo For You horn section, but was switching between the two last time I saw Arlet). Owen (clarinet) and Rosie just soared throughout.

I got a very nice recording of this on my Zoom H2, some of which may make it onto my next podcast. Unfortunately (for us, not for him), Owen's off travelling in South America for a few months soon, but Aidan assured me that Arlet will be continuing is some adapted form until he's back.

There's been a very welcome development in my non-musical life in Canterbury connected to Arlet: Andy Renshaw, who plays bodrhán in the Irish/Breton folk trio Triskele with Ben, was looking for someone to teach him how to play the ancient Chinese board game Go, so I did. He's really taken to it, so we now find ourselves at the centre of a regular Sunday evening Go circle involving Ben and Owen (both of whom we taught to play, and took to it rapidly) as well as Kirby from the now-defunct Furthur collective (who already played, I discovered accidentally) and Chris Banks, an excellent 12-string guitarist I've seen around at open mics, etc. over the years (turns out he studied classical Chinese at university years ago). Others have expressed an interest in learning, so this is likely to expand. I'd forgotten how enjoyable it is to spend an evening contemplatively placing black and white stones on a grid, listening to music with a group of like-minded people. And Andy's always got an excellent choice of music playing. When I used to play Go down in Penzance in the 90's with the West Cornwall Go Club, it was almost always Eno's ambient stuff, whereas this is a lot more varied: Miles, Coltrane, Fela Kuti, Mulatu Astatke, Dr. John, Roy Ayers, Spirit of Eden — it's almost worth going along just for his playlists.

Will Varley was up next, playing pretty much the entirety of his new album Advert Soundtracks. I've been meaning to write something about this for a while, so now is probably the time. I'd heard all of these songs live before, some quite a few times. The exception was "Zetlands", the dreamy, almost Springsteen-like (in a very un-American way) "let's get out of this town" kind of escapist fantasy song. Apart from that one, and the sureally amusing "Monkey on a Rock" (the perfect encapsulation in absurd popsong format of just how confusing it is to be a young person in early 21st century Britain), Will's songs to date are eloquently angry dissections of modern British social reality and global injustice (and the odd bitter song of lost love). He's well aware of his Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan/Billy Bragg lineage (I've seen his CD collection!). "Sound of the Markets Crashing" strongly parallel's BB's "Ideologies" ("...the sound of ideologies clashing"), just dragged up to date to address a looming global economic crisis, while Bragg was writing about the stagnancy of status quo politics in 80's Britain. "I Still Think of You Sometimes", a kind of hate/love song, has always reminded me of Dylan's "Idiot Wind" in its sustained lyrical bitterness. He's got a powerful voice, a real way with words (songs like "Newborn" are pure poetry), and if you haven't heard him yet, then Advert Soundtracks is the perfect introduction. It was recorded very quickly (as intended) by Dave Hatton from Cocos Lovers, with just a tiny bit of backing vocal from Nicola and violin from Natasha — this minimal approach suits what he's doing perfectly.

Listening to a Will Varley set (and this was a particularly good example, a strong performance, extremely well received) is a bit like reading an issue of Adbusters magazine — impressive, thought provoking, hard to find fault with...and yet ultimately a bit depressing. You need a bit of hope along with all the critical analysis of the forces relentlessly polluting our mental environment. But at least Will's got a sense of humour. I'm more interested in what he's going to do next than in what he's achieved thus far. He's particularly good at writing about what he doesn't like about the world, but I'd like to hear what kind of world he does want to see. He's escaped London (from where a lot of these angry songs stem), found a like-minded community of friends and musicians on the Kent coast, and has clearly been much inspired by recent progressive and community-building events like Smugglers Festival in early September and the Sondryfolk gathering in late October. So I'm already waiting for the second album to see how all of this is going to affect what he's got to say.

Cocos completed a near-perfect evening of music. Not so many of the obvious stompy favourites — I was very pleased to hear "Awake You Loon" (played for the first time in a couple of years) and "Van Rogue" (recently revived, with Natasha playing some musical saw and harmonica). Billy again swapped his bass for Will's acoustic guitar and sung an impressive "Barcelona" (you'd never have guessed he's only just started singing lead vocals). I spent a lot of the set thinking about "Oh Rosa (The Drowned Sailor)", a song I've not heard them do for over a year — wondering if I'd ever hear it live again...so I was particularly happy when they encored with that. They played it because it was Ash's birthday, and it's his favourite. He ended up on stage, a huge grin beneath a ridiculous blob of tinsel and tied-up dreadlocks, singing backing vocals alongside Nicola and Natasha. This is Ash who was once (still?) in the Ukelele Gangstas, now leads Famous James & the Monsters, a band who rehearse in the Wincheap house where Andy's hosting the Sunday Go sessions...Phil from Cocos recently moved in (he's doing a music course at Christchurch), bringing the banjo-playing population of the house up to a staggering three, and he's now playing some mandolin with the Monsters, whose new drummer is Josh Magill from Zoo For You, so suddenly quite a band!

Here's a video compiled from the whole evening (loads more of this can be found on the Smugglers Records Youtube channel):

I think everyone went home happy that night...

Cocos Lovers at The Marlowe + Elephant Lands review (finally!)

2011-11-20T17:40:00.011Z

They tore down the old Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury a couple of years ago (it was a pretty horrible building, so no great loss there), and have recently opened a newly built replacement. I'm not sure what I think about it architecturally (and I'm really not into the glowing purple neon vibe at night!) but I had a chance to look inside yesterday. (The first time I was in the old one, thinking back, was Fairport Convention in autumn '88; the last was Orchestra Baobab almost exactly twenty years later.)

Deal's Private Widdle Social Club cabaret thing is now very much mobile, and came to Canterbury for the first time last Saturday — to the Marlowe. I couldn't quite picture how this would work in a venue of that size, but it turns out they've got a mini-auditorium (seating maybe 200?) in there alongside the massive one — it was in there.

Cocos Lovers played a couple of mini-sets during the proceedings, compered by the comedian Paul Foot (that intentionally awkward, surreal kind of comedy, no obvious punchlines, just kind of leaves you on edge), with contributions from Deal's intentionally unintentionally comic poet Malcolm Head, Will and Natasha's young son Henry beatboxing, and Paul Clifford's unhinged hobo alter-ego Shed (he sang a great song inspired by seeing fish pedicure in a Canterbury High Street shop window a few hours previously..."There's a fish...nibbling at my feet...", as well as "Sam Hall", an old ballad made famous by Johnny Cash: "My name it is Sam Hall, and I hate you one and all, I hate you one and all, DAMN YOUR EYES!"). This made for a rather weird juxtaposition. All the comedy was steeped in that postmodern layered irony, whereas Cocos are just honestly and straightforwardly what they are — nothing postmodern or ironic, refreshingly. "We're still not that funny," confessed Billy as they emerged from the stage door to start their second set.

So, a slightly weird context, but a joy to see them play, as ever. They started with "Bow and Arrow", Natasha playing a bit of musical saw and harmonica for the intro (a promising new development), then a new one (they played this at the Jamboree — in fact Will tells me it was one of the embryonic songs we jammed on the Monday morning after Smugglers Festival). I can't recall the exact order, but they played "Elephant Lands", "Blackened Shores", "Van Rogue" (nice to hear that one back in rotation), "Howling Wind", "Moonlit Sky" and "Father". Also, there was a nice surprise in the second set when Billy swapped his bass with Will for an acoustic guitar and sang his "Barcelona", a powerful song on the new album which I've not heard live before (may have been the first performance?). Dave's playing a new semi-acoustic guitar, sounding superb. So a few clues as to where the current six-piece line-up might be going.

NOW, finally...

I only just got a copy of their recent album Elephant Lands, mainly because Matt Tweed who co-produced it with Paul Clifford had already given me all the final mixes from the sessions. But they'd recorded many more songs than could fit on one album, so I had just assembled my own favourite tracklist and listened to that. Now that I have their selection, in their order, packaged in their choice of artwork, I feel like I should write something about it. (This can't fairly be called a "review", though, as I'm now too close to the band to be objective about anything they do — you can find objectivity here and here, if that's what you're looking for.)

Rather poignant this one, as there's a lot of input on this record from Natasha's sister Pog — she wrote and sang lead on five or six of the fourteen tracks. And she and husband/drummer James have since left the band (this happened once before, and then they rejoined, but apparently this time the decision to leave was final). A lot of these songs were featuring heavily in their live sets during the last year, too, and so now that we may never hear them played live again, it's some consolation to have beautifully crafted studio recordings of them at their best. I'm already missing hearing some of these songs live... "Door to the Andes" was an instant Cocos classic, one of the best they've played, and "Love Is Not Like Roses" (often played alongside their cover of Gillian Welch's "Caleb Mayer") was one of the highlights of their sets from earlier this year. But the band continues to move and evolve. So this album is truly a record — a record of something that was and is no more.

back when they were eight...
The album opens with a few seconds of quite industrial sounding weirdness and some elephant-like noises which turn out to be Paul Clifford overblowing his battered trombone in a giant greenhouse near Ash where he lives — I happened to turn up there just as this was being recorded. The same evening saw him drumming on a huge rusty grain hopper with padded mallets while Will clanked giant chains, for the track "Black Douglas". That one didn't make it onto the album, but hopefully will emerge in some other form eventually (I hope so partly because it's a mighty, epic track, but there's also the vested interest that I played a bit of saz on it.)

"Elephant Lands" drifts nicely into "Feral and Wild" (those two songs linked in my mind, as I first heard both when they played The Bowl Inn at Hastingleigh a couple of midwinters ago, after leading the carol singing outside around a brazier in the snow). The latter's got a lovely lazy pace to it, ambling banjo, loping drum beat, and powerful vocal harmonies, naturally. And then we're into "Door to the Andes" with its African choir-like feel, all twinkly Dave guitar and uplifting Nicola flute lines.

Billy wrote two songs for the album sessions, and I'm glad to see my favourite of the two, "Barcelona", included. I had no idea he wrote songs or was so comfortable singing lead. And very glad to hear that played live last night. Having dropped from an 8-piece to a 6-piece, it's good to hear expansion in new directions. Matt's production has included some spacey backwards sounds at beginnings and ends of tracks, even Will whispering mixing instructions at the start of this one. He's also not been afraid to render Dave's guitar in abrasive, snarling Marc Ribot mode at times, which nicely offsets the sweetness of the vocal harmonies and flute.

"Lost Kids" is a Pog song that I was only just getting to know the last few times I saw her with the band. There's almost a swinging 60's pop thing that slips in there, then a pleasantly rocking jam at the end, and finally a mildly chaotic end wreathed in joyous laughter.

Nicola's "Days Are Long", just over a minute of her unaccompanied, layered vocals singing a lament about lost love is just devastatingly beautiful. Oh...

James' drumming will be missed...that's pretty irreplaceable. But at least we have a record!

The final track, "Twilight", another less familiar one to me, fades off into Phil reprising the mantra-like chorus of "Fortuna" on a battered old piano (Matt told me something about going around to someone's granny's house in Deal to record that one).

Dave did the artwork again, with Smugglers' friend Lawrence. Intriguing period collage work (the grainy gatefold image of the various band members posing among the rocks of a rainforest waterfall is really quite convincing) — a lot of attention to detail has gone into this whole project. The back cover is particularly nice — a handwritten tracklist in fountain pen on the back of a yellowed old postcard.

Already looking forward to whatever they do next...

Canterbury Soundwaves Episode 13

2011-11-10T10:56:00.008Z

...in which I chat to jazz trombone legend, East Kent resident and Robert Wyatt collaborator Annie Whitehead about jazz, politics and feminism in the 80's, Wyatt's creative processes, Zappa, her "Soupsongs" project, and her various work with Elton Dean, Phil Miller, Dave Stewart, Geoffrey Richardson, John Etheridge, et al. Also, the classic Soft Machine trio lineup on French TV in autumn '67 (newly surfaced footage), the top three Canterbury tunes from our winning Haiku poet, and a few words from the current Archbishop of Canterbury.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 13

Annie Whitehead

Another animated recipe from Normandy

2011-10-31T10:37:00.007Z

"Slow food" and stop-frame animation enthusiast Sue Cross across the Channel near Mont Saint-Michel on the Normandy coast just brought this to my attention — another of her animated recipes featuring music from the Dongas' Rainy Night in the Bell Tent tape. I'm not sure if my saz shows up on this track or not. The last one was a plum pudding. This time it's an organic courgette cake (again, not vegan, but local, organic and otherwise highly commendable):

Dawn Chorus Canterbury Fringe event

2011-10-31T10:22:00.018Z

This was the perfect continuation of the events of the previous evening. In fact, the Sondryfolk event had originally been intended for this date, until we found out what our friends at Dawn Chorus had in mind, at which point, we rescheduled. With a bit more notice, some interesting fusion might have been planned between the two evenings, but it was there in a way, as many of the same people were present, sharing a lingering sense of woodland magic. The full Arlet, in lineup particular, played a gorgeous unamplified set in the foyer, almost visibly glowing from their truly spectacular involvement the night before.

A group of us walked down there together (including Sven and Katrijn, their last night in the country) — the new UKC arts building (named after Derek Jarman) has a rather ugly exterior, and it's the first time I'd been in there. But its geographical location is highly significant: a stonesthrow from Tanglewood, the Hopper family home, where Brian Hopper, and Mike Ratledge played chamber music as Simon Langton schoolboys, where the Wilde Flowers rehearsed, where Robert Wyatt and Kevin Ayers both briefly lodged, etc.

In fact, the room where the bands played was in the downstairs corner closest to Tanglewood. I was standing outside the window peering over at the little white house in the streetlight as Liam (from Syd Arthur) started his solo set with a spacey effects-oriented intro. I was thinking about this (which I read here, original source unknown):

"Hugh became interested in tape loops ten years before this album [1984 (1973)] was created while living with Daevid Allen and Gilli Smythe in Paris. "Daevid had already been exposed to the work of Terry Riley and was producing sound-pieces made up of repeated tape loops". Hugh was just 18 at this time and living outside of England for the first time. Hugh goes on to say: "For the next year or so I carried on assembling my own loop-pieces. Back in Canterbury Pye Hastings lent me his Ferrograph for a while. I tinkered also with eight-millimeter movies,filming Mike Ratledge and my brother Brian being poetic or Robert Wyatt playing trumpet while looning around in a field of yellow flowers. Occasionally when our parents were away on holiday we had Cultural Evenings — tape and movies together!"

Tanglewood in the early 60s (photo: Brian Hopper)
I went in just in time to catch Liam going into "Black Wave", which features as an acoustic B-side of Syd's new 7" vinyl single, "Ode to the Summer". Raven wasn't able to be there, being in France for family reasons, but even without his violin parts, it's a beautiful song. It's all a bit blurry now (having hardly slept for days, and all the stimulus of the night before), but I remember the feeling of the space, very tastefully, softly lit with minimal psychedelic projections (some others out in the foyer), log stools and hessian drapes, all very soft. Liam continued to surprise with a string of unfamiliar or minimally familiar songs, each one with its own subtle magic, his unique vocals floating overhead. Brother Joel was at the desk all night, providing excellent sound throughout.

On the theme of the remark we got about the Sondryfolk Jamboree feeling "like the beginning of a renaissance", between bands, we audience members found ourselves drifting into the adjacent gallery space to check out the works of seven young local artists somehow affiliated with Dawn Chorus. It was all 2-d visual work (including a new piece by Tom Langley developing the theme of his "Get Rich" 'relational aesthetic' blackboard installation at Smugglers Festival in early September), except Andrew Kirby's piece, which involved a carefully made cast of his own face in frozen sawdust, gradually melting and dripping into a formation on the floor during the course of the exhibition — this also builds on his piece from the Sondryfolk/Smugglers 'exhibition', Vessel & Void, with a similar creation/destruction cycle.

Out in the foyer, Arlet played a stunning unamplified set. Libby, who surprised us by coming along (rarely gets out, rarely sees bands, isn't that interested in the particulars of music) had been sufficiently enchanted by the night before, and Arlet left her completely entranced. Thom's now playing both euphonium and trombone, and Cam seems to be fully part of the lineup playing double bass (despite temporarily living in Brighton and being in two other Canterbury bands).

As with the last time I saw them, Rae were without saxophonist Lorenzo. Last time Raven filled in on violin (wonderful). This time it was Owen (Arlet, Zoo) on saxophone, doing an expert job, having noticeably learned all the parts in detail. Leonie's voice left everyone stunned, yet again, but a gig in a rectangular institutional space (however beautifully laid out) was never going to compare to seeing her on the strawbale woodland amphitheatre by a fire the night before. No "Eyed Ear" (my favourite) either. Still, it was a massive treat to get the full Rae experience as well as the magical fireside solo set.

To conclude, The Boot Lagoon plugged in and tore it down before a very happy, appreciative audience. They just keep getting better: a lot of dynamics and texture, Pete's occasionally spacey soulful Santana-like guitar lines nicely loosening up the more mathematical proginess of the overall Boot sound. Bert Jansch (RIP) got a respectful shout from Cameron (who now seems to have taken over the frontman role, Callum seemingly happy to just lose himself behind his keyboard). And they just had the few minutes necessary available at the end to bless us with the lead track off their forthcoming EP ("it's been forthcoming for a year now", lamented Cam), what's become a kind of signature tune for them, the one called "Businessman". The mad stomp section in the second half got everyone madly stomping. With any luck, I should be interviewing them for a Canterbury Soundwaves episode fairly soon, letting them choose some favourite tracks, rather like the Syd Arthur interview I did earlier this year.

Sondryfolk Autumn Jamboree

2011-10-31T10:18:00.014Z

Where to begin? Such a joyful, inspiring and multifaceted week led up to this remarkable event that I'm almost at a loss to know how to describe it...

Elise, Sophie and Laurie, the Sondryfolk collective who I'd helped out with their previous two events (the Canterbury Arts Trail back in April, and the arts forest at Smugglers Festival in early September) had proposed an autumnul gathering/convergence/celebration at the beautiful wooded location near Canterbury where my 40th birthday celebrations took place, so I was more than happy to offer my assistance in helping them realise their vision. The idea was to bring together like-minded, creative and motivated people from East Kent, London and Bristol (their other two centres of operation) in a carefully crafted, beautiful, magical environment and then just see what happened.

The ingredients were: a series of 20 minute talks/discussions in a strawbale mini-half-amphitheatre semi-encircling a bonfire, music, aerialists in trees, storytelling, soup for donations, affordale local ale and spiced cider, beautiful decor, illluminated trees and a LOT of twinkly lights. This took some organising, and so Elise, Sophie, plus E's circus friends Maddie and Lynn (met on a sailing ship in the Mediterranean this summer) and another friend, Alex, from London, took up residence at the site and we spent an industrious and generally hilarious week getting it all together. Lewis, an old friend of Elise who came up through the free party/psytrance scene (which was quite strong in East Kent some years ago) put in a lot of time and effort with lighting and wiring, assisted by me (I was doing my best to be helpful, cooking, washing up, sawing wood, carrying stuff around, making the occasional useful suggestion — always happy to wire up sockets and plugs...).

Sven and Katrijn came over from Gent for the week too, which added nicely to the atmosphere. We had a couple of saz/darbouka sessions, and Sven brought his guitar along too. At one point, with about eight of us squashed in a tiny caravan, Elise asked to borrow it and surprised me with a really fresh, original guitar style (I had no idea she played — she also came out with some excellent rhythms on the darbouka, despite claiming not to be able to drum, and entertained us on the donated piano (from La Trappiste bar in town), as it was being driven onto the site, strapped onto a trailer). The immediate point of reference for her guitar style was Liam's (Syd Arthur), but she pointed out that this was less to do with imitation than the fact that they'd listened to a lot of the same music when they were part of the same crew of teenage Canterbury skateboarders (Zappa, Bassekou Kouyate, Mahavishnu, Caravan, Pentangle...)

The music which got organised for the Friday night event:

Will Varley playing songs from his new album Advert Soundtracks (he handed me a copy as he was leaving later that night, so I'll blog something about that soon) after the first round of talks in the amphitheatre. Several nearby owls decided to get involved in backing vocals, much to everyone's delight. Everyone was listening. It seemed like everyone was experiencing the whole event as a gift, and there was a tangibly happy, respectful atmosphere the whole time, between everyone, which included actually listening to music that was being played. Will's whimsical newish "A Monkey on a Rock" went down a storm (he'll be fielding requests for that one for the rest of his musical life now), and as he was finishing his last song, "This is an Advert Soundtrack", the inadequate lighting from the bonfire meant he couldn't see his frets properly, so he went for a faux-avant-jazz freakout ending, very amusing...

artist, journalist and archaeologist Christine Finn addresses the fireside strawbale amphitheatre about her Leave Home Stay art project (photo by Ed Q)
A bit later, it was time for the candlelit woodland walkabout — the first stop involved the assembled lantern bearing peoples stopping beneath a mighty Monterey pine to listen to me delivering 319 million years of local history (drawing on some evolutionary biology) from its lower branches, culminating in the here and now. I'd been asked to speak for a few minutes about "where we were", and this is how it came out. I ended by "getting out of my tree" and leading the audience further into the woods where the Ladies of the Lake (Nicola and Natasha from Cocos Lovers, plus Deal friend Jo) were seated on a large rope swing, surrounded by candles. They sang half a dozen unaccompanied songs (a sea shanty, "My Husband's Got No Courage in Him", "What Shall We Do With the Baby", and "Four Loom Weaver", a song about the Lancashire cotton famine, among others). Everyone, as they had been during my talk, was totally silent — enraptured in this case, as opposed to bewildered, in mine : ) . Even the littlest kids who'd come along sat quietly with their parents, seemingly transported into fairyland.

