This release with John Taylor and Matt Penman – BREVE – has been two years in the making and has finally made it up. I feel as if I’ve just crossed the finish line of an ultra marathon and can now collapse in peaceful but aching samadhi. The 2007 and 2008 concert of this trio are ready for download here.
Enjoy the whole concert on Plushmusic
Excuse the pause in operations, readers- it was one of those weeks. Here is some footage from a solo concert I gave in Krefeld last year to welcome you back:
The world is at peace as my old bike splutters and coughs along the majestic winding Rhein. Everything is white and the distant carnival drums are muffled and mute. The further I go, the deeper the silence becomes, until the only sound remaining is the low rumble of the barges ploughing upstream. My ears are almost iced over but it is a fair trade off for the silence I now enjoy. Although I can still see the peaks of the cathedral when I turn around, the scenery has become wild and the forest spills over into this great river with no sign of man in between. I can even pick out some sheep huddled together in the distance. All this isn’t just about respite from the thumping drunken fury of the Carnival but about picking up a Mk 6 Soprano from a distant cottage way down the Rhein. The thought of that gorgeous horn urges me on.
After several miles my tempo shifts from andante to largo and the quietude becomes even deeper. I stop to throw a frozen stone into the river and watch the shapes spill over. I sing some overtones to the river spirit, revelling in the white around us. High above, an unknown bird defecates, adjusting its position carefully to use the breeze. He misses me by around a meter and continues to fly on, oblivious to the patterns in the water. The moment of Samadhi now has a slight feeling of danger to it as a long line of gargling Geese now fly over, cutting the sky in two.
Across the other side of the Rhein my glass eyes make out some frozen monks and vikings, their legs protruding from the snow, their last cry of “alaaf” reverberating underground. Beyond them in a glen, a circle of Armenians clad in green robes practice long tones on their Duduks while one of them roasts sweet potatoes over a gas flame. I decide to wear my contact lenses next time to be sure.
As my breaths deepen I can feel the world around me slowing down with me and the blanket of snow and ice amplifies this feeling. Perhaps instead of exploding or imploding we will simply wind down and freeze over, an entire planet of frozen clowns.
Last week we recorded with Root70 in the old RBB radio studios in Berlin. These are beautiful old rooms that have a fantastic sound and are well suited to the kind of old-school sound Nils was after. No separation walls or headphones and a direct-to-tape method meant the session was a smooth one. I made this little film on that snowy day:
For some time now I wanted to put up my favourite track from Coptic Dub in it’s entirety: Dagaz eterna. Dagaz is the rune of day and contains a universe of meaning within itself. Aspects of the rune which led to the title of this piece are the inevitability of dawn, the turning moebius strip, and the meditation on ceaseless light.
Yesterday I played a nice concert with a Hurdy Gurdy player from Barcelona, Marc Ergea. Marc, a philosopher by trade, has been working to expand the possibilities of the instrument and I loved to play within the textures of this intriguing sound maker. I was fascinated to hear how he translates the ars magna of Raymon Llull (an intriguing system of interlocking wheels that revealed attributes of the logos) into musical structures and about his secret recipe for cod with figs, something that will hopefully accompany our next meeting… Here is Marc playing on this thousand year old turning wheel tickling the taunt gut in perpetuity:
During last week’s tour I organised a jazz night at Rote Platz in Cologne. Alongside some broken glasses and Russian conversation here are a couple of softbop tracks from that night:
As part of my duties to the City of Cologne and the contract I once signed I am obliged to perform at least once during carnival. As I am unable to play on one of the parades as I usually love to do I have been cajoled into playing this evening in a tour of the South City with the band Schmakes. For those who havn’t heard the delectable vocals of the Cologne dialect before here you go:
I am parting with one of my dear lady friends. She is beautiful in every way and is sounding better than ever with the ripe old age of 78. I have played her now for a few years and am looking for a new owner for her as I am after a new bass clarinet. She has a round and robust sound and is in mint condition, recently overhauled. I played her on the root70 52nd St album and on the Breve concert with John Taylor. Here she is in detail.
We spent the weekend recording in the beautiful old studios of the East German Radio in their huge wooden chambers. Nils had the team of sound nerds come down from Hamburg with their tape machines and vintage mics and we had a nice session surrounded by snow and ice. On this track I left the camera running and our dear drummer comes in late through the song at 2′52”. It’s 24, a blues that shifts through all 24 keys, a little sneak preview of the album to come out in June. In my heart I’ve been carrying around Roscoe and Zerfu with me through the white alps and empty plains of another tour as freight trains shunt us from one weak coffee to the next.
