2010 new tune BSG good again

ok,

so i spent last night and most of today with Emivore... we walked on the heath this afternoon, cycled there from hers, lovely to know that's easy...

2 years ago today i improvised a short piece of music, 1st on the piano, then on the rhodes...

the rhodes part i repeated twice, with the original piano part coming in on the repeat...

this tune - 1st january 2008 - is one of the tunes on my myspace...

since i woke today i've been itching to get back here to do a similar thing... but my music making equipment is in disarray and i currently have 15 minutes left of this 1st of january 2010...

one of the differences between me now & me 2 years ago is that it's easier these days when things don't work out how i want them to... at least in this setting... today i don't mind letting it go, the kind of mania that used to fuel the weekly improvisations is a little eased... so there won't be a "1st january 2010"...

having said that i did just set up the juno 6 and got it going into the computer...

over the holidays (both down in seaford with emivore & in blewbury for christmas) i had my DSI mopho with me... without any kind of keyboard around me i was glad to have it... the opportunity to make music... so i made a few nutty loops & i got into the habit of it...

so the other night, (30th/31st december) i couldn't sleep, i got up and started writing down ideas about my scifi novel (more on that later) - i also got out the mopho and programmed a simple thing to keep me company while i wrote... well... simple thing has been floating around for the past couple of days and i really like it... so i'm excited about putting it down into the computer and building something out of it...

in general this is pleasing because i have about 10 different ideas in the mopho, from this last holiday season and from trips i've made before, and it'll be nice to get them all recorded into the computer and work on them (if they deserve working on)...

ok - and lastly, i'm in the middle of BattleStarGalactica season 3 and it's good again... the 1st season was great, the 2nd season lost it, this 3rd season is back on track and it makes me happy... i guess the writers strike in america was to blame for the faulty 2nd season, or am i just making that up? the timings don't necessarily match up.. anyway...

balthazara here x happy new year x

Herbert Deutsch invocation

more on the moog,

it was designed after Bob Moog left the moog company in'77, designed by herbert deutsch who had worked with mr moog back in the 60's on the 1st moogs,

bob moog died recently, herbert deutsch is very much alive, he teaches for hofstra university, and i tracked down his email address...

i sent him a hello, with a link to last week's improvisation (featuring the moog),

i sent it on saturday and on monday he emailed back...

"thanks for the improv and the red wine. The opus sounds nice. might be a bit better shape than my old one. Keep up the improvs. I don't think they are "a little bit stupid".
Herb Deutsch"

in that improvisation i was sipping wine (rose as it goes) and midway through (around 10 minutes in i think) i accidentally stopped the recording with my foot, i fixed it but i was kind of muttering about being "a little bit stupid"...

this has kept me a little bit lifted off the ground for a couple of days...

not only did this man who designed my moog, reply to my email, but he watched the 20 minute improvisation as well...

x

other moog related news being that the string section, which it was sold to me as being not working, has life...

i've known of a kind of life it has for a week now but i found other life, in a different form, and it sounds fantastic...

this has just come through leaving the beast on all the time... it's gradually finding itself... i did open her up the other day and clean her a bit and that might have done something... who knows? anyway,

this happens when all the outputs are turned off, it shouldn't be making sound, but it's bleeding through, and it's exactly the sound i want to work, it's just not going through the right amplification bits...

when it works (which it will), there is a circuit which looks out for really high resonance and switches something off, to avoid distortion...

this ghost in the machine sound doesn't have the turning off circuit, so it distorts like nobody's business and this is how i found it...

yesterday i recorded a brief improvisation with the ghost sound, turned up a whole load... turned up some more once in the computer, running it through noise reduction twice to scare off the hiss that came with it...

i love it...

i think i'll put it on my myspace, but maybe the out there version of my myspace...

i'll let you know if it goes up, it's worth hearing at least once...

on listening to it it occurred to me that it was like an invocation...

i've called it invocation to a long dead god and i'm thinking of something like the god that the prehumans invoked, before homo-sapian, some early homo erectus...

maybe they could make a sound that pleased this god, or could call it... but with our evolution into homo-sapian out throats and mouths evolved to such an extent that we could no longer make the sound and the god fell away...

that's the god i'm invoking with this tune x

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

DayWatch & T.E.E.D

last wednesday night (well last thursday very early morning) i foolishly stayed up to watch nightwatch on filmfour...

foolish because i had the dawn project the next morning and also dinah's birthday, but not so foolish because it was really great, i loved it, i loved the main character anton, i loved the story, i loved the production...