Next stop was the circus performance: I led the people over to another massive conifer where a halogen-illuminated Maddie was suspended from a rope, about 8 metres up. Accompanied by Owen (Zoo For You, Arlet) playing a beautifully flowing clarinet improvisation, she amazed everyone with her grace, skill and strength, tumbling down the rope and re-ascending it, seemingly effortlessly, as if tree, rope and Maddie were one entity. Only a few minutes, but time was suspended, and, again (apart from the music and the unfortunate drone of the struggling generator) all was silent. As she settled into her final descent to the base of the rope, Owen wandered into the darkness, trailing clarinet notes. The audience turned to follow him, and then BING! the light switched from Maddie's tree to the space between two sequoias, between which Swedish slack-rope artist Lynn was poised in mid-air, and (collective gasp!) Owen was suddenly standing alongside the full six-piece Arlet lineup (including Cameron from The Boot Lagoon and Lapis Lazuli on double bass), who then launched into their gorgeously melodic "Summertimes" as Lynn skipped, rolled, tumbled and swung in various directions on her slack-rope. The tree trunks themselves were illuminated in a pinky-orange light, more of Lewis's creative lighting work. The atmosphere was just electric... I couldn't imagine a more enraptured, attentive audience. Suddenly the two aerialists were standing, on the edge of the darkness, hand-in-hand, staring back at us like two alarmed wood sprites who'd just realised that they were being watched...and just as everyone was about to burst into applause, they turned and ran off into the woods together, leaving behind a hovering sense of wonder and enchantment.

video by Rosie P

I then led everyone back to the main gathering area, where Cocos Lovers (the full current six-piece) played a near-acoustic set at the front of the bar tent, where real ale, cider, soup and bread was being dispensed beneath faerie lights and autumnul foliage. (They had a couple of small busking amps which helped to keep Nicola's flute at a sensible level, etc.). I was very happy to hear them starting off with the underplayed "Van Rogue", quite a weird spacey intro (more of that, please!), then a new one (always a treat) which Phil tells me is currently known as "The New One", then "Elephant Lands" (title track of the new album, which I will review very soon) followed by all the old favourites. The version of "Moonlit Sky" was especially wonderful (I immediately declared it "best version ever!"...not sure if that would stand up, but I think they've played it at just about every one of the (many) gigs I've seen them play...one that I just don't tire of, and this version had so much space in it, the band responding to their environment, as they do so well).

Half of Burning Glass were up next (Edwin plus the double bass/harmonium player), but in the interim I wandered back over to the strawbale amphitheatre to see what was happening. What was happening was pretty wild! Triskele, the local Irish/Breton folk trio were, entirely unplanned, playing a kicking set (Ben the guitarist had come as part of Arlet and brought Andy the bhodran player and Fred the fiddler) to a delighted fireside audience. At one point, a kind of vaguely Breton-style chain of dancers encircled the fire and spun the energies in a wild pyro-musical vortex. You can't plan these things, and it was hugely satisfying to see this space we'd created being used like this.

Scurrying around sorting out various lighting issues, etc. I unfortunately missed a lot of the Burning Glass set, but was happy to see them surrounded by a delighted semicircle of listeners singing along (I joined in for "Ten Long Years of No Women and No Wine", and then got to hear the poignant one about the old lady and her harmonium).

Leonie Evans from Rae was meant to be next, playing semi-amplified outside the bar tent, but things had over-run somewhat and it was time to switch off the generator. So, a much better idea, she (with guitar borrowed from Ben) set up on the strawbale amphitheatre (not playing at us, but playing amongst us) and worked her vocal wonders, an unforgettable set, wherein she took numerous requests, as well as playing some of the current Rae material. I suggested Jolie Holland's "Littlest Birds", which she seemed very happy to be reminded of (sitting listening to that was one of the highlights of the evening, if not the year, for me). We also got Nina Simone and Billie Holiday songs, and (quite a surprise), after a quick retuning, a version of the Incredible String Band's "First Girl I Loved". I can't remember all the songs, just a feeling of incredible ease, warmth, communion, seeing people stretched out, blissed out beside the fire.

a quiet spell outside the bar (photo by Ed Q)
After that, things started to thin out gradually, and the music was provided by whoever wanted to play. Sven and I got some trancey saz/darbouka jams going, a Lori/Laurie (not Sondryfolk's Ms. L. Lax, tho') rather shly played some sweet songs on her ukelele, Luisa who'd come down from London (a friend of Theo Bard, who didn't make it) played some quirky material on her accordion, accompanied by her quirky voice, Barney Pigeon (minimalist Afro/art-funk guitarist from Zoo For You) surprised us with a bit of late-night boozy blues, and on it went...

The feedback since has been most encouraging: "felt like the beginning of a renaissance", reported one attendee; "best f***ing party in living memory" reported another (who'd brought his entire family along); "everyone seemed so HAPPY", pointed out Gwen from the healthfood shop (who I'd seen in there for years but never properly spoken to before); "raised the bar for cultural events in Canterbury" opined local artist Tom Langley.

Many more ideas in the pipeline. Long live Sondryfolk!

The Orchestra That Fell To Earth

2011-10-31T10:13:00.007Z

Wednesday 26th October, 2011, St. Alphege's Church, Canterbury

A few weeks ago I interviewed trombonist Annie Whitehead for my Canterbury Soundwaves podcast. She's worked extensively with Robert Wyatt, as well as Elton Dean, Phil Miller, John Etheridge, Dave Stewart and Richard Sinclair, and she lives in East Kent, so this seemed quite appropriate. The interview will go out on Episode 13 (in about a week). We had an extremely pleasant and interesting chat over lunch up in the Veg Box Cafe above Canterbury Wholefoods, talking about growing up in Oldham, jazz, politics, feminism, Zappa and Robert Wyatt's creative processes.

We also talked about her time in the Penguin Cafe Orchestra (alongside Caravan's Geoffrey Richardson), and the new project she's involved in with four other ex-Penguins playing PCO material — they were originally calling themselves "The Anteaters", but have since mutated into The Orchestra That Fell To Earth. It turned out that they were going to be playing the Canterbury Festival, so Annie kindly put me on the guest list.

Annie Whitehead — trombone, tuba, bass
Steve Fletcher — piano, synth
Jennifer Maidman — electric guitar, bass, ukelele, pitch pipes, etc.
Geoffrey Richardson — viola (and ukelele?)
Liam Genockey — drums and percussion

St. Alphege's (named after the Archbishop who was murdered when Vikings sailed up the Stour to Fordwich(!) and sacked the Cathedral exactly 1000 years ago) is an acoustically excellent venue, but the temperature up on stage was apparently far too high, so the band were struggling a bit with tuning issues. But I only knew this because Annie mentioned it during the set break — you'd never have known. These five musicians clearly have a lot of fun playing together — that really came across. The audience was the usual Canterbury Festival crowd (largely well-off, well-groomed retired couples seeking a bit of culture), so not very lively, but attentive and appreciative.

The set consisted entirely of PCO material except their new "Tropic of Cancer" (appended to "Paul's Dance"). Just about everything you could have wanted to hear got played. They started with "Air a Danser" and ended with a sweet little calypso-like encore (which I couldn't put my finger on). Geoffrey talked a bit between pieces about their various origins, so we learned some details about "Telephone and Rubber Band", "Music for Helicopter Pilots", etc. as well as getting some insight into Simon Jeffes' approach to musical creativity. Annie played bass guitar on one track, a bassline involving just two or three notes (Jennifer has to show her which frets to use, she told me, laughing). Steve Fletcher was superb on piano, only reverting to synth for the harmonium sound on "Music for a Found Harmonium" (surely someone could have found him a harmonium?). Liam Genockey I'd last seen playing with Steeleye Span, and brought a similarly sensitive percussive touch to this ensemble.

Despite my pneumonia (at this stage I thought I was just recovering from 'flu), this wonderful music continued to bounce around in my head for days.

Here they are in Annie and Jennifer's back garden playing "Tropic of Cancer" a year or two ago (rough sound quality, but you get the idea):

Syd Arthur "Ode To The Summer" single launch

2011-10-31T10:06:00.010Z

The Farmhouse, Canterbury, Friday 28th October, 2011

This was meant to be Lapis Lazuli supporting Syd Arthur to celebrate the release of Syd's new single "Ode To The Summer" (pressed up on 7" vinyl!). Things didn't quite work out that way, unfortunately. Fred the drummer has been suffering on and off from tinnitus and eardrum complications, and this had become so acute that he had to pull out from the gig. So everyone's thoughts are with Fred, as drumming/music/Syd is his life — I really hope some kind of treatment will be able to reverse the situation, primarily for his sake, but also for the sake of the music.

So we instead got Liam and Raven (half of SA) supporting Lapis. They played something in the same style as the acoustic sets they've been doing over the last couple of years, but with Liam on electric guitar (very little amelioration with effects, loops, etc. — more like an acoustic set played on an electric guitar). Raven was on violin throughout, except on the second encore (the set went down VERY well with the audience, very encouraging considering its delicacy and subtlety, and the fact it was a beery Friday night crowd) — a few people had been shouting out for "Ode", which they clearly hadn't planned to play without the full band, but they gave in and played it in the end (Raven on mandolin for that one). Another exceptional set — I think I only recognised two or three songs... Liam's SO prolific these days, he can hardly keep track of all the new songs, and each one's an intriguing treasure, a small world unto itself. But Joel assures me that they've finally started recording his solo material up at the studio in Welling. Good news!

I'd almost not gone out to the gig, having woken up with what I thought was 'flu (picked up en route home from West Cornwall)... I've since discovered that I've had pneumonia (!), but not a serious case (on its way out now). That night was the worst of it though, and I'm glad that my body gave me about an hour of relative ease to enjoy the Liam/Raven set...after that, though, things deteriorated and I slumped at a table throughout Lapis Lazuli's set. I'm sure it was as good, if not better, than the last few I'd seen, but my brain was just processing it as a relentless pounding (filtered through an increasingly dense and noisy mass of people). A shame...

Bert Jansch RIP

2011-10-15T12:37:00.002+01:00

I'm sitting in Miss Peapod's cafe in Penryn, down in West Cornwall, and someone's put a Bert Jansch album on. I haven't had a chance to blog about his passing since I heard the news, but this seems a good time to do so. Last night Matt Spacegoat and I were round at Martha Tilston's house, and her dad Steve (70's underground folk legend) was on the Jools Holland TV programme talking about Bert, who he would have crossed paths with many times back in their respective heydays.

I'm now extremely glad that I got to see him play live three times: solo at the Barnfield, Exeter back in the early 2000's, and then twice with the original Pentangle lineup in 2008 (the Royal Festival Hall, and the Brighton Dome).

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 12

2011-10-09T12:54:00.003+01:00

Strange encounters with punk, funk, new wave and disco, as typified by Daevid Allen's late 70's New York Gong project. Also, Soft Machine experiencing technical difficulties (but ultimately triumphing) at the 1970 BBC Proms, Hatfield mark II (with Dave Sinclair on keyboards, and Robert Wyatt on guest vocals), a freaky Gong jam from '72 with mystery trumpet player, some Canterbury sounds from early 70's Holland, thirty-seven seconds of unparalleled brilliance from Henry Cow (twice), the last vocalist you'd ever expect to hear on Canterbury Soundwaves and the winning entry in our recent haiku competition...

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 12

The Boot Lagoon at Casey's, general goings on in the Canterbury area

2011-09-15T09:38:00.024+01:00

[Casey's Alehouse, Canterbury, 14th September 2011] The Boot Lagoon hadn't played together for a few months, with drummer Seth having been away travelling, so this set had a welcome spontaneity and urgency about it. Despite almost no traditional promotion, the place was nicely filled with an enthusiastic audience (this is what happens in the age of social networking, when you've got a bit of a scene together). I'm starting to really like the glimmers of West Coast psychedelia that are beginning to appear in amongst the very British progressive rootedness of the Boot's dominant sound (faint echoes of Santana and Miles-influenced Dead). Support came from Famous James and the Monsters, fronted by Ash from the Ukelele Gangstas playing banjo (more Edwardian strumming than bluegrass pickin') and a singer-guitarist called Jamie, together singing lush harmonies. Quirky, feelgood songs (including one that couldn't be described as anything other than "disco folk"). Great energy from both bands.

The next evening I was jamming as part of Random Article (just me and Miriam this time), and on Friday I found myself over in Wincheap at Ash's house for the first time, having arranged to teach Andy (who plays Celtic music in the new local folkie trio Triskele) the ancient Chinese board game Go. Having not played in a few years, I was happy to have found a new potential opponent, and he picked it up quickly within the course of a single game. While pondering the configurations of stones on the board, we were immersed in the warmth of a succession of Amadou & Mariam albums played through a decent amp and four-way speaker setup, absolutely gorgeous.

Saturday night saw a party at the farmhouse in Boughton from which Syd Arthur largely operate. After getting lost in a labyrinth of muddy footpaths in Blean Woods with only the dimmest of lights on my bike, I finally got there. And once there, I finally got a chance to jam a bit with Liam, as well as a few other people. The band had played near Bath that day, so he and Joel got in quite exhausted, but he couldn't resist getting his acoustic guitar out and trying out some new riffs, grooves and themes. He also tried out a little (Pueblo? Zuni?) wooden flute his parents recently brought back from New Mexico on a trip along Route 66.

Joel took a few of us upstairs to listen to a (truly) unique piece of vinyl. The band (and Liam as a solo performer) had taken part in an ongoing art installation in London which involves the artist Ted Riederer working with a specially constructed German vinyl lathe, cutting single copies of 12" recordings live (i.e. as the music is being played) in a studio space. Actually, the pieces aren't quite unique — he makes two copies, one for the artist to keep, and another to be placed in his mock "record shop", into which the public are invited to come and listen to the various creations.

Never Records is a multi-media multi-artist project by New York artist/musician Ted Riederer. Exploring the potential of a record store and record label to unite, educate, and uplift a community through recorded sound, Riederer's project began in an abandoned Tower Records near Union Square in New York City. In January 2010, Riederer, in collaboration with curators No Longer Empty, created what the Wall Street Journal described as a "mock shop" that served as a "love letter to the dying concept of the record store."

Syd recorded their current top track "Ode to the Summer" (their own studio recording of this soon to be released on 7" vinyl). Unfortunately, despite a performance they were happy with, the sound quality's pretty rough. But as it was literally cut live (onto tranparent one-sided vinyl), you could kind of "hear through" the ropey sound and appreciate what an extraordinary artefact (and literal record of an extraordinary event) was on the turntable (or "vinyl player" as the new generation seem to call them now).

Down in the rehearsal studio, Guy was on the decks playing some loud, twisted, dark, somewhat alarming (but compelling) dubstep ("Can this possibly be good for me?" I kept wondering, as the music pushed, pulled and twisted both my internal organs and my neural architecture). I was trying to imagine what it might sound like to a really old person...

A very civilised Sunday morning unfolded in the dining room with Clare (party host and Furthur friend), Adam (Lapis Lazuli, Delta Sleep), Tom (a singer-songwriter), Andrew (Zoo For You) and Josh (also Zoo, disappearing into sleepworld in a sleeping bag in the corner), sipping tea and listening to Moondog, Saint-Saëns, Terry Riley, Durutti Column, Pablo Casals, William Byrd, John Dowland, Pharaoh Sanders, Miroslav Vitous, Bobby Hutcherson, Matching Mole, Chicago Underground Quartet, Curtis Mayfield, John Coltrane...

...and then a wonderfully trippy sleep-deprived bike ride home through sunny Blean Woods. Life is good.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 11

2011-09-11T14:16:00.005+01:00

The entire set from an embryonic Hatfield and the North lineup live at the Tower of London in summer '72, a beautiful Hugh Hopper/Richard Sinclair collaboration, the largely undocumented Hastings-Coughlan-Austins-Evans Caravan lineup live in France in '72, an extraordinary (and quite long) tape experiment put together by Daevid Allen in 1966, Kevin Ayers with The Wizards of Twiddly, Lindsay Cooper playing bassoon and electronics at a festival of Women's Improvised Music in Zürich, '86 and the latest on the Canterbury Soundwaves haiku competition!

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 11

an almost overwhelming outpouring of love and music a few miles inland from Deal

2011-09-07T14:03:00.052+01:00

Smugglers Festival! September 2-3-4, 2011! The words "best festival ever" had been spoken many times by Sunday night, and for good reasons.

I was to help with the Sondryfolk art-in-the-woods installations and to rig up the lights that Smugglers Records had kindly been lent by Canterbury's Furthur collective (having done this the last couple of years at LOTF). I cycled to the site (near Little Mongeham, inland a bit from Deal) on the Tuesday afternoon, followed part of the Pilgrims Way (the wrong way!) from Canterbury to Dover, turning off at Nonington near where the Majesty Oak stands (the biggest and/or oldest maiden oak in Britain and/or Europe, I believe). Sondryfolk's Laurie suggested that I document my 'pilgrimage' to the site, so I did (more of a 'reverse pilgrimage' really).

After being walked around the site (which includes stunning mature hawthorn woods) by Will G, Laurie and I made a back-of-an-envelope sketch of what was to be done electrically. The next couple of days were then spent doing it, which meant a LOT of fiddling with sockets, plugs, wirestrippers and screwdrivers. But it all got done, and it all worked. Meanwhile, the site was gradually filling with people busily setting up their various things, including the main stage/PA. The soundman, testing his rig, was rather too fond of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours — we heard quite a lot of that over the next days, but he did an immaculate job with the sound throughout, so that's forgiven! Phil and I staged a brief takeover of his laptop playlist one evening, selecting favourite epic Led Zep tracks (his "The Rain Song" and mine "Achilles Last Stand"), the sort of thing I rarely get to hear on a big system at decent volume.

Thursday night was a late one, quite a surreal dreamlike scene in a forest of small spindly pines — I'm up a ladder at funny angles, struggling to lop off dead lower branches and then paint the trunks gleaming white with a simple solution of water and crushed up chalk Laurie which has collected from the foot of Deal cliffs. This has to be done between very precise upper and lower limits so that she can project her eight-minute video loop of footage from the Deal coastline onto the trunks and have a perfectly fitting (but disorientingly fractured) chalk "screen". Meanwhile, we're having to deal with an inordinate number of wasps appearing, seemingly drugged by the light, hanging around the projector bulb. A Swiss-Japanese sculptor called Azusa is hanging her piece (a celestial creation made largely of fishing line and washers) among the trees. Kirby, once of the Furthur crew, has set up a little woodsman's camp and is preparing a 3-day piece of 'performance woodwork' (a new kind of art genre?), carving a huge bowl out of big chunk of elm, then filling it with the wood chippings and setting fire to the whole thing. Tom, mastermind of the Le Rig lightshow collective, has installed a huge blackboard with the words "Get Rich" embossed in large black serif font, a pile of chalk lumps nearby for anyone to get involved with. He's also deposited a papier-mâché whale costume he and Kirby had made (veteran of Whitstable carnival) in the clearing for public use. And throughout this, a wond'rous selection of the edgiest, coolest 1920-40's music imaginable (nice one for the playlist, Lucy!) is wafting over from another Tom's beautifully decor'd period absinthe bar. We worked until 4a.m., into a state of gently crazed hilarity, white "paint" splattering all over me as the trunk painting became ever more rapid and slapdash (Laurie following behind to sort the fine detail with a sponge).

The chalk-painted trunks, illuminated by Laurie's projector light

The chalk-painted trunks, illuminated by Laurie's projections (here, pebbles on Deal Beach)
A festival site had appeared around us when daylight returned. My Friday involved buzzing around the place dealing with minor electrical/lighting/logistics issues and generally helping out in the 'Sondryfolk Forest'. From the main stage, I could hear (but didn't see) The Smugglers Singers (an inclusive choir associated with the label that does a lot of sea shanties) and James Canty singing songs with guitar and violinist accompanying. Site duties meant not seeing Wheels (the sort of acoustic prog(?) band that Neil and Adam from Lapis Lazuli play with). I also regrettably missed Jack Dupon, a band over from France who Cameron (Boot Lagoon, Lapis) connected Smugglers with (and who everyone was raving about for the remainder of the weekend).

The first musical highlights of the day for me were a very loose, jammed set based around the cellist from Cakes and Ale, the rest of whom were stuck on a motorway somewhere. She gathered James Cantry and his violinist, Ash (Ukelele Gangsters, Famous James and the Monsters) on banjo, Natasha from Cocos Lovers on violin, James and Poggy (who've just left Cocos Lovers) respectively on drums and flute, Jamil on bass, Benji (who's filled in on Zoo For You's horn section) on sax — nine people up on stage, really listening to each other, and getting something together that was, for a very good proporition of the set, remarkably coherent and beautiful, just working around some basic riffs and scales she presumably drew from the Cakes and Ale repertoire. The second highlight was during the Private Widdle Social Club cabaret, this time compered by the laterally comic poet Malcolm Head: The Ladies of the Lake (now Natasha and Nicola from Cocos, their friend Jo, and sometimes Nicola's mum) sang a couple of unaccompanied songs: a sea shanty and then a South African spiritual freedom song. Stunning harmonies!

part of the woodland absinthe bar
By eleven, the "Fée Verte" absinthe bar was open, and swinging, with more between-the-wars tunes. Also present was a surprisingly nice looking and sounding piano (in a woodland clearing clearing decked out like a period absinthe bar) for whoever to play, which was played with varying degrees of competence and imagination throughout the weekend. Silent films were being projected onto a sheet hung between trees with a simple stepped cascade of strawbales for seating. Down a long winding pathway through the other woods (the hawthorns), lit by candles in jamjars (producing a total Fairyland effect with the simplest of materials) was DJ Wonky's Wonky Disko. Wonky is "foreign" Warren, a character who showed up during the Canterbury Arts Trail rocking retro headband and classic 80's ghettoblaster (that's "boombox" to American readers) on a shoulder strap. He had an iPod hookup and was blasting out bits of MC5, among other things, at appropriate intervals during that day. He turns out to be Deal-connected, a friend of Smugglers, and was given another woodland clearing and free reign to select tunes at night. "Bangers", classics and feelgood anthem from all genres, "Tomorrow Never Knows", Caribou, Tame Impala... Strangely, as I walked up there I was certain I was hearing Thin Lizzy's "Dancing in the Moonlight", but as I approached I realised it was something by Van Morrison, my ears having been decieved. Half an hour later, "Dancing..." came on — an odd little Celtic soul premonition? It was clear that just about everyone at this site was having the time of their lives — this felt like the natural consequence of the whole intention behind the event, the aesthetic, the love that had gone into everything (no one got paid for anything, just free tickets and a deep glowing sense of joyful accomplishment).