Roscoe:
Zerfu:
The Blues program has been keeping me busy over this last week and I havn’t had much of a chance to write on this slate. Now we are deep in the alps somewhere and about to blow some light blue notes as the snow piles up outside and another promoter pours out the jazz stories and schnaps in abundance. On the way to the beginning of this tour I did manage to stop by Bach’s grave in Leipzig for a fleeting moment and listen to Gareth play on his childhood violin- how wonderfully the african spirit comes out through the tiny wooden body. Shortly after I captured our sweet drummer trying to find the right position for sleeping on a German regional train, no easy task by any means…
By popular demand I have one more piece of Lula’s:
Watch Fado with Lula Pena 2 on Plushmusic
I don’t think I’ve ever blogged a film here but recently I saw one that I think is worth it. I came across it by searching for low budget films and this one was low indeed, the director (who also happens to write,act, edit, compose, and do pretty much everything else in it) did it all for around 7k on 16mm. It is a riveting story, beautifully filmed, and fast paced. The background is also interesting, it is made by an engineer, 31 at the time of production, who gave up his job to make films. It contains some interesting theories about time and causality without slipping into the usual paradoxes. I just love it that he nailed it all on his own. If you can get your hands on it, I thoroughly recommend it – The Primer.
Yesterday, whilst jogging on the romantic Rhein I came across this German Tour bus which was begging me, screaming at me, to take a photo of it. I succumbed. My running music is Xenakis’s Naama played by Elisabeth Chojnacka, the closest a Harpsichord has ever come to death metal, only it’s life metal in the fullest sense and without the frosty christian undertones. Beautiful to run to, not away from:
One day in March of 2007 I was very close to the edge of the gaping abyss. On that day I took an album that seemed to match my dark flight and played along with it, recording it on a whim. Later, through many strange connections I found out who the singer was and made contact. Out of the mist covered horizon came Lula Pena, a wonderful soul from Portugal, and we played together last year for the first time in Cologne. Despite my Chinese clarinets breaking down in the gig it was special indeed to meet and play with her. Here is one piece from the concert:
Watch Fado with Lula Pena on Plushmusic
The singer by my childhood window.
Growing up in a small town in New Zealand, there was one sweet singing friend I could always rely on. He was a honey-eating sweet-singing loner, and he was perched regularly outside my window overlooking a lush green valley cradling a small river that sometimes swelled when the snows on the volcano melted.
His song entered into my cells and remained there like none other of his kind. It might have been the regularity or perhaps the pure beauty of his voice. Perhaps because he used to sing in the early hours of the morning and because our ears are always open for impressions and suggestions, he was able to make such a lasting impression. As I was fast asleep he was busily inscribing his DNA through song on the empty pages of my child psyche, forming the accompaniment to the early morning hours of deep dreaming. When I now listen to a recording of this bird I am at once transported to New Zealand and filled with a deep longing to be close to the song again. Years later, when I suddenly recall these childhood dreams of flying and imaginary kingdoms, they are always with the backdrop of his song.
I knew that what I heard in my waking hours was only a fraction of the sounds he actually produced. Sometimes I could see his tiny throat and body convulsing with song but my ears could pick up nothing at all. I wonder how many octaves of song and vibration bypassed my conscious ear completely. I wonder what secrets were contained within and if my sleeping mind picked up on some of them.
For most of the time he was a solitary singer. A few years later the only competition he had for the sonic mastery over the valley was my honking saxophone. How his song triumphed over my slow ascending scales stumbling up over a measly 2 octaves. How little he seemed to mind. Sometimes we even made eye contact and sometimes the shine off my glistening Japanese horn caught his iridescent plumes and set him on fire. I remember playing “Careless Whisper” and watching him light up.
The colours of this bird are almost as mysterious as it’s song. From a distance it seems black but closer up and under light, all kinds of fantastic green and blue tints are revealed. It is a perfect companion to the New Zealand forest with all it’s rich hues. Captain Cook, apart from bringing generous gifts of syphilis and possums to our islands, remarked on how tasty this bird was; they would listen to it, admire it, then eat it. I wonder how it then appeared in their dreams, singing all the way through their intestines perhaps, and if the sailors ever drowned in the same honey that his kind fed on.
I have heard beautiful birds the world over; virtuoso singers and gentle ushers of lullabies from Samarkand to Sydney. In the Black Forest of Germany the nightingales come close in their skill to my old friend but none of these birds could ever move me like the one of my childhood.
The bird I am now paying homage to was given many names. Apart from the Parson Bird and the Koko, many others were invented by man, something that again made me wonder how important the naming really is. Our current name for this winged fellow is the Tui , a beautiful name, but still only a name. I feel the word in my mouth – the tip of the tongue that begins the word and the smile shape of the lips that ends it. This may be seem a like linguistic reverie but imaging this creature as a Tui doesn’t lead us any closer to it’s true nature, it is merely a common agreement amongst men for sake of categorisation. What it is in fact, this tiny bundle of feather, song, and digested honey, probably has nothing at all to do with the word which describes it. I wonder what it calls itself? Could such a beautiful singer not have a name for itself? We place ourselves at the pinnacle of life on earth, and yet his song seems vastly more complex than those we can produce. Or is it?