so anyway, today i cycled into town to catch daywatch @ the westend vue managing to get charged £11.75 for the 3.00 showing which outraged me but i paid up because this was the time i needed to see the film...

during the trailers i noticed that a piece of curtain was hanging down over the screen and i was impressed when, after the trailers, everything stopped for awhile for a vueman to come and fix this...

and the film was great, very pleasing, when i saw the 1st one on filmfour the announcer said it was the 1st of a trilogy, can't wait for part 3...

and then Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosoars... they asked to be my myspace friend and i checked them out as i do all friend requests, and they rock...

their "Dinosoars having a p..." is just wonderful, it fades after a few minutes, i don't know if there's another longer version out there at all, and i also don't know what the P stands for, although it probably is Party... myspace often cuts the last letters off my tune's names, must one day work out just how many characters you can have...

so there you have it, if you can see nightwatch do so in the next few days and go catch daywatch at the cinema and check out those funky electro dinosoars... x

1 year today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ok... bed...

x

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

arkestra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

exactly 36 years ago today...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

x

still vulnerable

having a bleak september sunday...

it's good for music if for nothing else...

i have a lovely melody/chords thing that's come out of today's funk... and i mean funk in the old fashioned james joyce way rather than the james brown way...

i put an old tune up on my mypace... you know you can have 4 tunes up there at any one time? the last week had you can't be mine an old ballad i cowrote with some tinpan alley character (in that i wrote the words to an old jazz standard) that i performed with Hcello back in 2003... and now i've taken a tune called sleep deprivation - all mine - from my album's worth of tunes i was toting about to my friends a few years ago...

i love it, it seems that one of my 4 tunes will be an oldy most of the time... that's the story now anyway...

x

playing in a park maybe cycling far frivolous film

as the crow flies it's 10.7 miles, a possible cycle route would be 14.4 miles, the train would take about 40 minutes so the cycle journey would be a mad option but i may take it just once or twice... we'll see...

i hit the brick wall of no sir, you may not take out money this afternoon, just as i start my one week's work of the summer - often the way...

a cab is picking me up @ 8:15 tomorrow morning and then i'm in that week, real shock to my system it will be too, but i'm looking forward to it...

gigged in a park yesterday, strange time we had, an audience you could count on your fingers, a few technical confusions at first but we did alright, because of the strangeness of the event i found myself talking with the audience a fair bit and i enjoyed the humour of it... by the end i was shivering, just in a T-shirt and a windy, rainy afternoon...

the event was partly put on by the southwark playhouse who ran a week long summer school for kids which culminated in a performance in the park... primary school age kids, they'd made three papier mache heads of varying sizes...

as we were setting up to play one of their papier mache heads blew across the stage and it gave me an idea for a short film which i later enacted with the help of one of the kids - tori - once i've edited it together i'll post it, it's entirely frivolous and nonsense but it made us laugh...

the day before the trio had rehearsed and the day before that me & Wfloopyshaman had done the piano recording session... busy, busy, busy... in fact i'm listening to the fruits of that session now, i need to pick the take that i use or perhaps glue together two different takes... or three for that matter...

i love the sound of the piano that we got, just with my two mics,

oh - and a peculiar thing - through myspace i've met a netherlands based musician and i commented to her that one of her pieces of music reminded me of a band called outside (although i mistakenly called them inside outside) and then after playing yesterday, a member of the audience told me my music reminded him of outside...

x

splash

i'm loving the tune i made yesterday - do pop over to my mypace and hear it - i'd be interested whether it's just me, (quite possible)...

i had 3 hours work today, a moderation for the FUSE project that nippy ran... the moderator a nice man i've met several times already... might have got some work from meeting him today, for september...

cycled to the river for my now normal routine of thames path filming followed by 3 games of chess followed by more thames path filming...

i beat the puzzle factory 3-0 this time, satisfying...

but the splash was before that, as i was doing the 1st bit of thames path filming it was hightide & i saw that in a corner of the concrete edges surrounding the water the waves were sometimes making a large vertical splash...

so i made my way over to the splash and set up my camera to film it... stupidly...



x

wake me softly

i'm writing a piano piece of music to go with the thames path film and it's coming along nicely... this afternoon i turned a fragment of it into a tune called wake me softly which will shortly be playing over there on my mypace... it's a dreamy thing which i'm loving right now after i've just finished it... i hope i'll still like it tomorrow...

shortly going out to see Pirates of the... with Dinah & her folks...

x