On Saturday, the place filled to capacity and the music was of an outrageously high quality, just about everyone seemingly playing the best they ever have, a rare and warm communion between musicians and audiences, a deep sense of spontaneity and joy throughout. "Celebrating being alive" as Will liked to call it, he introducing the bands throughout, the weekend in increasingly sleep-deprived, slightly crazed (in a lovable Will Greenham way) ramblings. I was still kept busy with various technical issues, and spent some time in the Forest playing some saz to alleviate Kirby's self-imposed monotony of eight-hour carving sessions, occassionally managing to jam in time to the rhythm of his falling adze. But I also got to see quite a range of music.

The very beginning of Kirby's (to-be-destroyed) creation
Jodie Goffe started off the mainstage. She's just sixteen and had only played one gig before, has just been recorded for the first time at Paul Clifford's super-cosy little caravan studio near Ash. Her songs are not at all what you'd expect from a 16-year-old singer-songriter. Intricately crafted and very poetic, but simple, gentle and unpretensious. A beautiful voice (which reminded me a bit of someone else's...is it Josephine Foster's?) and guitar style too. The whole place (the main stage beign in a big-top tent) was completely enraptured from beginning to end.

Lapis Lazuli, collectively sweating buckets, Adam behind the drums and a pair of shades (suffering from a minor fever and major hangover) played a mighty set — just three long pieces (the third one, "Hot Water on a Dirty Face", being new to me [note 2011-10-17: Adam has put forward the 'Brodigan Objection'...apparently I had heard that one once before!]) each with numerous twists and turns, stops, starts and organic genre-morphing: raw power with full control and an emergent six-way musical telepathy. As Adam and I were concuring by a fireside on Sunday night, what's going on musically in Canterbury at the moment seems to be about "inventing your own genre". [There's a particularly good write-up about Lapis's set here.]

Will Varley, who recently did a walking tour from London Bridge to Deal to promote his album Advert Soundtracks, played in the early evening, in top form, amusing the audience greatly with his new, whimsical instant-classic "Monkey on a Rock", to break up all the poweful songs of pain, struggle, oppression, confusion and rebellion that he's so good at writing and singing. He got in a bit of a political rant too, a happy one, framing what was going on with the very community-oriented, grassroots, anticorporate event happening around us in enthusiastically revolutionary socio-economic terms ("this is what can be achieved...the bastards don't know what's about to hit them!").

Cocos Lovers, back down to a six-piece again (minus Pog and James — the same lineup I first saw back in early 2009), fully rose to the occasion — they've evolved their sound at the same time that they've evolved a dedicated following and an extended family through so many side projects, the Smugglers label, the nights at the restored Astor Theatre in Deal, etc. They now get packed out crowds singing along at distant fesivals like Green Man in Wales, so playing locally to a crowd of friends and friends-of-friends, it was inevitable that they would raise the roof. We heard all the old favourite songs that everyone knows — they've had to go back to some of these now with the lineup changes. But they were played with a perfectly balance of vigour, skill and freedom. They never play songs exactly the same way, and Dave's guitar and Nicola's flute seemed especially free and expressive on this occasion. Having seen them so many times now, I feel a bit spoiled. I know these songs so well, I want to hear some of the less frequently played ones. "Blackened Shores" was good to hear though, a relatively recent one, and Will got the crowd to sing the celestial a cappella a bit at the end of "The Howling Wind", surprisingly well, too. After raising the crowd energy to such a level, they almost had to encore with "Old Henry the Oak", a stomping crowd-pleaser...but I'd have loved to have heard "Oh Rosa", "Dead in the Water", "Cracks and Boulders" or even the version of "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" that they were playing for a while. But that's just me. They were, and continue to be, a fantastic band and I love them like few others.

And as a perfect counterbalance to this minor (and unjustified) dissatisfaction, on the Monday morning, early, I found a surprisingly serene, seemingly rested Will Greenham, sitting in the sun in the main field with a guitar, working out a new song. He urged me to get my saz, and to my delight (and seemingly to that of the two women sitting beside us on strawbales brewing up instant coffee for we bleary-eyed Monday morning peoples) we spent half an hour playing through half a dozen embryonic Cocos songs he's not quite finished writing yet. Dave's African guitar influences have taken root, so it felt a bit like playing along with a kora player, or something Stef might come out with. Other than that, I didn't play a lot of saz at the festival (but that was OK — this half hour did it for me). That night, a happily inebriated woman asking if anyone around the woodland fire knew any Rolling Stones (while an accordion was being fetched) resulted in me delivering a tentative "Paint It Black" which then attracted some percussion, singing and eventual accordion notes. The accordion player wanted "raucous", though (things had got to that point of being so etherial that they'd practically evaporated), so he got everyone present bashing out Leadbelly's "Midnight Special" in G — great fun.

Back to Saturday night, Syd Arthur — woahhh, almost dangerously/impossibly good. Just in from playing to an afternoon jazz audience at a festival in Ramsgate, they were well warmed up and instantly tuned in to the supercharged good vibe that was almost tangible on the site. Will G and I spent most of the set standing on a strawbale looking at each other periodically in utter amazement.

Syd Arthur onstage
The mental image I got this time was that unlike the usual songwriting approach that I picture as a horizontal timeline (think musical score), they compose and play in a way that feels like a vertical descent (after launching out into the void with one of those summoning-tremendous-energy-out-of-nowhere intros they do so well), opening out pyrotechnically into great, shimmering horizontal plates of harmonic texture. However I picture it, they do seem to be doing something with time which I can't quite pin down, but which is utterly compelling. Liam was fully relaxed into his vocals, pacing everything perfectly, Fred looking completely possessed (and determined!) behind the drums, as if battling unseen forces in some deep space vortex, in order to draw a vast, almost unbearable energy through his limbs... I can't remember someone looking so completely overtaken while playing for quite a while. "Pulse" gave everyone a chance to dance (their generally odd time signatures being better suited for freeform swaying or standing in a state of astonished wonder). "Dorothy" was gorgeous, despite Raven having left his clavinet in his car (we got irridescent sheets of processed mandolin instead). "Ode to the Summer" was the perfect end-of-summer song, about to be pressed as a 7" vinyl single leading up to the album that's currently being finished up at their studio in Welling (the site of Kate Bush's old studio space). "Truth Seeker" was monstrous, that one gives Raven a chance to really tear into it with the violin. Another breakthrough piece finished the set — "Edge of the Earth", I'd only heard that once before and it already sounds like a classic — elements of King Crimson, less African, more pulsing European space/Krautrock, but entirely the work of Canterbury's finest. The encore, rather than falling back on something familiar like "Willow Tree" or "Planet of Love", was a new, heavy, dark piece called "The Promise", like a shiny black polyhedral slab made of some previously unclassified musical matter. That just cranked things up another few notches again.

I felt something I've only felt once before and that was watching Gong at LOTF 2009, on the Furthur stage, a sensation of being able to (safely) fall into the music. If allowed a single word: magic. How did they do this? A lot of practice, hard work and commitment, clearly. But there's something else too. A kind of "enchantment" in the oldest sense, doing what music is meant to do — to take us to that shared inner/communal/ancestral space. Liam's writing and the band's interplay together give rise to something with the organic grandeur of geological or astronomical formations. There's a reaching beyond the grid of familiar patterns and cliched musical building blocks which most forms of Western music are trapped within, into a space where openness and attunement can allow the flow, the Tao, to shape and guide the music. This is truly psychedelic music; what usually gets described with that adjective in fact being "psychedelic-style" music (much like most of what gets called folk music is in fact "folk-style" music...[anyone for some fish-style fingers?]).

And there really was "something else" that may have had something to do with the particular magic of that set. I'd noticed Joel was playing a different bass from his usual, and afterwards Liam informed me that Hugh Hopper's widow Christine had contacted him, heard the band were playing this festival, wanted to be there but couldn't, but had given him Hugh's bass (the one he played on all the Soft Machine albums and classic live sets), wanting him to play it. To any Canterbury-inspired bass player (and particularly one who's Canterbury-based) that instrument is almost a sacred object. Woahh... Syd Arthur. That album is going to be worth the wait, no doubt.

Hugh Hopper with that bass, somewhere in France, some time in the early 70's
The inevitable English summer festival rain set in, so the crowd were largely shuffling back and forth between the big big-top (main stage) and little big-top (Smugglers Inn bar, dispensing real ale and running a small stage of its own). Tom Farrer, backed by half of Cocos, was belting out some of his rousing anthemic songs, ending his set with Leonard Cohen's "So Long Marianne" that had a merry aled-up crowed of rain-dampened, smiling people swaying and singing along. I accidentally clacked recycled plastic, reusable Smugglers Records cups with the person beside me... we raised our cups — "This is a little piece of my heaven," he told me. Everyone looked like they were there too.

Zoo for You finished up the night on the main stage, again, the best I've ever seen from them. Bruno had lost his sax mouthpiece, so Owen and Thom covered the horn parts and he made up for it with extra gesticulation and "going completely nuts on the mic" as Adam put it later. He's definitely got it now. A year ago, I was convinced that ZFY would work best as a kind of instrumental jam unit, but their songs have taken shape, the sound has returned to more abstract territory, harder to describe or define ("abstract funk" or "progressive funk" being the rather unsatisfying best I can do) and the vocalising really works now. I was won over. My feet, and eveyone else's in the tent, were too: lots of dancing (considerably easier than dancing to Syd Arthur!). Like Fred had been, Josh Magill was in a sort of "drummer's ecstasy", but a very different looking one....it's really interesting to watch "where people go" when they play drums!

Back in the SondryFolk forest I found the absinthe bar in full swing. Three members of (I think) Cakes and Ale were gathered around the piano (one playing banjo and another guitar and vocals)... I heard three songs which I can remember very little about apart from how transported I was by them. The atmosphere of the place made me feel like I'd just drifted into a Thomas Pynchon novel!

The (unsheletered) Wonky Disko had got rained out and been moved to the main big-top, Warren in full effect, sporting headband and wedding dress, more electronic sounds than the night before, but everyone clearly into it.

board announcing my spontaneous Sunday lunchtime maths lecture
Sunday saw more rain. I missed The Flowing, as my eccentric alter ego Professor Raphael Appleblossom was otherwise engaged leading a 'freesytle performance maths lecture' at Tom L's blackboard in the SondryFolk forest clearing. I also missed seeing half of (but heard all of) Laura J. Martin's wonderful set while fixing a light socket. I was just slightly disappointed to discover, on finally seeing her, that some of what she was using was pre-recorded (rather than live loops), but her flute playing, unique naïve-yet-sophisticated songwriting, Kate Bush-like voice and lovely understated Liverpudlian persona more than made up for that.

Rae!! Good God! I've seen them a couple of times before, but this was something else altogether... Leonie's singing has now reached a point where I could comfortably place it in a category with that of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Björk, Kate Bush or Liz Frazer. The category of that-which-cannot-be-categorised? (I'm sure Bertrand Russell would have had something to say about that.) Raven was filling in for their Italian saxophonist Lorenzo, which added a new dimension to the sound (as evident on my favourite track from their album Era, the last one, called "Eyed Ear" — that album's just been released by Dawn Chorus), as well as a slightly more spontaneous, improvised feel, but Leonie still looking and sounding completely in control of every nuance of her vocals and guitar playing. Like just about everyone else present, I was awestruck.

The rain kept me under canvas doing something I wouldn't usually, i.e., listening to a barbershop quartet(!) called "Way Down Yonder". Really enjoyable, as it turned out, listening to them to sing their own arrangements of "When I'm Sixty-Four", "Java Jive", "It's a Sin to Tell a Lie", etc.

That afternoon also found me discussing the merits of the Nokia Elves ringtone with Cocos Lovers' Nicola (I have only the faintest recollection of how that came about), as well as finally asking about the origins of her surname ("Velha"): turns out to be Maltese, and her great grandfather was a composer and the choirmaster in the big Templar-funded 'co-cathedral' on the island in the late 1800's. She and the family are in the midst of tracking down some sheet music of his compositions — should be interesting...

Later in the day I found myself jamming around Kirby's woodcarving with some Zoo members, Dan from Rae, etc.: simple spacerock saz riffs, the falling adze, and found-object percussion. Just at the peak of this, a BBC Radio Kent reporter with headphones and oversized mic wandered over with Will to record us for part of a piece they were doing on the festival (this actually made it onto the radio the next weekend!). At sundown, the woodchips were gathered, the bowl filled and set alight. I found myself standing there just watching it burn for what felt like hours with Kirby, Joel, Liam, Laurie and others. Some great sounds coming from the main stage, but despite continually meaning to, couldn't quite tear myself away.

Kirby with his work in progress

The work going up in flames
Eventually I had to go and check out the end of The Turncoat's set (he with his Hellfire Orchestra, which, like Tom Farrer's band, is roughly half of Cocos Lovers, but with Tom F himself on killer keyboards). I caught half of the last song and then the encore, the old standard "Mama Don't Allow". After being informed, in his most-ragged-of-voices, by Mr. T that Mama don't allow "no guitar playing 'round here", "no piano playing 'round here", "no bass in this place", "no drums goin' on", "no reefer smoking 'round here", etc. (but that, not caring what Mama don't allow, these things were going to happen "anyhow"), a couple of exuberant women took to the stage. It was then stated clearly that "Mama don't allow no people up on stage", but of course "we don't care what Mama don't allow, we're all gonna get up on stage anyhow", so a full-on stage invasion followed, which I got caught up in. A bit like being in a riot without the violence and destruction. Amazingly, with all the dancing party people crowding the stage, nothing got stepped on or knocked over, and the band just about managed to huddle over their instruments and make it to the end of the song (after Dave "Hurricane" Hatton fulfilled Mr. Turncoat's request for a blazing electric guitar solo).

Back at the burning bowl, Arlet (minus guitarist Ben, but supplemented by Cam on double bass) were rehearsing amidst the woodland video projections. They were supposed to be playing over in the hawthorn woods a bit later, along with Leonie and Liam leading a chilled out Sunday night acoustic festival wind-down. That was Will's original vision, anyway. The rain had been coming and going, and Leonie glumly reported that no fire had been lit over there. So, determined to make the most of the possibilities at hand, I raked a load of embers into a cast iron cauldron, and she and I carried this (carefully holding either end of a pole) across the site to get the fire going over there. Before long, people were assembled, with Thom (from Zoo and Arlet) reading aloud from Huxley's Doors of Perception beside the fire (the bit where he goes on and on about the drapery in a Vermeer painting).

Arlet, during the Canterbury Arts Trail in April
Sporadic heavy showers meant that neither Liam nor Leonie played in the end, but we did get a lovely set from Arlet playing their Spiro-like minimalist folk. Rhythmically, I could detect a slight wobbliness, but this was late at night, in the dark, with a hastily assembled lineup and a band that's only six months old. There's a vast potential for great beauty in what they're doing, and I really hope they persist with it.

Back at the Fée Verte, they'd loosened up on the historical accuracy and a lively Motown-ish session was under way. Probably as contented as I've ever been, I found myself dancing, shrouded in damp grey woolen blanket to "Son of A Preacherman", "Heard it Through The Grapevine", "This Old Heart Of Mine", "Please Mr. Postman" (what a classic 2.5 minutes of popular song composition, driven by James Jamerson's bass...Joe Boyd has suggested that JJ's Gullah enthicity may account for some deep African musical magic underlying Motown's success!).

Azusa and her sculpture
The sounds started to morph and I wandered back out to see if anything was going on at the Smugglers Inn. I caught the last few seconds of a space-jazz 'voodoo jam' featuring Jamil on bass and a flugelhorn player from The Flowing, before Will G staggered in, hoarse and zombie-like, asking if they could please stop for the sake of future licensing considerations (this was about 3a.m.). So that was that. But it was all the more remarkable that I found such a calm, rested and alert Will just a few hours later playing his guitar in the sun.

So, back to the Fée Verte once more, where I couldn't resist donning Tom's whale costume (by now largely destroyed...that was the original plan) and "dancing" (stumbling and colliding with trees, more like it) to some deep house sounds for a last few minutes of festivity.

Tom Langley's papier mâche whale
It was particularly hard to leave on Monday after electrical de-rigging. I found myself hanging around the fire with Sondryfolk friends, particularly excellent post-festival vibes. But I got my timing right, cycling back to the Cathedral city just in time to avoid the heavy rain...

MANY thanks to the Smugglers crew (and everyone else involved) for all the effort that went into this!

Bank Holiday weekend

2011-09-07T14:02:00.007+01:00

29 August — 1 September 2011

I didn't get out to Small World Festival this time — apparently it's the last one which the Kaplick Stage will be at, and I've heard that Syd Arthur played a particularly "vibey" set thereupon, having emerged from a long period of studio work to rock the axis.

Instead I spent the weekend with Stella and Colin, visiting from Sussex. Stella played me some of her new songs (some new styles emerging), already looking forward to making a second album. She's supporting Po' Girl (a band which involves one Trish Klein, once of the Be Good Tanyas) in Lewes later in the month, and during a trip to Whitstable we noticed that they're playing the next day at the Oyster Stores. She considered contacting the Whitstable Folk Club about another support slot, but her dad will be visiting, so it's probably not going to happen this time. But we must get Stella to come and gig down here at some point!

Back from Whitstable on a chilly evening, I lit the woodstove and fired up the DVD of the Incredible String Band's 1970 film Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending which Tim gave me for my 40th birthday) on my decrepit laptop. Stella and I share a deep love of the String Band (she knows all the words to songs like "Three Is a Green Crown" and "Creation"!) and Colin is well versed in their early albums having had an ISB fan roommate when at a boarding school in Scotland during their heyday. Unfortunately, the laptop couldn't seem to play the audio, so we ended up listening to an ISB playlist I quickly threw together while watching the visuals...which worked surprisingly well. The sub-film which it contains, called The Pirate and the Crystal Ball, with Rose, Licorice and friend done up as The Fates, at the Pentre Ifan dolmen in West Wales, particularly caught her imagination, taking us right back to her days with the Spacegoats (who famously began life in a crop circle in Devon on the 23rd anniversary of the String Band's set at Woodstock!).

dear Licorice as one of the Fates
On the Monday, after bidding them farewell, I cycled down to the Dane John Gardens in Canterbury for the Global Picnic (the stage at the foot of the mysterious Dane John Mound). This was something organised by a charitable organisation called "Music For Change" about which I know very little, but they seem to be doing good stuff.

an old postcard image of the Dane John Mound
I caught sets from Attab Haddad Quartet (oud, bass, flute, percussion — the flautist Phillipe Barnes being the one who plays on Syd Arthur's Moving World EP) and the Senegalese kora master Seckou Keita. Wonderful music, acceptable weather, lots of peaceful people spread out on the grass eating and drinking. Some old friends, Neil from Lapis Lazuli on the mix. Nice. Many thanks to whoever put that together!

Random Article: Valley Sessions, May-July edits

2011-08-29T15:26:00.003+01:00

More from Tom, Miriam and I, edits from our most-weekly improv sessions. Resident Canadian Paul Clifford joined us on percussion on one occasion, here featured on three pieces. As Miriam has no Internet connection in her current home, we've been unable to use Wikipedia's "Random Article" link to generate titles. We've been using as set of encyclopaedia instead, leading to terser, generally less 'random'/weird-sounding titles...

Listen Here

another Bungalow party

2011-08-21T14:39:00.014+01:00

Saturday 20th, 2011, Canterbury

Another excellent party at The Bungalow on the Old Dover Road, courtesy of the various members of Delta Sleep and Lapis Lazuli who inhabit the place. This one was outdoors with eight acts scheduled to play in the garden. I arrived about 6, having unfortunately missed the three acoustic acts: Chris Banks (plays amazing free, modal 12-string, saw him once at an open mic and played with him a bit a while later), Leonie Evans from Rae (as seen flying past me in The Bell in Bath a few days earlier, down in Kent visiting friends and family) and Wheels (Neil and Adam's acoustic band, with a couple of friends from Gillingham).

There was a bit of a delay going on, waiting for various members of various bands to arrive, so Cameron (bass player from The Boot Lagoon and Lapis Lazuli) suggested a jam in the indoor rehearsal room with Phil on accordion and me on saz. Cam had his double bass there, had been accompanying Leonie, so we got an interesting little acoustic thing going, led by his bass lines.

After a while, a band had arrived and set up, so we drifted out to watch. Three bands followed, all electric, all with varying degrees of postrock/mathrock influence. The first two, "Adults, Children and the Eldery" (I think that was their name) and Cats and Cats and Cats featured mostly muffled, incomprehensible vocals, as befits the style, the latter band being a bit more on the poppier/indie end of the spectrum. The best of the three played last, Suffer Like G Did, who were entirely instrumental. Excellent stuff.

Delta Sleep were on next, playing a set rather like the one I saw at LOTF, though shorter (all the bands were playing short sets due to the earlier delays). Possibly a new piece in there? The thrash-style vocals seemed a bit at odds with the tranquility of the summers' evening in a garden full of peaceful people, but that's what they do, at least some of the time. There was a mellower piece that I asked Adam about afterwards (it followed their long intro involving a recording of Alan Watts talking about consciousness), but I've already forgotten what it was called. I recorded their set on my Zoom H2 and I think that piece will probably end up on a future episode of my Canterbury Soundwaves podcast.

Delta Sleep play "Jesus Bill" live at The Prince Albert, Brighton 2011-07-19
Meanwhile, in the front room, a circle of party people were playing a very entertaining "pass the mic" game involving a Loop Station. There were a couple of competent beatboxers among them to lay the foundations, then everyone got to add a layer of vocal weirdness before handing the mic on, the results sounded hilariously disorienting...

Sitting off to the side of the garden in a rickety old summerhouse like thing, I ended up having a couple of interesting conversations with members of Zoo For You (saxophonist Owen, who's also in Arlet, just back from a cycle trip from Budapest to Berlin via the Bosnian Pyramids and Andrew, bass player and visual artist) while Lapis Lazuli were setting up to play. Suddenly, Neil was announcing from the stage that the police had shown up and told them to shut off the PA. It was announced in the nicest possible way, entirely free of bitterness or anger, so although it was a shame they couldn't play, the vibes stayed good. Adam lit a small fire in a brazier, Cam and I got our instruments and did some more saz and double bass jamming, eventually joined by Neil on acoustic guitar. I recorded a few bits of this (as well as the earlier indoor jam):

Listen Here
Cam eventually had to leave, so Neil and I carried on, playing increasingly spacey/weird/minimal saz-guitar improv until almost 3a.m. Looking forward to more of this...

