3 tweets

all on november 25th... 2 of mine...

you see i have just noticed that i was mentioned by polly cupcake on this day & she said:

"i couldn't agree more" (tweet)

but was she agreeing with my tweet about gorecki - or my tweet about misfits?

how can i know?

x

aaaah the times of the tweets gave it away, she was talking about gorecki x

february 2011 in phones

august 2009... + 18 months...

equals january/february 2011 does it not?

and if that is true then in february my 18 month contract with this phone will be over and i can get hold of something else...

my htc hero has been pissing my off of late - basically since the much talked about android 2.1 update, it's not been right... it's been good at all the other smartphone things it does but on occasion it becomes unable (and seemingly unwilling) to behave like a telephone... which is it's basic function afterall...

orange uk currently don't have a huge amount of choice in the android phone department, but these next few months will be interesting...

since i got my mac i have started to consider an iphone... although id prefer (at this point) to keep it in the android family if i can...

A desire HD would be nice... i wonder if orange will get hold of them and if i'd have to pay for it? hmmm

idly dreaming x

ode to portal... & the arguments for & against going backwards

spent the day alternating between playing the piano & lusting after portal 2 in a few different ways....

for example... for the last few hours i've been completely caught in this flash version of portal... E got in a little while ago & i was desperately stuck @ level 37 (of 40)...

& then before that i was devouring all the youtube portal 2 stuff...

from this to this... to this... it just looks amazing...

but i will need a more powerful computer... it's possible it will run on steam for the mac... and therefore on my lovely G5... which would be odd because i originally wanted to keep that computer just for the music... something i'm failing to do already...

& the G5... hmmmmmmm...

which is now running OS 10.5 so well... i'm considering going back to 10.4...

you see i got hold of something back then, something i wanted, and on trying to install it my mac told me i needed 10.5...

so i managed eventually to go up to 10.5... by which time i'd deleted (by accident) the desirable thing... a few weeks later and lovely D gave the desirable thing to me again (i'd given it to him on 1st getting hold of it) and i duly sat down and installed it... but after everything... it just refused to work... and a little bit of research (which i wish i'd done back then) told me that it wasn't only that i need 10.5... it was that i needed an intel mac... which i don't have...

so i looked at another - older version of the desirable thing... & it turns out that version will only run on 10.4...

also today i tried to do something which it seemed to me the only way i could actually do it would be to reinstall 10.5 - and therefore i may as well go back to 10.4...

and the piano playing?

alternating between a new composition & "we've only just begun" which i learnt for a student on monday and which i'm really enjoying singing...

x

improvisations

this one i did yesterday... mixing a drone i made in the TX modular synth with my rhodes...



last week it was the frohmage plugin from ohmforce that pleased me so much... with the rhodes...



and then a month ago, a week after the 1st i did (this time around)... rhodes & voice...



and while i'm in a youtube place... this rhythm tree i made as a reference for my students:



x

girlfriend

i have met and am now going out with a young lady whose name bares a striking resemblance to certain other young women in my romantic past...

i am also struggling with tryin to put mac OS 10.5 on my new mac PPC... something i've been struggling with for what seems like eternity but is probably more like a week...

me & her have been together for just under 3 weeks now... i have met her mother...

she is beautiful, with long dark hair,

she came round to buy my trombone, and didn't leave for about 5 days...

october improvisation

so today... after a weekend of setting up my new G5 computer (a mac)...

& indeed spending time with someone new... who shall remain nameless for now... but who is playing her trombone right now (used to be mine - then it was monty's - now it's hers)...

i got the m-audio sound card thing talking to logic in the G5... put the karma mics up under the knight piano...

and hey presto - a 9 minute improvisation -

enjoy x

booker business

so i woke up today & lazily reached over to find the book...

& read the last 20 or so pages of "In a strange room" by Damon Galgut...

being the 6th of the 6 shortlisted books for the booker prize...

and the decision isn't being made on it until a week tomorrow - so how ahead of the game am i ladies & gentlemen?

slightly lost though now... without the need to go to the big green bookshop and swap over this book for the next one...

although i do need to pick which one i want to keep (not counting C by TomMcCarthy which i bought already)... at the moment i think it's going to be this book i finished today - more thought is required though...

and who should win?

well 1st let me give you my 6 twitter reviews:

In a strange room - Damon Galgut: Hugely powerful, sparely written at 1st but gathering like a storm, maybe a little unbalanced, beautful x (today 4th october)

The Long Song - Andrea Levy: took me awhile to get into the style but it embedded itself in my mind, great characters... evocative writing x (thursday 30th september)

Room - by Emma Donoghue... kept me close to tears most of the way through... well told, thoughtful, lovely, will stay in my head... x (saturday 25th september)

The Finkler Question - Howard Jacobson. Very funny, a little bit painful, slightly flaccid in the middle, has an ending i'm not sure about x (wednesday 22nd september)

Parrot and Olivier in America - by Peter Carey... too long, olivier's character irritating, but ended well & had good history.. too clever x (friday 17th september)

finished C by Tom McCarthy... i was left wanting more... longlisted for the booker... great writer... lovely progressions of images... x (sunday 29th august)

and the 3 that are vying for 1st place in my mind are C (Tom McCarthy), In a strange room (Damon Galgut) & Room (Emma Donoghue)...

hmmmm - i'll wait a little for the dust to settle over my reading of this last one then i'll let you know...

all before the judges make their decision (i'm aware that they all read this blog and they will find it hard to make a decision without my decision)

x

pulsate

being what i found today... idly thinking about that lovely tonematrix... and stumbling from that onto a newer thing that he made... (andre michelle)...

this is the pattern i'm listening to right now... and i'm really enjoying it...

each circle expands until it hits another circle (also expanding) - they ring out a sound then both start shrinking until they're nothing then they expand again...

the bottom 2 circles... and the top 2 circles would be doing things independently if the middle circle wasn't there... they'd be locked into two different tones... with different cycles...

but the middle circle messes with them...

and it's all so non-linear dynamics... and a little bit solar systemeee as well...

there will be long periods where a small number of different tones are produced, with subtly shifting timings... like the top 2 will be just locked together making the same tone... the bottom 3 will be locked into a pattern of there own... until something shifts just far enough and everything changes again...

and this is just this pattern that i've got here...

sadly you can't save anything... or remove individual circles... you can just put in circles one by one or remove them all... but it's still a lovely, lovely thing... and it brings about a lovely calm in me...

x

Deflea again

actually this was yesterday... the little blighters are still around so i thought maybe i did the last deflea wrong?

anyway... she forgave me almost immediately... i think because although i did lock the cat flap she didn't try and go through it... which is a pretty traumatic thing... racing away from the abusive human only to bang your head against the cat flap...

saw gong last night along with space ritual @ the forum... a friend of A's had a free ticket... steve hillage was in the band and that was nice to see... some of those gong tunes are fantastic and i'm about to fire up spotify and see if they're on there...

indeed they are... angels egg - (radio gnome invisible part 2) the 1st album i ever heard... courtesy of my brother... lovely...

the booker has begun...

i'm 160 odd pages into parrot and olivier in america by peter carey... which is good but a bit hammy so far... it turns out C by tom mccarthy did make the short list so i'm one book ahead of the game already...

this music does make me want to smoke... and smoking does not particularly agree with reading all the booker price shortlisted books before october 12th...

so there's a conflict...

anyway - happy sunday x

deflea dr john chico buarque

she's sulking somewhere... but it's done...

dr john has come back into my life, much more than before... i'd seen him on jules holland and i think we supported him once at a student ball @ warwick university... not that i saw him then or him us - (i imagine)

anyway, i was @ core on monday for a meeting and a few of us musicians killed some time jamming, a straightforward tune led by me and then a much less straightforward melange which somebody said sounded like gris-gris... dr john's 1st album...

since then i've immersed myself in 3 different albums by dr john: gris-gris, dr john's gumbo & in the right place...

