cycling in the snow

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I haven’t posted about bikes in ages so now seems like a good time to mention it….

I love bikes and at the moment the particular bike I ride is coming into it’s own. It’s really snowy and cold (and a little bit icy in places). I ride a single speed 29er – a Haro Mary. Having the one gear and big fat tyres on MASSIVE wheels just means you roll along at your own pace, crunching through the snow, riding along the grassy verges when it gets a bit too hairy and genuinely enjoying the ride. You still have to look out for tools in cars but I wouldn’t want to swap the bike for one.

on sunny days

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I was thinking about school. How on sunny days the light through the windows would catch my watch casing and throw a tiny star of light against the classroom walls. How I’d play with it, tilting and angling my wrist to make this bright speck dance and move around the room, travel slowly, quickly, with purpose, intent. Sometimes it would disappear and I would move my hand around until it would be back and would slowly start again. The utter magic of it all.

That’s what playing music feels like.

Can I have a little more squeaky chair in my monitor, please?

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Have paintbrush, will travel
(Photo by the lovely David Wilson Clarke)

More action from the Y theatre show last month. I recorded the whole thing from the stage with my Zoom H4n and it did a pretty good job. Including picking up the squeaking drum throne that I was sitting on! See below for a section of the set. This piece has come togther from the improv’d gig I did with Misterlee Lee Allatson at The musician with Diane Cluck. Enjoy!

a view from here (30th Oct 2010 0949)

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Saturday morning at my children’s gymnastics class. Cold wooden floor. Their voices and the teacher’s bounce around the hall, reverberant reflections underpinned by rhythmic footsteps soon to launch somersaults across worn blue mats. Closer to me a wall heater rattles, other parents talk to one another,a phone call is made and the pages of a ‘true lives’ women’s weekly are turned.
A slight draft blows through the hall’s open door and makes small piles of grey dust and lint perform circular dances along the edges and in corners of the room. Through the windows a grey squinty light is making the climbing ladders a block of black squares as the class and morning slowly clop along.

In praise of……Robert A.A. Lowe

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As I sit down to write this Mr Robert A.A Lowe is about to take the stage at the Nook Cafe at the Fishmarket, Northampton some 40 miles or so down the road. Were I able to be there, I would be. As I’m not, I’m writing this.

I first saw Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe playing bass with 90 Day Men at The Charlotte in Leicester some time in 2002-4. They were unlike any band I’d seen before and he was a most charismatic man on stage. A few years later I saw a picture of him in Dream magazine and an article about his Lichens project. The article fascinated me and I made a note to try and checkout what he was doing. A month or so later, I saw this video on You Tube.

It took my head off. I sat there in complete shock. Amazed. He seemed to hint at the possibilties of where music can go when you just close your eyes and let it. Something that happens when you listen. Something I’ve been trying to do for years. It was an inspiration. It could be done.

I got the chance to see him play and chat to him the following year. He was so polite and nice, a real pleasure to talk with and friendly to everyone. He has a lovely smile.

Heres to Robert A.A. Lowe. To Lichens. To the beautiful spirit. Mistakeisms and letting go.

Some new video

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The lovely Matt Daly from the mighty Buenos Aires took some video footage of me on his fancy dan iphone at the maybeshewill and friends gig at The Y Theatre last weekend. I’m super grateful for this as I have little footage/evidence of anything I do, be it audio or visual. Thanks, Matt.

[I’m also really impressed by the quality of this. From a phone for crying out loud]

A recording diary – post no. 2

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Managed to get out of work a few hours early a week or so ago and had a three hour spell to do some recording at home and make some noise before everyone was home from school. What did we learn? This is what we learned….

Doesn’t take too long to set up and get going with the Zoom H4n at all. Probably about half and hour to set up guitar and kit and then go. Managed to record 2 hours and 5 minutes of audio – it said so on the screen! Felt pretty good about that. Better still, I managed to review it all in the following two evenings which is pretty much a record for me.

And the recordings themselves? Well…Using a pick up instead of mics for the guitar is great. It gives the guitar a whole different quality – it’s not the same as mic-ing up but is quicker and sounds 100% better than the piezo. I like it, not saying I’m not going to persevere with the mic-into-looper-for-guitar idea, just for the moment the ease of using a pickup means I’m actually producing stuff, which is ace! All of the instrumental parts of these recordings sound really good, they have a distinct gentle but electric quality to them. All of the vocal takes sounded way below par though – a consequence of a 5 mile sprint home on the bike and rushing to get going? That’s what I’m going to put it down to. I tried to fit an awful lot in and this session definitely pointed the way forwards.

Out of the whole session, this edited piece came through sounding really interesting.

The mic on the Zoom is super sensitive and setting the gain accurately on it is a bit hit and miss at the moment. I have to be very wary of overloading the input so I end up recording very quietly. Add to this a lack of any suitable means for me to mix and monitor adequately and the end result is pretty quiet. I do like the quality of the Zoom’s mics though and they pick up everything including the traffic going passed the house.

So, not quite there yet but well on the road.

the autumn sun / driving home

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On the way home. Late Afternoon. Autumnal sun. Blooming clouds, still, over the cooling towers. White line of steam from the brewery chimney. Glinting light from car rooftops, shining tarmac, the flanks of birds flying over head/across the road.

Then later, the sun lower, throwing long shadows of trees over freshly ploughed fields. Silhouettes of birches over the sloped end of a field – rounded shapes in the brown earth where the harrow has been, like an engraving.

Then lower still as it slowly starts to dip behind Bradgate Park. It tints and colours the few clouds in the sky. Long stretched out fingers across the horizon, golden lines slowly turning darker as evening gets closer.