gigged bagged aristocrat

so i did my online gig, 27 minutes of me playing to my girlfriend & sometimes my cat in this room, and two other people out there online, a third who popped in and out, bad connection i guess and almost a fourth who got it all set up about 4 hours before the gig then never came back... small acorns and all that...

it included the 27th weekly improvisation which is rendering right now and will hopefully end up in this post...

me & dinah just saw the aristocrats on more4... very funny film about a joke... featuring an awful lot of mainly american comedians...

and one of the presents i got this christmas was from my beautiful dinah and it is a bag... but a bag modified so that i can hang it from my handle bars as i cycle...

i cycled with it today and it rocks...

rummy slightly different sized families

howl's moving castle

ghibli

rummy

of some kind

...

i had to virtually borrow money today to bid on a soundcard on ebay...

me & felinity's immediate family played rummy tonight which was really nice...

slightly wider family only an hour before with trave's M (who he's marrying in september... oh yes... no small news that... hang on, why am i in brackets?)

MARRYING NEXT SEPTEMBER...!!!

he somewhat half-heartedly asked me to be best man when i was lying sick and bored in bed on christmas eve... i accepted somewhat reservedly and i'm hoping it's still on...

i'm looking forward to the speech...

so this slightly wider family watched howl's moving castle earlier while my ebay bid failed to win me the soundcard i desire, releasing me from the debt...

a more even version of this slightly wider family will be present @ tomorrow evening's meal which will be just before trave & M leave and will include both felinity's G & my sweet boobelah dinah...

howl's moving castle was a present from felinity to me and it's made by the same people who made spirited away (which i gave her last christmas), the cat returns (which me & felinity had seen together ages ago and which she didn't really like and i liked a bit) & princess mononoke (which i saw on filmfour in a couple of sittings & loved)...

it was very good, although a little too long..

larger family again an hour or three before this, with uncle R & auntie J and three of the cousins, very sociable visit they had...

and an even wider family about two hours before this with uncle C, dad's brother, who left this afternoon and had been here since christmas eve morning and who bought the snow patrol album this year... a fact me & felinity liked...

so, briefly, the rummy, some version of it, where each round you have a different wild card, starting with aces and ending with kings...

and just how nice it was only to have our immediate family (for once) no matter how pleasant each version of the wider famnily we experienced today, it's a rare thing, just having the five of us...

felinity won... having gained the lead from the 4th round and keeping it...

she won 6 of the rounds,

i won 5 of the rounds...

i started off losing spectacularly, became 2nd in a surprise attack, ended up 4th with victory in my grasp but not...

it was fun

having a lovely christmas now, despite my earlier sickness...

can't wait to see dinah tomorrow

x

sorry for myself

a little anyway...

yesterday i starting throwing up in the afternoon and i slept very badly last night...

so today i'm a little out of sorts, still not all better... and as a precautionary measure i'm missing christmas day dinner...

which is undoubtedly for the best but it is a bit rubbish...

my boobelah just phoned which pleases me though... and it turns out one of her nephews had a stomach bug which has felled both her mum and her sister in a similar way to my sickness... so that's probably where it came from...

ok, online gig business:

this page on deoxy gives you the gen... and... hang on...

basically you download the ventrilo client software and install it, then click on this link and i'll be there next saturday @ 9pm (GMT)

x

almost leaving the house

well, briefly this is...

just about 5 minutes before i head out of the door and head to the placid countryside...

i've said my goodbyes to my beautiful girl and she's gone to work, we'll be seeing each other again on wednesday - or - the day after boxing day...

and i have to say i'm getting a fair bit confused what with everyone using words like christmas day instead of monday... the schedules are confusing enough for me as it is...

and another thing...

toilets in shops..?

why do they not always have coat hooks...

why must i be working out a hygienic way to hold onto my coat while doing what i do in there...?

ray's jazz in foyles bookshop this was, this afternoon, otherwise a perfectly relaxed shopping experience, finishing off the christmas shop, a coldish cycle ride into town and then that calm atmosphere only a few 100 metre's away from oxford street and the madness that was presumably going on there...