'68, '72, '73,

and then chico buarque's construcao came to mind today after listening to some of the crazy arrangements on gris-gris...

i'm also continuing to write the tune i started last week on the rhodes... some lyrics are floating in...

and the sopranos is getting dark... ralphy in season 3...

oh and i've started my booker book club reading, although C by Tom McCarthy is only on the longlist, the shortlist hasn't been announced... i read an excerpt from C in the "sex" granta... what i read was great and i'm very pleased to have found another writer i like, and for this book to be at least in the longlist for the booker...

if it makes it onto the shortlist i will have begun early for the booker book club challenge of reading all 6 booker shortlisted novels in the 5 weeks between shortlist announcement & winner announcement... (i did it last year)

x

rhodes muse new tune

that beautiful electro acoustic instrument feeds me... i didn't know i was looking for love until i found it... i had forgotten how much it gives me & i am oh so glad to have it back in my life...

yes it would profit from the preamp being looked @ by the nice milton keynes man...

yes... that's true... but in the state it's in right now, which is pretty much the way it's been when it's been working for me in the past...

it is both muse and instrument... it calls forth music from me...

and since it's been working again - roughly the last 24 hours... i've written a new tune... well... i've got 2 sections chordwise and i've written a provisional melody for the chorus which is really nuts chordwise...

it may suit the voice of someone i met last week... it may suit my own voice... lyricly it may well talk about my feelings in relation to oncewassqueeze... it could turn into a spanner tune... it could be a longcat tune... it could be a tune from this identity i'm thinking about which uses my real name...

from me... if you will...

x

rhodes stuff

so i got the amp bit home... asked around and got hold of a soldering iron... soldered in the speaker lead that had gone astray... put the amp bit back in... proceeded to screw back in the 10 huge screws that i remember it taking me an age to unscrew the 1st time i ever did it...

didn't quite finish before the job finished off the screwdriver i was using...

excitedly moved the keyboard part near the amp/speaker part... plugged it all in...

and it didn't sound right... still doesn't... although it did for one moment...

disappointing yes... but i remember it being very reticent when i 1st got it and it finding it's proper voice after 6 months or so... i came to believe that it was being left turned off for long periods of time that it didn't like...

anyway translate that to today and it's clear to me the preamp (on the keyboard part of the suitcase) is having trouble... (the lights aren't coming on properly... so maybe it's not getting it's power quite right...or it's not happy in some way inside...

it's a job for daylight... and a possible phonecall to the nice man i saw today... although a thought has just entered my mind that maybe i didn't push the bits in correctly before screwing it all together again... and my heart breaks at the thought of undoing all those screws again...

so... that's where i'm at x

but just before i close... i'm just had another look at it and pushed the sustain pedal a few times, turning the tremolo on and off...

and it has started behaving like it's old self again...

tomorrow now before i give myself a proper rhodes experience... one can't play one's rhodes at the volume one deserves in the middle of the night... not in this flat anyway...

must also get hold of a new screwdriver and finish screwing down those pesky screws... exaclt half of them are as far down as i intend to get them, the other half and a cm or so off...

tomorrow x

tethered

my 3rd trip to milton keynes of 3... picking up the bit of my rhodes... then home... then some work putting it back together again... then possibly a smoke... then rhodes bliss once more...

blogging from my PC.... tethered to the internet through my phone... something i was looking forward to being able to do with android 2.1 - although it turns out i could have done it anyway...

around about the middle of the 2nd series of the sopranos... it makes me happy... a smile coming to my lips fairly often... such well written and beautifully crafted TV...

ok, that's all i have to say... i'm really just showing off because i can use the internet on this train...

and then i can't... mobile phone networks being oh so fragile while on trains...

x

today... the day before my brothers birthday

worked...

the 1st full day of the new term... although not such a full tuesday as i used to have... the spanners not rehearsing this time, and in the future they won't be rehearsing on a tuesday any more which, no matter which day it eventually falls upon, will make my life easier...

after work i walked over to see C (homerton to broadway market) - guitarist and recording engineer... as well as being many other things... we recorded over @ his place a few weeks ago, in the week where i had no work at all - (except a meeting... nothing's prefect)...

then after leaving his i got onto the canal and walked to angel... even trying to go beyond the bit that's closed off... i got through several fence type obstructions before a security guard stopped me, very reasonably from going the final 20 meters... the concrete had just gone down today apparently and even if he hadn't been there i probably would have turned back anyway...

then into the vue cinema for the loo, finally finding my way into wagamama's for a small meal...

i wrote this down while i was in there:

quite richard fordesque acceptance falling over me


although of course it's also eminently longcatesque & it's one of the things i like about richard ford - & about frank bascombe - that in some ways they are like me -


the rhodes situation casting a lovely bubbling presence behind my mind all day,


slightly timeless quality now - in that i don' know what time it is - only that it was 9 when i got on the canal -


walking also a welcome influence on my mind - the hint of autumn that the low sun coming through the trees @ london fields... not quite - it's more that lovely late summer magic that blesses us a few more times...


trave 39 tomorrow-


frank bascombe being richard ford's main character in the sportswriter, independence day & the lay of the land... the 3rd of which i finished reading today while waiting for students to show for my keyboard class - a risky strategy because it could have been cut off at any time... but it wasn't...

the rhodes situation being that part of my lovely suitcase rhodes piano is currently in milton keynes, under the watchful eye of a very nice silver haired old git who is mending it for me...

i don't know... you wait for a reason to go to milton keynes for decades... and then 3 turn up all at once...

x

magical menagerie & the sopranos

these days i watch way too much average TV... average to below average...

true blood is still good... and probably will remain so... i'm watching the 3rd season gradually as it is on in america... as i am watching warehouse 13's 2nd season... warehouse 13 being not as good but still mostly good... with the odd duff episode thrown in sadly...

also warehouse 13 got me into eureka... which i wish hadn't happened... a character from eureka turned up in warehouse 13 so i got hold of the 1st season of eureka and it's terrible... well... it's mostly half good... with the odd really terrible episode and once in a while there is a good episode... i'm about 3 episodes from the end of this season and... i know... why am i watching it?

some completeness thing i have i think...

anyway, i've decided to go back to the source and i'm currently getting hold of the entire 6 seasons of the sopranos... all of which (except for the last 9 episodes) i watched back when it was on british TV... somehow i missed the last 9 and i was thinking of getting hold of just them but it's been so long that i think i'm ready for the whole thing again...

it'll take awhile to get here... it's on it's way...

and then, just a few pictures of what me & grace got up to on sunday... except that blogger is odd these days with me & pictures... and i don't have the brain right now to go the long way around... so this is the only picture you have... suitably mysterious... the fantastic up down lever on one of the fish... so much fun...

more information another day x

michael franks half of life

a circuitous route brought me to this singer this morning...

i got a phone call confirming that i wouldn't be seeing the person i was hoping i could see this week... and indeed i haven't seen her for a couple of weeks... and i won't see her now for another 2 weeks after this week..

a fact that i was told back when she found me on facebook... (do you want to meet? yes, but it's either this weekend or not for 5 - 6 weeks)... but which i didn't really take in back then...