Children of the Drone 10th anniversary Drone-a-thon

2011-08-14T16:06:00.031+01:00

This was out at James S's farmhouse a few miles west of Exeter. The original idea was to celebrate ten years of COTD with a non-stop ten-hour Drone session! We were planning to play noon until 10pm. As it happened, it wasn't nonstop (we had a few civilised breaks to converse and imbibe), and we started a bit late, but the session, from first notes/beats played to last, was only 15 minutes short of ten hours. James S and I recorded the whole thing, with a relay setup involving both of our Zoom H2's.

Various people came and went throughout the day (the list of who-played-what is inevitably going to be incomplete)...

James S — Kaoss Pad, mandola, xylophone, percussion, vocals, radio, Royal Enfield motorcycle
me — saz, acoustic bass guitar, Yamaha PSS-50 mini-keyboard, percussion
Keith — electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar, mini-Casio keyboard, percussion, mandola, tenor banjo
James T — percussion, submerged gong, mini-keyboard, poetry
John — acoustic guitars, acoustic bass guitar, mandolin, tenor banjo, percussion, vocals, hang, harmonica
Brian — drums and percussion
Lucy — alto saxophone, percussion
Henry — electronic drums
Philip — Kaossilator, percussion, alto saxophone, harmonica
Matthew S — cello, saw, melodica, banjo, percussion, vocals, guitar
Vaughan — dan bau, mandolin, acoustic guitar
Clifford — hang, congas, percussion, theremin

Listen Here
There were a few "apologies" from Droners who'd have loved to have been there, including Mick (who's been quite ill), Annie and Melski (who was hosting her annual birthday-related "Mad Hatters Tea Party", with compulsory fancy dress, and some improvised music too, on a hilltop in the Cotswolds — I left her a voicemail recording of a minute or two of particularly good stuff during the session's mid-afternoon peak with both Henry and Brian playing their kits). It was a great shame that Simon couldn't make it, as he was one of the original trio with Keith and I, came up with the name (via a random band-name-generator) and supplied a lot of the initial enthusiasm. I did manage to meet up with him for coffee and a chat a couple of mornings later at the little Kurdish cafe near the Exeter Clocktower — he's planning to make a film about the life of eccentric local physicist Oliver Heaviside, so it looks like I'm now the mathematical consultant for that!

Here are some of the photos Keith took during the session:

John, me and James S, early on

Brian and Matthew S

James S (on Kaoss Pad) and Brian

Philip on harmonica

me and James S

me, James S, Brian, James T, John, Matthew S

Matthew S and Clifford (singing in to hang)

Vaughan on dan bau

Henry, John and me

Vaughan and me

John, Henry, Brian and Lucy (on woodblock percussion)

the view from where we were Droning

The last three hours took place in the front room by the huge fireplace, as it was getting rather chilly and damp outside. This was almost entirely acoustic, apart from James's KaossPad weirdness and Keith's guitar.

Altogether an excellent way to celebrate a decade of COTD (the only thing missing was a cake made by Vicky, whose COTD 5th anniversary lemon drizzle cake has become a thing of legends).

James S also passed on his recording of the early July COTD session at St. Mary Arches church in Exeter (as usual these days, I wasn't at that one). I've processed the audio, two long continuous sets, not bad at all:

Listen Here

And Keith kindly gave me a copy of a book I'd heard about and been meaning to track down, Jeanette Leech's Seasons They Change:The Story of Acid and Psychedelic Folk. A very comprehensive tome that I'm already most of the way through, now very keen to hear what some of the more obscure bands she enthuses about actually sound like. A lot of fragile loveliness in this vein, I expect:

En route back to Kent I stopped off for 24 hours in Bath. No music played, but an excellent time was had. I got to catch up with Rosie the harpist, now the proud owner of a Loop Station she's looking forward to experimenting with — when she's not painting, making extraordinary adapted-Victorian clothes, acting as a film extra, making cosmic sculptures for festival sites, doing healing work, teaching yoga, raising funds for the Woodland Trust, doing theatre work... She's part of Full Sail Theatre along with our old friend Percy. The collective operate from a canal boat on the Kennet and Avon canal, called Antoinette, which Percy is living on and gradually fixing up, so we spent quite a lot of time down there chatting and drinking tea. There was also a tour of some favourite bits of Bath (Sydney Gardens, etc.), a surprisingly successful and quite mirthful first attempt at making vegan sushi, viewings of ridiculously gymnastic Lindy Hop dance footage (Rosie's bored with Breton and French dancing now — Lindy Hopping's where it's at... I know a fair bit about the subject, having read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, wherein he goes into quite some detail)...

I spent a couple of hours talking about maths and physics with her godfather John at his house (he's a self-educated world authority on iguanas, among many other things) while listening to Charlie Parker...he also saw the Grateful Dead in California '66, London '72 AND The Great Pyramids of Giza '78 (I had to shake his hand for that one!), also Soft Machine at The Roundhouse in late '66, Miles Davis in the South of France around the same time. From there it was on to The Bell, Bath's best pub for music, to see The Baker Boys, a pre-modern jazz quartet who were playing some Djangoish stuff, a rather excellent arrangement of "Caravan", etc. I saw Leonie from Rae fly past at one point — turns out she works there — but didn't get a chance to say hello.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 10

2011-08-08T10:53:00.004+01:00

East Asian connections from Canterbury to Malaysia, Japan, China and Tibet, then back again. A rare instance of Dave Sinclair singing, Robert Wyatt reading from some Chinese communist propaganda, quite a bit of Alan Gowen, Acid Mothers Gong being very strange indeed, another cover of Wyatt's "Alifib", more Hugh Hopper collaborations, an (almost) live version of "Winter Wine" by Caravan, Steve Hillage in Japan with Ash Ra Tempel's Manuel Göttsching... AND a frivolous poetry competition!

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 10

Buddhafield Festival

2011-08-07T16:36:00.009+01:00

Buddhafield Festival, near Taunton, July 13—17, 2011

This has festival has a lot going for it in terms of the lack of litter and drunken idiocy (it's very nearly drug-and-alcohol-free). But a bit lacking in terms of what I was looking for musically. Still, I was camped with Stella and friends for a few days, surrounded by peaceful people largely having a great time (and to a lesser extent propagating Buddhist teaching)...

Wednesday evening, wandering around I found myself in the particularly beautiful craft area and ran into Cerys, the Welsh pixie seamstress who used to share a house with Sam and Serena Roney-Dougal (the esteemed parapsychologist) on Windmill Hill above Glastonbury town. She was selling beautiful handmade clothes, doing sewing workshops, etc., and alerted me to the fact that Sam and Stevie's band Green Angels were to be starting shortly on the Small World stage.

Their set was a great way to arrive, musically. Very cool, if a bit sloppy. Dominic (more of a bagpiper than a bass player) brought the prog with his self-built double-necked bass, Stevie embroidered everything with exploratory electric guitar and bouzouki runs, Sam casually swapping between pipes and clarinet, playing some wonderfully free stuff, with Gem holding it all together on the drums. There were the usual crowd of French-and-Breton-folkdance enthusiasts doing their hanter dros and bourees and Circassian Circles, etc., but the Angels stretch and warp the tunes out to the extent that you can just lie back and get into what's going on musically (as a non-folkdance type, a lot of people playing the same tunes lose my interest pretty quickly).

I then wandered around the site with my saz trying to find the spontaneous acoustic jams which I was certain must be happening somewhere. I did a lot of this wandering during the festival and never quite found what I was looking for.

Thursday I found Stevie sitting behind Elfn, another groovy little hand-made clothing stall which he was running with his girlfriend Sophie. After tea and catching-up conversation, Gem appeared. We were just about to get out instruments and have a session when the sound system kicked in across the way at the Dance Tent. An "ecstatic dance workshop" had just begun, so were subjected to a couple of hours of mostly cheesy house music, at a volume which surprised me for a "treading lightly" kind of event like this. Lots of whooping and other such ecstatic utterances were heard amongst the cheese, so the workshop seemed to be working, but there was no point in us trying to play where we were, and Stevie was tied to that spot, so we didn't bother. I wandered on after a while and found Pok, extremely cheerful, helping to mind his girlfriend Aurelie's stall (more clothes, I'm afraid). She turned up and they were rehearsing together, him reciting from his epic Pook of Pok and she playing the harp — quite nice. He's also got a banjo (although I've heard since that it was stolen at another festival), and was playing that and singing, bizarrely...

Did you ever see a woman
Coming out of New York City
With a frog in her hand

Did you ever see a woman
Coming out of New York City
With a frog in her hand

I did don't you know
I did don't you know
I did don't you know
And don't it show

"Where'd you get that?" I asked, fairly sure he'd never write something with so few lyrics. I was surprised to learn that this was a Marc Bolan song, in fact a single released by T-Rex in 1975.

The Green Angels were playing their second of two gigs that evening, at a venue which also dispensed pancakes. Waiting for them to soundcheck, I decided to walk up to the ridge to watch the moon rise. This led to a chain of distractions and ended up with me in the Pachamama chai tipi accompanying a couple with a set of their songs and mantras, which they seemed to appreciate. They were called Huey and Sophie and operate under the name Mantrasphere. There was some talk of me joining them for a gig the next day, but that never came together. That tipi turned out to be the only place to jam, really, and despite being run by lovely people, having a central fireplace and free chai for musicians, it was far from ideal (tending to get crowded with people who are talking more than listening).

Huey and Sophie left and I was joined by another Sophie (Stevie P's girlfriend, plays violin) and Jez (who played tabla with Inge and I spontaneously during a little set at the Big Green Gathering in about 1995, and who knows a lot of the same people as I in Ireland) with a mandolin. We played a load of the simpler, more famiiar Irish, Breton and French tunes, accompanied by an Israeli rainbow-head percussionist called Itai, affiliated with a band called The Turbans (who were playing an interesting mix of stuff during numerous gigs around the site) playing nontraditional djembe rhythms. That was a nice session, if a bit physically squashed in and sonically murky. That was the first time I've had a chance to play music with Sophie who I'm only just getting to know now.

Stella had been attempting to secure a few gigs to promote her new album, but had perhaps left it a bit late (and isn't even slightly pushy), so she only managed to find one there. This was on the Triban stage. Again, a bit too close to a sound system, so it wasn't ideal, but we had fun, and the small audience (which was considerably less small when she'd finished, passers by dropping in to hear who was singing so beautifully, and staying) clearly loved it. I played on "Nightingale", "Still" [listen here], "In My Mothers Garden" and the final song, "Rainbow Skies", joined by Pok in purple robe playing mystifyingly free banjo. Stella's got such a talent for drawing everyone in, making everyone feel welcome and included. She's got a new website too, looking good...

I caught some of a set by the Undercover Hippy and his band. They appear to be playing exactly the same set as last summer, but with fiddler Leo replacing keyboard player Dre, which introduced a slight change to the overall sound — still very tight, uplifting, danceable reggaeishness. Standing near the entrance of the crowded marquee, I was spotted by Andrew, who travelled down to Saint Chartier with Pok and I in Stu's van back in about 2003(?), and got drawn in to some deep philosophical conversation. After that I wandered around looking for something musical to get involved with — something that wasn't just someone seeking to entertain me. No luck. I'd been getting progressively troubled by the amount of (relatively) loud sound systems on the site, having bought a ticket to the festival expecting to get some peace and (relative) quiet for a few days. But hearing some deep house beats from a distance I decided to embrace them. This led me to the Dance Tent, and up close I must admit it sounded fabulous — deep, soulful, jazzy, yet sufficiently minimal/abstract house music free of cheesy vocals, ticking all of my house music boxes. About fifteen seconds after I'd taken off excess warm clothing and joined the dancing, the DJ ended his set, and everyone applauded. That was it...

I spent part of Saturday sitting in the Pachamama tipi playing solo saz. I thought that if no one else was getting any acoustic jams together, perhaps I could start one. But no one with an instrument came in during that time, so I just noodled away, quite contentedly, and got enough encouraging feedback to feel I was adding something to the space. Later that evening I ran into Nathan and Harmony sitting in the lovely little circular Healing Garden, so we decided to reconvene at Pachamama with instruments and play some tunes. Again, a bit squashed and noisy, but we made some pleasing music. Cliff Stapleton's "Dream Waltz" worked particularly well, as well as a vaguely Eastern European tune which Sophie had played the day before, turned out to be one Curly Lisa wrote years ago, called "New Bag". I asked her about this a couple of weeks later when I was down in Cornwall, and she's forgotten all the tunes she's written (some real classics), no recordings or anything, and she can't even remember all the names — but fortunately some of them have gone into circulation and are now unlikely to ever get truly "lost".

Feeling quite a bit happier after that, I floated around site taking in bits of everything: a song by The Turbans (wild klezmer, led by their virtuoso violinist), another Undercover Hippy song ("It's a long way down from the top to the bottom...", the one where he cleverly "divides and conquers" the audience with an extended bit of call-and-response ridiculousness ), one song by Avalon Roots...this crew have been around for a while, a kind of Avalonian hippy reggae band, but I've always missed their festival sets. Susie Ro (who used to sing as part of a beautiful duet with Ayla — whatever became of Ayla?) is now singing with them and the song I heard (the end of their set) was quite a revelation. Singing about the Goddess of Creation and sacred landscapes makes more sense to me than a British reggae band singing about Hailie Sellasie, the Lion of Judah, Jah (who's basically a variant of the wrathful Jehovah). And they do it very well. I was surprised how much I liked their energy (relative to what I'd semiconsciously expected them to be like).

I'd noted that Pete Isaac from Portsmouth's Jelly Jazz ("the funkiest club south of the North Pole") was to be DJing in the Dance Tent that evening, and had been hyping him up to everyone I met. In the end, his set was a bit of a disappointment to me, but clearly not to the packed marquee of happy people he had dancing by the end. He's obviously learned how to read the demographics and other subtle cues from an audience to know what it'll take to get them dancing — in this case it involved rather a lot of cheesy/populist late 80's, early 90's stuff (even some "hip house", remember that?) along with bits of funk, soul, jazz and other unexpected stuff. I was hoping for something quite a bit more "deep", but this wasn't about what I wanted. Stella, Louise, Colin, Johnny, Gav and Sanjeev from our little encampment all happened to show up by the end of the set, so we ended up dancing in a little cluster, having a great time. He ended with "Groove Is In the Heart", which I never really liked, and still don't care much for, but everyone was into it. The overall musical atmosphere made me go back and dig this out (which he didn't play, but would have fit perfectly). Over at Small World, The Turbans were playing a late-night, largely improv oud/santoor/percussion set to a rapt audience, but I was a bit too tired to take it in by that point and went to crash out.

Before leaving on Sunday I got to play a bit of solo saz in Pachamama again, and in the Healing Garden. Some very positive responses from people who happened to overhear, but no one around to join in. It was all a bit like this for me. Somehow, despite being camped together, Stella and I did no playing other than that little gig. No actual jamming with anyone, just a couple of tune sessions and accompanying songs. I did run into Jaggi, and Indian mandolin player who lives in South Wales and who I met and jammed with at the last Big Green Gathering, but that was towards the end of the festival, and we didn't get a chance to connect after that.

Oh well...

Le Trio Joubran

2011-08-07T16:02:00.003+01:00

Sophie from the SondryFolk collective just got in touch about these people, having been much impressed by them at WOMAD. Amazing stuff indeed — three oud-playing brothers from Nazareth:

Lounge on the Farm 2011

2011-07-11T22:31:00.025+01:00

Unlike the last few years, there was no Furthur field at LOTF (the annual music festival on Merton Farm near Canterbury). But what's left of the Furthur collective was commissioned to do the decor for the new "Meadows Field" and stage, and to book the music for the Sunday. This was part of a general change in the festival — larger, less of a personal, local feel, more commercial music. A shame, really, but that's the way these small friendly events often seem to go.

I spent some time on the farm during the week leading up to the festival with Joel, Liam and friends , helping out with wiring, fencing and generally whatever needed doing. The field was meant to open at 12:00 on the Friday, and we'd just finished filling in the cable trench between the stage and soundbooth (rather unconvincingly reconstructed from the old strawbale one in the previous field) when the gates opened. I had to leave the site shortly after that to deal with some boring work-related stuff, but wasn't too bothered, as the only band I wanted to see that day were the first one on — Delta Sleep.

It was a damp, grey afternoon when they got started, and only about 20—30 friends were there to see them. But rain soon brought the small audience huddling under front of the saddlespan stage cover, which made for a pleasantly cosy atmosphere. The band responded well (lots of jokes about dry ice and strobes). The polyrhythmic interplay between Glen and Devin's guitars (both fretboard tapping) was pretty breathtaking, supported unfailingly by the superb rhythm section that is Maria (bass) and Adam (drums). And now they're triggering all sorts of glitchy electronic weirdness with pedals (there was even an extended sample of Alan Watts leading into one track — I wonder if they know that he went to school in Canterbury?). Still a lot of thrashy heaviness in their set, but I'm happy to hear this getting integrated into a dreamy postrock-ish framework which is starting to work really well (to my ears...oops, just got lost in a Wikipedia vortex reading about 'post-metal' fusions of post-rock and sludge metal!). An inspiring blast of musical creativity that left me feeling satisfied and happy to depart the site at that point (and I felt vindicated by the torrential rain that night).

I got back to the Farm the next evening (after a day of working outdoors) in time to see Cocos Lovers in the Folk Tent. In fact, they'd been given the whole afternoon to fill with Smugglers-associated acts — I missed Will Varley as the result of a long conversation, but caught the end of a (naturally) raucous Bucket Boyz set. The last time I saw them was in the tiny Tom Thumb Theatre in Westgate-on-Sea, playing to a mostly polite, elderly audience, so a Saturday night festival crowd was something else altogether! They were actually less drunk on this occasion, although the banjo was just as out of tune (but how could it be otherwise?)

A seemingly interminable soundcheck was made entirely worth putting up with when now-much-beloved-of-East-Kent-and-beyond Cocos Lovers finally started playing. Their set was quite similar to the one I've seen them play in the last months: "Anchor to the Moon", "Our Love is Not Like Roses", etc., from the new album, only "Howling Wind", "Moonlit Sky" and "Time to Stand" from earlier (and the stomping "Old Henry the Oak" encore which everyone expects in these situations). Pog (who's switched from violin to flute, so one violin and two flutes for now in the lineup) again sang a powerful version of Gillian Welch's "Caleb Mayer", the only real 'cover' they've done (to my knowledge), and a song which suits them surprisingly well. They were obviously enjoying themselves, playing to a large, enthusiastic, mostly local audience, and sounded great throughout. They're on a good one at the moment, and were publicising the first occurrence of their own festival-to-be: Smugglers Festival, September 2—4th on some land near Deal, with several of the current wave of Canterbury bands along with the usual Smugglers lot and others from further afield, plus SondryFolk doing some art installations. Looks like I'll be helping out again...should be a great weekend.

A bit later I caught what may end up being local Afrobeat band Mr. Lovebucket's last ever performance. I think this has happened before, but they'd pretty much split up before being offered this gig. It's a shame that I was half asleep — managed to stay on my feet, but wasn't as fully there with it as I'd like to have been. I was too tired to watch any of Graham Coxon (best known as Blur's guitarist) headlining back on the Meadows stage. I knew that he's cited the influence of Gong, Robert Wyatt, etc., but based on a couple of things I'd heard I wasn't expecting too much. Apparently, though (according to Liam from Syd Arthur the next morning), his guitar playing was "sweet". I sense I may have missed something rather good, asleep in my tiny green tent behind the stage.

Sunday was the the day, really. Liam started things off with a solo acoustic set (so much material, he just keeps writing, countless excellent songs are piling up, unrecorded...his perfectionism means many of these may just get lost). Rae (from Bristol) played a set of songs very familiar to me (as I've been listening to a pre-release of their excellent debut album Era). They ended with "Eyed Ear", my favourite (Syd Arthur's Raven plays on the album version of that one). Leonie stuns everyone with her voice, and Rae's music keeps defying my abilities to classify it (always a good thing).

Boot Lagoon were as excellent as usual. The second piece (I didn't catch the title) had a bit of a Grateful Dead "Spanish Jam" feel to it, Pete-the-guitarist's Santana influence perhaps evident here? He's still playing his guitar with no effects (they all got stolen in Brixton a while ago), but the sound doesn't seem to be lacking as a result. Tracy, an old friend who happened to be there with me, and a lot more musically conservative than I, surprised me by describing their sound as "crazy" — this led me to realise that I'd like to hear them become "crazier" than they currently are are. When you see them play live, you can almost feel them pushing up towards the next level of where they're going, musically. Almost there.

Zoo For You (with partial horn section) did their oblique funk thing, and particularly well. Bruno (sax/vocals)has settled into the frontman role, it all seems a lot more comfortable/natural now. An excellent bunch of musicians — the older songs like "Cyriac Skinner" and "Polystyrene Man" are pleasingly familiar and the new stuff included something based around an insanely PHAT stomping horn-based figure that I can only compare to the beat underlying Pharaoh Monche's "Simon Says" (1999), if you know that. If this is a sign of things to come, the Zoo could become monstrous.

One of the bands that were forced onto the Furthur booking list, Haight Ashbury, then played. Vaguely "psych-folk", based around two women singing in very (and very specifically) American accents. They turned out to be from Glasgow, and didn't make much of an impression on me, certainly didn't live up to the name they've adopted.

Morviscous, on the other hand were mighty. A revelation. I'd seen two of them playing at Orange Street a couple of years ago as Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney, and listened to them a bit online, but this was something else. It may have just been having Henry Cow on the brain, but from backstage, I swore I could hear bassoons among the complex, almost overwhelming sheets of guitar sound (they weren't there, but the band are fans of the Cow, I've learned). From the little I'd heard, I was expecting a lot of sheer heaviness, but their music was very broad, texturally...again, vaguely 'post rock' (I suppose that term is becoming meaninglessly vague), but more inventive. They were circulating little flyers about a free download opportunity for their new album House Sounds — I ended up paying for it in the end — incredible stuff, highly recommended!