i'm watching a soundcard on ebay...

i have almost exactly no money so in some ways it's daft even to watch it but miracles do happen, one of my employers surely is about to pay me something...?

and me & dinah have booked a hotel in brighton for new years eve...

la, la, la...

a chance to see grace & josiah on new years day i hope...

ok, enough rambling... the road awaits... and a christmas tree at the other end that needs decorating...

x

longcat rhodes, voice & space echo improvisation week 26

happy solstice x

longest night

darkness has fallen and this will be the longest night this winter...

i've had a very productive day... managing to recycle the drinks cartons, get in the loo roll and the laundry powder and swap the freeview box for one that works...

we have a house meeting in a couple of hours which shouldn't be too arduous but could easily become so...

and tonight i am intending to record the longcat weekly improvisation week 26 at exactly the moment of the solstice... which is either 0.22 or 0.26 depending on who you ask, so that's ok, start playing @ 0.20 and make sure it's at least 7 minutes long...

x

freeview denied cold

you know, cycling home last night was very similar to cycling home tonight, both times i'd spent quite a long time outside in the cold before getting on the bike and both times both my fingers and my toes were very, very cold by the time i got in...

actually hard to feel them kind of cold... both nights i immediately sat in front of my heater and thawed out for 5 minutes or so...

last night i was with felinity, riding the storm amongst other things... we had meant to go to the pictures but we missed it and it was a very nice night anyway, just sitting in a cafe drinking tea for quite awhile, and of course the storm...

tonight i was out with some folks from londonbridgework and much fun was had, we ended up sat outside, huddled around one of those gas heaters, outside of the george on borough high street... producerG & M amongst the people... producerG came with me to richer sounds to help me buy the freeview box i bought tonight... a product i got home and which promptly didn't work at all...

deeply rubbish, i'll be ringing richer sounds up tomorrow and questioning this situation...

and i've been checking out soundcards... i want a 4in 4out and producerG was ringing round for me to get ideas... i'm a little put out by technology tonight what with the freeview box not functioning... but i think i'm going to end up spending 80 odd quid on an M-audio soundcard that will give me what i want...

it would be a handy thing to have tomorrow (or the next day) when i'll be doing this weeks improvisation, week 26, exactly 6 months since the 1st one...

the winter solstice falls at around 0.25, (just after midnight) tomorrow night, so actually the 22nd of december and i'd like to do the improvisation then, although it being the middle of the night i'll probably do it earlier... or later...

and that man in the north of england is cool with the online gig a week on saturday so that's looking likely...

x

trickster

popped down to kennington to retrieve my keyboard this morning, which meant getting out of bed about 4 hours before i got out of bed yesterday... yesterday bearing the hangover from monday night, (even with said hangover i still managed to ride the storm in leicester square with felinity last night)...

but not only the hangover, the gradual process of not working and therefore sleeping later each day was doing it's work and so this morning was about resetting the body clock and was tricky...

so around 7 (early by a couple of hours) i woke up to find that my room was booby trapped... i could even hear/see the booby trapper, i knew him, he was a friend, the booby trap was a playful thing...

which was all very well but both of the tape delays currently in my possession, neither of which is actually mine, were balanced precariously up high so that as soon as i moved they would fall on me...

and that surely wouldn't do them any good...?

so i lived in this paradigm for a little while, before eventually looking at what the time was, and working out it was all a dream... drifting back to sleep...

i was thinking about it on the tube back from kennington... this trickster in my subconscious... the second time in recent months that i've seen someone in that dream space who wasn't threatening me like previous visitors...

no conclusions... just questions...

so i'm off shortly to have a christmas lunch with various people from londonbridgework... then i'll be in town so i think i'm going to purchase a freeview box... and maybe some christmas presents...

x

1 year today

we have two anniversaries, one on the 25th of september being the first time we kissed... and one on the 18th of december being when we officially became boyfriend and girlfriend...

and check it out, only just over an hour into the 18th and i've already been paid... so i can spend a little on my beautiful girl and me...

just listened to the improvisation that's up on mypace and i love it... i do hope you've listened to it or will listen to it... (me, me, me)

and i think i've decided when to do the internet gig...