so i said to myself... as i got out of bed (the phone call had woken me up),,, it's better to know than to not know... which brought the song positive into my mind... the michael franti tune that i had loved all those years ago (around the time she was in my life last time)...

so i fired up spotify and i tried to find the song... and spotify asked me if i meant michael franks... which pleased me immensely... part of the album "the art of tea" was on a cassette tape that my friend luke hedge made for me when were in the sixth form together... half my life ago...

naturally i wanted to hear that album now as well as the michael franti tune...

not that spotify could satisfy me on either score... spotify with it;s random holes...

however i used my other means and i got to hear everything i wanted in the end... except that the 1st time i downloaded the album, whoever i got it from had the wrong version of st elmo's fire... very odd, listening to the 1975 album of lovely wistful jazz (featuring the great joe sample on keys) and then being thrown into the 80's sound of john parr... most distressing... even though that tune was something i was fond of even further back than my liking for michael franks...

oh and... talking about half my life ago... on monday i passed through being exactly half as old as my dad... without realising it...

something i'd been thinking about for ages and which had sometimes been casting a dark shape over my emotions (uneasy comparisons between him then, me now, me being born, his 2nd son, me having no kids and no prospects right now)... and while it was going on i was saying goodbye to grace after 24 hours of her... having my ear syringed & thus ending the ear saga... generally feeling as though i was crossing a line in a few ways, but forgetful of the actual line i was crossing... only tonight, reading richard ford on the tube did i remember...

must ring dad tomorrow...

x

longcat in mono

about to go out and start the doctors process... register at the doctors on the corner, make an appointment for as soon as possible...

it's been a week and it hasn't cleared up so doctor bound am i... just as most of the women in my life are telling me to go there (sister, ex-girlfriend, long-lost-once-was-squeeze)...

so hopefully this will mean an end to this situation in the nearish future... but while it's here i want to mention a few facets of it...

1stly it's odd that i listen to most of my music these days through a mono speaker anyway... the TV is stereo and headphones (when i listen to music from my phone) are too but mostly i listen to music from my computer through spotify... (like i'm doing now, with the mono speaker on my left hand side, with the ear that works... lovely album by Bill Frisell, Paul Motion & Ron Carter)...

2ndly - it may be an illusion but i can hear my singing voice clearer now, so singing in tune is easier...

this is something to do with the background noise being more foreground i think... although i can't tell you why right now...

3rdly it has been very odd and a little like taking hallucinogenic drugs... in that i feel somewhat at odds with the world... at some distance from it... like the world is behind a sheet of glass...

and then there's the pain, when i yawn, swallow, that kind of thing, not all the time when i do these things but quite a lot of the time, and i've been taking pain killers but i don't know if they've been working...

and when i'm in pain, i become a much simpler human being... i can't deal with as much as i normally can and my world shrinks down to the space in my head...

ok 4thly... the space in my head... i have this odd movement of my jaw which i've been conscious of for a year or so now, i tend to do it when i'm lying down ready to sleep... i move my jaw so that i get a sensation of pushing against something... although i don't know what it is i'm pushing against...

only now, with this ear thing, i do the pushing thing and somehow one of my teeth - (whose filling fell out ages ago and i haven't been to the dentist about) connects with the pushy jaw thing which in turn connects with the ear pain, and it all hurts...

it's amazing... and irritating... i wish i could stop doing it... when both pains are there sometimes my brain interprets them both as a major third (2 musical pitches).. high up (because the pain is in my head)... i blogged about this sort of thing once before... hmmm... no, can't find it... anyway... must go to the doctors x

portishead

listening to the complete works of portishead, as presented by spotify... not quite the complete works of course... but what's easily to hand...

i love this band... haven't paid much attention to them for some time, and it's nice to re-associate with them in my mind...

i'm also taking the initial questionnaire for the UK COSMOS study - the mobile phone usage and it's effect on health study that i'm signing up for for the next 40 years or so...

i'm taking a break, because i don't know how tall i am, nor how much i weigh... i've just put a pencil on my head and drawn a line onto the wall... like mum & dad used to do when we were growing up... at some point i'll find a tape measure... as to my weight i've have to find some scales... not in this flat...

i'm also heating up some daal in the oven, it's from sainsburies, 1st go at it, i stopped in to the sainsburies in camdem on thursday after a walk along the canal from paddington (as is my want) - hoping to find an indian meal for one, which my local sainsburies has stopped doing... (they have the meal for two) but sadly even the camdem one doesn't do it, maybe sainsburies as a whole have given up on me and my single liking for indian food...

i did get a few other indian ready meals which i duly ate on thursday night, except for the daal... which is in there now...

the walk was lovely, and i'm very glad that i'm getting used to putting it into my weekly routine - such as it is... quality of life is important to me... x

oh well

peter green... popped back into my life again yesterday as i was showing him playing in the 60's to a student...

via the medium of youtube...

oh well... being a killer, killer riff based tune that peter green's fleetwood mac used to play...

and the words "oh well" describe something in my head this evening... not a great deal, but something...

that's all...

x

canals

so this is for 3 different occasions recently...

the 1st a couple of mondays ago, then the wednesday after that, then this thursday just gone...

1st & 3rd on foot, 2nd on the bike...

it started that monday, regretting not cycling in to KCC (by trellick tower), i got onto the grand union canal right there and wondered along it, at a very different pace to the cycling i generally do on it - although having said that, my quite impressive walking pace cycling technique does get employed with pockets of pedestrians on that canal from time to time -

little venice came along & i transferred onto the regents canal with a certain amount of street necessary... although less street than when i'm on my bike as feet can go back down to the canal earlier than wheels it turns out...

it was around 2 in the afternoon and on the two mondays previous to this i'd been to see the finches, 1stly with felinity on her birthday, then on my own (but seeing felinity's friend & goddaughter there)...

back to this monday i'm talking about i found my stone grand piano, under those rail bridges... place of homage for me...

i met a lovely young woman reading a huge textbook where the canal goes around the top of regents park... then floated off the canal and lay down in the park for a little while... reading proust...

i wanted to take the canal all the way to kings cross tube but i was kicked off it by some work happening (not happening in my sight but cutting off my progress),,, so i reluctantly made it back to street level and found the 29 bus home...

the following wednesday i had a meeting @ cm for an hour in the middle of the day, and afterwards i rolled a little jazz cigarette & stowed it away in my bag - i went in search of dilmah tea in the huge sainsburies in stepney... successful in my task i then headed north and when i hit the regents canal i got down onto it & headed west...

finding my progress cut short by another bit of work i stopped and smoked my JC... watching a man deal with his barge on his own...

when he started trying go through the lock that was just on the other side of the barrier blocking me & my bike i lent him a hand, squeezing through the barrier and assisting him with shutting the lock doors...

it turns out he possesses a sound system so we traded numbers, the idea that one day i might need a huge soundsystem seemed possible just then...

then finally this last thursday... again i hadn't cycled in to work over there (this time HWLC) and again after work i rolled myself a couple of JC's & i was drawn to the canals again... i got the train over to paddington and came out round the back by the canal... walked through the throngs of commuters up to little venice and onto the regents...

did that little bit of street, coming down just east of the maida vale tunnel... stepped off the path to right by the tunnel mouth and smoked the 1st of my two JC's...

saw a boat enter the tunnel and headed east... meeting a family of ducks, a couple of beautiful women & a travel writer on my way around regents park, through camdem and then eventually off the canal at the same point i'd been kicked off a couple of mondays earlier...

this time i tried to walk from there to where i could rejoin the canal but i got distracted on the way by st pancras graveyard... by st pancras old church (where R used to do those gigs, maybe still does)...

the graveyard suited me fine and i smoked the 2nd JC while looking @ hardy's tree... really enjoying the low angle that the sunlight was coming in @...

also really enjoyed soanes tomb for his wife (and eventually himself) which seemed to me to be like a really old rolls royce car...

eventually leaving there & walking down to st pancras station, through the eurostar bit (under that fantastic roof) and down finally to the tube @ kingscross and home...

many more canal days ahead i hope...

x

YMCK & Blewbury

1st blewbury, the whole of our immediate knight clan met up over there yesterday, because felinity & her G were planning to go down & pick up some plants...

i met felinity & G down @ the BFI IMAX @ some ungodly hour of the morning for Avatar... the 2nd time i'd seen it there and with slightly better seats, although still not perfect...