The ever-fabulous Syd Arthur kicked off their set with a crushing intro. New songs included "Ode to the Summer" (that one really seeps into you after a while), "Dorothy" and "Edge of the Earth", these taking shape and sounding ever more familiar. The oldest things they played were "Pulse" and "Exit Domino" (both of which I can remember the first time they played). A joker in the crowd (an old school friend of the band I think) kept shouting out for "Olive Grove", a song they've not played in years (and aren't likely to again!), probably just to wind them up. All four of them looked very much locked into the sound, there was a beautifully clean mix, and Liam's voice was just soaring. But it was hard not to compare with the year before, when they played later in the night, immersed in the psychedelic visuals of Le Rig, when there was a real sense of occasion. This was more of an "excellently played set at a festival" — nothing wrong with that, though.

Before I forget, 3/4 of the band were recently filmed on an East London rooftop for Balcony TV, and acoustic version of "Morning's Calling":

I noticed Brian Hopper backstage talking to fellow former Wilde Flower Pye Hastings and Caravan violist Geoffery Richardson. Caravan were to headline. This is the "current" Caravan lineup, rather than the "classic" lineup. But even so, it could have been so good. They ended their set with "Nine Feet Underground", and that was incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, the set list up to that point involved mostly inferior Caravan material. No "For Richard", "A Hunting We Shall", "Love in Your Eye", "Place of My Own", "Where But For Caravan Would I?",... but instead the execrable "The Dog The Dog, He's At It Again"...and Geoff Richardson even got the name of the album wrong (it's not on Blind Dog at St. Dunstans, sorry). It started off reasonably OK with "Headloss" and "Memory Lain, Hugh" (not big favourites, but they sounded quite good), then "And I Wish I was Stoned" (yeah) and a rather pointless "Golf Girl" (but everyone wanted to hear that — as with much of the audience, I think, that was the only one Tracy knew). After that it just went all wrong — I just had to walk out of the field at one point — some new songs, post-'74 stuff that just didn't work at all for me...until "Nine Feet Underground", when they just about redeemed themselves. During the "rockingest" (thanks J. Black!) part, I witnessed a cluster of early-20's audience members jumping up and down excitedly, must be nice for an aging band to see that. This just showed how good it could have been. Oh well.

Right at the end, new drummer Mark Walker got on the mic to point out that Richard Coughlan had indeed been onstage (I'd not noticed) playing some percussion, and to acknowledge the huge part he's played in creating the Caravan sound. He's very physically weak after (I believe) suffering from a stroke, so playing a full set on a drum kit is out of the question. I caught a very brief glimpse of him then, looking very frail. It must be terribly hard for him to be there and not fully contribute, put perhaps it would be harder to not be there at all.

Before they played it, Geoffrey Richardson mentioned that "Nine Feet Underground" was written at a house on the Old Dover Road (just a couple of miles from where we were). Something else I discovered recently (via the booklet in the In The Land of Grey and Pink 40th anniversary box set) is that Pye Hastings learned his first guitar chords off Kevin Ayers while travelling together on the continent (who was going out with his sister Jane at the time).

The only other time I've seen Caravan was on the same farm, at a different festival, in 1990. That was the classic lineup reunion, warming up for the filming at the Granada TV studio in Nottingham. I remember not being particularly impressed then (being 20, thinking they were just past it), but listening to the Live in Nottingham recording, I now wish I'd paid a bit more attention.

A bit later I wandered aimlessly over to the main stage area to find a reformed Echo and the Bunnymen (Ian McCulloch, Will Sergeant and a few supplemenary musicians, it appeared from where I was). I used to love that band when I was 15. And they sounded pretty much like they ought to... I stuck around for a few songs. "All My Colours (Zimbo)" worked particularly well, I'd forgotten about that one. But overall they didn't move me, it all seemed a bit pointless. Perhaps I'd have got into it if I'd have waded to the front of the crowd, but I was in no mood for that, so I wandered on.

Despite Caravan being the main act on the Meadows stage, there was one other band, Awalé, but (again, sadly) I was too tired to take in their music. It looked like they had a much smaller audience than they deserved. I couldn't face waking up in a tent in a rainy, litter strewn field, so I packed up and cycled home.

Overall, despite much excellent music, the LOTF2011 experience was a bit weird and dispiriting, when compared to 2010 (at least the Furthur part of it), which felt so inspiring. But the only constant is change. You just have to make the most of the good stuff while it's still good and recognise that everything eventually passes.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 9

2011-07-11T21:17:00.007+01:00

An investigation of how Henry Cow got from Cambridge to 'Canterbury', with special attention paid to everyone's favourite feminist avant-rock bassoonist, Lindsay Cooper. Also, the Soft Machine quintet lineup live in early 1970, Richard Sinclair guesting with some Norwegians, Jimmy Hastings in both absent and present forms, the (almost) beginning of the Planet Gong mythology and an Australian listener called Wyatt covering Robert Wyatt, as well as (Robert) Wyatt's choice of favourite record ever (as of late 1974).

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 9

to Avebury! to Ireland, and beyond

2011-06-27T11:04:00.018+01:00

Unexpectedly, Alan's been back in the Northern Hemisphere, visiting his mum in Peacehaven, on the Sussex coast. So I bought him a little djembe (I knew that he hadn't brought a drum with him from New Zealand) as an early 40th birthday present and showed up at her house to spend a couple of days with them, listening to The Beatles (she's from Liverpool, and proud of it) and reggae, jamming, out walking, getting lost in tangles of crosscountry footpaths in the traditional English midsummer downpour. As a result of our rambling rememberings, a videotape surfaced from his mum's boxed-up collection — me, Inge and Alan playing for her in her front room near Cork City. She filmed it, I'd forgotten. There's almost no footage of Inge and I playing together (apart from this), so this was a great find. I'll put an edit or two up on this blog once I've been able to digitise it.

Alan's mum also presented him with an old semi-acoustic guitar (I forget the make, but exactly like the one Paul McCartney used in the early Beatles before his switch to bass). She's owned since the 60's — her dad had a pub in Liverpool and bought some instruments for the place so that musicians could just turn up and play. He's going to get it fixed it up and use it in his new reggae band back in Golden Bay.

[left] me on saz, Barbara on the phone (to Uncle Les); [right] my saz sits beside Alan's new guitar
Then it was on to Avebury, walking the whole of the Ridgeway from Goring (a three day 40+ mile trek) with Andy Bard (carrying mandolin), his wife Nomi, concertina Jim, whistler Jim and 'Midsummer Paul', an enthusiastic walker who we only ever see at this time of year (not musical, but a huge fan of what we do around the fire). No music en route (everyone was too exhausted from the walking!), apart from me noodling on my saz one morning while waiting to set off (we were camped in an ultranarrow strip of woodland, marked on the OS map as Rats Hill:

early morning saz noodlings upon Rats Hill - photo by Andy
Stef joined us at our camp near Barbury Castle the next night. Good vibes, but no tunes. Not everyone was sure they'd be able to walk the next stretched — serious exhaustion. But we all did, strode up to Windmill Hill the next day (in a light shower of rain — almost miraculously, this was the most we'd had the whole way, despite parts of southern England having been lashed with it for the duration) and had a much needed nap under the sycamores.

As arranged, I met Alan (plus auntie Liz and cousin Sam) and John Crossan (he who began the Irish Treewalks, carrying his trusty bodhrán) in the village and escorted them to our favourite gathering place. The drumming was audible from the stone circle, but it's just too hectic for me with roads going through, people drinking, litter, chaotic drumming, etc. It's a peaceful gathering in an amazing place, it's great, but I'd rather be away a bit in a quieter space.

The music that night at our fire was really quite something else indeed. Hours later, I felt somewhat stunned, not quite sure how it happened, as the daylight started to stream through the trees. To have Alan there drumming, Stef playing his mandola as if possessed by ancestral spirits (full on inspirational Stef playing, among the most amazing I've heard), Whistler Jim playing beautiful slow Irish aires on his low whistle, spacerock saz-mandolin jams with me and Andy, Andy singing some new songs he's written, and some old ones that have become solstice favourites, other Jim doing some incredible stuff on his concertina...including a genius spontaneous arrangement of The Beatles' "Tax Man" (with all the bits, imitation vocal lines, everything) in response to a joke Alan made, and earlier Beatles requests (Jim's from Merseyside too, and I'd been induced to attempt "Tomorrow Never Knows", "It's All Too Much" and "Norwegian Wood" on the saz). But some of the mandola-percussion-saz stuff with Stef and Alan, sometimes Jim's concertina weaving in, it went to somewhere really far out, really ancient, yet really familar. We were all carried along on something — the sort of thing that you can't make happen, it doesn't happen very often, but when it does, you just have to be grateful.

During the only real pause, a couple of hours before dawn, Nathan and Harmony appeared at the fireside with their instruments, played some lovely slow Irish stuff and then something Welsh, Nathan singing in Welsh (he's fluent, grew up on the borders) — Nathan on bouzouki and Harmony on fiddle (and flute, perhaps). Twilit enchantment under the sycamore trees. It occured to me that Welsh is probably by far the closest surviving language (however far it might be) to whatever the ancient Britons who created the monuments of the Avebury landscape would have been speaking and singing in. So particularly resonant, that (I think N&H felt they'd missed out by arriving late, but their timing was absolutely perfect).

Nomi descending Windmill Hill (barrow in background) - photo by Andy
After spending a good part of midsummers day talking with Stef and chain-drinking tea by a pile of embers (this seems to have become an unintended tradition), Paul and Stef accompanied John and I on a quick tour of the landscape: the overlooked longbarrow near the Beckhampton roundabout, the Adam and Eve stones (end of the missing avenue), Swallowhead Spring and the Kennet, West Kennet long barrow, Silbury Hill (from below), the Avenue and, finally, the Stones. After watching a rather odd ceremony while sipping pints of Guinness from the Red Lion, we got the little bus to Swindon, then a train to Stroud where we were met by Melski and whisked to a stunning Cotswold ridge overlooking the Severn to see the sunset. I can't remember the name of the place, but it was on the way back to her home in Dursley. The next day, the three of us were on the ferry to Ireland — John on his way home to Longford (he'd come over especially for the solstice), Melski and I on our way to West Cork for our mutual friend Mike Collard's 60th birthday party (a three day event!)

The first day was Mike's actual birthday, and after a busy day tidying, cooking, wiring plugs, and generally rushing about, Kris (down from Sneem with Birgit and the kids) and I got the music going in the front room. Some old tunes we used to play in the late 90's, the Bear Dance, "Bella Ciao", various nameless Breton and Irish tunes. There were multiple DJs stationed around the outdoor parts of the property (this is an old farmhouse up in the moutains), but live music by the fireplace seemed to be what pulleed people in. The jam soon expanded with John Lynch and Fiona on twin saxes (both relatively new to the instrument, usually playing other winds), four young Israeli percussionists (just out of the IDF) who were travelling through, Andy Ra with his supersteady 12-string space skank, Melski on flute and chalumeau. Eventually the drums multiplied and took over and I wandered around outside to check out the various sounds.

Back in the house after the drums and subsided, Melski got hold of a guitar and sang us some songs. I have hazy memories of accompanying "Crazy Man Michael", "Lovely Joan", "Katie Cruel", "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall", "This Land is Your Land". Various people in various states drifting in and out of the kitchen. A hilarious attempt at "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (Mel had the lyrics in her ubiquitous song book/notebook). We played "Ambee Dagez", the Armenian tune too... Probably loads more I've forgotten. I stayed up til first light then went to crash out in a nearby barn-like thing.

I awoke to a day of solid, torrential rain. So everyone who was still around (quite a lot of people huddled about in the kitchen drinking tea, making toast, playing chess, singing songs. Andy Man turned up at some point, down from County Clare, with his mandola, so I played a lot of folktunes with Andy that day. There was a crew of young Irish lads who were singing and playing some of their own stuff, late into the night, some relatively contemporary stuff that I didn't know, but all really good, and jammable. I can remember being surprised to find myself playing along with "Where is My Mind?" (The Pixies) while stooping over the kitchen table contemplating a chess move trying to remember which colour I was. Things got increasingly chaotic (alcohol..sigh...), but I did manage to get everyone to be quiet and listen a bit so Melski could sing/play "Wild Mountain Thyme" before I headed to the barn again for some more sleep.

This time I awoke to see a team of determined dreadlocked members of the Earth Star Tribe psychedelic trance collective putting up a marquee for a loud electronic party (the Saturday night finale). It was pretty muddy, didn't look too hopeful as a party space. But they seemed to know what they were doing. Toby from Wiggle is involved with this crew which suggests the music must be worthy. I was vaguely curious to see what the vibe would be like (a whole different wave of people coming up the mountain for this one), but we had to get to Cork — Melski to a Laurie Anderson concert and I to an online seminar (from Liz's house on the Old Head of Kinsale). After the 'webinar' (people really use that word!), Liz played me some recordings of her son Leo. I've not seen him from a few years, and he seems to have grown up into a talented poet/MC (MC name "Anonimis"), now part of the new young Irish hiphop scene.

We spent the next day with Liz, her daughter Lea + friends, and her friend Dervla. Old familiar songs were sung and played around a fire in the garden that evening ("She Moved Through the Fair", "Wild Mountain Thyme" again, "Spancil Hill", "Star of the County Down"). Melski was also delighted when Dervla was able to answer a question she'd been carrying around with her for years about an old Irish word for a very particular type of spontaneous musical gathering (the word was something like "screagha" I think).

Skellig Michael - photo by Kilaana
From there, we headed up to Sneem (County Kerry) for a couple of days up at Kris and Birgit's, which included a boat trip out to Skellig Michael, a rocky outcrop in the Atlantic now home to 8000 almost dangerously chilled out puffins, and, for a few centuries to some seriously hardcore early Christian monks (I was out there once before, autumn equinox 1996 — even took my saz and played it out there). In the evenings, Kris got out his new Gibson-inspired Heritage guitar and loop pedal and we had fun jamming over spontaneously created loops. The best of this was the first night, where we started with a loop taken from Ali Farka Touré's "Diaraby" and then just tranced out and layered endlessly on top of that for about an hour. But (as with the rest of this trip), that all went unrecorded...just didn't feel appropriate to get my Zoom H2 out. I did record the last session, not quite as lively, but with a few nice moments (just me and Kris on this, Melski got an earlier night, having to drive back to the ferry port early in the morning).

Listen Here
Kris's son Dylan got his electric guitar at one point and joined in with us. He's not bad at all for a 10-year-old! He's into The Ramones and AC/DC at the moment, but has grown up in a household absorbing sounds from all over the planet, so he'll quite likely evolve into an amazingly versatile player. He's learning the drums too (in a convenient outbuilding!).

The next day we were driving across sunny South Wales, debating the issues of the day, listening to the new Jesse Morningstar album (gorgeous, as expected), Henry Cow, a fascinanting album of 30's and 40's (I think) popular music from Egypt, etc. The song that seems to stick to the memory of that last bit of the journey (before my trainride back east) is Sufjan Stevens' "Casimir Pulaski Day", I don't know what it is, something about the gentleness and simplicity of that song, the way the simple trumpet line comes in...

* * *
Back in Canterbury that night there was another party at 'The Bungalow' down on the confluence of the Old and New Dover Roads. I arrived just as a jam was ending involving Adam (Delta Sleep, Lapis Lazuli) on drums and Phil (Lapis Lazuli, Madam Molotof, Mr. Lovebucket) on tenor sax. But soon something had started up involving my saz, Neil (Lapis) on bass and drums (rather than his usual guitar), really excellent connections made with him, Tom on guitar (I think he used to do electronics for Delta Sleep) and Phil's friend Stu on bass. Later, Jim from Lapis took over on bass. Really interesting jams, continually changing and evolving, quite loud, but I was being nicely amplified. Later into the night, Jim's Polish girlfriend sang some three-chord songs which we jammed around (a nice simple core around which to build something). Later still, penniless resident and drum maestro Adam provided abundant cake and curry for the late night party people — respect!

another Estonian review

2011-06-26T11:41:00.002+01:00

...this time for the Children of the Drone session in early May (one I wasn't present at, but recently processed the audio for).

9.4 out of 10 [review here]

"Every new (and voluminous) appearance of this Foggy Albion-based combo (with some core members and loads of occasional members for every session) does have worth enough to pay huge attention to it. However, throughout the appearances on the two last albums/sessions (including the recent one which is recorded in a church) COTD has somewhat completed their obvious raga/ drone folk-based concept with some new sonic additions. For instance, the Exeterians' soundscape is evolved into more synthetic, exploiting more electronic devices (sampling units and low-end synths) for it and on the other side playing up jazz-hued (those saxophone-relied cool passages) and downbeat improvisations. The change is welcomed in any cases, moreover, as the combo have previously managed to maintain their profound approach for the progressions into the kinds of transcendental state of minds."

Canterbury Soundwaves Episode 8

2011-06-15T10:52:00.002+01:00

The latest in my series of moonthly podcasts...

"Oh no......Steve Hillage!" (Neil, The Young Ones)

Oh yes! From the heavy psychedelia of his (and Dave Stewart's) first band Uriel to his more recent collaborative efforts with 90's spacerockers Ozric Tentacles and ambient explorers The Orb, from the classic '73 Gong lineup to his triumphant 2009 return, Subcomandante Spillage's influence on British psychedelia examined from several angles, oblique, acute and orthogonal. ALSO a '68 Caravan classic, the Annie Whitehead connection, Robert Wyatt's second favourite piece of music ever (supposedly) and an Ornette Coleman cover performed in Canterbury just the other day...

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 8

Stella's album launch in Lewes (my birthday!)

2011-06-13T16:56:00.007+01:00

The perfect musical birthday treat, Stella Homewood invited me to her candlelit album launch gig in Lewes (in the upstairs room above the Lewes Arms pub).

Support came from Stella's best friend Louise's housemate Matthew Bird (a couple of powerful songs) and Jaime Regan (a mini-set of John Martyn-meets-Thom Yorke emotive songwriting, sounding perfectly fine without the loop pedal he usually uses, but which wasn't working that evening).

Stella had made her usual effort to create a beautiful space with vases of flowers, paper candle-lanterns, dangly strings of tinfoil stars, fairy lights, lacy wallhangings, calligraphic art, etc., turning the room into a kind of faery grotto (with the incongruous, but weirdly reassuring, sounds of a Saturday night pub crowd smoking on the pavement from the window below).

Before she started her set, Stella's partner Colin read some of his Sufi-inspired poems (there was an astonishing synchronicity: just as he spoke the words "infinite light", someone standing against the wall accidentally leaned on a lightswitch, suddenly flicking the light on and off...Colin stopped, everyone gasped and then burst into joyous laughter...he then resumed reading with perfect, unphased, timing). This poetry brought a wonderful atmosphere of stillness and calmness, a perfect way into Stella's musical world.

She was accompanied throughout on acoustic guitar by old friend and local luthier Richard Osborne (whose workshop is across the road). Matthew Bird returned to play Spanish guitar on "In My Mother's Garden" (in lieu of Stella's harp playing). I joined in for the last song, "Rainbow Skies" (after hurriedly relearning it from the CD in Stella's kitchen an hour or so earlier!), happily sat on a sofa along the side of the tiny stage. No covers — just songs from Ordinary Day (and one new one about birds, which I'd not heard before), all as beautifully rendered as could be. The audience listened attentively (a nice change from what seems to be the norm these days), and even the noise from the street below (Stella suggested opening the windows as it was getting quite stuffy up there) just seemed to anchor the magic of Stella's words and melodies in the "real world", rather than being annoying or distracting.

A recording of this may eventually surface (mine was lost due to file corruption, but Colin was filming, and someone from the local Oyster Project was recording so that disabled residents of Lewes could also hear our Stella!)

The whole event made me feel incredibly proud of her for what she's accomplished in recent years (having drifted away from songwriting and performance for quite a long time after the Spacegoat years). The next day we wandered around a village-fête-type event in The Paddock across the road from her cottage with Colin and Louise. This was a fundraiser for the Waterloo Bonfire Society (these Bonfire Societies being a big part of Lewes local culture). All the traditional English stuff: hoopla, tombola, coconut shy, crockery smashing, etc. (but no Dwile Flonking, sadly!)...and persistent drizzle (of course). Stella suddenly remembered that it was at the same event a couple of years ago where she timidly asked Porchlight Smoker, a Brightonian country/bluegrass-type band, if she could sing "Wildwood Flower" with them, the first time she'd sung in public for quite a few years. A satisfying way to complete the loop before getting the train back to Canterbury.

another Small World

2011-06-06T11:38:00.006+01:00

It's an easy bikeride from Headcorn railway station to the Small World festival site. It was still light (just) and I was buzzing from the experience of the Arts Trail which had just finished. After an unproblematic entry (this festival has the least aggressive/alienating security setup of any I know), I orbited the site a couple of times looking for The Mordekkers in their new, blue converted horsebox (eventually having to revert to a phonecall to find it, though).

I got to spend some time with Stef and Penni, meet the new bass player Ben and generally settle in before their headline gig in the main Small World tent. As usual, they had the whole place packed out and dancing within ten minutes. Some great new material, and Ben's the perfect bass player for what they're doing (the first time he'd been to a festival like this, and he was clearly enjoying it immensely). The bagpipe-less sections had me thinking about James Brown's band — the supertight, choppy mandola style Stef has evolved for this band, sitting on top of the powerful rhythm section. They're continuing to bridge the rhythmic spaces between drum'n'bass/dubstep and traditional French/Breton dances like plins, gavottes, an dro's... and just getting better at what they do. Most of the dancing crowd probably had no idea what the origins of the music were, beyond the vague label "Celtic", but like James Brown's music, the Mordekkers' sort of locks on to your central nervous system, giving you no option but to get up and move to it.

It had been a long day. A long few days, in fact. I wasn't able to stay up all night as Stef does, keeping the music going til dawn. I was asleep fairly early. But then I got to enjoy the relatively tranquil early morning scene on Sunday.

Sunday was largely spent sitting and chatting with Stef (one of the world's great conversationalists). In the afternoon I wandered around a bit, caught I Jah Mo, the reggae singer (who's ALWAYS at Small World, with a different band) playing in the Full Circle dome with an excellent bass player, plus drums, sax and backing vocals — a strong set, perhaps the best I've seen from him. Will Varley played in there a bit later, as entertaining between songs as he is compelling during them. I just read on his website that he's planning a tour, on foot, from London to Deal soon — what a great thing to do! Making up for the rather difficult time they had the day before in Canterbury, Cocos Lovers played a killer set, one of their best. The place was packed, I was glad to see. When they finished "Howling Wind" without the usual a cappella choral section (they've decided to drop that for tuning-related reasons), someone shouted out to request it! So they sang it, angelically, and in a happily bewildered sort of way, accompanied by a less-than-angelic audience rendition. It's heartening to see them getting the sort of growing, enthusiastic audiences that they are. Pog's "Our Love Is Not Like Roses" and cover of "Caleb Mayer" were both stunning.