i for a long time believed that america were behind us, as in, we would have midday and then they would have it 6 to 8 hours later...

this week i found out that it's actually the other way round, that they're ahead of us...

i walked around for at least a few days believing that i had been wrong and that they have midday before us...

and then i was out with felinity on saturday night and she told me that no... america is in fact behind us... so i'm having to get used to this new fact in my life which is the same fact i always had...

anyway, with this in mind... i'm currently thinking of playing an online gig @ 9pm (GMT) saturday 30th december... so it'll be 1-3ish in america, 10pm in europe...

i know it puts the rest of the world into unsociable hours but at this point these are the parts of the world most likely to check it out... i think...

of course i've got to spread the news and check it out with the man up in the north of england whose ventrilo server i'll be on... it's under the banner of deoxy's socratic hall... if you wish to check it out you'll need the ventrilo client software and the server details, which i'll post when it's all sorted, but that's currently where i'm at with it...

ok... bed...

x

PS - just before i get into that warm bed beside that beautiful woman of mine... any italian speakers care to help out felinity with a little translation?

arkestra

gigging tonight with T's band, 1st one, kind of a warmup, at the south london pacific bar where we've been rehearsing...

and before that i might meet up with felinity over near hampstead heath where she's going to a party...

now felinity is kind of at the centre of this following story, because she has had a shuffle longer than me and always puts songs onto it randomly...

i'm much more straight than her in this way, i choose my music... usually...

but the last couple of shuffle loads have been random fillings because i was thinking about the amount of music i have and the small percentage of it that i actually play...

so this afternoon i was cycling back from waitrose (close enough to home to warrant a headphones/no helmet approach to cycling - foolish yes) and a miles evans/gil evans track had just finished, whole band with wind sections and everything... another very brassy tune came on which i didn't recognise and a voice said over the top:

Sun Ra and his arkestra - ... - 16 December 1971

exactly 36 years ago today...

beautiful track with deep resonant horns, afro percussion, crazy rambling trumpet over the top...

in other news i was looking at a report of the viewings of my weekly improvisations on googlevideo and i made a list, comparing what would be a reasonable expectation against the facts...

a reasonable expectation being that the older the video the more views it has...

so week 1 would be at the top of the list and week 25 would be at the bottom..

and although week 2 is more than week 1, other than this at the ends of the list things do pan out as expected, but in the scheme of things, week 8 appears 3rd in the list, when it should be 8th...

so i had a look at week 8 and it was the 1st one i did on the landlord's grand piano... and it is pretty cool... so i've uploaded the mp3 to my mypace...

ok, off to meet felinity and play the gig...

x

last teaching first gigging

ok, that's me for working in 2006...

taught my last 2 lessons this morning before cycling down to the south london pacific for our last rehearsal before our first gig tomorrow...

largely penniless but for dinah's helping... not too long to go before payday on monday so it could be worse... monday will also be me & dinah's one year anniversary as boyfriend/girlfriend... good timing for getting paid...

a little empty headed so maybe i don't have much to say, just marking this passage into not working...

x

november autumn colours

this was the day my piano arrived... this video is akin to september sky changing... the music is the tale end of this week's improvisation...

Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of atlantic records, has died... that record company did some great, great things...

x

the dead c

uncle filmo has many of their albums... they're a new zealand band who never leave new zealand... but they made it over to london for the all tomorrow's parties festival and a side gig was the gig @ the luminaire last night that me & him made it to...

they were supported by a duo whose name i never caught... i wasn't so keen but filmo dug them a little, the last track was a huge, huge guitar thing accompanied by wailing vocals and i wasn't so keen on the vocals... he thought it appropriate though..

but we were there for the main event and that was amazing...

there are three of them, in the mighty dead c, drummer, 2 guitarists - both of them messing with all manner of electronic gadgetry...

their gig (which seemed to be completely improvised) began with the 2 guitarists tinkering with their electronics, a strange electric sound gradually rising...

yellow shirted guitarist then strapped on his guitar and played a huge chord...

red t-shirted guitarist didn't pick up his guitar for another 5-10 minutes...

