rain and no rain neve joy

last night around midnight, cycling by the thames, the houses of parliament on the other side of the river... lowtide, mad, mad rain pouring on me... joni mithcell's hegira in my ears... as though the river was so low because all the water was falling from the sky...

tonight, around the same time, (a little later), no rain, clear, crisp sky, a bite in the air... carl craig in my ears...

last night, coming in and having to take every single item of clothing off, not even my T-shirt escaped the wet... a hot shower, careful arranging of things on radiators...

similar shaped days today and yesterday... well, yesterday and the day before yesterday if you're reading this on thursday... me being in the early hours thereof...

saw spski yesterday, he of job interview fame, lovely to hang out with him, popped in for a tea around 2...

today i was supposed to meet one of the actors from the show i'm doing, to go through his big number... he didn't show, wasted 90 minutes of my life, time i could have spent fetching the proust which has arrived at the bookshop...

then, yesterday and today, i spent a couple of hours being a session piano player for the students @ CM, yesterday with MM running the class and today with yimkin in that position, yesterday i recorded my weekly improvisation after, today i recorded some current compositional ideas...

had a bleak moment or 6 around 6 o'clock and i was very glad of that piano to play... came up with some melancholy drenched thing... worked on the "dreamt i was bach" piece, just learning how to play it on the piano...

yesteday i went and got spski again, dragged him out of the flat to get a curry, today i met yimkin, (who had in the mean time been @ ginger B's studio) and we got a curry -

yesterday on my own but meeting T (and M) there, today with yimkin in tow... i went to the studio... down in kennington... new home of my rhodes...

yimkin & me got something working in the system, UAD plugin's which i thought we had but which weren't showing up... the PULTEC of which i'd heard tell and several NEVE plugins's - channel strips or EQ's... so very sexy...

i'm going to put this weeks improvisation through some of it... in fact that all worked really nicely, recording @ CM and then opening exactly the same file in the studio...

good times ahead...

much work to do on the studio but it's going to be so, so sexy...

of course it's quite alot of time away from my dinah which is sad... this week she's a studio widow... last night dripping wet me found her asleep on the sofa...

tonight she'd gone to bed by the time i got in...

and that's where i'm headed now, hammersmith work tomorrow and i'd like to cycle in, i wonder how the distance compares with the studio schlep? hmm... and weather..?

i'm rehearsing with the spanner jazz punks tomorrow night so if i cycle i'll have to get back here and then strap the keyboard on and hit the tube...

anyway, must sleep, i want to get that proust in the morning, and in fact that would be beautiful, the whole tube journey to hammersmith (barons court), to try and start this proust, then head down to the studio, do my thing with the improvisation, then skip over to the rehearsal...?

which to choose? bike or tube?

x

studio

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

we made an amazing thing...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

x

yr3wk34 drums, rhodes, piano

yr3wk34 drums, rhodes, piano from longcat on Vimeo.

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

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

now...

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

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

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

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

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

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

pretty hot i reckon...

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

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

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

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

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

times are afoot x

mental mixer shuffle

it's been a mental day... driving up to gloucester with S & T, missing our turning, finding our way with the fosse way... arriving, meeting lovely but slightly mental L (he suffered in the gloucester floods), testing all 28 line inputs, all 28 mic inputs... checking out the lovely (odd) EQ, learning a mad amount about mixing in the few hours that we were there talking to him...

to agree... to get it in the van... to see L rip up his floor to get to the loom (cables) he was giving us... to almost get out of gloucester and remember he was giving us the bass to put it on...

to meet mad, mad weather, (fog, snow)...

to get back and carry the massive thing to the bottom of our stairs... (they're coming back tomorrow and we're taking it to it's new home)...

and then to find dinah, who had my solstihannimous present which was/is an ipod shuffle... bearing the words "With Love From Loobs To Moobs xxx"...

protest about gaza plus mixing desk road trip

i won't be protesting in central london tomorrow because me & T are going on a road trip...

but i would be if i could...