Maoris were said to have trained the Tuis to speak. Perhaps he was teaching me something over the years too, something I will never know whether I grasped it or not. One thing is for sure, when he did sing, he really sung his little heart out. Already in that lies a lesson for those of us who choose to use and transform sound through music.
For souls who like to keep to themselves, the Tui is a bird to admire. He led a very solitary life and I can’t remember ever bearing witness to his girlfriend or date in the bushes outside my window. There were other things that connected us: his love of honey (given, mine was taken on white bread and with cheese) and his staying up on the full moons.
Is what he sings music? I have a funny CD made by Australians who analyse the song of the incredible Lyre bird and break it down into musical fragments. I think this is a bit like doing Sudoku – a nice little exercise but it doesn’t achieve much and the numbers certainly don’t need us to play with them. The Tui’s song for me is something other than music. Our ears like to pick out musical elements of his song as they tend to connect us and make us feel we might understand something, but when it comes to the intention we still could be galaxies apart.
For some strange reason the note I most liked to play with him was a mid register f sharp on the alto. It seemed to fit best, don’t ask me why. Maybe that was the tone of the valley.
Growing up next to his song I never tried to copy it or write it down. I simply listened to it in the same way I listened to waves or wind. The longer I have been away from my home island, the more this song is framed with nostalgia perhaps; but it is a beautiful thought, no matter where I am in the world- whether in another seedy jazz hotel or endless airport security line- to imagine one of his children singing his heart out in a flax bush somewhere in the valley above the river’s whisper.
Here he sings:
And here is a link to the page I was kindly asked to write for…
First I managed to lose myself on this beautiful binary date in the scifi landscape contained in the roof of Frankfurt airport’s baggage collection hall. Reversing gravity and shrinking to 15 centimeters would be great here. I managed to get this pic before security arrived. A few hours after I found this tiny buddha almost buried in the snow in the forests nearby, the warmth of his face kept the snow at bay. After the sun rose I found two separate trails of footprints that came to an abrupt end. Either the walkers had suddenly and unexplainably shot up into the sky or they had dropped from the heaven onto this spot and then proceeded to walk backwards. Perhaps it’s another mystery I am not supposed to understand. In the distance bells are ringing from the local Serbian orthodox church. The creek is frozen and there are no birds to be heard.
I looked for a piece of music that was as far away from the theme of snow as I could possibly imagine. Tinariwen did it for me, there is no white powder in ear shot. It’s in E, the ultimate key for guitarists and trippers:
I was a bit late in uploading this my small farewell to 2009. My pipes are slightly detuned, there is salt on my lips, sirens in the distance, babies crying, and the rain and wind were blowing into my drones: a fitting end to a stormy year indeed.
A few years ago now I was back home in New Plymouth and I walked into the local art gallery in the evening. There was a piano performance in place and the pianist was blindfolded. In the gallery, some of the listeners were in sleeping bags. I found out it was a dusk till dawn performance by an artist called Domenico de Clario. After sometime I felt the urge to play with him and I approached what seemed to be his assistant. After asking her she closed her eyes for a good while, and then said a quiet yes. I always remember that. By that stage it must have been midnight.
I softly joined Domenico’s performance and then a little while later disappeared again, only to meet him several years later. If only more encounters could be like this.
Years later I also found this track which appeared on Burnt Nonplace release of this artist. I think they are also taken from night-long performances.
One of the problems of attending concerts for me is the assault on the nasal cavities that invariably happens. Year by year this seems to be getting worse, perhaps it is a natural logarithmic curve as the chemicals play off against each other. Calvin Klein and Gucci are usually much stronger than the music and it is very hard to block them out. And when I listen to the music through a curtain of Dior, the music is sadly and irrevocably filed under Dior on my hard drive. Not even the bottle of cedar wood can hold them out and gas masks in the philharmonic hall tend to raise suspicion and block our some of the higher frequencies.
This reminds me a little of the anecdote Bob Dean used at the end of his great speech at the Exopolitcs conference in Barcelona this year. Our friends from elsewhere were asked what they really think about us earthlings, ” Well, to be honest you do smell rather bad” was the answer.
This is my second podcast. It starts in the Mississippi delta and heads quickly eastward via Dublin to Eurasia. Download.
Here’s a track that’s been with me for a long time now. There’s something in the string chord that struck a tone in me and still sounds. It’s Raining Today by Mr Walker is the first track on this little podcast I have made of music that it is with me at the moment, from there it lifts off and lands a few light years later later in Bali. Download:
We New Zealanders are often accused of liking our sheep perhaps a bit too much. Well, still it happens to me that I come across a pasture and I get a little homesick. It happened today when I saw these beauties. Ok , they are not as furry or as pure white as our proud marinos, but these mallorcan beauties certainly did it for me and after taking this photo my day really begun in earnest. A good thing, as the ocillation between self loathing and the urge to defend what I believe in is so fast that it almost becomes an audible frequency, at least I have the soft bells of these future fillets to drown it out. The light was nice too.
