yr3wk36 with Gareth Mitchell

yr3wk36 with Gareth Mitchell from longcat on Vimeo.

such a nutty week last week, with that marking even now hanging over me muddling my plans... yesterday i realised i hadn't finished editing the improvisation i'd done last tuesday with G...

monday and it hadn't even been edited...

bad...

so i got it going, in such a way hat i could still work (mark) it finished rendering last night, i uploaded it...

here it is...

quite out there in places...

i'm still marking... but i intend to be in a prince charles cinema & 3:30 watching hunger... so that's my final deadline...

x

studio

i had my camera with me but i didn't take a single picture or video...

we made an amazing thing...

a little different to our original plan and indeed the slightly different plan i took along...

when we started doing it T said it was a Y-fronts plan... by the end it was a little less pant-like...

drummer K was there and in fact he did most of the drilling and screwing... i did something i'm sure, handing him screws, the drill, moving massive panels...

but i also played the rhodes a fair bit (i knew i would - i have to)

came up with something... it's been wierd actually, since the rhodes went i haven't had a keyboard set up in here, there's the piano, but i haven't found my way back to it yet...

it's really odd not having something to hand... i'm still in marking hell at the moment, meant to be out of it by the weekend but life...

so as a treat between successful stages of this final marking surge i'm going to set up one of them... don't know which...

x

idyllic

i had a good teaching session...

covered the circle of 5ths... 9th chords... composing using the chords of the major scale... good receptive students...

finished @ 1:30... got home just now - 6:10 or so...

so how did i spend that 4:40 hours?

well spski is currently working in that area and last week i found out that his lunch break started @ 3... so i had a notion that it would to still be around 'til 3...

chatted with M, owner of the juno synth... about acoustics... stuff... good talk...

then i popped up to the office to drop off my register and i bumped into HK, one time student there, now around every now and then helping out... had a lovely chat with him about all sorts, synths... music... drugs... moogs... arranged to go and improvise with him in about a month and swap moogs for a few weeks - his rogue for my opus 3...

then i went back down to pack up and i started to play the piano... playing this piece i wrote the other week on the juno 6 - with it's arppegiator - trying to play the arppeggiator bits on the piano...

very interesting... it's basically a 7 pattern against a 4 pattern and because of how the notes work it is quite a large pattern before it repeats itself...

i got caught up in that and lost all sense of time...

once i had done it enough i got on my bike and rang spski, thinking it was 3... but he was just finishing his lunch break... i accompanied him back to work and he helped me with my bike a bit, a puncture that had become a looming bulge that has now just disappeared as a puncture...

it turned out it wasn't 3 at all and in fact it was 4... i must have looked at my phone believing it was 3 and not taking in the real time...

got back on the bike and realised i was hungry... so i decided to visit an old friend around faringdon, the owner of a lebanese cafe...

i cycled over there, only to find to my horror that his cafe had become a posh looking french restaurant... i enquired how long they'd been there and expressed my disappointment that my friend had gone and they told me he was just next door...

where indeed he was, lovely Faisal, only it was no longer a cafe he was running it was a shop, with a falafel stand in it... one of those shops that sells everything you can think of and much more besides...

he made me a falafel and a tea and we talked some... "life goes by so fast" he said, "only yesterday you used to come here and you were 23... now you're 35..."

we talked a bit about love & warmth as against cold money... not a million miles from the conversation i'd had with HK earlier...

and i left there with shuggie otis in my ears... in a part of town i hadn't been in in ages, not sure how to get home from there... pootling about until i hit upon a route i used to take, passed the british library, through camdem, up to holloway, then pushing through, over passed the dawn project place, through crouch end and home...

what a lovely afternoon...

x

moses jones no sleep

so if you're astute, you'll have seen from the time of that last post that it was from 8 in the morning...

and if you know me... you'll have wondered why i was up that early...

the truth is i had a couple of hours sleep that night, but by 5am it was clear that was all i was going to get right then, so i got up...

smoked a little (a peculiar pleasure at the hour) and got on with my business - recording music from the D8 into my computer... sifting through the stuff i'd already recorded...

at some point i ate some cheese - i remember thinking i was smoking AND eating cheese if i could have slept my dreams would have been marvellous...