1st the bombing, and now the invasion of gaza, a strip of land with one & a half million people living on it, largely starved of food, fuel, medicine for many, many months... is a terrible thing...

israel has been in the wrong before, but not for a long time has it been this wrong...

making war in a densely populated area that you have previously blockaded is a form of collective punishment...

anyway, i won't be assembling @ 12:30 @ speakers corner tomorrow and i won't be marching to the israeli embassy...

because i will be driving up to gloucester with T (& S who me & dinah met on T's birthday) to test and perhaps buy a mixing desk for our studio that we're setting up in kennington...

i don't know if i've mentioned it before but i'm merging some of my musical equipment with T's and some new stuff for this studio in a room that is currently full of junk...

it's going to be amazing...

cycling moment

i was cycling home today from work, my apprentice P came back today and it was great to have him the class and chat with him afterwards, so anyway, there i was, cycling north on hornsey road as i do and on my left, just on the road side of the fence there were quite a few things covered in plastic and i thought to myself,

oh, that's sad, they must be flowers left for someone who had an accident here...

months before i'd seen flowers by the road at that crossing although on the other side (where seven sisters road meets hornsey road)...

but when i got close to the things they were plastic bags full of bottles i think...

not a sign of an accident but of haphazard recycling...

deep in the editing of a video for T's band, using the shots & video from the photo shoot a week ago x

photo shoot film fest

so last night i travelled down to tooting to see felinity and also to be there at 6:45am when i woke up so i could get to tooting bec common for 7:30am...

felinity and me had a nice quiet night sipping beer and going through her pictures of the wedding, also catching an episode of a bit of fry and laurie which was great, particularly hugh laurie's legs...

her G rolled in around 4am, really drunk and unable to lock the door behind him,

i rolled over and did indeed rise @ 6:45, making it to the park on time, meeting K, followed by T & M, with O rolling up 45 minutes late...

we had a good morning taking shots for the band, K with his fancy camera and me videoing with my little one, which i'm tempted to make into a scratchy video for one of the tunes that T has recently finished mixing, i'm listening to them now and they sound amazing, it's the recording we did ages ago with the strings we added later, and the other little bits of sessions we did over the last few months,

i think T has put some of them on his myspace,

after the shoot and a lovely green lentil soup from the cafe in the park i went back to felinity & G's for tea and much hanging out with felinity & hungover G, making it back to my ends in time to eat our customary veggie roast with dinah then straight off to the islington vue to meet with felinity (again) for the angel film festival which was truly great,

it was the final of the festival and the quality was very good, we laughed a lot at a very small ahaaar, we were moved by a sad tale of saving suicides on beechy head, we were frankly amazed by a film called surprise...

altogether an inspiring day, just a bit of work for teaching tomorrow and fixing a puncture for dinah then i can go to my well deserved bed x

just before bed blog

repacked my keyboard just now, from the chaos of post gig, freeing up the stage for the next band, no dressing room to sort it out... got it home and now it's waiting by the door for the morning...

switch my head back from T's band to the reluctants over the course of the night and the long drive up to sheffield...

apparently we will be on T4 (channel 4), although probably not tomorrow, it turns out the singer is from sydney so i'll be getting information from her about where felinity and her G can go to when they're over there next easter...

very tired and no dinah to rest my weary head against in the night... oh well... the rock'n'roll life x

nuts

i'm about to go to my first rehearsal with the reluctants, a band i joined on tuesday, then straight from that rehearsal to a gig with T's band, then home tonight, only to be picked up tomorrow morning @ 9 by the reluctants to travel to sheffield to audition for mobileact...

it's all a bit nuts x

rescued collaborative improvisation

me & tooting tone, had to work hard to rescue it but rescue it i did x

lost improvisation russian visitor

T came round yesterday to do probably my last session for the recordings, some piano, some clav, some hammond and also my voice...

good session, closing with the 1st of my longcat collaborative improvisations, T on voice, me on voice & hammond...

and i half knew it would happen, but somehow i thought if i waited long enough it would right itself...

cubase freezing at the moment i pressed stop, we went out to the plough after to wait it out and when i came home much the worse for wear 4 or so hours later it was still frozen, so the improvisation is lost...

