Category Archive

The gLASSsHRIMP show on Resonance 104.4FM now has a functioning website again, where we’ll post playlists, links, photos, and details of forthcoming shows (of which there are a couple of crackers coming up…you’ll have to head over there to find out).  Hopefully podcasts and stuff someday too.  glASSsHRIMP - it’s for your ears.

…so the robotic monkey can be packed away.  What did I miss while I was away?  A bit of a storm, some more of that precipitous slide into recession, and Scotland beating England in the rugby?  If those aren’t the first signs of the forthcoming apocalypse, I don’t know what is.  Read the rest of this entry »

..and a flash machine, obviously.  With those I be hypnotising chickens; hopefully for long enough so that they don’t realise that this is yet another 2007 retrospective post which has nothing new to say about anything.  Once more, in lieu of something substantial, have some fluff: the favourite images to have been created by the photo pixies that have lived in the memory of my digital camera over the last 12 months. Read the rest of this entry »

I had my second stint on Resonance FM as part of the gLASSsHRIMP collective last night.  What do you mean you missed it?  Oh, you would have loved it.  We played The Thing, WZT Hearts, Bob Devereux, Kevin Ayres, Robert Wyatt, Nub, Roam The Hello Clouds, James Blackshaw, and Crescent, amongst others I’ve forgotten, and Howard Aggregate did a lovely reading of some book shop “staff recs”.  All of this endearingly shambolic aural goodness was topped off with a faintly surreal conversation in which Kev told us about his last two weeks following the mighty Rush on tour around the north of England.  

gLASSsHRIMP: Resonance 104.4 FM Monday nights, 9.30-11pm.  It’s for your ears, apparently.

Apologies to those Londoners who heard what sounded like a drunk Scotsman coming out of their stereo last night.  You may have just stumbled upon my live radio debut, as a guest of the gLASS sHRIMP collective on Resonance FM. 

If you didn’t hear the show, you missed out on an interview and a spoken word piece, as well as some terrific new music: Efterklang, Vashti Bunyan, Gultskra Artikler, Beirut, Prefuse 73, A Broken Consort, Six Organs of Admittance, something from the new Soul Jazz Brazil 70 collection, and a track from the new project of Brian Chippendale (of Lightning Bolt infamy), Black Pus.  As well as some mucking about with Buddha Machines. 

The gLASS sHRIMP show is broadcast on Monday nights from 9.30 to 11pm on Resonance FM - 104.4 for those in London; alternatively you can stream it from the Resonance website.

I figured it was about time this place got a bit of a tidy up.  Like most such chores, I’d been putting it off for months, but then I found myself with something particularly boring to do at work, so learning a little CSS and mucking about with hexadecimals suddenly took on much greater appeal.

I had two primary aims:

1) To make the navigation easier - everything in the sidebar used to run together horribly, and people couldn’t find such important parts of the site like the “contact me” button.  Of course, now people will use it, and they’ll want to engage in some sort of dialogue with me, and I’ll get sociophobic and wished I had removed the button altogether.

2) To free up more room for photos - before they were quite squashed into a 400 pixel space, now they can relax comfortably in the first class leg room afforded by this design’s, um, 500 pixels.

And in truth, I was becoming a bit fatigued by the little Hungarian houses and their tangle of ex-Communist cabling.

I’m still tinkering with it a little, and I know it isn’t perfect (for example, I’m damned if I can put that comments link at the bottom of each post on the front page), but feel free to let me know what you think - either in the comments, or by using the now (too) easy-to-find “contact me” gadget. 

If it wasn’t for the fact I was just arriving back into the country on Saturday, I would have been very much up for the all-night Wayang gamelan and puppet performance in the Royal Festival Hall at the weekend.  Common sense prevailed, and monkeyman and me settled on Sunday for taking off our socks and shoes, sitting down on cushions, and banging away with a bunch of children on these gorgeous instruments in one of the RFH’s gamelan workshops.  Loads of fun.

(Ooh, bet that title made you groan.  Sorry about that).

I’m back from my sojourn in Finland (and a little bit of Estonia too, country-counting enthusiasts), and what a lovely green and blue, foresty and lakey country it is – albeit one with a thoroughly over-extended fascination with the solo works of Bruce Dickinson (oh yes, and local-boys-done-good Lordi – see picture above). 

I managed to hoover up as much of the Circle back catalogue as I could find/afford while I was there, including what I thought to be the latest – until the young shop assistant in Helsinki’s Popparienkeli informed me that there had been another one since then, and he’d sold out.  “Never mind”, he added, “there will be another one out soon”.  Obviously.  