Over at Triban, I saw Burning Glass play a set rather like the one in Canterbury the day before, just less audience participation (and attention, to be honest, everyone being spoiled by so much good music everywhere, and the fact there was a PA meaning you didn't have to be quiet and listen). After dark I was out playing with Stef and Penni (saz/mandola, pipes, drums) at various points around the site, and accompanying various singer/guitarists at the 'Tribal Voices' fire, listening to the various poets who gather to recite their works there.

Monday, after The Mordekkers took off back to Wales, I wandered around with my saz, ending up joining I Jah Mo's makeshift band (including Jeremy the dulcimer player I met there last year) on a tiny stage, playing sloppy but heartfelt reggae. Then accompanying a set of mostly medaevil French songs by Pok's girlfriend Aurelie (plagued by horrible tuning issues with my saz and her guitar, but she sang a lovely Josephine Foster song called "The Golden Window" which sort of made up for it). A couple of bits got recorded on my Zoom H2.

I found a group of percussionists and an acoustic guitarist sitting by one of the thoroughfares, playing some nice rhythms and modal sounds, so I joined them for a while. The guitarist turned out to be called "Sas" (it sounded like). I recorded that too. Around the corner I found a bunch of young musicians (guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, trumpet, etc.) huddled around the tiniest, sweetest pedal harmonium I've ever seen. They turned out to be members of Buffo's Wake, the Illbilly 8 and at least one other band. We played some klezmer-like stuff, a waltz or two, again quite sloppy, but fun, and worth a listen:

Listen Here
The members of Buffo's Wake were warming up for their set in the Full Circle, which I caught the first part of as evening drew in and I realised that it had start to rain. Not relishing the thought of having to put up a tent and then waking up in a wet one (I'd made a little nest under the Mordekkers' horsebox, which had driven away hours earlier), I abandoned my plan to cycle back to Canterbury the next day, and instead quickly packed and headed for the station.

One of the magical musical highlights of those few days occured earlier that day (I think it was). A bit weary, I had collapsed on a sofa inside an old khaki canvas tent where someone was selling tea and cake, with an old out-of-tune piano installed, which people would wander in and tinkle on for a while (earlier, I'd stuck my head in to find the omnipresent Ewan Bleach was playing "The Girl from Ipanema"). I was drifting in and out of sleep, enjoying watching the stream of colourful people passing the opening of the tent. At one point I woke up, and someone in an orange paisley-like coat was playing a a lovely bit of Erik Satie. After a few blissful moments, she got up, and I realised that it was Leonie from Rae. So we had a little chat (she was there playing with another band called Animal Folk).

A Canterbury (Arts) Trail

2011-06-05T17:00:00.014+01:00

Saturday June 29th, 2011

Via my involvement with the local Furthur collective last summer, I got to know a highly motivated Whitstable native and circus performer called Elise who, in the time since then, has formed an entity called SondryFolk with her friends Sophie and Laurie. The press release says:

"Sondryfolk is a new not-for-profit collective set up to run inclusive projects in arts, education, community sustainability, environmental and regeneration contexts. This project was born out of a concern that we are growing disconnected from each other, our surroundings and ourselves. We hope that working together, through engaged artistic expression and shared ideas, we can reconnect, inspire and provoke!"

Very much my kind of thing, then. So I got involved helping out with their first event, an 'arts trail' which installed artworks and performers in overlooked public spaces in Canterbury's city centre. This turned out to be a truly excellent day, but I'll limit my commentary to the musical dimension, otherwise I'll be typing for hours:

Arlet, a local collective of whom I was previously unaware, played a set down in the beautiful undercroft of Eastbridge Hospital (a "hospital" in the old sense: providing hospitality to pilgrims rather than medical attention). This is an 12th century building on the High Street which I've walked past for decades but weirdly never set foot in, always just associating it with tourism, foolishly.

Arlet are a five piece, involving Owen and Tom from the Zoo For You horn section (Owen on clarinet rather than sax, Tom on trombone as usual) with an accordionist called Aidan who I've not seen before, a violinist called Rosie and a very familiar looking guitarist (from here). The music's all instrumental, refined, lush and uplifting. Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Spiro were the only points of reference that came to mind as I listened, spellbound. Then Aidan mentioned Spiro, who inspired their last piece (which was, unsurprisingly, even more Spiro-like than what had preceded it). The trombone-clarinet combination works wonderfully! And it was the most perfect setting. AND it was being filmed, so hopefully the audio will surface before long.

Eastbridge Hospital undercroft
It's worth mentioning another Zoo For You connection: bass player Andrew Prowse had some black and white fine-line ink drawings being exhibited down in that space, what looked to my brain like Escher-meets-Tanguy organic geometrics. Really incredible stuff. I don't think he's even got a website set up yet (very modest when I talked to him, didn't seem to fully realise just how original and impressive his work is).

The assembled audience (nicely mixed, as throughout the day — one advantage to urban free festivals being that all sorts of people just sort of wander in and out, unexpectedly) then followed Arlet down the High Street to the Westgate Gardens where they accompanied, with a tasteful improvisation, Lucie Pepper, a static trapeze artist who performed in the gargantuan 200 year old plane tree to a delighted audience.

plane tree in Westgate Gardens
Later in the afternoon on the Franciscan Island belonging to the Greyfriars (another wonderful space in the centre of Canterbury of which I'd been inexplicably ignorant for 23 years) Cocos Lovers played an unamplified set under a beautiful old copper beech. Unfortunately, it was a very windy day and the sound of the wind in the trees rather swamped their delicate sound. They actually started with Nicola, Pog and Natasha singing the a cappella "My Love Has Gone Away" (a heartrendingly poignant little song Nicola wrote for the new album), then played a selection of mostly delicate songs from the new album (as well as "Howling Wind" and "Moonlit Sky" from the last one). After a while, the guitars were going out of tune and they were clearly struggling, so they made a sensible move to just sing a rousing sea shanty... which went down a treat with the assembled artstrailers. Not one of the best sets of theirs I've seen — as well as struggling with the wind, Billy forgot to bring his bass (oops!), was sitting mournfully off to the side with a can of Red Stripe — but I think it was definitely the most beautiful setting I've seen them in.

Later in the afternoon, singer-songwriter Abigail Hubbard played down in the Eastbridge undercroft. I was mostly running around with a walkie-talkie during the day, fixing things with cable-ties and carrying stuff from one place to another, so I didn't get to see everything, but I managed to catch a couple of her songs. She's got unusual voice in the Joanna Newsom or Leonie Evans (from Rae) style, would like to hear more.

As requested, I set up a ropeswing in a yew tree on the Franciscan Island, around which a spot was created called "Buskers Corner". I managed to find a quiet half hour to sit and swing and play a bit of saz for the curious artstrailing bypassers. Later I noticed it being used by a ubiquitous moustachioed banjo player, singing Edwardian songs for a small cluster of listeners.

Also, in the "Prison Room" (once used as a prison, unsurprisingly) of the little chapel which bridges the River Stour (the oldest Franciscan building in Britain, surving destruction because it was a useful bridge), Laurie and Dawson from Furthur had installed a joint video/sound installation (she's a video artist and he did a degree in 'sonic arts', I learned that day), all made from footage and audio recorded in and around the space. Laurie's video work had a morphing, dreamlike quality, whereas Dawson (in his own words) "mangled" the sounds he recorded, creating something quite unsettling — a successful combination, I thought. It had a palindromic format, playing forwards, then backwards, then forwards...

Franciscan island chapel — photo by Robert Radford
Dawson greeted me with a "Have you heard the bad news?" that morning — I had, and I knew what he meant: Gil Scott-Heron had died. So RIP GSH. I'd like to think he'd have appreciated the community-minded spirit of what we were doing in Canterbury that day.

video by Jason Brooks

The day concluded with a feast in the tiny, much overlooked Best Lane gardens. It was open to all, people brought food to share, and there was live music: Liam and Raven from Syd Arthur to begin with. What they played was a bit like their acoustic set which I've seen variations of (here's a good example from last summer's Furthur stage), but Liam was using his electric guitar, and both he and Raven (mandolin/violin) were using a lot of effects and loops. Liam's vocals were occasional, and unamplified, mostly it was quite an experimental set, very dreamy, framed against a large, flowering, elder tree and venerable brickwork, plus the colourful SondryFolk bunting and the occasional splash of evening sunshine. A perfect setting for their music, with dozens of peaceful people assembled on the grass, sharing each other's food and company. At one point it seemed like Liam was playing in Morse code (something involving elaborate delay effects — I remember thinking how this was really quite avant garde for a public arts even in a city centre on a Saturday afternoon). They ended with that magical song of Liam's that I think's called "Forgotten Lands", one that always transports me...

How lucky we are!

Liam and Raven in Best Lane Gardens
Lucy Kitt played a set of her songs. Very quietly, without amplification. She doesn't sing or play loudly — she usually has no reason to. But there was such a kind, appreciative atmosphere in the gardens that quickly everyone stopped talking and started listening. I was far enough back to have to slightly strain to hear her (a bit like the aural version of squinting), but somehow this added to the experience, it was like something precious we had to make an effort to experience.

As a perfect end to the day, Edwin Brookes (whose brother Jason had been busily filming the day's events) and his band Burning Glass, down from London I think, played an unamplified set. They were able to play/sing loudly. Edwin's got an immediately endearing awkwardness about his performing persona, was able to belt out his eccentric lyrics and get us all singing along with relevant bits. This was a proper motley crew of a band (much like audience): Edwin on ukelele, a bloke with a quiff, neckerchief and double bass who doubled on harmonium, a bloke in a hoodie with a guitar and a speciality in village-idiot-style grins and facial expressions and a young woman with a clarinet. EB writes songs like no one else ("stretching metaphors like elastic bands...on the hands...of a postman...who thinks he's a bumblebee..."), some lovely melodies that have been stuck in my head all week...and he got everyone to be quiet so we could hear the harmonium (there's a touching song about an old lady and her harmonium which features it).

As soon as they were done (we had a 7pm cutoff) I got involved in the rapid takedown of bunting, flags, signage, collapsible tables, etc., then got the 8:00 train to Headcorn with bike so I could get to the Small World festival in time to see The Mordekkers...

Sounds New

2011-06-05T16:55:00.012+01:00

Saturday 21st May — a great day...beautiful weather, I heard my first cuckoo (the start of summer!) and saw, from very close up, an egret taking off from the stream in the woods between Tyler Hill and Broad Oak. In the evening I cycled out to "The Bungalow" on the Old Dover Road, current HQ of Canterbury bands Delta Sleep and Lapis Lazuli. Phil from Lapis had mentioned that there was going to be a party with bands playing — it turned out to have been going since early afternoon in the back garden, with gazebo and PA set up for the occasion. I'd just missed Delta Sleep (Adam the drummer assured me that they'd played "terribly"), but Lapis were just setting up, so I got to see/hear/record their set. A real treat. A bit later, most of Zoo For You turned up, from a rehearsal, and played a 45 minute instrumental set of mostly new stuff, also very enjoyable. I had my saz with me, but by the time acoustic jams had begun in the house it was all a bit loud and intoxicated (still fun though, sazzing along with Tony from Folkestone and his songs).

A great evening, the Lapis set having left a powerful impression. I thought they were extremely tight, but a few days later realised that what I'd experience had just been the band in relaxed party mood...they played a 140 minute set at The Ballroom for the Sounds New festival (a contemporary music and sound art thing that happens here every year) on Wednesday 25th. I recorded this too, and they were really tight (and properly mixed). So much going on with this band it's hard to keep track of. Most of their pieces are at least 15 minutes long, with numerous twists and turns, changes of instrument, time signature and/or mood. There's still a heavy prog/post-rock foundation, but Phil's tenor sax playing has added an interesting circus/Gypsy/Balkan flavour...at times the sound almost reminded me of the classic era Cardiacs (the Cardiacs playing a kind of ska, at one point!).

Phil's also playing some accordion, so there are emerging tango vibes, as well as a kind of an epic "spacefunk" piece called "Big Bird" which evolves into a shakuhachi solo (as well as borrowing part of The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight"!). They've got a huge, expansive sound, with Cameron on bass and Adam on drums comprising a seriously impressive rhythm section. This long set was fully engaging throughout, no sense of anything dragging or flagging or getting dull or repetitive.

Cameron was back on The Ballroom's stage the next night, as he's also part of The Boot Lagoon, who played the Thursday Sounds New slot. Seth the drummer had been away in Argentina (teaching flute, apparently), so the rest of the band had taken the opportunity to work out an acoustic set. Seth actually opened this with a virtuosic, rather "Flute Salad"-like flute solo, then quickly took his place behind the drums, Cal on piano, Cam on double bass, Pete on electric guitar (but no effects, they having all been recently stolen in Brixton). It was great to hear some of their familiar pieces given this new treatment (Cal sounding excellent on a grand piano).

We then got some poets (who I had already got a rather negative opinion of, due to their talking loudly through the Boot set, while sitting near me, up near the stage) reading over some specially prepared soundscapes. These varied. More interesting than a poetry-free setbreak, anyway. The Boot then came back and powered through a high-energy electric set. I captured both sets on my Zoom H2 (similarly with the Lapis gig the night before) and will almost certainly be podcasting some of this on future Canterbury Soundwaves episodes.

Going back a couple of days to Tuesday 24th, local psychedelic jazz fusion band The-Quartet also played The Ballroom for Sounds New. I arrived a bit late, just as guitarist Jack Hues was bringing a young singer called Violet to the stage. I happened to know that this was his daughter (Miriam from Random Article was once involved in a production of Under Milk Wood with her). She sang a song I didn't recognise, what I assumed to be a fairly recent pop song she'd chosen, not a particularly engaging arrangement (to my ears at that moment). I was a bit confused, having expected some kind of psychedelic jazz-rock experience — what was this?

It turns out that rather than rather than letting his daughter sing a song of her choice with the band, this had been Joni Mitchell's "Marcie", from her first album (which I've somehow failed to hear after all these years), and it turns out to have been an integral part of the evening's concept (more on that later). Next, also somewhat unexpected, but more enjoyable, The-Quartet ripped into David Crosby's "Almost Cut My Hair". They cracked that one right open, gave it the full American jamband-type treatment. I'd forgotten what a great song this is, and in going back to check the original on CSNY's Déjà Vu, I found this seriously powerful live version:

Unfortunately this had something to do with the execrable "Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame" (how un-rock'n'roll can you get?), but the sound is fantastic, Stephen Stills shredding on his Strat...and heartening to see that David Crosby's still flying his freak flag after all these years, and all he's been through.

Anyway, back to Canterbury. After the setbreak, Jack explained the concept. The-Quartet had composed a piece in collaboration with a pair of poets (from the University of Kent's School of English): Simon Smith and David Herd. The piece was executed with the poets reading sometimes in alternation, sometimes simultaneously. Everyone had been given a little booklet with the entire text, some people were following along carefully (unfortunately the poets weren't always easy to hear due to miking issues).

The piece began with an interpretation of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" (wonderful, and I got a reasonable quality recording, to be featured on Canterbury Soundwaves episode 8). "then it kicked off...big time" (opening words of the poetry). The character Marcie from Joni Mitchell's song recurs through the poem (with the melody drifting in and out), which explains why they played it in the first set. It also transpired that the drummer was Mark Holub from the mighty Led Bib, presumably filling in for Dave Smith, The-Quartet's current drummer. It's always a pleasure to watch MH drumming (his facial expressions and the general way he moves his limbs). And Sam Bailey on piano was a revelation.

Overall, the poetry collaboration was a great success apart from the problem of miking the poets effectively. I'm hoping they'll do it again...

new additions to COTD archive

2011-06-03T10:21:00.005+01:00

James S has taken over the task of recording Children of the Drone improv sessions down in Devon. Unfortunately, I've yet to get one this year (I hope to later this summer). But James recently sent me his files for processing, and it's nice to still be involved in keeping the website/archive up to date even if I'm not actually on any of the recordings. There's some interesting stuff throughout (James S getting evermore into his Kaoss Pad, but also playing santur, some lovely clarinet from Annie, Brian triggering Steve Reich-like marimba sounds on his keyboard, James T getting more confident/creative with his poetry recitations, Clifford guesting on hang, as well as local creative musical types Kimwei and Ric White dropping in for occasional sets). Here's are the Internet Archive pages with audio and full information:

St. Mary Arches, 2011-02-02
Cleave Farm Cottage, Whitestone, near Crediton, 2011-03-02
St. Mary Arches, 2011-04-06
St. Mary Arches, 2011-05-04

Annie, Lucy, James S, Mick and Brian(?) at recent "Edge of Chaos" event in Exmouth (COTD's set was unrecorded)

Random Article: Valley Sessions, March edits

2011-05-17T11:50:00.007+01:00

Miriam — violin, voice, percussion
Tom — bass
me — saz
Paul — percussion (on a few tracks)
Frankie the landlady — slight percussion (on a few other tracks)

Listen Here
As usual, everything was entirely improvised. The titles were generated by the Wikipedia 'Random article' link (look in the left sidebar!) before each piece was played. The title "Sproat Lake" caused visiting Canadian percussionist Paul Clifford momentary ontological confusion and was a bit of a shock to us all when he explained that he was intimately familiar with the place (on Vancouver Island, British Columbia), had had some extraordinary, formative experiences there. Weeks later, we were further weirded out to learn that the landlady had visited a friend at her house on Sproat Lake, been given paintings and drawings of the place by her friend's artists son (some of which had been hanging on the walls of the house we were in only weeks earlier!).

I met Paul via Matt Tweed and Cocos Lovers, as he's been co-producing the new Cocos album Elephant Lands out at his little caravan studio near Ash with Matt. I was very impressed to learn that he played drums on The Be Good Tanyas' wonderful Blue Horse album. He seems keen to percuss further with us, and we're very happy about that!

Canterbury Soundwave episode 7

2011-05-17T09:55:00.006+01:00

The latest in my series of moonthly podcasts...

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Caravan's In the Land of Grey and Pink. Also, Canterbury sounds from Belgium, something appropriately far-out from Gong's Mushroom Tapes, Kevin Ayers addressing the nation's schoolchildren in 1972, Matching Mole on French telly, two Beatles covers, two flavours of fruit jam, and a chunk of the Soft Machine's (almost) forgotten score to the 1969 London 'happening' Spaced.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 7

Cocos Lovers in Whitstable (at last!)

2011-05-15T11:07:00.013+01:00

The "Private Widdle Social Club", a Deal-based cabaret experience which has been gaining strength over past months, ventured out to Whitstable on Saturday 14th of May. This was the first thing I've ever attended at the Horsebridge Arts Centre, despite keeping an eye on live music events in East Kent for the last four years. For some reason, they never seem to book anything that interests me. But the PWSC brought Cocos Lovers out from Deal, so I wasn't going to miss that. This is the first time I've seen them in Whitstable (and I think the first time they've played there since their days as The Faraway Tree).

One of the great things about gigs in Whitstable is that I can cycle there and back (and go and spend some time on the beach watching the waves rolling in, possibly catching a famous Whitstable sunset).

Whitstable sunset photo by Swales Parry

A comedian-singer-songwriter (very sharp, quite surreal, generally very funny) called Mitch Benn compered the event. Ladies of the Lake (Natasha and Nicola from Cocos, plus a friend) sang four a capella numbers: "Rounding the Horn", "What Shall We Do with the Baby", "The Waggoner Lad", "Four-Loom Weaver" (about the Lancashire cotton famine during the US Civil War...something I knew nothing of). Beautiful, of course. The acoustics up in the Horsebridge are notoriously problematic, but quite OK for unaccompanied singing.

There were various bits of (mostly funny) comedy and poetry, everything moving along at a nice pace. Paul Clifford (the Canadian drummer who played with the Be-Good Tanyas, recently co-produced the forthcoming Cocos album with Matt Tweed, and who's jammed with me, Miriam and Tom) put in a brief appearance as the unclassifiable 'Shed' — I won't even try to describe...

Olly, a.k.a. MC Kotchin got up to rhyme over the top of fiddle, guitar and drums supplied by members of Cocos, with Will and Natasha backing his vocals on the chorus. He's got an incredible flow, really gentle, and always seems to explore deeper subject matter than the average MC. Vaguely metaphysical stuff. I'll never forget the freestyle he did while Cocos were playing around the fire at my birthday party last year (during the instrumental part of "Cracks and Boulders").

Cocos Lovers then braved the acoustics, sensibly keeping the volume relatively low. The set was almost entirely composed of post-Johannes material, illustrating how prolific they've been lately. Their manager Gary was sitting at the back next to me, having repeated self-confessed "proud dad" moments about how mature the band are now sounding. Deal friend Liam was filling in for Billy on bass, expertly (but Bill's absence allowed my ears to take note of that particular magic touch he brings to the sound).

There was one song which is so new that it's not even on the album sessions, called "Lost Kids", sung by Pog and featuring both Phil and Dave on electric guitars. That, back to back with "Our Love Is Not Like Roses" would have been the highlight of the set for me, but they then ended with a cover of Gillian Welch's "Caleb Meyer", a song unknown to me at the time. Poggy sung this with such force, over a super-powerful groove (nothing 'country' about their rendition)...I've never heard them quite like this before, and it was one of the highlights of 2011 thus far.

There was also a segment of their set where the band morphed into "Poggy Hatton and the Humble Oats" (that's Pog, James, Liam, and Liam's girlfriend) for a couple of songs. She's so prolific at the moment that it's probably a good move to have a second outlet for her songs.

They encored with "Time To Stand" (it would have been nice to hear "Hal-an-Tow", it being early May, but the audience were pretty up for it at this point, so something a bit more raucous was probably the right choice).

Cycling home through Blean Woods I stopped to listen to three separate nightingales, about as close as you're ever likely to get to a nightingale. Good to be back in England!

