knocks & floats (a bit techy)

so the music therapy lot turned me down - knocked me a bit it did - a few weeks back now...

& one of my classes that i teach in homerton has been low on numbers for awhile and yesterday they told me they're taking that class away from me...

so i'm losing hours...

it hurts... it will hurt financially and it hurts emotionally... but life goes on - more work will have to be found...

i've got a few things keeping me emotionally afloat at the moment... one of which is my synth world which is slightly larger than it was & more interconnected now...

i've been messing around with a modular synth called jasuto - on my phone - i have the somewhat undernourished android version... it turns out there's more money writing for apple so the android version is the poorer relation in the family but even with seemingly no attention from it's creator for a few years it's still a fine beast...

over the weekend i made a sound on it which i called "peeved child"... my ladyfriend (i forget what her nomdeplume is...?) within days of meeting the peeved child expressed a wish not to hear the peeved child again...

i love it still...

yesterday - day of receiving bad news - i found myself on the overground from canonbury to new cross gate - nipping home after work before going out again to a spanner rehearsal...

i saw, behind my bicycles rear wheel, a mains plug... which i've been meaning to check out for a while now - a sign by the plug said not for public use...

so i got my Dsi Tetra out of my bag and plugged it in - all the lights came on - i found my headphones and set about converting the peeved child into a "confused hippy"...

most of the bits that make up peeved child in jasuto on my phone are similar to bits that exist in my Tetra - 4 LFO's, a low pass filter,

the sound generation in jasuto is a sampler that i drew the waveform into & that's beyond my Tetra, but Tetra's saw/triangle wave works pretty well instead... by the time i had arrived @ new cross gate i'd completed confused hippy which i later unveiled in the spanner rehearsal and it's earned itself a place in the spanner set on saturday night...

really nice that the phone synth is influencing the gigging synth... long may it continue...

the spanners are @ the round midnight in angel on saturday night if you're a londoner & you want a fine night of free music - confused hippy included x

round trip on foot

Fulfilling day in amongst financial worries & emotional ups & downs...

Me & Emma are back together - after a break of a few months - a touch shaky as all such things are - less than a week in & it doesn't yet feel normal... i trust it will...

gigging tonight with the spanners in angel - the round midnight - 2 sets as ever - one 8:30ish - the other 10:30ish...

about to pack down my lovely red keyboard for the trip over to the soundcheck...

half of my brain is also on editing a video that is part of my application to Nordoff Robbins Master in Music Therapy that i'm getting ready... videos that i filmed earlier this afternoon before going out to do my dusk project...

i did it yesterday as planned but i was a few minutes late due to hungover slow walking - so now i have the choice of either today's footage or yesterdays when i get to the other end...

very old friend JF rang me to say he was going to an exhibition in Peckham - being what where i live these days...

i left here on foot (bicycle out of action for too long now - slaps own wrist) dropped a shirt off to be pressed @ the dry cleaners - went down bellenden road to see JF & his new flatmate - whose exhibition it was/is... hmmm - can i link it? Yes i can...

good stuff, documenting a housing estate in kidbrooke that's being demolished - photos of residents with a film & book...

then me & JF walked over to the NC for the dusk project - the 1st time i've had anyone with me - really nice to be with JF who's round the corner (ish) these days so will hopefully see more of him (he came to last week's gig in brixton that i didn't tell you about)...

and also really nice to be able to show him Nunhead Cemetery - it's right up his kettle of fish...

directed him roughly westward & he cycled off as i walked home - stopping by the dry cleaers to pick up the shirt...

one more tea & then i'm outward bound 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

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

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

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

piano moved

emivore & me, over the last two days, began work turning this flat into something lovely again...

when me & dinah moved in we (well, i say we, it was largely her) made it lovely... then after me & dinah broke up and she moved out a little later, it drifted back down into something i loved, but let's be honest, it was not lovely for anyone else...

i had been letting it drift down, partly to do with getting over dinah in my own way...

anyway, the move to get it lovely again, (partly to do with me wanting to have grace here, and making it nice for her, partly for emivore), began this weekend...

and part of it for myself was getting my beautiful piano out of the room where it's been since it moved in (that day a couple of years back, when landlordE, spski (now dad), floopy, dinah, me... movingM & his sidekick... struggled for many hours getting it up the stairs and round that corner)...

getting it from that room, which is above my downstairs neighbours living room and therefore not a very friendly place to play my loud piano, through the seemingly very thin floor boards and straight into their TV watching room...

into this pink room which dinah used to use for her uni work... which is above my stairs and their front hall...

emivore left a few hours ago, after much work clearing, sorting, cleaning... we ate @ lava's and i took her to the tube,

i phoned spski (now dad) on the way back to the house and i had a lovely chat with him, he's in great place, sad not to be with KWo & the little one, (she's in the hospital still, nothing dangerous, just resting after the birth), but drifting in the clouds in a hallucinogenic, childish way as he described it to me...

