In praise of Hood – The Cycle of Days and Seasons

peter wyethLeave a comment

My first encounter of Hood was in a fanzine article around 1997 (Easy Pieces, I think) – I remembered being astounding by the amount of material they’d released ( see both Singles Compiled and Compilations 1995-2002 ), it wasn’t until 1999 I got round to hearing them.

I saw the sleeve in my local record shop and immediately picked it up – there was something about the photo, something I recognised. Discovered it was Hood, remembered the article and bought it straight away. From the moment I put the record on I was I was transfixed. It’s difficult to describe the songs as they’re ‘just songs’ but sometimes they’re barely there at all. The first thing that struck me was how I could identify the sounds because they all sounded ‘real’ to me – there wasn’t coats of polish over them, they were just recorded quite starkly and laid next to one another. It wasn’t just the guitars though – there’s trails of tape delay, crinkly field recordings, muttered dictaphones, actual pianos in actual rooms. Also the quality of the voices, again, were just real. They really seemed to capture a sense of place for me and a time too.

It’s still a record I go back to time and rime again when I want to be fascinated and lost in the sound, in another world and when I want to feel inspired with what you can do with minimal equipment and an idea.

itunes

peter wyethLeave a comment

The morning is quiet and grey. The odd family car drives past, sidelights on, most only seem to have the one occupant and it’s usually Dad, the driver. There’s a breeze, the lilac and holly seem to tremble gently in it. Two rooks sit on the telephone wires right next to the tip of the pole. The garden has two piles of stripped tree cuttings, thin branches, almost shoots. There is soup to be made. Typing this out now, I’m grateful for how simple it all is.

The ‘Having to stop playing music live’ post

peter wyethLeave a comment

You may have noticed from some of my recent posts that I’ve been having a fair bit of trouble with my hearing lately. It’s something I’ve been dealing with fairly well up until now but unfortunately it’s gotten a lot worse and I find myself having to take some action to try and help myself. As a consequence I’m going to have to stop playing live music for the immediate future.

I’m absolutely gutted about this – live music is where everything comes to life, it’s something I love doing so much but there’s no point me doing that if I’m just going to destroy my hearing. Though I wear ear protection whenever I go to a gig, I’ve struggled to use them when performing. It’s OK if I’m doing just instrumental work but it’s very difficult to sing and improvise when wearing them.

Now, I know what you’re going to say, ‘a 30 minute set with exposure mainly to a monitor set up surely can’t be that bad for you?’ Well, to give you some perspective on this, a 40 minute recording session last week with a 10 watt practice amp on 1 and a half left my left ear feeling like it had been punched by a particularly vicious doorman. I then spent the rest of the evening in a weird kind of daze. A journal entry for the day says something so woefully teenage I’ve prevented my self from repeating it here but suffice to say it’s forced my hand.

It also means I’m letting some wonderful people down with the gigs I’ve got booked at the minute, especially John from maybeshewill, which makes me feel terrible but I can assure you I would not be doing this unless I thought it was absolutely necessary. And right now I do.

So what next? Well, I’ve got around one and a half hours of audio recorded that I’m trying to edit down into one cohesive piece. I’ve got an ‘instant composition’ piece that I was going to make into a business card cd-r for the Her Name is Calla gig that I’ll probably just put up for free download in the week. After that I’ve got to try and work out how I go about doing things, I really hope I can play live again soon but until I can work out a way of doing it, I’m sort of stuck.

But I want to hang onto my hearing for as long as I can.

Stamp of the week

peter wyethLeave a comment

These have been sitting in my wallet for ages but the post mark says 2008 – they can’t have been in there that long?! Have a feeling a friend at work had these in her draw for me but forgot about them. I’m not a James Bond fan by any stretch of the imagination but I like the posters. I went passed Noel Coward’s house where Ian Flemming wrote one of the Bond books when I was at St.Margaret at Cliffe in the summer. It looked very nice place indeed.

Using Multitrack DAW

peter wyethLeave a comment

I got Multitrack DAW by Harmonic Dog to trial out on my daughter’s ipod and my partner’s iphone. Hadn’t used it much until last weekend and I wanted to share with you my thoughts on it.

Before I do that it’s worth me pointing out something –
I don’t like using computers to record or make music. I find the mouse and screen apporoach to creating things really counter intuitive – I like faders, knobs and buttons. Consequently I’ve been very excited at where touchscreen technology is leading us. The above software was my first attempt at using it.

Didn’t really pay much attention to the (excellent) onboard manual, just kind of pressed record and went for it. It’s so easy to use. Everything does what you think it would do and the touchscreen makes thing so simple. Cutting, copying and moving was pretty straight forward. The metronome worked well – could do with a seperate volume control I think. Mixing was just a case of pressing a buton marked share and selecting an option for file type and destination – to device or to Soundcloud . You don’t move levels when doing this, it’s just a straight mixdown/export.

Mixing is maybe where it’s limitations come to play. There’s no way to fade in or fade out tracks only cut and move so you do miss a bit of finesse there but other than that I didn’t feel there was anything that would prevent me doing what I would normally do with a 4/8 track. Screen size on the iphone was a little tough to use when scrolling through 8 tracks but I was listening rather than watching and as the levels can’t be moved on mixdown (hence the need for fade outs) it wasn’t that much of an issue.

There’s still the need to get a quality signal into the iOS device in the first place and the lack of a stereo interface for the iphone is a problem at the moment but I can’t see that being an issue for long. The ipad can already do stereo via some ancillary devices – such as this. Using the mic on the iphone to record with didn’t bother me at all – it works and it got the idea out which is way more important – as I said before I’m very happy with how this turned out. Gavin from the ace worridaboutsatan recorded me on his iphone at the Y show last year to give you an example of it’s sound quality in a different setting – worriedaboutsatan’s record box.

If you’ve got an iphone, i’d would recommend you spend £5.99 ( £5.99!!?!!) on it. You could make Pet Sounds on a phone you carry around in your pocket. Which is mental.

unfurling morning / untethered afternoon

peter wyeth1 Comment

It’s been a difficult week or so. My ears have been ringing worse than I can ever remember. I’ve been doing a lot of recording and very little of what’s been making it to tape has appealed to my ears.

On sunday morning I took my partners iphone outside to record the bird song – I could hear that thrush again – a thin squiggle of audio drew itself on the touchscreen. Later on I sat on the bed with my daughter’s guitar, the iphone on my lap, listened to the birdsong and started to play. Our cat climbed up on the bed and purred. I listen back to the sounds and pressed the icon marked ‘share’.

I’ll gladly sacrifice sonic quality to get within a quarter’s touching distance of getting what’s going on inside of me outside and I feel this does that. I’m going to make a little film for this song. It’ll just be for me. It’ll be my children spinning round and round in the garden, rolling on the grass.

Enjoy it. Share it with your friends. Thank you for listening.

P.x

[I’ll probably write later on about using multitrack DAW to record this as it was a valuable experience]

The phrase ‘untethered afternoon’ comes from an A.E. Stallings poem.