around 7 i was thinking i should try and sleep again...

but then before i knew it it was 8 and dinah was up, she made me a tea...

then the day started to impinge on me a bit and i realised i needed floopy's camera, then he agreed to drop it round and pick up my mic...

which meant waiting for him to arrive...

i finally crept into bed with a hot water bottle around 9:45 am... with my alarm set to 11:45 am...

but no sleep was evident... around 10:30 my friend D rang me out of the blue... he agreed to ring back later... this was the final thing... no sleep was going to happen... it was nice though, being in bed with a hot water bottle...

i decided to get up and watch "moses jones" on catchup from the night before (monday night)...

it turned out to be the final episode and it was disappointing...

still enjoyable, but a real let down after the promise of the 1st episode... looking back, the 2nd episode had shown signs of not quite being great...

and it makes me sad,

in american TV there's a tradition of following a fantastic opening series with a flawed 2nd series...

lost, heroes, desperate housewives... to name a few...

in england it's as though the model is that much smaller, we can do a really fantastic opening episode, but can't sustain it...

having said that the devil's whore was great...

i went out to meet G later on, to go through his tunes and talk about approaches to recording, we also improvised... really odd improvisation that i have no idea what it's like...

there are few people i'd want to be around on only 2 hours sleep and G is definitely one of them... lovely guy...

we went over to the queen elizabeth hall in the evening for a night of music & chance which was a little patchy, but had some great moments in it...

particularly the charles ives piece they did...

x

studio rhodes

the studio in kennington is moving on...

those massive 8/4 foot acoustic panels are going to be built in a kind of hexagon...

with 2 of them fixed on the top... so it'll be a 6/6 foot room for recording drums, and indeed anything else...

i was there tonight (well, it really is tuesday morning now, so.. ok last night) & i'm going back on sunday (probably)... to do the building...

at the moment 3 of them are standing up but they're all resting on things (wall or massive speaker cab)... so all the drilling, screwing, sawing and so on will be on sunday...

i also plugged in my rhodes which is there... i took down one of the tracks i'm working on in the korg D8 and recorded a few rhodes parts for it...

it was lovely playing it in the room... no sound issues... (touch wood)...

it's going to be absolutely amazing in there...

cold though...

x

good telly

oh what a mad day it's been...

played with G down in camden... jazz/funk... a few hours... nice to gig, gave the hammond organ a good environment to shine in...

then up to tufnell park for my regular sunday night rehearsal... now i'm home...

(obviously)

a little lightheaded...

so telly...

3 things, the 1st of which was a rerun last weekend which i caught on catchup...

the devil's whore...

english civil war... very good tv... the main guy from the wire plays oliver cromwell.. a whole heap of great british actors... that ginger haired man who's in green wing is excellent as honest john lilburn...

the main woman is fantastic i think... good story, characters... just all round good...

now take that ginger haired man... place him in a modern day police drama... and you have the 2nd of my 3 great tv things...

moses jones... written by joe penhal... BBC thing, looking at the african community in london... dramatising the plight of refugees... partly set around borough, the same cab office that was filmed for dirty pretty things...

only 2 episodes in but it's good so far... it's british so it could always fall on it's arse but i'm liking it...

and finally american, not made by HBO but still marvellous:

madmen...

one episode into the 2nd season as we are over in england...

fantastic... no other words, just very glad it's there...

so... not much analysis but there you have my 3 great tv things...

x

yr3wk35 roland juno 6

yr3wk35 roland juno 6 from longcat on Vimeo.

x

yr3wk34 drums, rhodes, piano

yr3wk34 drums, rhodes, piano from longcat on Vimeo.

yesterday dinah brought me a cup of tea in the morning, i was very asleep...

she woke me a little later to tell me it was at the right temperature to drink... i woke up enough to take a sip, then i was holding the mug of tea in my hand and i leant my head back down on the pillow and started to drift off...

now...

you can see where this story is going... but it didn't quite happen like you'd expect...

i started to fall into that halfway point between sleeping and waking, where dreams come and can be very vivid...

and in my dream i knew i was holding a cup of something.. and for some reason i chose to tip it all out...