the gig went on without stopping for 40 minutes or so before yellow shirt asked red t-shirt to stop for a moment - somewhat nervously it seems...

yellow shirt spoke briefly, announcing themselves as the mighty dead c (fuck yeah)...

they did one more tune which was much shorter - only 5 - 10 minutes - ending with red t-shirt throwing his guitar to the floor and storming off... yellow shirt and the drummer followed and as we were leaving a few members of the audience were trying to raise an encore but it was clear the c had finished for the night...

the sound that they made was incredible... really, really loud and very beautiful... loads of lovely harmonics within the guitar sounds... red t-shirt inserting metal things between the strings and the fretboard, getting a great springy sound... clearly messing with the sound of the guitar all the way through the gig, at one point balancing the guitar on it's tuning end and hitting the back of it directly in front of the amp...

feedback galore and very fine for it...

inspirational stuff

x

half remembered faces - the dead C & a stupid tale

watching the dead C perform last night in kilburn i found myself fantasising that i was on stage at such a gig (the support) and in my mind i started improvising lyrics that i was performing there & then...

i wrote the lyrics down when i got home and today, half remembered faces is becoming a song...

more on the mighty dead C later...

so the stupid tale...:

this is yesterday morning and i hope i tell it right...

i left the house to go to londonbridgework wearing my small coat, i've been wearing the big coat more and more now it's getting colder - even cycling - however work days, cycling longer distances is the smaller coat...

but being a two coat individual these days i forgot to transfer my keys and my travelcard (wallet) into the small coat, a fact i discover a couple of minutes into the journey... i decided not to go back for them, just going to work, i had enough money...

so i'm cycling along and i reach the point near angel about half way through my journey and i get a flat tire...

it's been awhile since i've had a puncture and i'm not at all in the habit of carrying around the doings to fix them these days...

so i think alright, that's ok, i'm near enough to angel tube i'll lock up the bike there and get the northern line in...

so i'm walking my limping bicycle along to the tube, trying to ring work to no avail to get a message to my students that i'll be late, they're not answering the phone, i'm getting worked up by this now, a simple phonecall to let them know where i am would ease my mind and i can't get through...

i try the two students whose numbers i have, i try my friend M who is on the staff, she's on holiday, i try the main work number again and again...

by this time i've reached the tube - where i'm aware i won't be able to make the phonecall and i'm accepting the fact that i'll be 10 - 15 minutes late and i won' t be able to let them know...

so i reach into my pocket to get the keys to lock the bike and only then do i remember that i've left my keys at home...

so i cannot lock up my bike...

this was huge... my brain just couldn't take it in for a minute or so... i had a puncture, no repair kit, too far to walk home or to work...

i remembered once i was with felinity and i'd forgotten my keys and we were going to the cinema (also another time - in camden... who was i with?) and both times i found a way to hide the bike, or actually in camden the staff took it behind their counter...

so with this in mind i went into the station and asked someone what i should do and instead of saying, alright, just put it in here, come back later, as i was hoping (foolishly) a man in there suggested i take it to a police station, there's one a few streets away from the tube...

which i did, the police station turning out to be right where i got the puncture, i waited in there a good 20 minutes and then was told that no, sir, that's not something we do here...

so i walk out of the police station, really not knowing what i should do...

and then i hit upon the notion that i should have thought of all along which was to find a bike shop... leave it there... or better still, get them to fix it, go on my way...

i ring spski who thinks for a moment and then tells me the name of a bike shop on essex road... (amazing mind that man) and i trundle over to mosquito, by now i've walked 1 & a half miles with my limping bicycle, mosquito charge me a little more than normal to fix the puncture i cycle on my way...

i arrive at work over an hour late...

the dead C deserve their own post... all that stupidity has taken up too much space... later on x

day after soup & week 25

last monday i went over to the landlord's & finished off the soup from the gig the night before...

today i went down to my own kitchen and finished off the soup from the gig last night...