30 minutes on the phone with him, then i put on Aja, the Steely Dan album,

there was a little preparatory work to do still, and i set to it, moving lesser things, dinah's (now my) wardrobe, with all kinds of floopyness on top, clearing a path...

then i started moving the piano from there to here, shedding clothes as i did it... a mad energy within me as i pushed it, pulled it, shoved it, lifted it, many trips from one end to the other, midway through doors so the only way was over the top of the piano...

balthazara watching in cat bemusement...

after the album finished the spanner jazz punks demo came on, (i'd forgotten that i'd accidentally put it in the same playlist in itunes, before noticing and putting it in the right playlist but obviously leaving it there also)...

at this point the piano was half in the hall, half in the living room, having turned about 10 degrees and was about to change direction, heading into dinah's (now my) room...

so the last part of the move came with the 1st 2 tunes on that demo (which may or may not have made it's way onto the SJP's myspace by now...?), and as the last 2 tunes played i smoked some and sat at my freshly moved piano, not playing it, just sitting @ it, smoking...

when Punk Jazz Spanner came to it's nutty "band going mental but being slowly driven away" ending and gradually faded to nothing i was left with a lovely silence, as i contemplated the piano in it's new place...

still no playing of it, it is the middle of the night and i don't yet know for sure it's not going to bother somebody...

naturally, midway through the move i thought i should have set up a camera, filming the whole thing, speeding it up afterwards... but it was too late then, so no visual record remains of that mad dash...

strange, i just got a skype phone call from someone in russia, strange but kind of nice... not someone i know (i don't think) perhaps he found me because maybe he calls himself longcat as well...? not sure but... anyway...

my piano moving story is told, i still have the post moving settling back from the chaos to deal with, but maybe that's tomorrow now...

ok, laters x

mixing & one more reason to avoid facebook

jai bound any minute now...

me & DSpanner found ourselves locked in to OTR studios last night with M, the guy mixing us, who had recorded the band on sunday...

some muppet had padlocked the door on leaving, without checking to see whether anyone was still in the building...

this was discovered around 12:30 am with 3 out of the 4 tracks mixed...

anyway, aside from a few mad moments - M considering climbing over a razor wire fence - M considering hot-wiring the goods lift - we got all our mixing done and the muppet returned to let us out...

interesting experience working with a hard disk recorder, no computer screens to interact with, the whole thing taking a touch longer in certain situations, but an experience all about the ears and not the eyes which is refreshing...

so DSpanner drove me home, he had to get up for school in the morning, glad i didn't...

at a certain point i realised that it was a bit like the day before, walking around kew gardens with emivore, really not wanting to look at the time because time had expanded and i didn't want to return to normal time yet...

yesterday i'd been working, 11 through to 7, then a stroll over to the studio, then mixing from 7:30 to 2:15...

we looked at the time when the drama happened, (12:30 ish), but even this i resisted...

i was sat there pushing through, not knowing what the time was, not wanting to know, just knowing that we had to get the mixing done...

everything always takes longer than you think it will in the studio...

ok, and then facebook... i'm a fan of the SJP's on facebook, so i wrote on our wall just now, reporting on the mixing... and it disappeared into the "just fans" tab... so it's not on the wall, unless you click on that tab...

i'm not just a fan...!

just one more reason why i personally should not try and interact with facebook, it is set up to upset me... i see that now... i don't know how they did it... but they definitely had me in mind when they set that thing up... "no wait, hang on... if we do it like this it'll really twist his mind up"...

i wouldn't be surprised if they've got access to the little camera in my laptop, everytime i log on to facebook it logs the video taken from that camera, so they can see the irritated looks on my face... and laugh...

x

cookies google chess tax return cubase

so that was weird, google wouldn't accept my password all morning...

i was having odd thoughts about someone hacking in and changing my password...

anyway it's working now... maybe it's time i changed that password anyway...?

i gigged with the SJP's on saturday night to a lovely big crowd (including dinah, floopy, Nslider & emivore), the venue was right by a sainsburies so i popped in after the soundcheck and got some of those cookies that i love... i had them tucked behind my stool on stage while we were playing...