it's happened before and i really need to get into the habit of saving just before i press stop... or maybe set up auto saving... foolish, and it means this week's improvisation will be recorded later today on my own...

i did however meet a man in the pub who said steven seagal is a great blues musician... this is going to make me laugh for weeks...

and then also at roughly the same time i had my 6666th visitor, sadly @ 8:04pm on the 6th of the 7th 07 and not 4 hours later on 7/7/07 but it's still great...

and tonight i'm meeting with felinity to go the circus courtesy of spski which is lovely, i was meant to be going with my dinah but some work has come up and though i'm very sad not to have her on my arm it's great that felinity can come...

oh yes, and where did my 6666th visitor hail from?

well i'm glad you asked, they hail from the great city of st petersburg.

x

bitten

our sleep cycle is way behind these days, and tomorrow is going to be a little hard because of that... but no more hard than it's been for awhile...

but once again this morning i woke after midday and i'd really intended to be out and cycling by that time...

i made it out the house with a cheese sandwich and a miniroll in me to go see T and work on his string arrangements, the sky was grey so i wore jeans and a black T-shirt, by the time i got down there the sun had come out and it was a glorious day, me in my all black outfit, with my various different bites chafing away at me...

bites... i hate them...

the other night i was hard at work marking when i should have been over @ T & W(floopy)shaman's i heard the tell-tale sound of a mosquito in here so i covered up my skin with all sorts of clothes on that hot night and got back to work... stopping after awhile to trap it in a glass and take it out... but not before it had bitten me a few times...

then i became aware that balthazara was entertaining a few visitors (hence the deflea last night) and every time i touch her i get bitten on my hand (i have 4 flea bites on my fingers so far)...

anyway, that's behind me now i hope, i'm just baring the marks and trying not to itch...

so i settled down to work on T's strings and it was productive, i'm really looking forward to the string session which'll be fairly soon, so much an area i want to grow in, string arranging, brass arranging... all that..

it all took longer than planned but it always does, i came home, still only a few chocolate biscuits in me in addition to when i'd set off...

popped over to W(floopy)shaman's to pick up the camera for the dawn project and chatted awhile with him then returned to find dinah had prepared the most delicious meal - her version of someone else's leak crumble... oh it is truly wonderful...

just about shaking off the ill-humour that i was under when i got in, hunger i guess it was...

and i've just realised something odd about my dawn project, i'm almost half way through the tape that i thought would last me the whole year and i've just found that the early weeks i was only filming for 30 seconds, somehow i slipped into filming whole minutes a month or so back... which is pointless if the early bits are only half that, so it's back to 30 second filming tomorrow morning... sorry, i guess it's a bit boring to talk about this technicality but what goes on inside my brain is what i write about...

x

improvisations

spent yesterday in tin pan alley studio (denmark street) recording for T... it was a long day and i hadn't slept much the night before but recording music is a beautiful thing and i gave it all i had...

carrying the keyboard home killed me a little and what with the whole lack of sleep thing that i'd been keeping at bay hitting me all at once when i got in i was a bit of a wreck...

but the day was great, meeting S, the engineer and owner of the studio, was really nice, he has a great attitude in the studio, made the whole thing work very well...

also playing with the band, including K who has recently joined as our drummer... very good stuff...

as a band we played 4 tracks, then afterwards i went over three of them overdubbing a piano track, and being as we were there and these lovely mics were already set up on the grand piano i decided to do my weekly improvisation there as well, with T & S's permission...

but by then my camera had run out of batteries and i didn't have any on me, feeling too broke to buy some specially... which maybe now i regret... maybe not...

so i recorded an improvisation anyway, it's just not video'd so isn't week 51...

it's 6 minutes long and it's sitting over there on my pace right now if you want to hear it...

i'm listening to week 11 of my weekly improvisation and although it would take 11 hours 6 minutes to listen to the entirety of my weekly improvisation up to now i am doing it, probably not all in one go...

wole soyinka

a couple of early mornings and long days this week meant that i was very keen to sleep in this morning...

before dinah went off to the synagogue this morning she brought me a tea which i was keen to get at least one sip of, spski poked his head round the door when she delivered it, spski before you're ready for him is a peculiar experience...