3D cinema really does require some extra brain work, small parts of my mind constructing the 3D world from the 2 visual sources, and we all found this a bit hard after 3 hours, but it's a great film, i loved it until the last hour and felinity could have lost the middle hour or so... if only G had really disliked the 1st hour we could have all had separate hour breaks...

then off we drove across to blewbury, where D&M&C had also landed, i got to sing a little bit of charlotte's song to charlotte just before they left, got an appropriate leaning in my direction from her as a response...

mum & dad both well, D&M on good form & felinity & G their lovely selves... charlotte the star...

got home last night and i've woken today with nothing to do...

not the worst sensation in the world... i might ring up le fam pevo & see what they're up to, i have been invited to a barbecue by someone i met last weekend, but i'm not sure i'm ready for so many strangers @ once today...

G came round on wednesday night to finish watching the leopard (visconti) & whilst he was here he showed me a few ableton tips, so i'm curious about that little world, music making in a different way... also i've got charlotte's song to finish writing & begin recording, a tune of HK's that i said i'd find a bassline for which i've had the idea for, but not followed through with the recording...

so there's a few things i might do... or again i might do nothing at all, smoke a little & play the rhodes all day x

listening to YMCK - family genesis, it's beautiful... i find their songs pop into my head at odd times... lovely music...

finches portal dance

currently queuing for the finches... the 2nd monday in a row... after me & felinity came here for her 30th x

these days i'm playing portal... a game that's become free on steam (i heard about it on charlie brookers twitter)... it's great, it stretches my little computer...

i took a really slow train back from brighton last night, after a truly lovely weekend with grace & josiah, also catching a bit of mr dance, and a great actual dance/movement piece called expresso that josiah's downstairs neighbour was in... fantastic...

so i was on the train that took 2 & a half hours to make the hour or so long trip... i was a bit spangled (mark turned up just before i left & we piped a little before getting into a large one about israel/palestine) and i spent some of the time gazing at the fieldlines thing, some time reading, although i only had the new scientist with me & i was having trouble taking it in...

so i spent quite a bit of time in portal... it works better when @ home with my larger monitor, but it works ok with this little screen just so long as the character doesn't go into any really large rooms... i'm not sure if she can go into large rooms alright @ home, but for sure my little computer starts slowing right down when the distances get bigger with the little screen...

so for example i would be puzzling over this massive room right now but i know it would just frustrate me... hence blogging...

.............................................

ok, finches done, sat out in the dazzling sunshine after having eaten a pasta dish served up by the waterside cafe... thought i recognised a woman in with the funches as felinity's friend... with her daughter, who would be felinity's goddaughter if it was them... but i didn't make contact...

also a few finches landed on me a few times... put me in mind of the rilke poem about the birdfeeder...

very pleasing all round... and now i think about it.. i got a text yesterday from felinity showing me something she made from a book i made her get last monday while out for her birthday and she might be offering it to me...?

or she might be making another one for me... pictures when it arrives...

happy day x

Richard Ford & me

@ 8 last night i was getting changed in A's car... (A is the bass player in the Spanner Jazz Punks), listening to Richard Ford on the World Book Club...

i got the suit on by around 10 minutes in & then A came back down & we went up to the stage... got caught in the speech being made by Ab who was having her birthday party & had drunk a little bit...

then A was moving bales of straw for me to sit on & i was setting up my keyboard, whilst a salsa thing was going on...

the band who had played before us were leaving so 1stly i had to take the drummers place in the salsa line (men remain stationary while women move along the line, very odd), and then just before playing our set the same drummer found me & i had to tell both A & P (tenor sax) to move their cars so the other band could leave...

then we played our set to a small but perfectly formed audience... (aliens)... lovely time had i think...

we got out of there quite swiftly... P driving me & M (bari) back to london... i got in to mine around 2:05am...

i very quickly transferred myself into bed and was drifting ever closer to sleep when P rang me & told me i was on Radio 4... he'd just heard me ask my question to Richard Ford...

the world service popping over to Radio 4 in the night...

i did indeed make it onto the show, i can be found asking my question @ around 14:53 - 17:12... but you can also hear my chuckles, laughs, a "yeah" @ all kinds of moments in the whole show...

it was a lovely afternoon spent listening to him talk, and aside from my relentless need to self publicise i think it's a great show, he gives good radio...

x

deflea... jethro tull... mad men

ok, so 1stly i found a flea earlier today... so i've just (5 minutes ago) deflea'd her ladyship...

she took it... she didn't like it... but she took it...

she'll be back in a bit and i'll be forgiven... i hope

i'm currently listening to jethro tull... (lastfm me if you don't believe me)... to do with the shadow of the moon & to do with L @ core arts...

the film had michael collins talking about (amongst other things) how it felt to be left out of the walking on the moon thing in 1969... and there's a tune on benefit called "for michael collins, jeffrey and me"... so i had to listen to that tune in the brief break i took in the middle of the film...

then L @ core arts and me have been talking about jethro tull and it's really nice to talk with him about it... he's a wonderful musician himself...

so today i listened to the whole of benefit, while cycling about town... including the song "cry you a song" which i want to do an arrangement of for the SJP's... i'm now listening to the album before it (stand up)...

and earlier i watched the last episode of this season of madmen... which came to me in a very nice serendipitous way...

on saturday me & E popped over to meet spski in spitalfields market... we were watching the lodger the 1927 hitchcock film... with live soundtrack from minima... it was heavenly... and something in the film brought madmen to mind...

which was odd because i hadn't thought of madmen for several weeks... it's been a bit nutty you see...

about 3 or 4 weeks ago josiah was here... we watched the 2nd to last episode of the season together on BBC4...

then on either the following wednesday or the one after that i was @ the sun ra gig with N & R... didn't even think about madmen...

last wednesday was E's birthday & i was showing her a good time... no thought of madmen...

so by saturday it had been a few weeks since i'd even thought about the program & it seemed likely the season had ended...

but what worked well for me, was that BBC2 was at least a week behind BBC4 and that episode me & josiah watched together was only on BBC2 last week (i guess there must have been something to interrupt it, you know how BBC2 is)

so the last episode was on last night and i-playable tonight... and it was perfect... deeply satisfying... didn't quite make me cry but it was close...

oh good telly... thankyou x

richard ford

it turns out he was just like old friend DR... (PD to some)...

i woke early, went over to beneath the trelick tower...checked out the lesson i'll be teaching in a few weeks, the man who's currently teaching it is off touring by then...

perfectly nice...

then home, found the sports writer which had been missing for a little while... got on my bike, went down to aldwych... bvsh house...

had a fine old time... asked my question.. which i think has a better chance of being aired on the show than last time's question... because it drew an interesting bit of conversation...

he signed my copy of the book, i had a glass of wine, played the thing i often end tunes with on the steinway grand in the room...

then once outside i bumped into him again, he was waiting for his car to take him to the hotel, i offered him a backy, but he said his prostate might give him trouble, he said my prostrate might start giving me trouble too...

i asked him how old he was, hoping he'd say he was 72... because i met the 18 year old me on the train down to brighton on friday night & it made me realise i was surely going to meet the 72 year old me as well fairly soon...