(un)expected cadences in Central Wisconsin

2011-04-24T04:34:00.012+01:00

At Sarah L's request, I dropped in on an Irene's Garden rehearsal a couple of days after that wonderful concert in Appleton. This was at an upstairs room in downtown Stevens Point (above what used to be the Graham-Lane Record shop). They want me to play on two or three tracks on their soon-to-be-recorded Interplanetary Love Songs album. We're going to arrange this online, and with any luck I can get Matt Tweed to record my saz parts on the Pondlife mobile studio. We ran through the songs they have in mind, and I felt pretty comfortable, apart from a handful of unexpected chords. Wheatie, the keyboardist/composer, tends to write really harmonically complex songs (although they always sound very organic).

Andy Letcher gave a talk called "Towards a Minimal Theory of Psychedelic Action" at the Breaking Convention conference in Canterbury just before I left, and he proposed the metaphor of music, particularly what he called "the unexpected cadence" — when music takes your mind in a certain direction, so you think you know what it's about to do, and then it turns a corner — the introduction of novelty into consciousness. (Being in Canterbury, he couldn't help sneaking in a mention of Caravan, who were particularly good at that). The Stellectrics/Irene's Garden were/are all about the unexpected cadence.

A couple of days after the Irene's rehearsal, I was down at the Elbow Room, Stevens Point's most tolerant bar, down on the old :Square, for the weekly "songswap". Lots more unexpected cadences: Donovan's "Mellow Yellow", America's "Sister Golden Hair", various Beatles songs,... As well as the usual Neil Young, etc., the songswap crowd seem to like chord-heavy songs, which are always a bit of a challenge to fit my modal noodlings into. But we played our way through "Norwegian Wood", "Paint It Black", "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and a few others. The pleasant surprise of the evening was The Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues", something that's not so well known in the States (I've not played it since the time in the campsite in Wiltshire last summer with the extremely drunk canal traveller called Lenny). It was a pleasantly quiet night down at the Elbow, due to heavy snow (for April) keeping people away, so everyone could hear each other. It felt more like someone's front room rather than just another bar. And there was a more diverse set of instruments than usual — just one(!) acoustic guitar, plus an electric, a ukelele, mandolin, fiddle, harmonica, and my saz.

Out at the Northland Ballroom in Iola the next night, there were a lot less unexpected cadences, as I sat in with Sloppy Joe and friends for their weekly Wednesday night session. I arrived as they were playing "The L&M Don't Stop Here Any More" (one of two songs Stef was hoping to finish up her solo album with while I'm around). The stage was pretty crowded — Sloppy Joe with Jamie on washboard plus friend Nate on mandolin, Art and Dale from The Highwater Band (guitar/vocals and banjo, respectively) and Dale's teenage daughter Rachel on fiddle. So I just listened and enjoyed it for a while. Amazing stuff, sounding almost 'arranged' despite the looseness of the whole thing. There's usually a young crowd of UWSP student eco-hippies in for these nights, but the Madison-based psychedelic jamband Elf Lettuce were playing on campus that night, so it was mostly an older, rural crowd, very appreciative, some dancing, much whooping and cheering (including a man of mystery known only to the band as "The Tambourine Guy" who yelled "Yeeeaaahhhh!!!" from the bar every time the music stepped up a notch, i.e. quite often).

I eventually ended up on stage just as Nate was about to attempt a kind of novelty bluegrass cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean". We got through that. Then a lot of other stuff, some familiar, some unfamiliar. Gradually things thinned out and I was just playing with three of four (Jeff or Jimmer on standup bass, Nate or Bobbie Burns on mandolin/guitar/vocals). Nate and I closed things out with attempts at "Down By the Sally Gardens" and "The Cuckoo" — the British versions I'd taught him last year when we were recording for Stef's album. Rather sloppy, but only a handful of people were left at the bar by that point (around 1:30), so no one minded.

Listen Here
The night after that, I was over at Jeff and Maude's house (Jeff's the guitarist from Irene's Garden) for some experimental jamming. Jeff's been working on playing one-handed electric guitar (hammer-on style) while using his other hand to play a bass guitar (laid flat on a table) and his feet to trigger loops with some kind of pedal setup — amazing to witness! We tried out a few different ideas of his, including something in seven which worked quite well, I thought. He switched to acoustic guitar for a while, but then Maude came home from teaching a knitting class and we ended up sitting talking til late. Hopefully we can jam further next time I'm over there.

Listen Here
During my time in Point, I dropped in on another Irene's rehearsal (the first involved Rick the drummer but no bassist, this one featured JennaLee on bass but no drummer, and worked better from my point of view). That was Beltane — That morning I'd got up early to cycle down to the confluence of the Plover and Wisconsin Rivers and watch the sunrise and play some saz by the Native American mounds there (which none of the locals seem to have heard about, despite them being probably 2300 years old — and this is in a place where a 150-year-old building gets revered as "historic").

There were also another couple of Elbow Room songswaps. "I am the Walrus" worked surprisingly well despite its unexpected cadences, "Six Days on the Road" was fun (that's a country trucker anthem made famous by local-ish hero Dave Dudley), Tom Petty's "Last Dance with Mary Jane" sounded good, as did ELP's "Lucky Man" (not something I thought I'd ever play). And Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My" was epic. A police car pulled up as I was walking across town that night, making me understandably nervous... but then the cop inside quickly put me at ease by asking "Excuse me, but is that a banjo?" I explained that it wasn't, and then he asked if I'd been playing at the Elbow Room. "You guys sounded fantastic!" he enthused — it seems he'd come in briefly to see the owner about something, although I'd not noticed at the time. I think he thought we were an actual band. And presumably I was the banjo he thought he'd heard.

There was another Wednesday night at the Northland with Sloppy Joe and friends, during which I played quite a bit...

Listen Here
...an afternoon and evening out at Jimmer and Stef's place near Rosholt playing music and partaking of a vegan feast (thanks everyone! especially Sarah for the truly awesome (not a word I use easily!) tofu cream pie with Door County cherries!)...

Listen Here
...AND Stef finally got it together to pass on to me the premixed versions of three pieces we recorded for her long-in-the-making solo album last spring ("The Cuckoo", "Sally Gardens" and Michael Hurley's "The Moon Man"):

Listen Here
There was a final songswap on my last night in town (I spent most of this chatting to Johnny P and Gavin about local psychedelic history, missed my chance to join the music, but did play a little bit of blues with Otis and Jim from Otis and the Alligators just before closing time).

The next evening I was in Madison jamming with Peter, Maggie and Ken at M&K's new place which backs onto the hill formerly known as "Radar Hill" (not sure what it's called now, but we saw a gorgeous sunset from up there after dinner). They've got a music space (naturally) in their wonderfully retro 70's basement, and Peter invited Nic the drummer from his new (as yet unnamed) band over to join in. He's playing trumpet these days — fairly basic stuff, but good to see him diversifying. A couple of very rough jams got recorded:

Listen Here
From there it was a bus to Chicago and then a train to Colorado. A couple of days hiking in the Rockies, singing kirtan and chanting at a basement ashram in Boulder with Sistas Luna and Rachelle before flying back to Englande and it's springtime wildflower and birdsong profusion. Perfect.

Del McCouray Band with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band

2011-04-19T02:14:00.004+01:00

Friday 15th April, 2010, Performing Arts Center, Appleton, Wisconsin

Having only just arrived in Wisconsin, I got a pleasantly unexpected call from Sarah Ludeman (she of Irene's Garden, formerly The Stellectrics) to let me know that she had a spare ticket for this concert. "Del who?" I wasn't particularly bothered, as her sister Jenny (another Irene's Gardener), plus Gavin, Stef and Jimmer from Sloppy Joe, were going to be coming along, and it seemed like a great opportunity to spend time with old friends.

At the farmhouse in Amherst, before heading east, Gavin hurriedly showed me a picture of a young Del McCouray playing guitar with a bluegrass band, as well as mentioning some kind of fusion with New Orleans jazz that was going to be happening. And that's what was happening when we got there (just slightly late).

The Del McCoury Band involves DM playing guitar and singing lead vocals, along with his two sons, Ronnie and Rob, who play mandolin and banjo respectively, a fiddler and a bassist. It turns out that Del was guitarist in Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, who (does anyone dispute this?) created the 'bluegrass' genre. So...one of the originators.

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band are a New Orleans institute, active for several decades, with an evolving lineup. The current band includes Charlie Gabriel on clarinet, who said a few words about his happy memories of a residency at the Spa Lounge in Appleton back in the 50's, jamming with musicians over at Lawrence College, etc.. He even remembered the street names, which went down well with the locals!

The show involved a continually morphing body of musicians on stage: At times both bands (totally 14 players) were fully present, other times just the bluegrass players, just the jazzers, or some combination of both. There were only a couple of moments where it felt a little bit forced to me — other than that, a hugely successful experiment in intertwining two pinnacles of American music. The bluegrass band (superb musicianship, as you'd expect) reminded me of Irish session music at its best, but with a kind of groove or swing you'd probably never hear in Eire. When they were jamming with Preservation Hall, it became evident that this extra element in 'Americanised celtic folk' (if you can call it that) is the influence of the African diaspora...an inescapable groove that affects everything it touches, and which works as a bridge between the very "white" bluegrass style and the traditionally "black" New Orleans jazz sound.

Del M said a few words about the influence of jazz records on the early bluegrass players, and they played a couple of pieces to demonstrate this connection. Dixieland was also a major factor in all of this (although Dixieland, like the Grateful Dead, tends to involve everyone soloing at the same time, whereas bluegrass is very much a one-solo-at-a-time kind of thing). One of the Preservationists urged us all to our feet for the last number, the standard "I'll Fly Away" (Sarah whispered to me that this was played at our dear friend Chad Kelly's recent funeral — RIP Chad) — it was a great relief to be finally out of our seats, as this was not sitting-down music!

The encore, naturally was "When the Saints Go Marching In", something that both genres are entirely at home with. However, the arrangement was so intricately ornamented, that like a piece of New York subway graffiti that's so stylised you can no longer read what it says, it took a minute or two for the crowd to recognise what it was hearing. And then everyone was on their feet. The horn section processed off stage, along an aisle, through the lobby, back down an aisle and onto stage, attracting a string of dancing audience members along the way (including my friends... I hesitated at the last minute and missed my chance, but had the pleasure of watching Jimmer twirling Stef around on stage as the concert came to its naturally joyous conclusion, looking like he'd walked straight out of The Freak Brothers.

Afterwards, we ended up at a bar called Camelot (I think) where a couple of Appleton friends of my friends were playing a bluegrass set with their crew. I kept drifting in and out of sleep, but my mind kept superimposing a New Orleans jazz pulse over the top of their tunes, improvising intertwining horn lines, etc. Sarah had joined their circle, but as no one thought to bring instruments, she was happily making do to 'play' the knitting needles, knitting socks (I think).

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 6

2011-04-17T18:42:00.001+01:00

The latest in my series of moonthly podcasts...

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno attacks Canterbury with his direct inject anti-jazz ray gun!! Also, Nucleus, a couple of Caravan pieces from Dave Sinclair's early 70's hiatus, the Gong Global Family goes Japanese, the short-lived Soft Machine lineup involving Australian mystery drummer Phil Howard live in Germany 1971, and more sounds from the Canterbury of today.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 6

new Canterbury sounds

2011-04-08T00:30:00.005+01:00

It's been a long wait, but it's been worth it. The new 5-track Syd Arthur EP, Moving World came out about a week ago, and it's a magnificent piece of work. Their music has evolved even furthur[sic] since these pieces were recorded at their studio in SE London, but this is a perfect introduction to Canterbury's finest, and an excellent document of their progress to date:

It's available from the Dawn Chorus Recording Company complete with beautiful packaging, but the band have also been kind enough to make MP3 versions of the whole thing available to stream online for free or download for your choice of fee. I've already stretched my vocabulary enough in the past trying to describe what they sound like, so just listen...

01 Morning's Calling - Moving World EP

02 Pulse - Moving World EP

03 Exit Domino - Moving World EP

04 Planet Of Love → Hermethio - Moving World EP

You can hear an interview I did with Syd Arthur as part of Episode 5 of my Canterbury Soundwaves podcast, wherein they choose a few of their favourite Canterbury scene tracks, talk about their own music and their influences.

The Boot Lagoon
Meanwhile, another Dawn Chorus signing from Canterbury (both geographically and in musical spirit) are The Boot Lagoon, several of whose live sets I've described on this blog, are about to release their debut EP. One track has already been made available as a free download, which gives you a pretty good idea of what they're all about:

The Boot Lagoon - Businessman

Solunasonic podcast

2011-04-07T19:08:00.005+01:00

Chris 'Scope8' Topheshaw, a multi-pseudonymed Exeter-based electronica artist who I've worked with a little bit in the past (sometimes just pleasant acoustic jams, sometimes adding saz to his twisted beats) has brought this Soundcloud-based podcast to my attention:

Solunasonic Podcast - 02/2011 @320mp3 by scope8
After about 20 seconds of dark dubby sounds (wouldn't know what to call it, but it's amusing/gratifying to see tags like 'illbient' and 'darkstep' connected to something I've been involved in), there's an unexpected crossfade into a saz/Casio jam we spontaneously recorded in his flat last September, then it's off into the worlds of Zilchoid, Dv8Tors, 231ZigZag and other anonymous alphanumeric artistes.

More from that session (my own lo-fi recording) can be heard here.

both Steeleye Span and Raagnagrok in a single evening

2011-04-06T11:55:00.008+01:00

Last weekend (April 1st—3rd) saw the UK's first multidisciplinary conference on psychedelics, "Breaking Convention", held at Kent University's recently built Woolf College... 500+ people from all over the planet, 80+ speakers, Skype talks from Stan Grof, Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass...almost too much to take in in a single weekend.

There was also music during evening social events on the Saturday and Sunday. I missed out on part of the Saturday night event, as I'd bought a ticket weeks ago for Steeleye Span's gig that night (also on the UKC campus at the Gulbenkian Theatre), so detached from the temporary population of psychonauts, chemists, anthropologists, ethnobotanists, philosophers, psychotherapists and multidimensional misfits to join a very different crowd of old folkies for a couple of hours.

The crowd was uniformly about 20 years older than me, quite conservative looking (despite some no doubt colourful pasts among them)...I almost felt like I was there representing the band's (indirectly) psychedelic roots, in my faded tye-die shirt. So I was very happy when they came out and launched into the translated Danish traditional ballad "700 Elves" (after which Maddie Prior made a joke about the elves as 'eco-warriors'... I couldn't help thinking of the approximately 700 people who'd descended on that hilltop that weekend for the conference). She then explained that for their first set, they were going to reproduce their 1974 And Now We Are Six album in its entirety. She explained that they'd come up with the idea since the latest lineup is a six-piece and that "It seemed like a good idea at the time". It seemed like a great idea to me, because the next piece was the wonderful "Drink Down the Moon" (check the comparable version from their 35th anniversary tour here). I was sitting in the middle of the middle block of seats in the auditorium, so it felt like Maddie was singing directly to me at times. It was immediately apparent that (despite what you might think, after four decades, and now playing to comfortable middle-class audiences in polite theatres and arts centres), they've not lost that edge of wild, witchy earth magick that they could summon at the peak moments. I'm unashamed to say that this band of old folkies filled my heart with joy!

Their playing this album also meant we got "Long a Growing" (a ballad which Pentangle also recorded, although with an entirely different melody, and a different title, too, I think), and the classic "Thomas the Rhymer". There are a few oddities on the record too (Peter Knight joked about how they'd been "off their heads" when making it, "smoking a lot of marijuana", etc.): a medley of riddles and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" sung in high-pitched children's voices (credited to the "St. Eleye School Choir") and a cover of The Teddy Bears' "To Know Him is to Love Him" (written by Phil Spector). The first two were reworked with just Maddie's voice and Peter's violin (plucked on the first, and utterly transcendent on the latter, with a long, tripped-out solo between the second and third verses — and, yes, Maddy was able to sing this silly little song about as beautifully as anyone ever has or ever will). The keyboard and saxophone that I'd noted with some alarm on stage before the show started turned out to be there solely for "To Know Him is to Love Him". It was explained that around 1974, they were doing "rock 'n' roll encores" — coming out in 50's fancy dress, wigs, etc. for their encores and performing rock 'n' roll numbers, including this one... hence its seemingly incongruous inclusion on the album. I hadn't realised that David Bowie played a plastic toy saxophone on the original. We got long-time Richard Thompson sideman Pete Zorn playing a proper sax instead (he effortlessly switched between acoustic guitar, mandolin and flute during the gig, as well as providing backing vocals). It was a bit weird hearing Maddy sing with a slight American twang, but it was still enjoyable to hear them do that one.

Rick Kemp joked about aging, his back pain, etc., while Peter Knight lamented his loss of eyesight, unable to read some solo gig dates off a flyer he'd brought along (he'd forgotten his reading glasses). Maddie cheerfully helped him out, and he mused that "If I'd have known I was going to live this long, I'd have looked after myself...as it is, we all just have to help each other out." Keeping in that spirit, before the set break, Maddie mentioned that she'd be selling raffle tickets in the lobby to raise money for Martin Carthy (a friend who was briefly part of the band in its early days), who's unable to work at the moment as his wife, Norma Waterson, is ill. So I went over to her little table, had a chat while writing my contact details on a book of five tickets (I fought off the temptation to ask for an (urgh) autograph, but really I'd just have liked to give her a big hug for providing the world with 40+ years of musical enchantment). Such a lovely soul.

Liam Genockey (who I've recently realised is the drummer with the braided beard who plays with Robert Wyatt in the Free Will and Testament documentary) did a fabulous job behind the drums — I've since learned that he played in an early 70's 'Afro-Prog' band called ZZebra with ex-members of both If and Osibisa...there's an African dimension to his playing, lots of brushes and percussive subtlety, not overly 'rock' — this is good! The latest new member to the ever evolving Steeleye fold is Julian Littman on lead guitar — he's from the Richard Thompson/Jerry Donahue/Trevor Lucas school of English folk-rock Stratocaster players, and apart from a couple of arguably unnecessary solos, was spot on throughout.

The second set was more varied — a few slightly cheesy moments, involving modern pastiche folk-style songs (the sort of thing Fairport do a lot of these days), but some old favourites and unexpected wonders as well. They ended with an appropriately raucous "Bonny Black Hare" (one of the low points in the early Fairport catalogue, but brought to life here by a stomping beat, raw overdriven violin and lusty vocals), then came back for a predictable, yet still wonderful, encore of their Status-Quo-gone-folk anthem "All Around My Hat", during which the audience got to enthusiastically belt out an unaccompanied chorus (we did rather well, I thought).

The highlight, though (along with "Cold, Haily, Windy Night", from the Martin Carthy era Please to See the King LP), was my all-time favourite, "Cam Ye O'er Frae France". Maddie didn't get up to any of the skirt-twirling, skipping around the monitors in her plymsoles that she sometimes does, just a bit of dignified grooving-on-the-spot, but she managed a graceful little dance during this one. It was a powerfully understated version, lacking the ultra-abrasive bursts of electric guitar which animate the studio version. But I got my fill of ultra-abrasive electric guitar less than an hour later, over in Darwin College bar, where Mark Pilkington's heavy psych-drone improv group Raagnagrok were playing to the Breaking Convention attendees (and a few dozen confused students who happened to be drinking there!) The lineup was just Mark on throbbing analogue electronics, a guitarist/oboist, plus my old friend Dr. Dr. Andy 'Shroom' Letcher (University of the Hedge) guesting most effectively on English bagpipes. A super heavy, trance-inducing set that basically took that little bit of electric noise on "Cam Ye" and unfolded it into 45 minutes of transcendence. Woah!

Lapis Lazuli

2011-03-27T17:00:00.011+01:00

Casey's Alehouse, Canterbury — Friday 25th March 2011: Lapis Lazuli, with support from Joe Inkpen's Mop Collective.

The Mop Collective were a much smaller group than what I saw of them last time. Again, despite excellent musicianship and interestingly complex compositions, their music failed to engage with my brain. I thought perhaps I was just a bit tired, or it was the fault of the awkwardly shaped space they were forced to play in. But in retrospect (after Lapis managed to grab my fullest attention for the entirety of their set) I think it's more to do with the fact that it's one man's vision being executed by an ensemble, rather that the output of a group mind, which was very much in evidence with LL's music.

Members of the interconnected Canterbury bands Delta Sleep, Zoo For You, Boot Lagoon, Syd Arthur were milling around — it felt like a real occasion.

Lapis Lazuli, not long ago, at their first gig (Orange Street?)
Lapis Lazuli's set consisted of several ambitiously long, complex instrumental pieces: two guitars (one being Neil Sullivan who I met and jammed with at that party a few weeks ago), Cameron from Boot Lagoon on bass (absolutely bang on from start to finish), Adam from Delta Sleep on drums (superb, as always), and a percussionist who also switched between trumpet, low whistle and analog electronics. Phil from Madame Molotof and Mr. Lovebucket also guested on tenor sax on a couple of pieces.

A mighty sound — compelling, engaging and (just what I like) complex without being soulless. There was a thrilling rock'n'roll energy, despite the 'post-rock' nature of their compositions. I sense a huge creative potential lurking within this ensemble. If you're in the UK, look out for them on the Kaplick touring festival stage (they've sort of signed on as 'house band').

Ten years of Droning

2011-03-25T09:47:00.007Z

Keith from Children of the Drone just sent me this photo:

It's from the very first COTD session, even before we had a name, just Simon, Keith and I playing noodly modal sitar-saz-mandola jams in the bed department of the Debenhams department store in Exeter &mdash we were all sitting and playing on a very large bed at one point This was part of an initiative local music organiser (and occasional Droner) Philip Robinson put together to "install" musicians in unexpected public locations.

We had a celebratory session (and a wonderful cake made by Vicky!) for our 5th anniversary. Any tenth anniversary celebrations are going to have to wait, as I'm not going to be anywhere near Exeter for another couple of months.

A new COTD compilation is about due (I've been putting one together about once a year). Keith and I were joking about a limited edition ten-anniversary box-set...

a lot going on...

2011-03-22T09:57:00.007Z

Thursday 10th March: I recorded an interview for my latest Canterbury Soundwaves podcast with Joel, Raven and Liam from Syd Arthur out at the old farmhouse in Boughton where they have their rehearsal studio (Fred was away giving a drum lesson). We covered a lot of ground, as I'd asked them to choose a selection of Canterbury-related tracks to play and talk about. So we got some Gong and Hatfield (and a story about how they'd discovered them via a friend's Dad's record collection), some Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, Caravan and Egg, as well as something totally new to me from Hermeto Pascoal (scroll down three posts if you don't know him already) and The-Quartet (a local jazz-rock ensemble with whom they collaborated on a cover of the Softs' "Facelift" a couple of years back, and whose pianist taught at St. Edmunds, where they all went to school) .