they faded away and i woke up a little later for the sip that i wanted... then back down into sleep...

i was down in the kitchen making my second tea several hours later and the word woye soyinka came into my voice as a rhythm... a 5 rhythm with a 3 underneath it (must record it before it goes) and i was reminded that the woye soyinka interview that i took part in would now be available on the net...

so hear i am, sipping that tea, listening to the nobel laureate, the same words i heard on felinity's birthday, with every question hoping the voice will be mine...

once it's done i'm meeting dinah @ penny's for our sunday veggie roast, moved forward by a day because i'm in the studio all day tomorrow with T's band, and after eating i intend to cycle off to brentford... for the one of the last showings of the scott walker film in a cinema i don't know... waterman's...

...

just reached the end of the wole soyinka interview and there is no me... x

punctures & gothernberg

Continent : Europe
Country : Sweden
State/Region : Vastra Gotaland
City : Gteborg
Lat/Long : 57.7167, 11.9667


as promised... and gratifyingly pretty it is... Gteborg, or Göteborg, or Gothernburg...

Sweden...

no facts for you, just pleasingly a little like gotham... batman's home...

thankyou oh 6333rd visitor for drawing our attention to this beautiful place...

and now punctures...

3 of them, all on my back wheel which is a real pain...

my front wheel has teflon coating and seems relatively impervious to punctures, but my back wheel is imperial rather than metric so they don't do that kind of tire for it... and it does get punctures... oh yes it does...

so 1stly, a couple of weeks ago, i got a puncture when i still had money, i took it to cycle surgery... they fixed it... marvellous...

the 2nd one came right in my recent no money period and i tried to fix it but messed it up... i had to wait until i had money again to take it in to cycle surgery again, and while they were fixing it they reconnected my gears wrongly...

so on saturday when i picked the bike up the gears were wrong, and the gear lever was very resistant... which meant i pulled too hard on it and sheared the cable...

so i took it into cycle surgery on tuesday and they said - oh look, your cable is sheared, i said yes, but it's sheared because you reconnected my gears wrongly so are you going to pay for it to be fixed? and they said....

no.

so i'm never going there again, cycle surgery on holloway road ladies and gentlemen, bullshit service... (forgive my language)...

there's a bike shop just round the corner from where i work in shoreditch so i decided to go there this morning, drop it off before work and pick it up around now... get them to rectify cycle surgery's mistakes...

i grabbed my bike this morning and lo & behold... my 3rd puncture... back wheel... no time to fix it, public transport into work, no rectifying just yet for my little bike...

gigging tonight @ the metro with T's band...

x

pre gig dundeeism

so it was 1:40 am, last night, searching the internet for the word "mellotron", some citizen of dundee using firefox on a PC became the 5000th person to visit this here blog...

(since july 23rd 2005)


dundee...

in the east of scotland on the firth of tay... known as the city of discovery due to it's scientific background and also... but look, there's no point me just repeating information i read moments ago on this page about dundee...

suffice it to say that i hereby recognise dundee as the place of residence of my 5000th visitor and let's be done with it...

it was very nearly going to be finsbury park, london but my beautiful girlfriend did in the end agree to let someone else be the 5000th... she is after all far more special than a mere number...

we're going out in about an hour or so to my gig @ the metro club, oxford street, i've had a mad day of it... teaching this morning, racing over to kennington to run through the set one more time then back on the bike to soho square to load the gear in for the gig, soundcheck... before cycling home through strangely empty cycle lanes ...

i'm pretty knackered but a good dinner will sort me out... then tart myself up and take dinah by the arm and lead her through the bowels of the underground to tottenham court road where we'll probably catch the band on before us (the unready) before i get up there with T's band and rock the place out...

very slight nerves but they've got time to arrive in more numbers as 10 o'clock looms nearer and nearer...

x

31st longcat weekly improvisation

i'm gigging on friday @ the metro... in tony cannam's band... today i've been checking out the sounds i'm using and today's improvisation comes from my keyboard and the 2 modules i'm using for that band...

also the arcdev industries dubbox tape delay simulation on the hammond organ...

i'm loving where those two sounds take me...

x