T, dinah's mum, did a reading of her poetry in our front room... Wfloopy(shaman) did a little piece on the guitar as an intro...

it was very good, her poetry is right up my street... the poems are all taken from a collection of hers called bone woman & other tasty morsels dealing with dark subjects, old fairy tales, crones, the like...

T also cooked the soup which we consumed after the reading.. (& today)

as you can see i did an improvisation today, just using my sm58 mic going through the ROLAND space echo that still lives in this house (but for how long?), so my voice & my piano swathed in that beautiful tape delay... long though - 17 minutes -

and then i've been thinking about my hard drives, so much information going through them... my main drive (MURAKAMI) is due for a defrag and it tells me it needs 15% of the drive free to do it's defrag properly so i've been archiving like a mad thing to get that much space on there...

just now it's burning one last archive onto DVD then i should be able to set it defragging before i go out to T's rehearsal,

it's been a long time since i last defragged and i have no idea how long it will take... the 5 or so hours i'll be out? all night? several days?

i hope you like the improvisation...

x

dance

ok, so i did enter the David Brent Dance Competition, although inexpicably i did not win the flatscreen TV...?

that handstand was well recieved though and it got me through to the final dance off, which none of the 4 contestants wanted to do... making a dancing fool of oneself once is one thing...

so that was thursday night's dance event and then last night i went to dinah's college to see her dance as part of a 3rd year students choreography assessment...

strange to be in her environment without her,

there were about 12 or so pieces of which dinah's was 9th, so i had to sit through all of them pretty much but it turned out to be really great... wonderful to see dance and expression to music, it reignited my desire to write music for dance...

dinah was great, very sexy, a sultry character making love to a chair (i know) in amongst a range of different characters... later on she was spinning towards the front while all of the others hurried to get their chair out of the way, the piece ending with all of the other dancers gathering at the front of the stage sat on their chairs while dinah danced for them... she rocks...

another experience again of perceiving her... the way she is personally to me and to others... the way she is performing with the watts, rocking out which i often feel is like watching aliens take over the body of my girlfriend... and now dancing dinah, just another distinct way to see her...

....

lazy day today, i think i'm going to go and see zidane @ the prince charles in a little while...

x

weather (including this week's improvisation)

i saw the flash of lightning this morning as i was preparing to go to work and i heard the long roll of thunder after...

moments later rain was noisily pelting my window...

i'll take the tube i told myself...

the first time in ages i've got public transport to work and it was a moment of weakness... but it gave me a chance to read on the train which was nice...

also walking along with an umbrella tapping the ground is a groovy thing...

so i get to work and there is news that a tornado has hit kensal rise... a tornado..?

i used to live in kensal rise...

strange times...

i'm about to cycle to londonbridgework for the christmas party, at which i will not be entering the david brent dancing competition and i will stand no chance of winning the flat screen TV... i really intended to learn the moves yesterday but one of these spells of lostness hit me and...

and it brings to mind last years christmas party that i did not attend for some reason...? i was upset about something and i have no idea what it was, somehow i think bo might have been involved but that's just a guess...

strange to remember the results of an upset but not the reason for it...

my rhodes/space echo video is currently uploading to googlevideo even though i have no indication that it won't look rubbish... (it turned out alright and is up there above this)

oh and i've been invited to perform at a socratic hall event, very modern... virtual... don't know how it will work but i'm digging the notion...

x

longcat rhodes & space echo improvisation week 24 (not)

ok, here it isn't, last night's improvisation... only youtube rejected it because it's too long... oh googlevideo... sort your shit out please...

E's space echo sounding beautiful through my rhodes (and vice versa)

Hcello coming round in a little while...

similarly lost like last early evening as the dusk gathered tonight...

cup of tea should sort me out though x

and because the video didn't come through here is my wordcloud:

still lost

taught this morning, search & reflect to the teaching course, where i discovered that one of my students has been checking out my improvisations via this very blog... a nice fella by the name of L, not that i could say "god i hate that man, what a pain in the A he is" being as he'll read this at some point but he actually is nice...

earlier on this evening/late afternoon i had about 3 things to be doing and i just couldn't start any of them... but i've managed to climb out of that place and by now, about to watch the soprano's with gordy i've managed to achieve most if not all of them...