i ate one between sainsburies & the venue, me & emivore had one each between the two sets... so that means there are two left... and it's just possible that they are still tucked behind something on the stage @ the round midnight jazz & blues bar...

i won't lie, it is odd having both one's ex-girlfriend and one's girlfriend at the the same gig, odd for me, odd for dinah, odd for emivore...

the gig was triumphant though... a big crowd really pulls something out of us i find...

i'm currently down in brighton to help josiah with her tax return, it turns out she didn't request an activation code before this morning, something i was worried might happen and i thought she'd already done it, so they're sending it out by post and it may or may not arrive before the deadline... anyway, i'm adding up her numbers for her so she can put it in when the time comes...

i've got my own tax return looming, and that'll probably be done on saturday now, what with the moving but ever so slowly moving marking mountain that i'm still under...

and i'm a bit stuck in a game of chess i'm playing with felinity, one of those knight situations where all sorts of forks are available to her, and what do i want to safegaurd...?

oh & i'm in denial about this little computer being just a netbook... it's only a couple of decimal points below my recording computers processing speed (this is 1.6G, that one's 1.8...) and i used to run cubase on older computers...

so i've downloaded a free bit of music software called Kristal... it seems to do what it needs to, although i'm sad that i can't get my old favourite the arcdev dubb bbox working with it...

it made me decide to get hold of cubase... which i duly did last night... and it turns out this copy of the arcdev dubb box doesn't work with that either...?

cubase certainly takes up more of my computers thinking than kristal, but i know cubase (although this is cubase 5, i've been using sx3 for years) so i'm hoping i can use that... i loaded a demo song into cubase, with all the bells and whistles galore and tried to play it and my computer just laughed at me... in a very unpleasant digital distortion kind of laughing way...

ok, later x

last spanner gig of the year

floopy was there, resplendent in purple top hat & coat, videoing the whole thing,

dinah of course, lovely,

it was a private party, we were great, i think,

afterwards i got the bus up to east finchley where i am now, blogging from E's bed while she meditates, just listened to boychild by scott walker...

the spanners are concentrating on recording in the near future...

ok, that's all i've got x

yr3wk50 bass clarinet & rhodes with Dan Spanner

yr3wk50 with Dan Spanner from longcat on Vimeo.

it really did take just over a day to render... it finished just before i left the house for my mental day of work yesterday - 9:30 - 9 in 2 different places...

so, wednesday, late for an improv but finally it's here x

yr3wk30 via vimeo

Yr3wk30 from longcat on Vimeo.

tired of waiting for dailymotion for the videos over 20 minutes, this is vimeo's version of last week's improvisation...

i've just arranged a tune i've had in my head a few weeks for the spanner jazz punks who are rehearsing tomorrow night...

...pleased x

no improvisation but science

it's been a funny week for the improvisations, very synthy...

last thursday i recorded last week's improvisation, i lost a day or so through that LAME mp3 mess that was inflicted on me, then then finally it was ready to upload on sunday, standard fair really, i've fallen into doing the improv on sunday fairly frequently recently...

the video was/is 24 minutes long, i uploaded it to dailymotion, who have a 20 minute limit, unless you specify that it's creative content, in which case someone has to check that it is, and then you can publish it...

well i didn't realise this at the time, i was just confused that i couldn't put it anywhere even though it was up there, also i'd uploaded it to googlevideo and they'd just lost it, it didn't show up anywhere in their system, so i thought, forget googlevideo, this is why i'm moving over to dailymotion anyway...

but after a few days of dailymotion not confirming my video (i think they take anything between 3 & 6 days - that's a guess), i decided to upload it again to googlevideo - who magically found the 1st one i uploaded, so that's now adorning my myspace and longcat.net, but i think i'll wait until the dailymotion one is done before i put it up here... dailymotion will be the better quality of the two...

so yesterday i did this week's improvisation, partly spurred on by the thought of losing the NORD synth, and partly consciously doing it early in the week to give dailymotion more time to sort themselves out so i can publish it by sunday,

and this one (rendering now) is 22 minutes long, over the dailymotion limit so the same thing will happen with this...

i'll start uploading it tonight and dailymotion will hopefully get it through before sunday...

in general, what with my working week being so empty at the start of the week it does make sense to do it this way,

the new...

rehearsed again with spanner jazz punks last night, it could well be great with them... gigging in some kind of circus cabaret with them on the 25th of october

x