(18 years old (ish), half my age, doing mechanical engineering (mathy) @ university, plays piano, has a stud cat... (we had a female stud cat)... so the 72 year old i'm going to meet will have been doing roughly what i'm doing now... 36 years ago...)

he said no he was 66... oh well, nobody's perfect...

it also turns out that there's a 3rd book to the frank bascombe books (the sportswriter, independence day...) called the lay of the land, which he was writing just as i started reading him... back in 2002...

so that's very exciting... i've got independence day ahead of me, then the 3rd...

so i was totally high on life as i cycled away from bvsh house... went over to le fam pevo to deliver some books josiah wanted them to have (baby stuff)... had a gradually calming down evening with those lovely folks...

it turns out EQ is just about to pop... by friday apparently...

now i'm home & i've got my 1st huge tuesday since the holidays ahead of me...

oh & i met a nice woman on the tube... as you do... (in the 1st half of the day, the 2nd half all bikey)

x

Bean Juice? Human Bean Juice

@ some point in the night i was looking at the book about Sun Ra that N gave me on wednesday...

it's a headpress book, i ended up with about 5 copies of it for some reason, which are going back, but i also have my own copy of it...

it's got a picture of sun ra on the cover - with a blob of perhaps sunlike stuff over him... maybe on his costume, although it's a black & white picture & the blob is in colour...

anyway, i'm asleep... and i'm looking at the cover, and i realise that the blob is my own blood, not much of it, just a little tiny sphere that been squashed between two surfaces...

so i'm about to give the book back, but something stops me... and i realise how i should hold onto that copy, because i've made it my own, it's got my blood on it...

and i feel special...

many hours later i wake up and look at the sun ra book & laugh...

.....................................................

i have all these copies of this book because on wednesday night, me, N & his R... (who he met in thsiland, lovely woman) went to cafe oto to see the sun ra arkestra, led by marshall allen...

it was one of the most inspirational gigs i've been to...

influences from throughout the history of jazz, from the 40s onwards...

able to go to some very scary 60's free jazz type places, which felt like an opening out of the heart... play a chopin piece which was the most beautiful thing i've ever heard... play some old jazz standards in a swinging fashion... (stars fell on alabama).... do lovely vocal melodies with lyrics to do with freedom & peace & love & losing your mind... they ended on a few outrageously cheerful tunes that might have been disney tunes... he did a few arrangements of them apparently...

in particular there's a kind of sun ra tune i've come to love, where parts of the band are doing complex, but rhythmicly working things... african type rhythms & cuban type rhythms... like the guitarist wil be gently plucking a rhythmic pattern... sometimes very quietly... and then gradually, some of the horn players will start playing a slow and aching melody over the top, more & more horn players join the melody... in sometimes strange & beautiful harmonies... the rhyhtm also grows...

just perfect x

also hafa was there - hafa who N has kept in touch with over the years, who i know/knew, back when i knew N the 1st time around... (hafa's blues was a tune we used to do in the cops, one of the few i produced... with hafa's voice...) - in fact, it was only on wednesday morning that i found the minidisk i'd recorded hafa's voice onto, which i'd sampled from...

hafa used to talk about sun ra back then... he knew him...

hafa (from wednesday): if you want to talk about music go & talk to marshall, i never talked about music to sonny, me & sonny used to talk about "the ascension of the name"

this was in the break between sets & me & R were talking to hafa who was a little irate to begin with...

i took me leave and crossed the room to use the toilet, and on my way i bumped into marshall allen and i shook his hand and told him how happy i was that he was there and that the spirit of sonny was alive in that room... he told me that it was what kept him going (he's 80 odd)...

then on my way back from the loo somebody yelled for me and i had a little chat with a guy i've met over in homerton, bass player (very sharply dressed that night)...

it was a truly lovely night... aided in part by a little tickle of something which might have a name but i don't know what the name is...

3 different T's combined.. very pleasant...

x

life worth living

sometimes i am so glad that i live in this city...

met up with felinity to go check out possible venues for her 30th

it will be taking place 2 days before her birthday in a secret location...

there will probably be a facebook event relating to it for those of you interested in coming...

so anyway, we started in angel, got a bus down to holborn,

popped into conway hall where an old fashioned dance was taking place...

we crept into the balcony and looked down on the dancing partners...

stopped in on G, out drinking in the place where it will be taking place... as it happens...

then got another bus down to the southbank... sat in the royal festival hall for a couple of cups of tea... dropped her off @ waterloo,

lovely to spend time with her, nothing quite like being with someone you've known since you were 7...

she got on her train, i was about to go down to the tube...

but something in me wanted to walk for awhile...

so i popped on my comedy over sized headphones, listened to julian joseph's version of "the other side of the tracks" for the 7th, or 8th time today (loving that tune) in fact you can find out exactly how many times i've listened to that tune today over on my lastfm...

should you want to...

then just south of the river i started listening to my lovely herbie hancock playlist..

butterfly,
sun touched,
bubbles,
people music,
gentle thoughts,

it carried me over the north hungerford bridge, up passed charing cross, passed trafalgar square,

walking up charing cross road...

down onto the picadilly line @ leicester square...

& in fact it carried me all the way out to turnpike lane, starting to repeat the 1st tune again as i arrived at my door...

lovely to walk in london, over the river...

joss fucking stone

me & dinah came back here last night after the gypsy hotel gig...

a way station on her way home... a smoke to take the edge off the adrenalin...

& we were listening to al green... when suddenly "how do you mend a broken heart" came on, but with joss stone singing over the top...

most unnecessary...

& now here i am, having recorded a couple of minutes of piano through the new mics, watching eragon, and who should turn up as a shabby looking fortune teller?

indeed yes, joss f*cking stone...

(because i can't spell that word in the content of this post, but strangely i allow myself to spell it properly in the title...?)

the gig was triumphant, a bit like that gig down in bristol... great crowd...

put me back into a good place... went to bed around dawn...

x

april fool

so, the long weekend stretches out in front of me... it must have been a full moon recently (or perhaps in the next couple of days) because it's easter...

spski & the family are meeting me tomorrow @ the ICA... we're going to see the billy childish exhibition...

i drank last night without eating properly, and i woke quite hungover... got out of bed around 7:30 to wait for the new microphones to be delivered... i was lying on a blanket near the front door napping when they arrived @ around 9:45...

i left for work about an hour later...

so a bit short on sleep, and although i was intending to start testing the mics tonight i found myself watching "the dark is rising", here through love film, and i was dropping off near the end wondering if it really was as bad as it seemed of if it seemed that bad because i was so tired...

it's been a night in front of the TV, i woke up a bit and watched madmen from last night (very good as ever)... then i started watching "this is england" which was looking great, but i realised after awhile that i needed to eat and didn't have food in the flat so i gave up on the film (which will be on my lovefilm list any minute now) and went out to lava's for a takeout,,,

then came back and watched wallander (swedish one) which was also great...