His wiki entry is merely a few lines and it mentions the fact that he had six daughters and played the indian nadaswaram – could almost be a fairy tale. It is a stark contrast to the entry of someone like Zorn, who is no more radical than he was in a more introverted way – extending his bebop phasing into exotic fields. Charlie Mariano was another great soul who left his vehicle this year. Although his last years were spent in Cologne we never met. We haggled over a sax price once, old school american sceptic versus no worries mate attitude led nowhere and we never met in person. From afar I always admired his work. This is a reworking of a theme from Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night he recorded in ‘79:
It is an exciting moment for me to present the group Huun Huur Tu on Plushmusic with a concert film and documentary film about their return to Tuva. We go back a long way, the first time I heard their music must have been 1996 and I was truly blown away. I had never head sounds like that from a human voice and I practiced like a maniac until I could get close. At that time I was living with Gareth Lubbe in Cologne and we infected a good many souls with the overtone singing virus! Many years later I met the group in the beautiful wild settings of the Rift Valley in Kenya. It was a treat to hear them and jam with them in the middle of nowhere, the cradle of humanity.
The last few months have been hard work but I can say it was a labour of love and I am proud to present the results now. The film about their return to Tuva is a beautiful portrait of their homeland. I had always dreamed to travel there, but now having spent so long on this film I feel I have already been there in a way. Here is a link to the concert and film and below is a trailer from the film:
Another guy on my list of fine maniacs in the Cologne area is Thomas Brinkmann who often stops by at Piethopraxis, usually in some strange set of wheels he is modifying , putting flames down the side, and pimping up to the extreme. Boy has a nice groove shift in the middle, it’s followed by Who in the Funk:
I am delighted to present the first longer music film I have made. It is called Eleven Voices and was filmed this summer in Greece. On it are eleven vastly different musicians who basically play and sing in different locations on Mount Pilion. A good deal of blood and sweat went into this one, as well as an entire Tokyo vending machine filled with green tea and espresso. It will be up on Plushmusic soon but I have broken my code for a while and embedded it here.
A spanking new airport terminal has been created in Barcelona, leaving the old terminal now almost deserted. I made sure to book my flight on one of the few remaining carriers using the old building. As you can see in this photo, the massive edifice is now almost completely deserted, creating a wonderful and almost dreamlike space. All of the bars were still open but I could only see ten or so other souls floating through this dream. Standing in the middle I could hear the hum of the moving advertisements and the flickering of the departure board, even though there were only five flights scheduled for this evening. One of the bars sported some sad christmas lighting. Around the arrivals I sense a beautiful emptiness, like an inverse crowd, like the gaping silence when a hotel air conditioning machine suddenly switches off after lifetimes of humming. Voices reverberate inside, again, dreamlike.
Within this huge space, we are suddenly small again- but not simple ants darting from one futility to another as we usually must appear- but rather more like curious little cockroaches surfacing after the nuclear holocaust and peeking out to explore the space anew.
When I take out my sax and play a short one no one even cares. The echo I count as 8 seconds. I should enjoy this while it still lasts.
Like some of the Renaissance paintings of ideal cities, the proportions are suddenly right again- a large man-made space is dotted with a few souls. Within this modern urban “nonplace” it feels easier to contemplate the questions that matter without being overwhelmed by the sound and fury of the poor players onstage.
I just got back to my hotel after the Merzbow concert. Merzbow, for those who do not know. is a musician from Japan who has been producing a lot of noise since the 70´s. He uses heavy distortions and electronic feedbacks at massive volumes to create a wall of sound that stands proudly for a good hour and can literally blow you away. Being in the room can be a painful experience and I only lasted about 30 seconds without earplugs. Around him is quite a large scene of people who produce “noise” over large sound systems like this one.
Once I adjust to the levels I am able to enter the sound world and judge it for what it is. As with any kind of music, once I can get through the outer style barrier I can start to check out the facets that make it interesting- how it uses variation, the play-off between randomness and human intention-the colors- etc. I must say I enjoy to be in these “noise” landscapes- well, at least this one. It has little to do with what I make with my copper and reeds but there is much I can take from it. I stayed for close to an hour and was never bored. Within the noise, you can make out all kinds of forms- I think that is one of the great things about this music- that their are no melodies handed to you or rammed down your throat, but rather those with open ears are invited to make their own, Naturally the melodies give way per se to rhythms and then all kinds or portals are opened for those who choose.
The only strange thing that happened to me in this concert, and I admit, it could have been because of the t-shirt I was wearing (covered up, mind you) with the Palin 2012 on it. I suddenly had a premanition that Sarah really would take the vote in 2012(not that I think it even really matters). It was like a strange vision that came out of this intense noise soundscape I was taking in. I went back and immediately placed a bet on her to take it- I was shocked at how low the odds were. Isn´t it amazing what a good dose of noise can do to you?
Tonight´s acts are billed as “avant-rock, cutting edge electronic art, and nu-art”. I still havn´t decided if I´m from New Zealand or Nu-Zealand. I will go with an empty mind, an empty sd card in my camera, ear plugs, and make all the other suitable preparation. My t-shirt reads “Sarah Palin 2012″. My fingers ache to write about it. It´s drone-time Baby!