right now the gig on sunday is playing, but i'm going to stop it for the soprano's...

i recorded an improvisation tonight, this week's even though last week's has only just gone up...

mainly because the space echo is still here and i don't know exactly when it's going...

rhodes and space echo, it's pretty good i reckon... although googlevideo are still arsing about so i won't upload it just yet...

anyway... soprano's...

x

longcat voice & piano improvisation week 23

know what i mean?

it's rubbish quality, oh googlevideo you used to be so great, what's happened?



let's see if youtube does it any better?

now this is odd, before you start the video, gogglevideo's one looks much better than youtube's, but once the viceo is running, youtube's looks much better than googlevideo, almost as if the googlevideo one is showing you what the youtube would look like and vise versa...

the improvisation was done as part of the gig on sunday x

post gig blues

woke up today with a puffy eye, the same one (the right) that was funny a few weeks ago...

i think it's the stress of putting that gig on last night and i'm just thankful it didn't arrive before the gig...

i was hoping to include in this post the video of last week's improvisation which i performed at the gig but google video made it inexplicably low quality, so i'm uploading it again in a slightly different version to see if that will make any difference...

i'm a little low today, post gig, an emotional business, even though the gig was a success i feel,

so the gig itself:

well, the projector and the space echo arrived in the afternoon (courtesy of E) and we rigged them up, producerG brought his collection of various bits and pieces, i just had my two mics with me along with gordy's laptop which the film was coming from...

the space echo's tape broke a couple of hours before the gig, and even though a replacement tape was included with it i had no idea how to deal with it so sacked it... T from the brian jacket letdown was one of the 1st to come and he offered to nip home and fetch his LM9 (i think) delay... which he did and which proved to be equally broken...

so the heaven's had decided i wasn't to have delay for the improvisation, i suspected that had we access to a 3rd delay unit it too would be found to be broken when placed on top of the piano...

the time of the gig rolled around and by then i'd got dressed up in the suit, dinah had cut my hair and the mexican moustache had been redefined... (uncle filmo, resident at the landlord's, said i looked like a wee hard man)...

and it went well, i'd guessed that we'd have 15 people in the audience and we had around 17 in the end,

the acoustic set was the scariest, including the 2 tunes that i'd finished that day, the weekly improvisation and the open letter to grace which is mostly improvised lyrically...

it went well, and having done the scariest bit 1st i was in a good space for the rest of the gig,

producerG had cooked up a lovely tomato & lentil soup which we ate before the film, both being well received...

then the electric set, 5 tunes with both producerG and myself,

i hardly spoke in between tunes, we pushed on through the set and it felt great, producerG recorded it and i'll be able to listen to the recordings once i get hold of them tomorrow, which always casts a slightly different weather over one's impressions but right now i feel good about it...

i've been over there today to pick up my bicycle and i had a good play on the piano, sharing the last of the soup with M (landlord) & H,

even though i'm a little low my impressions of last night, of the whole experience, are good...

x

BANNER SCROLL DOWN gig on sunday 3'rd december BANNER SCROLL DOWN

finished?

i'm about to start the film rendering, i've finished it but it may need a tweak or two before i show it on sunday, should be meeting up with E to pick up the projector (and the space echo) fairly soon so my plan is to set it rendering, go out, meet him, maybe eat something, then by the time i get back it will have either finished or not finished and i can try it out on the projector...

scary, but hopeful x

rendering

did something stupid, in fact it was a pretty stupid night for me...

the improvisation section proved to be harder than i thought it would be, mostly because i was in a not very clever headspace...

a daft wrong move late on meant i had to back track a little but my main stupidity was setting the whole thing rendering at 1 in the morning... being as i have to work in the morning...

10 minutes at the most i thought...

it still has 6 minutes left on it and it's been going for over an hour...

and it's not even finished, but i'm getting close...

i was playing around with the image of my piano playing when i realised i needed a firm idea about it, not just messing about... so i thought, render it as it is, watch it, go to bed...

foolish of me...

and the classic playing the piano and using the rendering time to write music is not on because it's the middle of the night...

oh well...

laters x