The next night I ended up at a party at "The Bungalow" on the Old Dover Road where some of the local bands Delta Sleep (formerly Sávlön) and Lapis Lazuli reside. They've been hosting regular jam parties, which I'd heard about through Phil the sax player (Mr. Lovebucket, Madame Molotof) who works at the wholefoods shop and always has time to talk about music- and consciousness-related matters. Liam mentioned this particular session the night before, so I cycled over with my saz and a little Pignose busking amp. Various members of Zoo For You, Delta Sleep and Lapis were jamming in the music room when I arrived. I ended up playing some really nice stuff with Neil, guitarist from Lapis — he immediately plugged me into the PA and was incredibly welcoming. Also some good stuff with Adam (drums)and Maria (bass) from Delta Sleep with Zoo's guitarist Barney on drums, and with a guitarist called Tom, among others. I'd been planning to play some Lapis on the next podcast — a 13-minute epic called "Triton Gnast", which, despite sounding entirely 'done' to me, but which Neil assures me is merely a demo, recorded in the back room in which this jam was going on. And it went on. Quite loud, not always coherent, but always pushing, always exploring. There should be things like this going on everywhere, all the time... but as there aren't, this was an incredibly welcome happening.

The next night it was Syd Arthur's first gig in quite a while, at Canterbury's acoustically-challenged venue known as The Farmhouse. It was packed out, hardly room to move. And Saturday night...as Joel pointed out later, one problem with these popular hometown gigs is that they provide an opportunity for a lot of friends to get together, so (after a couple of hours of drinking) the noise floor goes right up. This particularly afflicted the support band, Rae, from Bath/Bristol, whose gentle music was largely trampled on by the audience chatter, but still maintained it's floaty Anglo-Hispanic dignity (Leonie has an extraordinary voice, and sings quite a bit in Spanish — one song was the words of a Spanish poet put to music — but there's something very English about the whole atmosphere they create, something very calm and understated, rather like Robert Wyatt's exploration of the Spanish language). Tenor sax, acoustic bass guitar, sensitive drums, and Leonie on wow! vocals and big red semi-acoustic guitar. I just wish I could have heard them a bit better.

Syd started their set by launching into something I've heard a few times now, but don't know the name of. I managed to find a spot near one of the PA speakers, among a more-attentive-than-usual cluster of friends and settle into the sound. A long, tight, powerful set. Raven playing a bit of pianet on one piece. Six new songs (a couple having been played once or twice, the rest debuts). "Dorothy" and "Ode to Summer" are clearly going to become significant parts of their repertoire, and "Truth Seeker" (only played a couple of times before) already has. From the forthcoming Moving World EP, we got "Exit Domino", "Pulse" and "Morning's Calling" (they've changed the name since "Dawn Chorus" was adopted as a label name), but not much older than that. They keep moving. The whole set was extremely well received. No gimmicks, no hitches, just one BIG, almost overwhelming, flow of music. Talking to Joel outside afterwards, he was clearly exhausted — just from the sheer concentration involved in successfully delivering this increasingly complex music. I wish I'd been a bit less tired and that there'd been more room to move so I could have fully absorbed what they were doing. In any case, they got one of the most enthusiastic encores I've witnessed in a while (they played "Second Difference"), and if it weren't for licensing issues, I think the audience would have kept them there for a good while longer.

Happily dancing dancing afterwards to Fela Kuti records with a happy, thinned out crowd, I counted my blessings. The live music scene around here has gone into slight recession, but when it's happening, it can be something rare and precious and not to be taken for granted.

Random Article: Valley Sessions, January-February edits

2011-03-22T09:39:00.005Z

Miriam — violin, voice, percussion
Tom — bass
me — saz

Mark — bouzouki (on track 1)
Dave — percussion
Kris — percussion
Listen Here
[a week later:] This just got a review from an Estonian blogger — 8.5 out of 10!

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 5

2011-03-17T16:53:00.003Z

The latest in my series of moonthly podcasts...

Hatfield live in '75, Gong backing a long-forgotten French poet, cameos from William Burroughs and Robert Wyatt's young son Sam, recent Canterbury-ish sounds from Helsinki, and a chat with contemporary local band Syd Arthur about their own music as well as their Canterbury influences and connections.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 5

Hermeto Pascoal (wow!)

2011-03-17T16:52:00.002Z

A whole new musical world has recently opened up for me.

I was recording an interview segment with local band Syd Arthur at their farmhouse in Boughton for the latest Canterbury Soundwaves podcast, and they happened to mention the Brazilian bandleader, composer, multi-instrumentalist Hermetho Pascoal as an influence. I was entirely unfamiliar with his work, but he turns out to be one of those mad (in the best possible sense), ultra-prolific creative geniuses (genii?) in the same league as Sun Ra, Frank Zappa and Lee "Scratch" Perry.

The Ao Vivo Montreux 1979 album is a good place to start, but his catalogue is pretty huge. It's going to take a while to catch up!

Check the video:

Wyatt in Whitstable

2011-03-06T15:16:00.013Z

Robert Wyatt was in Whitstable a few weeks ago, and no one around here seems to have known about it until after the event (it got a mention in the Canterbury-area paper because of the local connection). What a shame. It was a weekend sound-art and music convention called "Off the Page", and he was there with his wife, the poet and painter Alfreda Benge, giving a talk about his favourite music and joining in with the panel discussions.

sketch of Wyatt done during the event by Geoff Winston
Apparently, due to one of the CDs he'd chosen from having gone missing, he ended up singing the piece in question (Coltrane's "Naima", as interpreted by Les Double Six). Nothing on YouTube, so seemingly no one captured that on their camera phone. Oh well.

I first heard of this from Jim in Canterbury Rock, a proper old record shop in St. Dunstans that's seemingly been there forever. I bought my first copy of Wyatt's Rock Bottom there in the early 90s. Jim mentioned that a similarly venerable record shop in Whitstable, called "Rock Bottom", was one he started many years ago and named after one of his favourite albums. I'd always wondered if that shop was named by a Wyatt fan, or was just a badly named record shop (hoping the former, of course). It's just a few doors from what used to be the Bear and Key, the pub where The Wilde Flowers played their first ever gig on January 15, 1965.

I did find a list of his favourite ten tracks (probably just ten things he happened to like the day he put the piece together) in a magazine feature from 1975. I'm going to work through the top five in my next five Canterbury Soundwaves podcasts.

And then there's this (the last few seconds are just extraordinary...)

Citizen Fish

2011-02-27T11:22:00.006Z

A couple of Friday nights ago, the first time I'd been out to see any live music in far too long... Actually I did see Luke Smith and The Feelings doing their thing at The Cherry Tree not that long ago (including a lovely cover of Them's "My Lonely Sad Eyes" in which he interpolated a Brian Patten poem). Before that it was Madame Molotof at 'The Ballroom' (Orange Street restyled in decadent Edwardian style) on Miriam's birthday, quite a while back.

Citizen Fish! At The Maidens Head, a 15th century pub in Wincheap — beautiful oak beam ceiling, the inside stuffed to the gills with punks of all ages and varieties (mostly the old sort though!). Ripped T-shirts, tatooed necks, studs, boots, tartan, receding mohicans, dyed/shaved bits of head, blokes with those skeletal features and bad teeth from too much speed, others with shirts off moshing, lots of beer and general good cheer. I felt completely at home amongst it all, forgot where I was, having never been in this pub or seen any of these people before. It was a bit like an anthropological field trip to be among the tribe of aging punx!

If you didn't know, Citizen Fish are an anarcho-ska punk band who've been going since 1990, around Dick from Culture Shock (1986—1990) and the Subhumans (1980—present, on and off). They've got a trombone player to add a bit of musicality to the otherwise predictable (yet wonderful) guitar-drums-bass 1-2-3-4 punk ska vibe. Dick's got a lovably eccentric, slightly bumbling and earnest stage persona. My overriding memory of the evening will remain this exchange, I expect:

Dick: "This is a song about traffic lights and the anarchist's dilemna: do you follow the rules and obey the red light or..."

drunk punk up at the front: [inaudible]

Dick: "Well yeah, mate, if your vehicle's made of water. [pause] This is called "Traffic Lights". 1,2,3,4..."

I got into the spirit of it, ended up on my feet among the kinetic throng, had more beer than necessary, falling (not badly) off my bike a couple of times as I wobbled home thereupon, but still with a huge smile on my face.

Punk's not dead!

Steeleye Span

2011-02-22T10:40:00.007Z

Steeleye Span are playing the Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury in early April. Normally I haven't got much time for folk-rock revivalism, but the current lineup involves Maddy Prior, Rick Kemp and Peter Knight, and recent video clips I've been checking out suggest they're sounding as good as ever (and really enjoying themselves too). And I've never seen them...got to see lovely Maddy Prior and the crew at least once while they're still around!

They've had their low points over the last four decades, but anyone who doubts the validity of this band should check out this, my favourite of their recordings:

(There's a version of the same here from their 35th anniversary tour, and there's this, both clearly demonstrating that they still rock!) And then there's this (with Martin Carthy, pictured left, on electric guitar!):

The Storm is Passing Over

2011-02-20T16:20:00.000Z

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 4

2011-02-17T12:02:00.003Z

Hugh Hopper's first and last recorded performances (separated by 46 years and both involving Daevid Allen), Sun Ra's influence considered, the audio from some recently discovered French TV footage of Kevin Ayers and Caravan live in Paris (1970 and 1973, respectively), a rare (and somewhat muffled) glimpse of Egg live in 1970, Peter Blegvad considering the noun form of the adjective "numinous" in the midst of a wonderful bit of National Health, Robert Wyatt live (sort of) in 2003(!), and a lo-fi recording of his Matching Mole classic "O Caroline" being sung mostly in Welsh.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 4

Matua RIP

2011-02-16T12:40:00.004Z

Very sad news from Aotearoa (a.k.a. New Zealand) this week. Alan got in touch to say that our good friend and brother in music, Matua, had just died of a heart attack. I met Matua on the 2006 Treewalk along the Motueka Valley and was lucky enough to have had a chance to talk to him at some length about Maori culture, and his journey from gangster criminality in the ghettoes of Wellington to a peaceful Rastafarian life as a father and musician. We also played a LOT of music, some of which I managed to record.

Our Czech friend Tomaash has put together a little tribute video:

I remember when Alan was living in SW Ireland, getting his head around the fact that he was (not entirely of his own choosing) going to be moving to the other side of the planet for the foreseeable future. Knowing very little about the place, he still had some kind of vision in his mind. If things got tough, "I'll go up into the hills and jam with the Maoris", he told me. I wasn't sure how plausible this was, but little did we know that there are few cultures on Earth wherein a rootical reggae busker like himself would receive such a warm acceptance. Maoris, he soon discovered, love reggae music, and strongly related to Bob Marley in the 1970's as a voice of native people striving for liberation from European colonialism (he received a full ceremonial welcome when he visited the country). Within months of settling at the top of the South Island, Alan was playing music regularly with Matua and friends — busking, gigging, festivals, Waitangi Day (which is also Marley's birthday) celebrations, playing for free in old-people's homes, centres for the "differently abled", etc... something which continued right up until this tragic event.

When I was there in 2006, Matua's several children were all singing and/or playing instruments. His oldest son (who must now be well into his teenage years) was showing great promise on the guitar. I don't doubt that they will continue his good works.

RIP brother Matua...

* * *

Click on the following link or copy it into your favoured media player:

Matua 2006 playlist

* * *
[a few days later] I had a bit of time with nothing in particular to do, so I downloaded some images from the recent events in the Arab world (and some other places) and put this together. The peaceful uprising in Egypt would have been starting around the time Matua left his body, so this seems like a fitting tribute:

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 3

2011-01-19T10:18:00.002Z

An unexpected guest brings out the wilder side of Caravan, Terry Riley's influence explored, an African excursion, Soft Machine unleashing total sonic mayhem on a Dutch TV audience in 1967 and several Canterbury bands covering each other's material (among other things).

Canterbury Soundwaves, episode 3

recording in Kent and Sussex

2011-01-12T15:11:00.011Z

I'm just back from Lewes, having been recording some saz for one last song Stella wants to put on her album. It musically harks back to the old Spacegoats days, so she got Matt/Zegg playing bouzouki, Chris/Krishmael playing hammered dulcimer and Richard the luthier (once part of Hearth) playing some very Pokish mandolin. (It turns out that Pok had just got back from the Pyrenees and had been spotted busking in Brighton, but it didn't work out to get him in the studio for the session. It was at The Loophole, a friendly one-man operation in Brighton where I recorded the saz part for "Nightingale" for the same album, back in 2007.

Stella manages to make studio sessions into joyous occasions, brings a whole picnic along with her and make sure everyone's well looked-after. It was a pleasure to be part of (and to see Chris again — he's hardly touched his dulcimer in four years, now involved in growing fruit in the Brighton area). Back at Stella's cottage in Lewes that evening, she managed to get Matt and I to watch the surreally awful 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (a major childhood influence on her, apparently)! The next day, after a long breakfast with Matt at a groovy Lewes cafe, talking about DNA, quantum mechanics, philosophical problems concerning the Law of Large Numbers, early Buddhist scriptures and the Riemann zeta function (conversations with the Zegg are among the best), he mixed the new song while I set Stella up with some web-hosting, put together the beginnings of her website and helped lay out a gig poster. She then took us to an excellent free Qigong class which kind of cancelled out the previous night's film experience!

The album's going to be called Ordinary Day and should be out in the first half of this year. The combination of her beautiful new batch of songs and Matt's production work has led to something exquisite, to my ears.

A few days earlier, I'd been down with Matt plus Will and Dave from Cocos Lovers, recording a saz part in a huge greenhouse on a farm near Ash. There's a Canadian musician/sound engineer called Paul Clifford living there. He's set up a tiny little caravan a recording space (insulating the walls very carefully with straw and colourful quilting, with additional fairy lights, etc....a really magical little space he's made). It turns out that he'd played drums with The Be Good Tanyas, played on their Blue Train album (a favourite of mine). And a lovely bloke. He and Dave had been probing the acoustics of the greenhouses with pushed-to-its-limits trombone (Paul) and very loud electric guitar (Dave) that afternoon, so everything was set up to record a saz part in there for "The Black Douglas", an epic, adventurous leap forward for the band — and something that just sort of came together in the process of recording their second album (it's called Elephant Lands). Paul had recorded all the rhythm tracks in his caravan, then Matt had come down for an intensive week in Deal to do the vocals and instrumental overdubs. They chose him on my recommendation, and I was glad to see that it had worked out very well indeed. Will said it was the first recording experience the band had had which was enjoyable rather than hellish. Matt's very good at creating a pleasantly calm, but creative atmosphere, and they'd all been having a lot of fun and getting quite experimental with the whole process.

After my takes, the mics got moved to a big barn to record Paul drumming on a huge grain hopper (or silo?) with percussion mallets. This was also for "The Black Douglas", along with clanking chains, jagged Marc Ribot-type electric guitar and some very able fingerpicking from Phil. It was written about an ancestor of Natasha and Pog, and looks like it might close the album. It'd be nice to think a bit of my saz playing might make it onto what looks like it's going to be a magnificent album, but that track will need thinning out, so we'll see what Matt comes up with in the mixing process.

organic plum pudding soundtrack!

2011-01-11T17:46:00.004Z

I just heard from someone in France that she'd used "The Lark in the Morning" from the Rainy Night in the Bell Tent collection for an "animated recipe" for an organic plum pudding which she'd created and put up on YouTube.

"I found the above piece of music on the Internet Archive and it was absolutely perfect for the animation I was making called: Slow Food - Hasty Pudding. It fitted not only the pace of the animation but the spirit of it - organic Plum Pudding, made with ingredients from around the World and cooked on a woodburning stove, fed with pallet wood. I hope you like it and feel I have done justice to your music..."

Very sweet (in both senses), but not vegan, unfortunately. But it is organic, and the Dongas (the nomadic crew Inge and I were travelling with in Cornwall at the time) were always extremely fond of rich cakes and puddings like this, so quite appropriate, really. That's me (saz), Inge (mandolin), Jo (wooden flute), Ruth (violin) and Colin (percussion), as far as I can remember (it was 1997) on that particular piece.

Random Article: Valley Sessions, November-December edits

2010-12-30T20:43:00.004Z

Miriam — violin, voice, percussion, telephone conversation
Tom — bass
me — saz

Adam — percussion
Kris — percussion
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Boot Lagoon + Zoo For You in Whitstable

2010-12-28T14:24:00.007Z

The East Quay, Whitstable, 27 December 2010

An appropriately excellent end to an excellent year of music.

It's been a bit too icy for cycling, so I got the bus in to Whitstable, got chips and wandered along the beach to The Neptune. I wasn't expecting anything, it being a Monday night, but I'd forgotten that it was a bank holiday. There was music coming from the pub — rock'n'roll and R&B standards, Beatles, Stones, all played and sung exceedingly well...at one point the whole pub was singing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" — proper Whitstablian seasonal cheer! Only at the end was it announced that half of this duo was Jim Leverton (who I can only imagine is the Jim Leverton who's been the bass player in Caravan since the mid-90's). Joel from Syd Arthur was down there, along with his dad — they'd been out celebrating younger brother Josh's 21st birthday (Josh being drummer in Zoo For You). We talked about the death of Captain Beefheart, the ever-evolving saga of the "coming soon" debut Syd Arthur album, and about the big changes going on with Furthur Productions and plans for the future (of which you'll no doubt find out more here at some point).

Joel's been playing bass with the Happy Accidents lately — this is a quirky local band who've been going since the 80's, involving both Graham Flight and Brian Hopper (former Wilde Flowers). He mentioned that Brian Hopper's taken an interest in my Canterbury Soundwaves podcast, suggested a willingness to do some kind of guest slot/chat/interview...that would be nice.

Speaking of Beefheart, this was the first thing I put on when I heard the news, my favourite track off Trout Mask Replica:

Joel also mentioned that The Boot Lagoon were supporting Zoo (the first I'd heard of it), and that the two bands (plus he and Liam) were planning a finale of the Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless", that mighty piece from Remain in Light. I carried on down the seafront to the East Quay, not wanting to miss anything. Nice to see some of the Furthur crew and entourage who I'd not seen since the summer. There was also a small Deal contingent there, with Nicola and Bill from Cocos Lovers plus a couple of others.

The Boot were excellent once more. They're audibly relaxing into their sound, and despite the precision and tightness of the playing, there was something less mathematical and more soulful about it all. Their set (which tends to flow from one piece to another in the Canterbury tradition) just seemed to pour out of them. There were also a couple of pieces augmented by a tenor sax player (I couldn't see too well from where I was, but I think it was one of the Zoo horns). But where's that heavy fuzz bass sound gone?? Bring it back, Cameron!

I wasn't quite sure about Zoo For You's set at LOTF this summer — great party music, but I felt that it was at the risk of losing some of the abstract depth I remembered from the band's earlier days. This time they seemed to get it just right. Still great party music, raw, funky, edgy and yet DEEEP. Saxophonist/frontman Bruno led three cheers for Beefheart (no covers attempted, that would probably be a bit too much to expect at such short notice). And I'm starting to really like the song "Leaf"...

And the finale was indeed mighty: all of ZFY, most of TBL, half of Syd, plus Dawson from Furthur on cowbell and numerous girlfriends on stage. Anything involving so many people on such a small stage would normally be a bit of a mess (however much fun), but we got a surprisingly tight, coherent, exploratory and really quite transcendent "Crosseyed and Painless" which seemed like the perfect thing for this band to be playing. Their sound had brought the Talking Heads to mind in the past, but somehow hearing this made further sense of where they're coming from to me.

Did anyone record this?? Please get in touch if so — I want a copy!

A Cocos Christmas Carol

2010-12-22T17:52:00.004Z

Sunday 19th December 2010, The Farmhouse, Canterbury

I got there just in time for The Ladies of the Lake, singing unamplified in the restaurant part of The Farmhouse. Natasha, Nicola and Mary-Anne have been joined by their friend Jo from the Smugglers Singers for this project. They started with "My Husband's Got No Courage in Him" (much giggling from the peasant diners), followed by Mary-Anne's new "People of the Sea". Natasha picked up an acoustic guitar for "The Hills of Spain", which sounded very much like an old folk song to me, but Phil assures me she just wrote it. Some more lovely stuff (which I can't recall now), ending with a spellbinding arrangement of (of all things) the old children's rhyme "Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat...", set to a haunting melody and interpolating part of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman" (I think it was).

A bit later, the Smugglers Singers (whose main set I'd missed, but whose recent CD-R of home-recorded sea shanties I've heard) returned to sing a couple of Christmas songs. I'm pretty fed up of Christmas songs, but (not surprisingly - everything this crew touch seems to turn to gold), they managed to make "Silent Night" and even "Ding-Dong Merrily on High" sound magnificent to my ears.

Quite a lot of the scheduled acts (The Momeraths, Tom Farrer, The Turncoat) couldn't make it due to the weather, but we got an excellent Will Varley set. Will in ironic Santa hat delivered the usual stinging political punk-folk songs, with a couple of love/hate songs thrown in (one I'd not heard, called something like "Fate Sometimes Gets Things Wrong", was in the same sort of league as Dylan's "Idiot Wind", truly captivating from beginning to end). He'll be recording his album soon, and if he gets it right, it could end up having quite an impact...

The full 8-piece Cocos Lovers finished up with an excellent set of mostly their newer stuff, including "Blackened Shores"? (heard just once before) and a new Mary-Anne song I didn't recognise. It was a bit like an abbreviated version of that last, extended two-set thing they did at St. Alpheges, just with a livelier audience. And Matt Tweed (who I put them in touch with) is going to be recording their new album in January! I reckon they'll have another excellent year in 2011, however long it takes the world-at-large to catch up with their wonderfulness.

Canterbury Soundwaves episode 2

2010-12-22T14:47:00.007Z

Digging further into the Canterbury archives (but tending to get stuck in 1974 for quite a lot of this one)...

Canterbury Soundwaves, episode 2

Westgate Towers, Canterbury