Saturday’s concert in the Hague will see a good dose of noise being produced- Merzbow and Whitehouse are on the menu. Here is the program. As I arrive a day ahead I´ll have some time to scribble down something about this intriguing sound world.
In the men´s bathroom of the Tate Modern. Behind me lies a fascinating discussion of literature and freedom with Nusruddin Farah, Cees Nooteboom and Wole Soyinka. I could have listen to each of them for days on end. On my right there are three large Africans lined up and facing the wall, as is our male lot. Wole had spoken beautifully of the self-imposed imprisonment of the writer. The ethnic scot´s is noticeably larger than those of the Africans, only they speak eloquently of Proust, Joyce, and Kafka and he muses on nothing but rugby. Some quiet overtones soar gently over the human trickling and outside the voices of authors speaking of exile can be heard. Cees was eloquent in explaining the futility in trying to measure the effects of a book like Ulysses and how the subtle levels of mental osmosis of such works will always defy our attempts to measure it. They all spoke with such clarity- it was a beautiful concert indeed! It was difficult to say goodbye:
Over the last few years I have been very lucky to have a wonderful sound man on my side. Robert Nacken (Rob Neck) has been with me the world over and this summer he was in Greece lending his expert hand. He earned the nickname “McGayver” for his talents in setting up ideal mic positions in places where there seemed like there was no way and through his “is or isn´t he” gaze. He turned our hotel room in Nairobi into a high end recording booth and and transformed the country chapel in Mallorca into a beautiful studio with naught but ropes and wire. Aside from these talents he is also quite an entertainer and a bit of a ladies man as well- here are some out-takes I cut together from this summer in Greece: Robert “McGayver” Nacken. PS, the full version of his final song, 80´s sax solo and all, is up here…
Here’s another sneak preview of an imminent release on Plushmusic of the Breve concert with John Taylor and Matt Penman. It´s taken us well over year to prepare this one and when it is finally up next week I will announce it properly. This ballad is Matt´s and he called it Slow Gambol:
I have a couple of offerings today. The first is the audio of the short film “Eleven Voices” which I made in Greece in summer and will be presenting on Plushmusic on December 4. Sometimes I think it is nice to form the images alone before seeing as film- just as a good book always wins over the same film. In this case I filmed eleven vastly different musicians in different locations in the village. Each one plays or sings for a few minutes and there is almost no dialogue. It runs for just over half an hour. Eleven Voices:
The second is this text I unearthed that deals very well with the mechanics of manipulating beliefs to sustain warfare. I am often stunned how around me, educated and seemingly intelligent people actually believe in a terror threat, or that the west is fighting for democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan, and so on ad absurdum. Here is an excellent summary of modern techniques of public coercion by the former council to the US senate finance committee.
The third ties in to the third. I try to focus on the positive on this blog, presenting the things that matter to me, but once in a while I am forced to do the opposite, to present the other end of the spectrum- if only for the sake of making a point. This anonymous recording was given to me by a man I trust, a fine literary figure and one of the most widely read people I know- only the jazz he gave me encapsulates almost everything I have thrown out the car window on my life´s highway. (Actually I wouldn´t even bother here it wasn´t for the man who gave me this CD) It is actually a good example of what not to do and why it was in a sense right what the late Miles said about Jazz. I would like to dedicate it to my jazz critic friends in Germany (no need for names here) who like to lure me into polemics for leaving the “sacred jazz island”. What is it exactly that smells funny here ? Where should I start? Harsh and honky tone, heavy use of cliches and finger related patterns in the solos, simplified 4-8-16-32 structures in every part of the song, lack of accuracy in the lines (the feeling of falling down the steps uncontrollably), a kind of diligent and trained aggression in the music that, combined with the flattened digital sound recorded all in separate cabins, comes off as tragically comic- like dated gangster rap, slick CD packaging with countless arts council logos masking gaping holes in the sound production, wanton editing within the tracks, the stock theme/solo/solo/drums/theme order , and so on and so on. The only difference is that they at least committed all of these sins in 4/4, if it was Europe the crimes would have been amplified through a 11/8 bar and I would have had even more wounds in my ears. There we go, it´s gone and out of my mind for good….
Accordions have pursued me my entire life. I´m not sure if I´m simply paranoid but they seen to follow me everywhere, transforming normal cityscapes into pools of sentimentality, steeping in to every tram I take with their accompanying bipeds. Close to the top of this wonderful map of currents I took this photo from a boat on which I was trapped for a long journey around Iceland with an aging Icelandic accordion player. I used the time to learn some Icelandic shanties and watch the play of northern light on the liquid mirror we were gliding on.