and so in real life i did indeed tip all the rest of that tea (thankfully i had had a sip of it) onto the floor and partly into one of my booty/slippers...

i immediately woke up properly and laughed because it was so daft, while at the same time i had that sadness of a lost tea... quite apart from the fact that one of my booty/slippers was not at all wearable...

this improvisation at the top of this post is from last thursday, it's been a mental time in between then and now and it's taken me this long to get it together, but there it is, me & DS on the drums...

pretty hot i reckon...

me, T & S did in the end make it down to bristol to pick up the new computer which is right now in a cardboard box in the centre of this room...

we went on saturday... made it over to gloucester also to see the guy we bought the mixing desk off (he had a few more cables and a couple of spare Z80 chips for the desk to give us)... on the way back we stopped in on mum & dad in blewbury and mum made us all a lovely meal, curry...

really lovely to see them and it was a very valuable pitstop for the 3 of us, we hadn't eaten for many hours and were flagging by then...

the computer is going to be amazing... a mac G5 with 8 Gb of RAM... very exciting, our studio is going to be great...

last night i popped over to a man called C's house to check out some acoustic panels that he's got hold of... probably tomorrow the same 3 of us will be hiring a van, picking up 10 of these panels, the new computer & my suitcase rhodes and taking them down to the kennington studio..

times are afoot x

thaw

popped out to go the cafe, then i went over to floopy's, to pick up something, nice to see him, dragged him kicking and screaming into the 21st century by insisting that he get skype...

then once i left him, navigating through the thawing snow & ice on the roads on my bicycle, tricky stuff, i put my camera onto my bike handle bars to catch it all...

i've just watched it and it's alright... a little bit too jerky... must find a way...

anyway, i went over to the park, the same as yesterday, to see the difference...

i was videoing mostly so i didn't take that many pictures... in fact only the one at the top of this post on my camera, the other 3 came from my phone camera...

the lake was completely frozen over and i put my camera on the ice to get that kind of shot... like i did once before on the canal... only that time it was my old camera and i just put the camera itself on the ice (which started to sink almost immediately)...

this time the new camera was on the gorrila tripod thing that floopy & T gave me for christmas (the large version - as opposed to the small version which dad gave me last christmas and which lasted about 6 months)...

all the while i was continuing the john martyn marathon listen... through "one world" and into "solid air"... beautiful stuff... with a short stop off in this piece i recorded this afternoon called moog ritual... probably will be part of something else later on but i love it in it's current form...

oh and i saw moses jones last night on BBC2 and it was really good... (as was this neil young concert from a couple of nights back) - those links will last for a week (slightly less with neil young)...

x

no bristol but snow

i got up this morning because me , T & S, the same team who went to gloucester a few weeks back to get the mixing desk, were going to go to bristol to get the computer...

i've got a small mark on my face, not quite a bruise, from last night, i was cycling back from the christian musical rehearsal and it had been lightly snowing since i'd cycled in, cycling in the beginning snow had been lovely...

cycling on the way back was lovely at first, but cycling over a bridge over the railway i decided it was so great looking i had to stop and take a picture...

even though i'd told myself at the start of the journey that the key was to try not to break, i broke, and i fell off my bike... noone around to see, but it was fairly miserable still...

as i was cycling up the hill (towards where i used to do the dawn project) someone through a snowball at me, and i'm ashamed to say it drew from me a "f*ck off", my 1st snowball of the season and i didn't see the joy in it...

much later, just before bed, dinah called me into the bedroom to see a fox that had found something to eat in our garden and was busying himself with it...

it continued to snow all night and it was beautiful this morning... i was still in bed when dinah got out and i heard her say "oh... it's a winter wonderland"...

she went off to work and i was about to go meet T & S when i rang T to check it was still on and he cancelled it, maybe tomorrow, maybe wednesday now, so here i was, all dressed and ready to go out... beautiful snowing day out there...

how could i not walk to the park?

my john martyn listening is coming along, so far i've listened to "bless the weather", "grace and danger", most of "inside out", and most of this listening was this morning in the park... i left @ 9am and got back @ 10:30, very glad of the 2 hot patches that i bought down in brighton...

x