(incisive reviewing you get here - such great descriptive words as - great... and... bad... oh, hang on, maybe it's bad reviewing... oh...)

so anyway, slightly reluctant to be going out tomorrow, as i really do want to start recording that piano with those mics, but k-wo, baby bird & spski are some of the best people in the world so once i'm there i'll be perfectly content...

gigging on saturday night with the SJP's, seems a long way off but it's not too far...

oh dear, largely pointless post... just wanting to mark how foolish i feel on april fool's day x

large emotional gradient important me is interviewed

the 1st of several mental days today...

and i didn't know it was going to be this mental when i woke up,

in fact, when i woke up, i felt quite desperate, not sure why exactly, but then about 12 hours later, cycling up kingsway, i felt like i was floating on a cloud...

because, whilst i was @ work, i got an email from someone @ the BBC, asking if i could be part of a trailer for the world book club event coming up in about 3 weeks... the one where richard ford is coming to talk about the sportswriter...

the one that i'll be attending,

the email i sent to ask whether i could come was very enthusiastic...

that's why they asked me to be part of the trailer, because i was so enthusiastic...

and i was so enthusiastic, not just because richard ford is such a fantastic writer, but because i'd started rereading richard ford a few months back, well, further back really, 6 - 8 months... in an effort to connect with the version of myself who existed before i was with dinah... a getting over dinah kind of thing...

that book that i'd left down in brighton in the house of a man i barely knew, and got back a month or so later...

that was "just a little piece of my heart", it was great, and it was very good timing for the world book club to decide to bring him over...

anyway, la la la...

i finished the sportswriter over the weekend and again, very good timing to be asked today to do the trailer thing...

it turned out that the best time to do it was this evening after work, (because the next few days are going to be mental) and i cycled over to bvsh house in the rain around 7ish, floating through the barbican highwalks along the way which i love...

met with a lovely guy called B who led me through the plush old parts and into the not so nice newer parts, sat me down beside a neumann mic and asked me questions about the book, the writer, myself, my thoughts...

it was lovely... just to have a chance to talk about something i care about, and be listened to...

i left there just after he turned up the microphone on big ben for the 3 chimes of 8:15.. (so cool to have that mic on big ben all the time, live, so when you hear the bongs for the news it is actually big ben bonging...)...

and i cycled home high on life... stopping off in muratori's cafe, full of cabbies, for a largish roast meal... while mum & dad were probably eating down in earlsfield with kat & her G, celebrating the new flat, which is on my itinerary for tomorrow...

the trailer will be made by next tuesday and there'll be an extended web version around too, B's going to send me a link when it's around and it will make me very happy to hear myself on the BBC, or at least on the BBC website...

ok, bed, big day of travel tomorrow, biking it down to whitechapel for a meeting and to drop the bike off for a service in the one bike shop i trust in london (bicycle magic, greatorex street)...

then public transport down to earlsfield to see kat & the new flat...

then up to ladbroke grove for another meeting,

then the science museum for their science museum lates night, a core arts staff do type affair...

covering all 4 corners of this great city i'll be...

x

garden mixer

last week, one of the items i've recently bought arrived, it's an active monitor, (speaker) and it's lovely...

one more thing to carry to gigs and i probably won't always, but it's good to know i will be able to hear myself if i do take it...

this afternoon i decided to clean up my mixing desk, it's been in a bad state for a little while, gathering dust even when i was using it every day...

so i got my can of servisol 10 & i set about squirting it into various bits of the mixer, (a mackie, same brand as the new speaker)... after having done 4 channels (of 16) with a lovely advancing cleanness visible... i decided to heed the advice on the can and not do all this in an enclosed space...

i took the new speaker, plugged my phone into it and put it on my window sill...

a de la soul album pumping out which i've been enjoying very much for the last couple of weeks,

i took the mixer and the can outside into the garden and i had an enjoyable 45 minutes, cleaning up the rest of the mixer... in the best way i could think of, which hopefully is the proper way...

the album lasted exactly the right amount of time, i was a little aware that i might have been being antisocial with my loud music, but it was only an album, in the middle of the afternoon, and had anyone raised their head over the fence i would have turned it down...

anyway, it's such beautiful music, i'm sure all my neighbours appreciated it anyway...

i haven't yet tested the mixer, that's a task for tomorrow, but i'm glad to have done it...

x

highs & lows

proust's on hold, because richard ford is going to be on the world service's world book club and i'm going to be there to ask him a question...

so i'm rereading the sportswriter, the book of his that's going to be discussed...



judging from the cinema ticket stub that is the bookmark, i last read this book in 2002, the film (from the ticket stub) was Ivans XTC, which i might put on my lovefilm list to see again...

the sportswriter is wonderful and it has made me laugh out loud (not lol) several times already, made me smile many times and brought me quite close to tears...

richard ford isn't wholly responsible for the almost tears, i've been quite low recently... lonely...

bubbles, the downstairs cat, meows mournfully all day when they're not in down there, i feel for her, and try and show her a little attention whilst at the same time assuring balthazara that i'm not cheating on her... i'm a one cat man... even if that one cat wakes me up in the morning by touching my face with her paw...

i'm very glad to have her, i think it's true to say she's very glad to have me...

other highs have been:

true blood season 2, which i've had for a little while, but was holding off because it's on the telly (FX), but since last friday's episode i've been hungrily devouring the whole season, and it is better without adverts, the only thing is sometimes my copy of the episode doesn't have the closing tune, which changes each episode and is generally both fantastic in and of itself, and funny, in relation to the story just told...

one episode left and i'm trying to hold it off, but i won't be able to hold off for much longer...

my piano, tuned a week or so ago and in a wonderful place, no downstairs neighbour conflict, possibly side to side neighbour issues to come but i'm not being rude about it, if someone can hear me that way...

i'm writing a synth thing that currently has piano playing on it, i've ordered a couple of niceish mic's that i intend to have setup on the piano fairly constantly, my nice condenser mic would have been recording that piano by now, but it's still in the hands of T who i used to make music with... he's dragging his heals to an extent... glad to have ordered the other ones, they'll be here in a couple of weeks or so, coming from america, i wonder if i'll have my stuff back off T by then?

all this piano playing has given me a renewed interest in my GEM piano module, that may surface at a gig some time soon...

my tetra, my space echo, both of which met my gigging keyboard last night at the spanner jazz punks rehearsal in the venue for next saturday's gig... my keyboard which is so slim the mopho fell off it many times, and last night the bari player knocked the tetra to the ground and i lost the plot a tiny bit, it's partly my fault, i haven't yet invested in the bluetack necessary for the purpose...

on the way back from the rehearsal, keyboard on my back, a drunk polish man (i think he was polish, and he was definitely drunk) told me he needed someone to make music for him, him being a rapper, he wrote his number on the brickwork by where we were standing with a bit of chalk from the ground and proceeded to sing a really long and loud tone into the wall to prove to me that he could sing... i left him there...

x

retrograde

just watched dogma, which i've been meaning to do for ages...



it was great, bless kevin smith...

alanis morrisette is a weird looking lady, she looks like she belongs in a circus... and she's god...

anyway, i just turned on voyager, the star, sky software thing that i like, that i've got set up like a astrologer would have it, the planets and the sun (but no moon for me, she moves too quick) arranged around the ecliptic...



and i see that mars is right on the border between cancer & leo, my sign and my brother's sign...

i'm curious which direction it's moving in so i press forward in time, and it drifts into leo proper, i press backwards in time and it drifts into leo proper...