Some years later I have been working on a little film which happens to include one of the best of this species I have ever come across- an accordion player from Bulgaria I filmed in Greece called Peter Rachev. Here’s an excerpt…
Orange stewardesses. Another difficultjet flight. Another long discussion about which instruments can fit in as hand luggage and which must freeze it out in the hold. Hold, isn´t that Hungarian for full moon? My shoes and belt remove themselves from me and take a radioactive bath. Taking and land-off are misty and smooth. I muse, about time:
The other day I was asked in a radio interview to explain what I meant by the phrase “this music helps the listeners to move away from such linear thinking models” which I wrote in the Coptic Dub record text. The German language allows no space for sweet little poetic flights around the point when it comes to describing the nature of time and experience and my German was already having to muster it´s thinly spread forces to defend myself. Now, it would be easy to say that describing such linear thought models is only possible by using these very models, thus making it a somewhat futile exercise; likewise it is often argued that three dimensional reality is utterly incomprehensible to those who occupy a two dimensional space, and so on. It would be equally useless to say that it was something I only experienced after leaving my body for 4 days by chewing 28 grams of Iboga root powder in Gabon and can only be directly experienced, not explained. We do owe it to back up our claims, even if it means struggling to find the right words for our listeners and readers. Loaded within this question was also “how can it be that you think such simple musical structures, almost childlike compared to what you have made before, could possible serve some kind of higher function?” – clearly perceivable to me as such.
What I am pitching at in my statement is really the function and direction of time and the way I(or my ears) can move through a piece whilst listening (or playing, which is for me almost the same). At one end of the scale is the linear way, in which I perceive the beginning, middle and end of piece as a natural progression through thyme (however it is you yourself like to define this enigmatic herb). On the other end of the scale I perceive of this piece of music as one entirety, an entirety I am free to navigate my way through in any direction at will- in the normal way that is in the tempo of the work framed by the beats and seconds we are so familiar with, but also in an inner direction when sounds and pulses open up allowing their inner complexity to be explored. This requires “hearing” the piece as one. Sound a bit stretched? Well it is- it feels as pliable as putty in my hand and the key to this is a “simpler” outer structure (harmonic/rhythmic) and a more complex inner one (melodic/intuitive). On top of that it needs a heightened state of awareness which we achieve with breath- nothing mysterious there, even bi-athletes use it. Once that is achieved I can move through the music in non-linear ways- it is like walking into a painting and having it open up (no, I havn´t tried that yet). Now of course you can argue that this can be done with more “complex” structures, but I think these “complex” structures in jazz often belie a simplistic inner core with few secrets to reveal whereas the opposite is the case in such works of outer austerity. Sir, you´ve been selected for some extra security screening, can you please step into the booth…
I spent the weekend in in Saarbruecken leading a workshop with students from the music academy. What a pleasure it is to encounter students who are more interested in areas like breath work and group sound than the usual fare we are raised on. The piles of laub were growing as I left under the autumn sun. As far as I know we don´t have a word for this on our mother´s tongue- in German it rolls off the tongue nicely. They are neatly scraped together and removed- walking through them, bathing in them, throwing them up in the air in joy, and worshipping them is generally frowned on. But I can forgive them for all of this as their noun is so sweet to me. The cane shoots out sparks behind us. Ur-laub , you remind me of a precious secret. Gymnopedie Nr.2 by Akira R.:
In a week or so the the floodgates will open and I hope to present some of the sea of editing I have been working on, including a beautiful concert by the Tuvan group Huun Huur Tu, some concerts from this summer in Greece, and a portrait film I have made called “Eleven Voices”. All of these happenings have stories behind them, stories I have been keeping in until I finally have them up and ready for Plushmusic. In the meantime I have dug up a few tracks from an album I have long treasured: Colors by Ken Nordine. Here are three of my favourites from this gem from the 60´s: Lavender, Yellow, and Sepia:
From a distance:
It’s a small Scottish isle in the northern Hebrides and a huge storm has just blown over. Two villages before this one, a local had seen me on my bike and warned me of the weather ahead, pointing out to me in the meanwhile that there is a cottage on the side of the loch with a blue roof which I could use to shelter in. He was right and by the time I pulled up the rain was coming down in buckets. Inside the tiny cottage was filled with old books on seamanship and 3 cats were perched up against the thin window pains. I remember clearly the one book that didn´t have knots on the cover, a little gem about the that mysterious of centers, the Solar Plexus(I recently found the text again here). I dried myself off and covered myself in the tartan rugs on the wooden bed, looking out through the window onto the windswept Loch as the skye gave host to a festival of natural wonder. I stayed that way for a few days, nibbling on muesli bars, listening to the rain and cat purs and learning about my hallowed nerve center, the scent of wet turf never far away. Latha Dha’n Bhinn Am Deinn Longnaidh:
Yesterday was a day of contrasts worth writing about. I woke in Tokyo to a sunny autumn day and scribbled down some last notes for a lecture at the Modern Art Museum. Around midday a few hundred souls came along to listen to my thoughts on installation music and modern shamanism. It was a solemn affair with plenty of serious looking students and professors. Behind me was a very able translator who helped me throughout. I left the lecture room around 3 and hopped into a taxi which took me through heavy Tokyo traffic to the national stadium. I´d received a tip that the New Zealand All Blacks were playing against Australia so I had packed my black t shirt, can of beer, and jeans into my bag before going to the lecture. I changed in the taxi and cracked open the Japanese beer, savouring the space-time warp I was in. As soon as I exited the cab, a crowd of Kiwis, convinced by my t shirt, can of beer,and red beard I am now sporting, shouted out “”Ginger-over here mate”. For the next 2 hours I participated in the national religion of New Zealand. The best bit was still to come though. My cheap seat meant I was right up the top of the stadium next to all the Japanese families who had had come along out of curiosity. Next to me were 3 year old japanese girls dressed up as witches for halloween. There were a whole row of them with their little black hats and brooms and they managed to just watch the war dance of the New Zealanders before casting there little japanese spells, laughing at the ginger next to them, and falling asleep for the rest of the 90 minutes in their parents´laps. I hadn´t been in a big rugby game since high school when we were forced to come to each game and perform the war dance as a school. Only back then we didn´t have tiny japanese witches to put us all to sleep.