The disconnection of the automated review-generating robot will take place soon, but it has those mad-looking red eyes, and is swishing at me with a rolled up copy of The Wire, so it may get to write one or two more yet before it can be lured back into its box by use of a bottle of Finnish stout as bait…

I’m off to Finland later today for a couple of weeks.  I have just taken the automatic review generating robot out of his box (I can’t say he looks very happy about it), so there will still be stuff happening on this site in the mean time.  I haven’t yet decided whether comments moderation will be on or off; I left it off while I was in Nepal earlier on in the year with no adverse consequences, but recently a few spam comments have made it through the improvised filter which I fashioned out of a used pair of tights.  So, if I leave it off, I’m trusting you not to post anything stupid or illegal in the comments box.  Actually, stupid is fine, knock yourself out.  But if you see anything which looks like an advert for online gaming, or for some weird drug you’ve never heard of, for Santa’s sake don’t go clicking. 

…was a rubbish suggestion of mine for a pub quiz team name, when we were going with a theme of inserting the names of things you would find in the kitchen into the titles of films.  Others I can remember included The Collander Girls, The Italian Hob, Fridge Over The River Kwai, Sieve and Let Die, Spice Racks Like Us and, best of all, The Breville Wears Prada.

What am I getting at?  Well, I just noticed that the one year anniversary of this blog residing at WordPress has just passed, and thought it was worth noting.  After a nascent period tinkering about over at Livejournal, the first piece posted on this site proper was a review of the This Heat Out Of Cold Storage box set.  It has all been downhill ever since, some would say.  Anyway, I figure this gives me an excuse for some navel-gazing (I see no ships!  Oh, wait…), and delving into a year’s worth of stats. 

Top 10 most popular album reviews (by number of readers)  in the last 12 months:

1. Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
2. Bjork, Volta
3. Joanna Newsom, Ys
4. Panda Bear, Person Pitch
5. Battles, Mirrored
6. Tim Hecker, Harmony In Ultraviolet
7. Caribou, Andorra
8. Stuart Staples etc, Songs For The Young At Heart
9. Animal Collective, People EP
10. Max Richter, Songs From Before

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bigger the artist, the more readers (hmmmm, I hope all those people didn’t feel too short-changed by the Bjork review).  Encouraging to see all those hits for Tim Hecker and Max Richter though; I wouldn’t have guessed at those being up there.

Onto the top 10 most popular live reviews in the last 12 months:

1. Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton at the RFH
2. Bonnie Prince Billy at Shepherds Bush
3. Fennesz and Philip Jeck at the Bedford Arms
4. Field Day at Victoria Park just last week
5. Keiji Haino and Chris Corsano at The Spitz
6. Matmos and Cornelius at the RFH
7. Supersilent and others at Cargo
8. Homefires 2007 day 2 (day 1 strangely unloved)
9. Tony Conrad and Islaja at St Giles
10. Tindersticks at The Barbican

I don’t really go to so many gigs by really big acts (too many people, too many queues, too far from the stage, too much security hassle), hence the list is a bit more varied.  A well-attended event will of course still do pretty well - that Field Day review is only a week old (an amazing number of hits have come from people googling “field day queues”, funnily enough). At number three though…a gig in a pub in South London.  That pleases me.

And if you want to see a sample of the best of 12 months worth of inappropriate search terms, they are over there at Page Not Found.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for all your comments, corrections and even insults over the last year.  Keep them coming.

It was nice to be back at the Royal Festival Hall at the weekend.

Despite having a seat way way way at the back.

Despite all the people who arrived late and wandered around aimlessly so as to block my view.

Despite the fact that they double booked my seat.

Despite the fact that I missed half of the quite brilliant Valerie Project trying to sort out the double booking.

Despite the over-officious orange-jacketed security staff attempting to prevent any swift resolution to the double booking.

Despite - mapsadaisical recurrent theme alert - the queues for the toilets (didn’t they put more in?).

And despite - I may have mentioned this already - the fact that there was a double booking.

Despite all that, stamping around on the bat and ball carpet whilst looking out over the Thames fair warmed my heart after a few years away.

Another week, another deliciously independent and vital arts and music venue veers towards the ditch.  After the demise last week of NYC’s cauldron of cutting edge creativity Tonic comes the sad news that one of my favourite London venues The Spitz has hit trouble with the landlords.  The property developers have deemed that a location this proximate to the big money swishing around Bishopsgate has no business enriching the nation’s cultural wealth when it could be filling their own pockets with the tepid overflow from the city bankers’ bonus pot.

The Spitz is always reliably eclectic; over the last year I’ve had a number of very enjoyable evenings at the venue, including performances by Keiji Haino and Chris Corsano, The Fence Collective, Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, and Noah Howard, as well as a few performances in the bistro (and more than a few fine Belgian and German ales).   The next week alone features experimental violinist Felix Lajko, some klezmer and some Nepalese music, as well as some gigs from their annual blues festival. 

This may all be gone in six months.  I’d advise those of you with an interest in such things to give the venue every chance of beating the axe by adding your name to the petition, and by getting down there to see some events in the near future.  Or just drop in for a pint and a mooch round the gallery.  Save the Spitz!

I’ve just returned from a wonderful two week holiday in Nepal, and still have the jetlag and dodgy stomach to prove it.  I’d like to extend my thanks to the automated review-writing robot which has been filling in for me for the last two weeks – I think the results have been pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing.  Couldn’t train it to post replies to all your comments on its posts (leaving comment moderation off may have been slightly risky, but seems to have worked out fine); otherwise it seems to have managed to maintain some semblance of business as usual round here.  I’ll melt it down now to provide the material for several dozen metal statues of Buddha to liven up this grey-looking place a little.

Before I went I decided on my return I would write something about Nepal’s musical culture.  Having been there I realise that this would be pretty impossible for me to begin to do it justice.  The demographics and topographics of the country mean that it is split into so many different ethnic groups each with their own local folk traditions.  Add to this the strong influence from neighbours to the north (Tibet) and south (India), and the position is muddied yet further.  Hence this is to be by no means an authoritative discourse on Nepali music!

The Nepali folk groups I saw in Kathmandu used tabla, accordion, wooden flute, funny little violins and tambourine; sometimes women would sing over the top in vocals sodden with reverb and at stratospheric pitch.  These are the same vocals you would hear drifting out of open doors all over the country from tinny radios, which somehow added greatly to the effect (the Sublime Frequencies Harmika Yab Yum compilation, while brilliant, doesn’t accord with my experience of what the locals were tuning in to).  And these were the same vocals you would hear from the local music video channels – three minute cut-price Bollywood, in which young women would wag their fingers furiously at their straying husbands. 

You would find it hard to walk down the street in Pokhara without hearing the strains of the Buddhist mantra “Om Mani Padme Hom” blaring from a Tibetan refugee’s craft shop.  The mantra is repeated 108 times (an auspicious number; I’ve never heard the word “auspicious” used as frequently as I have done over the last two weeks) over what became an increasingly tedious new age backing track.  Chanted prayers were de rigeur around the vast temple at Boudha; thankfully they were entirely a capella.  One Tibetan musical instrument (well, meditation aid would be more accurate) which did take my fancy was the ubiquitous singing bowl, which when rubbed with a stick builds a loud ringing drone like a little metal Buddha Machine.

I came across some of the Tharu tribe in the Terai, who as well as having developed complete immunity to malaria (no-one appears to have worked out how, I would have thought this would have been a priority for someone) have a neat line in musical performance (pictured above).  The men of the tribe have a brilliant ritual which involves co-ordinated fighting with sticks; all the more impressive when the power failed half-way through and yet they continued unabated without accidentally bashing each others heads in.  Tablas drove the music into rhythmic spirals over which war-like chants would repeat intoxicatingly.  I think that monkeyman may have captured a video of some of this, and if I work out how to do so, I’ll add it here.

(Oh, and I saw a young Nepali band covering “Another Brick In The Wall” in very earnest fashion.  They were quite adamant about their needs vis-a-vis education and thought control.  It was quite amusing). 

Listen to “Sorathi” as performed by Krishan Gurung and Jangal Singh here (amazingly, you can buy the compilation on which this features from dexohouse), and a track from Harmika Yab Yum, “Ram Saran Nepali”, here (you can buy that from boomkat).

Some of you will know that the professionals I hold in the highest esteem are those employed to write the headlines for Britain’s tabloids.  You don’t see surgeons or teachers trying to form ridiculous puns to accompany pictures of minor celebrities out jogging, and I’ll continue to bestow my non-attendance upon hospitals and schools until those lightweights get their fingers out.

With that in mind, I’m well chuffed with my triumphant debut performance in the Guardian’s Arts Blog caption competition last week , relating to the musical pursuits of everyone’s favourite all-action buddhist.  See the award of this most prestigious of honours (and my latest effort, which I’m sure you could top) in this week’s competition.

In return for taking someone to see some free improv earlier in the week, which was never really going to be their cup of tea, I was taken to the 100 Club - on London’s retail paradise Oxford Street - the other night to see something they wanted to see.  I’d never been there before (to the venue; I may have dallied a while on the street once or twice before).  The venue was nice; wider than it was long, friendly bar staff, hi-tech Dyson hand driers in the loos.  To compensate it was full of middle-aged, poorly dressed, overweight, bearded (and frankly, rather ugly) men.