which means it's balancing, right now, between moving backwards and forwards.

it turns out that it's been moving backwards (retrograde) for almost 3 months, and in almost 2 hours it's going to stop moving backwards and start moving forwards again...

it didn't quite make it back into cancer, it's teetering right on the edge...

dinah & her mum & dad are astrology people and all i know about astrology comes from living with dinah, she used to speak of mars being in retrograde as being a difficult thing... so i'm all for an end to a difficult thing...



ok, the talented mr ripley... which now i remember is based on the same book that plein soleil is based on, and i think i didn't which this one when it came out because i felt i should watch the older, french one 1st, alain delon...



which i never did, and now here i am watching the talented mr ripley... and i might have read that book...? and mars will reverse it's direction (relative to the earth) in less than 90 minutes... and i've got to be up for work in the morning... i'm a fool x

before time 1980 techyness dream eating

on friday morning i just missed a call from a student... i knew roughly what he was going to say...

sorry i'm late, or, sorry i'm not coming...

anyway, the answerphone message he left remained unlistened to until this morning...

also on friday i finally got my windows 7 computer to sync up to my HTC Hero phone...

which means that:

a - i could install the new ROM that came out for the hero (on orange) a few weeks back

& b - i could back up all my text messages that would have been deleted by this process..

they all got backed up onto my gmail... which is really odd, seeing text messages in gmail...

so anyway, it all happened, it all works, which is pleasing...

i woke up this morning and looked at my phone, and it told me i had an answerphone message from june 22nd 1980, this being the answerphone message from friday morning,

from before my phone got it's ROM changed and therefore before my phone's current conciousness came into being,

like imagining events from before i was born...

anyway, i like the fact that it chose june 22nd 1980... pleasing x

but while i'm talking about things working, i have a few positive and one negative "things working" stories to tell,

1stly the negative, the mopho is not responding to treatment, or at least, not the last bout of trying to fix it that i gave it, with the arrival of the soundcard with it's MIDI in&out i can now talk to the mopho, and i've tried a few different ways of getting it back on it's feet but it's resisting...

but in a positive way, i was able to take the sound i use in an SJP song, put it into the computer, then load up the Tetra sound editor and manually program that in so i have the exact sound now... and all the original mopho sounds i programmed are all similarly in my computer now, in code, so i can get them into the tetra slowly... and maybe someone @ DSI will tell me how to load them onto the tetra in a much easier way...

but sad for the mopho, i can't help be struck by the fact that it broke (or i found out that it was broke) on the day i ordered the tetra... to anthropomorphise my mopho a little, either it knew it's old age was coming and it just managed to hold on until i had a replacement, or it saw that i was getting the tetra and it broke itself in a fit of anger..

so, fantastic that i have the tera now, but what would i have done if i hadn't been buying the tetra when it happened?

my other (partial) success concerns the tetra and the spin doctor... the spin doctor being a purple object with 16 knobs on it that you can plug into any MIDI device and set those knobs to controlling the device, i got it from D (moog drummer D) on thursday...



i'm currently plugging it into the tetra, which is a beautiful synth, but it doesn't have that many knobs on it, you can assign 4 of the knobs to whatever you want, which is great, but i want to be able to control more than just those...

so far i've been able to set up 11 knobs on the spin doctor to control the tetra and it's lovely...

there are many, many more settings i might want to change yet, and also i need to do a bit of learning as to how to speak in NRPN MIDI messages, but it's a really nice and intuitive way of interacting with a synth and i'm really digging it...

ok one more thing, i dreamt of bass player A last night - well - this morning, and it was the end of a long day, moving things, and suddenly he came out with this amazing veggie indian food... and offered half to me - by saying "well, you're not going to get a quote on it", which seemed to me to be inviting me to eat...

and i ate, in my dream...

x

jazzers meeting by chance

a week ago i went to see my friend J (JtJP) play a gig over in ravenscourt park,

playing with J that night were - R, student of mine, lovely singer, F a wonderful drummer who i've played with once, when i played one of those sunday jazz gigs in camden... and the guitarist who i've met but can't remember his name, lovely player, and a bass player...

on my way out there, i got off the tube and was walking up the road when a man asked me if i knew where the polish centre was...

i told him i didn't but that i had googlemaps on my phone and that i might be able to help...

a short while later i had directed him back down the road he had been walking along, and i made my way up that road towards the gig, where i met lovely D, (who sold me the moog all that time ago and who drums in many of the improvisations)... the gig was wonderful... all of them were marvellous, i had a rocking time watching them play...

also the pub saw fit to show Top Gun projected massively behind the band from film4... it started pretty much as they started and it finished almost exactly when they finished...

me & D drunkenly shambled back down that road to the tube and were waiting for a train when the man who i'd directed to the polish centre earlier came onto the platform...

it turns out he's a sax player, he was going to see a bigband, run by a man who fixes and sells saxophones, in fact at least one of the SJP's have got a sax from that man...

so we chatted awhile, talked about the musicians life... sax players... music...

got on the train when it came and before we knew it me & D were getting off and he was staying on...

so that was that... he goes by the name of BP... and it was nice bumping into him x

under the sea

in a couple of hours i'm going out to meet with felinity, we're seeing micmacs....

i'm feeling a bit under things today, a sore throat and a cough/sneeze thing...

i'm about to smoke a tiny bit, which won't be very pleasant but it will produce quite a nice feeling, upon which i'll sit down at my rhodes, with the MIDI keyboard on top, the rhodes going through the BlackStar valve thing, the MIDI keyboard controlling the hammond and the tetra, and everything going into the space echo...

and i'll play for an hour or so...

still not recording because i'm still waiting for delivery of a USB sound thing, it turns out the Edirol one i ordered (and paid for) was in between names, being rebranded, and i wasn't going to get it until the end of next week...

so i cancelled it and tried to get it from someone else, phoned a few people, one man told me he wouldn't be able to get an edirol for a little while and anyway, the last one he'd sold (a year ago) had blown up...

so he persuaded me that in fact i wanted an M-audio thing, newer, for £100 less...

i was persuaded, and tomorrow morning, possibly before i leave for work, i shall receive it in the post and then it will all start to slip into place...

i will also be able to start mending the mopho, or at the very least recreating the mopho sound i was using in the SJP's in the Tetra...

x

just listening to this, being another time i was playing my rhodes through a space echo, but that time, my rhodes was in full working order and it was a real 70's space echo...

this time, my rhodes is still broke, the amp part is in need of some specific love, but the upper, harp part is currently wired into my Blackstar valve overdrive pedal, which is wired into the brand new (to me) Boss Space Echo, a seemingly faithful digital reproduction of the original...

similar therefore to my hammond organ module - the Creamware B4000, a lovingly researched and recreated digital version of an analogue classic...

week 24 of the weekly improvisation (because that's what it is i'm listening to) was recorded on the 5th of December 2006,

ok, it's just finished, and now i'm listening to week 34, from the 10th of february 2007, the day that landlord E popped over to pick up his space echo after a few months of it living with me...

i'm sharing these links with you because my old computer is dead and until my brand new Edirol USP sound thing arrives i can not record anything just yet... but when i can ladies & gentlemen you will be drowning in the deluge of music i'll be making...

earlier on i felt so completely at home playing the rhodes through the space echo (with that lovely bit of valve overdrive), i tweeted with joy, and tomorrow i'll be taking both the space echo and the brand new tetra to the SJP rehearsal, we'll see what the hammond sounds like through it...