One of the pieces I just set up in the Museum for Contemporary Art uses whale recordings. The legitimacy of such nature sounds in this setting is up for debate and yet we live in a world in which in some ways it seems that anything goes. At least on the level of politics this is certainly the case and it has long since seeped through into other spheres of communication and arts. Now may I, as the official composer of this here abstain from the table?I´ll let you decide: Light Imprisoned (2002): :
My first thought in setting up this piece today was whether or not the Japanese visitors would get hungry upon hearing this work. I think they will.
Yesterday I visited some temples in Kyoto. Someone shot me here drooling over some tatami mats which I inspected for a long long time. The gardens and craftsmanship were astonishingly beautiful. Perhaps even too beautiful. I cannot see how it would be possible to practice and perfect the original intention of zen washed in so much beauty. How can you reconcile this with the reality facing our planet now? The moss, the wood, the birds, the attention to detail..refined beauty everywhere you look. But that is no longer our lot. At least not on the surface.
On the train from to Kyoto I caught a glimpse of the base of Mount Fuji (here is a picture of my first ascent). I remember clearly my teacher some 25 years ago explaining to us how she was the sister mountain of our beloved Taranaki, so close as they are to each other in shape and size. Taranaki (or as we used to know her as, Mount Egmont) dominates the sky around my home province in New Zealand and stands like a silent sentry watching over the surrounding Taranaki coast, quietly counting to herself the days until she decides -like all fiery women do- to blow her top and bring the men around her down to size. When she does decide to do this it will be quite a sight; our local geography and the close proximity of the sea will provide for an incredible spectacle of the elements , when liquid fire meets sky and sea- not something we like to speak of too much back home so maybe left better to the realm of poets, bloggers, and soothsayers until that day really does come.
Mount Fuji hides her peak from me today but I will glimpse her yet…
Flicking open the pages of the Herald Tribune this morning for my daily entertainment I am confronted with a powerful and of course accidental montage. Here it is. The jubilant baseballers of the sports section are only centimeters away from an anguished Iraqi father after another bombing. Now of course if I was to list down the absurdities I come across every day I would have no time left to play discreet bop but still some things seem to stick out for a reason. It made me first think of the chinese sage who spoke of all extreme human emotion being essentially the same thing. Then I thought of Susan Sontag writing eloquently on how we deal with constantly having so much human misery thrown in our faces, our capacity for compassion being tried and stretched each and every day. Then the dear exopolitical community which I deeply admire came up, who speculate that such excess emotion prevents us from taking our true place in the local universe and keep us in the stage of being simple, dangerous, and rather smelly creatures. Then the futility of another endless war. Then I thought of the massive dry cleaning bills those baseball teams must foot. Next I simply thought of the tragedy and comedy of our current situation, with wealth and misery contrasted so profoundly. I quickly contemplated the 320 million the US spends on fuel alone each day in Pipelineistan. Then I ordered a back- up espresso, delighting in the way 4 japanese assistants call out “hai, esplesso, hai” each time. Next I returned to the montage and breathed through it. Then I returned to my cell and wrote this post. And here we are.
Tokyo Wind-ow
Cries out secret air haikus
Dreamtime whisperer
Click on the haiku to listen to my invisible friend sing.