One of the support acts was a woman playing a steel guitar.  She was rubbish, horribly derivative blues sung in a grating faux-American accent, but there was one hilarious (to me, no-one else seemed all that amused) moment when she dedicated a song to her husband. 

The song featured his name, sung repeatedly, and with tongue nowhere near cheek.

Her husband’s name was Barry (the crime was compounded by rhyming it with “marry”).

Barry.  If ever there was a name I had never envisaged being celebrated in song, there it was.  I nearly laughed her out of the building back to her seemingly beloved Noo Awwwwleans.

I arrived back on Sunday from a holiday in Taroudant and the Atlas mountains.  I’m glad to see the place is still standing.  I was worried I’d left the gas on.

Some musical memories:

1) Small children playing crude drums (see picture above).  Beating paint pots with sticks with an extraordinarily instinctive sense of rhythm.  I was spellbound.

2) Jay-Z’s “Anything” being played in a taxi.  The lyrics about bitches and strippers seemed rather out of place to me in this overwhelmingly Islamic part of the world.  The driver didn’t bat an eyelid.

3) Berber street musicians playing down a back alley of the maze-like souq with minimal passing foot traffic. The importance of having a few dirhams in coins for tips cannot be understated.  Unfortunately, the difficulty in breaking a 100 dirham note to get a few dirhams in change also cannot be understated.

4) The call to prayer, five times a day.  First one at about 5am, heard usually in a dream.  Two variants: the one that sounds like a motorbike accelerating (”aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAllah akbar!”), and on rare occasions, and from only one of the mosques, a gloriously melodic muezzin sung with passion.

5) Being invited into a berber home for mint tea, we spotted a large goat skin drum hanging on the wall.  They were only too happy to demonstrate (see below).  Satisfyingly loud and resonant.

Just a quick note on the lovely lovely lovely pixie harpist Joanna Newsom, who plays in London tonight.  I had tickets for this, but then booked a holiday instead (it was the last free week in my work schedule until April, and I was damned if I could wait that long), so had to get rid of the tickets.  Which was quite upsetting,  Tears were shed, I can assure you.  But not by the person I was taking, who still has that problem with the Newsom voice, and would much rather be killed to death by scorpions in the Atlas mountains than be sitting in the Barbican tonight.

Tickets were going for around £250 a pair on ebay at the time (they since went up to a ludicrous £450, I hear), but instead of making a massive profit (which to be fair I would only have blown on coffee, biscotti, and Blue Note reissues) I opted to sell them in entirely altruistic fashion to the Newsom-daft, ticket-poor Milkman for face value. 

I’m not pointing this out to get an MBE or anything (save those for the cricketers and their cats, please), but merely to increase the pressure on him to write us the bestest review he can so that I can read it through teary eyes from a Moroccan internet cafe over the next day or two.  He works better under pressure, I reckon. 

If he doesn’t write it promptly, if someone could arrange a denial of service attack on his blog I’d appreciate it - I’m probably otherwise occupied with a lamb tagine.

I have some Amazon vouchers to spend, and am not sure what I’ll do with them.  I’m currently leaning towards this, and not just because the plate in my skull is attracted to all the metal in it:

I only have one of this seemingly never ending series of clunky Miles Davis box sets.  It is of course the Jack Johnson one (none of which appears to be on my iPod, maybe I should be putting my vouchers towards a new 80GB one of those fellas) , which was worth the extravagance to get to hear the full Sonny Sharrock, exploding from his uncredited corner of the Miles discography and spraying shards of guitar all over the shop (try this: “Willie Nelson (Insert 2))”. 

One thing that has always confused me about Jack Johnson is this - with all this glorious noise on tape, why did Teo Macero feel the need to splice in that section of In A Silent Way exactly half way through ”Yesternow”?  The change in ambience jars for me every time I hear it.  Once me and Neil joked about making an album - we were probably rather drunk, to be honest.  It would have consisted solely of us banging on things and shouting, but we figured we could make the whole thing hang together by inserting 10 seconds of In A Silent Way midway through.  Hey, we could have been right.

The Cellar Door Sessions (along with the arse end of the Jack Johnson set) formed the basis of the Live Evil double album, which is one of my favourites, only partly because of that wonderful cover art and only partly because palindromes make something in my brain go ping.  I listened back to Live Evil the other day - probably the first time in about a year - and was made dizzy by its rush of colours.  And not just those on the sleeve.    Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett in particular burn the place up - how did Jarrett go from this sick funk (as in “What I Say”) to the Koln sessions to his standards trio?  Are these located on the same continent? 

Anyway, if anyone has any better suggestions for how to spend 45 of your GBP, stick them in the comments below, and I’ll consider it.  And no, you don’t win anything.