we're practising up for a big showcase type thing that will feature dancers (including dinah):



be there or be square folks x

space echo

my heart is full of music making love...

i currently have AT tuning my piano, and i also have, by my side, the Boss RE-20 Space Echo pedal which i picked up from the post office this morning...

so i've got my lovely DSI Tetra, going into the Space Echo, and it's just heaven on a stick...

my cup runneth over...

i am, if you haven't guessed already, going through an acquisitive month or two, what with the laptop, DSI Tetra, Space Echo... and indeed an Edirol USP Sound unit currently waiting to be sent off from liverpool...

it's all come from the marking that kept me underground for ages recently and also the fact that the very reputable company that i bought the tetra from mistakenly charged me too little for the beast...

so for once i find i have money, but of course it won't last long...

anyway... the space echo, i hit the Push It button on the tetra and turn the Cutoff control, giving a short burst of synthy loveliness... it goes into the space echo and repeats, i turn all sorts of dials on the space echo and the synthy loveliness turns mad and nutty and even more lovely to my electro loving ears...

all to the background sound of my KNIGHT upright piano being tuned by that lovely man...

x

Tetra

it arrived on wednesday, while A was here trying to fix my rhodes (to no avail, although he brought us closer to knowing what is wrong)...

i took it into work on thursday and played with it after teaching, with old friend D on the drums... lovely to play with him again, and lovely, if new & a bit odd to be playing with the Tetra...

it's basically 4 mopho's in 1, and in protest at being outmoded my mopho has been behaving strangely ever since i ordered the new beast...



i booted up the old computer, to speak to the mopho, and i think i can fix it... but it will take a bit of time, and of course my old computer died the very next day so i have to wait until i get some MIDI going in & out of my laptop before i can do the fix on the mopho...

once upon a time i would write bits of tunes or sounds on the mopho and dream of having just a little more control and sound possibilities and using the mopho live to give me a rhythmic pattern to play over... in particular i was frustrate by the notion of being able to set up a lovely groove on the mopho, but being unable to change to the next groove (verse => chorus) during the song...

the tetra is currently balancing in my mind between being clearly much more able to deal with that dream of performing with it, but perhaps not solving that specific problem... not that i know this, and i'm going to try and get it to work how i want it, i just have to think quite a lot about the situation and what i now have at my disposal...

loving the possibilities x

early morning

late notice cover asked of me today, for tomorrow, so i'll be rising @ 6, leaving the house around 6:45...

nuts... for me of all people...

but at least it means i won't sleep in on tuesday, something i was a little concerned about,

it's for M, M who i mentioned a post or 2 ago, who's been round to look at my rhodes & my moog...

it'll all be over by 2.00, and although that would be stretching it a little, on a normal monday i could sleep until 2... alhtough generally i'm up by 1...

i committed the error of supermarket shopping while really hungry earlier today, and now i have loads of food... i'm sandwiching tomorrow, and probably tuesday as well... i packed tomorrow's lunch & it's 2 chicken sandwich's, a cox's apple and a cookie...

in theory, in order to get 8 hours sleep, i should go to bed in 10 minutes... but i can still feel the food in my stomach and even if i went to bed, i don't think i could go to sleep very easily, however i will be in bed by 11... and hopefully i won't spend hours tossing and turning...

oh and i started writing another tune today, based on 2 notes from my moog that have been playing since thursday, quite possibly it's for baby bird, who officially has a name now, courtesy of a text from Kwo earlier (they told me and josiah on friday, and once josiah knows, it's safe to assume it's not long before everyone knows)...

Robin...

hence baby bird...

x

baby bird

7 days have passed since it ended with me & emivore and i'm trying to slightly ritualise this moment, kiss the memories as they pass so as not to be haunted by them...

i saw baby bird yesterday, i didn't have to work over in homerton so after CM in the morning i went over to SP of stepney and Kwo's to meet with the 2-week old...

grace, josiah & M came up as well so it was quite a big visit, grace was irrepressible and i found myself bearing the brunt of her while the grown up's talked...

the baby is wonderful and sp told me a story that i love - that perhaps one day i'll retell here, but not yet...

me & dinah are in communication again, i don't have a huge amount of space for her in my head just now but at least we're talking...

and the sons of anarchy are in my life... i got hold of the 1st season, thinking that the series currently on 5 USA was the 2nd... i was going to catch up with them and then watch them weekly...

they arrived on thursday and i've watched everything but the last episode now,

just checked though, and 1stly the 5 USA thing is this 1st series, so i've already over taken them, and it's shown on wednesday's @ 10, which is when madmen is shown over on BBC4, so that's not going to happen, it looks like i'm going to get hold of as much SOA as i can and consume it madly...

it has helped me this week, what with my small but definite heart break...

also i'm buying the thing i wanted... retail therapy which for once i can afford... but won't be able to afford anything else for a little while...

x

the fog

& lo & behold,

TV let me down, then the BBC came to the rescue...

i watched the fog on the iplayer just now and it almost made me cry...

it really is very good TV...

& i am sad, as my screensaver tells me...

last week it said "i am in love"...

the day before valentine's day it said "i have my eyes open"

and today it says "i am sad"

and although i am a bit sensitive to the thought of a certain ex-girlfriend of mine reading this and being pleased by it... i hereby announce, once more, that me & emivore are no more...

it happened on saturday, the day before valentine's day...

one of the 2 reasons i had for not going to work yesterday was in order not to see her... and as it's halfterm and weirdly, that place respects half of halfterm, (i should have worked yesterday, i'm not expected to work on friday), i don't now have to see her until next tuesday...

i began this current period of singleness quite relaxed and remarkably calm, but, unsurprisingly i am actually quite angry and sad...

at the rehearsal last night there was drum stool right next to me, covered in dust (the drummers studio where we rehearse is constantly shedding dust, it is below a railway track and stuff is shaken from the ceiling all the time...)

anyway, at a certain point i drew my initials into the dust on the drum stool and then i wrote "is sad"...

a bit weird because the youngest SJP (G - trombonist) was walking up to me just as i was doing this, in order to look at the lyrics i had on my music stand, and he might have seen it, i considered rubbing it out straight away but i realised that i wanted it to be said so i left it there...

later on M (baritone) sat on it, rubbing my sadness out with his arse...

at one point in this episode of madmen a character says to another character:

"you're a house cat, you're very important and you have little to do"

x

things

things are bad...

mad men is right now on bbc4, but in the 1st 11 minutes it froze up about 5 times, each time lasting a couple or perhaps 3 seconds... tiny bits of dialogue lost that in a lesser program i might not mind, but in mad men?

i had to turn it off...

also my internet has been a bit odd recently, i put it down to the cheap wireless router i bought, and it still could be that, but it's still a bit rubbish even when i plug in directly, still plugged to the router, so it could just be that...

(still using that still word)

but if my TV is being weird too then maybe it's virgin?

anyway, i'll catch mad men tomorrow on catchup whilst i'm not working over @ hammersmith - it being halfterm...

and in other news, the mobile phone money came through, and the RAM has been bought and installed and i can see no clear evidence that anything's improved...

it's always the way, when i installed the new ROM in my phone i wanted to see an immediate improvement but it just seemed the same...

i trust in both cases that it is better...

my studio is coming on... slowly but surely... A from the SJP's (bass player) is coming round next week to have a look at my rhodes... possibly fix it... another lovely man in the tradition of MM who's been round several times to look at the rhodes... the moog.. etc.

and i'm developing a longing for a Tetra, a small box of heaven... like my mopho but 4 notes at once... chords possible...

& i love my cat