yr2wk41 & wedding tune

recorded sunday afternoon...

also - for a little while one of the tunes i wrote for D & M's wedding has been on my mypace, the one meant for the moment when the congregation are leaving the room...

well i've swapped it for the piece from the same wedding where the bride is entering the room... i think it's great, it's over there now x

townhouse blues

it's been quite the week let me tell you...

monday, tuesday, wednesday we were in a rehearsal room in shepherds bush, the 2nd 2 days with AS, he giving us direction, shaping the tunes, preproduction...

then on wednesday J (the drummer) came over to mine with his van and we picked up the rhodes and took it the the studio - the townhouse - where we were going to record...

thursday was work... no dawn project in the morning so a kind of a lie in... then over to the townhouse in the evening to set up...

friday we were in there from 9am, recording the tunes...

saturday me & dinah played/sang a couple of tunes for T's "archangels in action" day and i saw there will be blood in between,

then today J has just left, he picked me up about 3 hours ago and we drove over to the townhouse once more to pick up the rhodes and my gigging keyboard...

and the thing is, that session we did on friday is the last session ever to be recorded in studio 1 @ the townhouse because universal who own it have decided to sell off the whole place... we played @ the marquee on the last night it was open, we recorded the last session @ the townhouse... fantastic studio... huge waste... great session...

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yr2wk40 guitar, looper, rhodes & voice improvisation with Matt Mars

google being dumb so this took a few more days than it should have done x

lost and found

i got back from work on thursday and dinah told me that she hadn't seen balthazara all day...

which freaked me out a fair bit... neither of us could remember if we'd seen her that morning...

in a moment of half-sleep that night balthazara was near me but just out of reach, but this was just my brain giving me what i wanted,

so friday morning brought no cat return and me, dinah & spski went out for the very last dawn project, (videoblog to follow) and afterwards i took a picture of balthazara round all the houses whose gardens back onto ours, there's a kind of a rectangle of gardens behind our house that stretches quite far back and we thought she must be stuck in a garden, or had been taken in by a household somewhere in the rectangle...

near the southernmostpoint of the rectangle i was talking to a woman who hadn't seen her and had no cat of her own, i asked if she could hear the meow i could hear and she told me i must be imagining it...

i could still hear it but it didn't sound like balthazara, i wanted to ask her neighbours if they had a cat but they weren't in... i couldn't see the cat whose meow i could hear.. it foxed me... i moved on...

no joy and a little later i made the rounds again with a leaflet to put through the letterboxes of the households i hadn't spoke to someone in and again passing that corner i heard the meow...

i stepped back to see if the cat was on the roof, i looked all around but i couldn't see it.. and again i thought it didn't sound like balthazara...

so friday passed and i came off my bike while cycling across a park (right over the handle bars)... the front brake had messed up (still is messed up)... no return of the cat...

i became sure that she was in one of the gardens near our end of the rectangle and i spent quite a long time sat on the shed at the back of our garden rattling dried cat food in a tupperware box and calling her but the sun went down and she was still out there...

bear in mind that on thursday night there had been horrible rain and wind and the wind had carried on, is still there now... really nuts wind... the idea of her out in that weather was driving us a little mad...

the worry of it, constantly there in the background... over at floopy & T's i looked at their cat and i felt tears coming, partly to do with the little sleep i'd had before the dawn project that morning...

so this afternoon we were due to go filming with K-wo & spski and we both went out to walk the streets looking for balthazara before hand, a couple of neighbourly individuals allowed us to go through to their gardens, close to where i was sure she would be, but no avail...

so i said to dinah we should check out the meow i'd heard the day before and we went down to that house... finally finding someone in who also let us look in their garden, but the garden was much further down than i thought she would have got to and lo and behold she wasn't there...

and on leaving the house i once again heard the meow, when i pointed it out the man in the house said:

"oh it's not a big cat is it? there's been a big cat running around the front here..."

so i said no it can't be her, (always in denial about how fat our beloved cat is), dinah went through that front garden to the hedge and i went round to the neighbours front garden, same hedge, and dinah said:

"i can see a cat's arse"

"is it her?"

"it might be"

...

and it was...

and i picked her up and took her home where she now is, she ate an awful lot of food and i apologised to her for not getting her until 26 hours after i'd first heard her meow...

me & dinah went out to highgate woods to film (me in a bear suit) and all is right in our world once again...

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Dawn Project videoblog week 53

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yr2wk39 piano improvisation

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kat flap

on sunday floopy was round with his tools and he put in a cat flap for us....

balthazara has been very wary of it...

day by day since then she's got closer to it, sniffing it... and this morning just after the dawn project i saw her pushing it open with her nose, just a bit, but enough to show she could easily push it all the way..

then tonight dinah brought my attention to the sound of the catflap and whether balthazara had just gone out... we had a look and it became clear she really was outside and she'd used the cat flap...

(this makes me very happy)

(her poos have been getting much bigger)

and then over on the other side of the river, my sister felinity has moved in the last few days into a new flat with her G, i'm popping over there next wednesday to check it out...

all this while our own flat is gradually nearing completion...

and week 53 of the dawn project this morning looked just like week 1 had, beams of refracted sunlight searing across the screen...

stupid early mornings abound but life is good x

film making & tv

last night i watched a program about stephen hawking on the telly...

it was irritatingly slow and it kept trying to inject drama unnecessarily but it had a few good facts in it, in two of the advert breaks i'd que'd up those two great OK Go youtube video's and this one filled the break perfectly, whilst this one was a little short...

so film making, i'm at it...

3 more week's of filming for the dawn project, (making 55 weeks in all) and i've begun putting them together, at least the 1st stages of it, lining them up, it's a lot of work...

and i'm a few week's into this film making course now and as i'm leaving i'm talking to the camera teacher guy and it becomes clear that he is newlandlordE's lodger...

my new film making camera teacher is my new landlord's lodger...

that's out there...

and finally madmen.. just caught an episode and it could be great, it has that HBO class about it, thoughtful... (it might not be HBO made though)...

promising x

yr2wk38 saxophone, drums & piano

which i recorded with the 2 P's down in their greenwich home on tuesday, journeying there i was cycling along Bird In Bush Road and Green Hundred Road crossed my path and i thought, what a great pair of names for a crossroad:



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yr2wk37 shifting harmonic hammond organ & rhodes

recorded yesterday x