Saturday Diary Twitter-style. (If you can´t beat the idiocy, join the idiocy)
Woke and ran through a park where old couples danced slowly to cha cha cha. Had rice and pickles for breakfast whilst laughing at the Herald Tribune which has strayed deeply into neo-con absurdity. Sat in shopping mall and filmed the buttocks of a nymph statue in a fountain to practice my zooming and white balance. Drove 2 hours out of Tokyo to a photo museum where the artist Sugimoto had exposed negatives to electric shocks underwater making beautiful images like this. Attended traditional japanese puppet performance with heavenly music (but forgot my camera in the car). Was frozen to my seat. Stunning. Walked around shinto shrine and marveled at the garden. Threw 100 yen in garden pool and prayed for world peace. Threw in another 200 just in case. Tasted a pizza quattro formaggi. Got a lift back to Tokyo with an eccentric gay sephardic Jew who tried to pick up young attendants from the gas stations on the way back using the fact that the Japanese word for “full tank” is very close to something obscene. Got stuck in massive traffic marmalade. Was relieved to get back and had fried pumpkin for dinner. Learnt a Bach Sarabande off by spleen. Watched distant traffic jams and the old couples still dancing cha cha cha´s from my window, listening to Gesualdo´s In Coena Domina:
After spending a day editing films in my hotel room and a mere hour playing some Bach I needed something to get my mind elsewhere and so I did I little German translation of this ballad, improvised into my little computer microphone. I´d like to dedicate it to all my dear German readers and anyone else who would like to turn Manhattan into an isle of joy:
Today´s tiny udon den I discovered had a Japanese name I couldn´t read though I christened it Surround Slurp. Seating alone in the middle and flanked by a suited business crowd, I was treated to a festival of slurping in dolby surround like none other I had heard. The volume itself was enough to impress me but also the great variety in timbres and lengths of the slurps was eyebrow-raising to say the least. Once my udon arrived I happily tucked in to them and decided to see if I could match their talents. I made a real racket but all I noticed was a small glance of appreciation from another salaryman through his steamed-over lenses. The symphony cotinued as I scribbled down these words and then vanished through the chimney:
Perhaps this could also be a white document of separation
evoked now in a noodle den
Or a self-enforced exile
from the islands and people you know
and in the endless space between is nothing but sound to interpret
just as pi is the mediator between the square and the circle
only it is no longer made of meat
but of emptiness and endless sonic longing
Last night I entered a little restaurant in Shinjuku. It was almost empty but for 3 waitresses and the chef. Only a few seconds after I sat down a fuse blew and the wooden room was cast in darkness. The waitresses took it as standard procedure and drew their torches, illuminating the room now in the strangest of ways. The Chef lit the bunsen burner and the battery powered radio continued to play early Beach Boys at a low and comfortable volume. My Sake was slowly heated over the flame and the torchlight wove patterns through the cigar smoke of the only other salaryman inside, who had silently finished a large bottle of sake on his own. All of this was only a block away from the Yanagisawa Sax shop I had visited again to try out some more silver plated sweetest, none of which topped the s-880 my Dad gave me in 1991 or made me feel as good as this moment did.
If you’re in Tokyo tonight and you’d like to hear some of the records I have with me, this is what you have to do: ” the Gay street is located in between Shinjyuku street and Yasukuni street. When you find a main gay street, you turn at the corner where you see the bright pink sign. You turn to the opposite side of the sign, towards a graveyard at the end of the street. The bar is on the right side, Velvet Overhigh´m DMX. It looks like this.Of course there are many pink signs on gay street, but the brightest pinkest one is the one you want, Hayden. This is the pink store and the sign look like this. If I´m not there, the codeword is “pink pink action”. Music starts at 10.” Good luck, readers.
My hotel in Tokyo has one feature I really love: the elevator. Now, I usually detest these things but this one really does it for me. When I enter one the four elevators and press floor 14, the door closes silently and swiftly and the ride begins without delay. Elevators which wait several seconds for nothing to happen almost push me over the edge and all the breathing training in the world won´t help me. Another wonderful feature here is that they are almost always empty- no awkward glances and no offensive aftershaves. This little baby whisks me up in no time to my floor, all the while some smooth jazz is playing at a barely audible level. The doors swish open and my good mood is still very much intact- now how difficult can it be to build these?
Here´s one of the samples from Coptic Dub which I just uploaded to the Embassador´s myspace. Aside from being the rune of day, Dagaz was an important dog in my life. Dagaz Eterna:
My dearly beloved Autumn sun,
I leave you now for the rising one
In the land of sharp knives and blunt wit I arrive
All thoughts of whales I now put aside
As the scent of wasabi kisses my sax’s zinc
I watch the lonely crowds and sink
Into another ocean of solitude
Alongside my actual work here in the museum in Tokyo, I´m armed and dangerous with several HD cams- so expect some absurdity to follow soon. Today I am doing as all true Sax nerds would do, hanging out at my favourite dealer in Tokyo and collecting vintage neckstraps…..what joy!
Part of my contribution to my Congalese friend´s album involved assuming another alias- this time Colin Mzungu MacGregor was called forth to take his scottish tenor and blow some lines over the afrobeats. The broad sea of afro-sax naiveté as heard on Fela Kuti and others peppered with some Brecker and Berg phrases were Colin´s inspiration here. You can also feel his desire to break away from the damp highlands and soar over the African plains with his chinese tenor and flying tarten carpet. Colin´s solo sends out some strong messages soaked in scottish irony- deep in the cognac glass you can make out a tiny scroll if you look hard enough. Enjoy: