Something pulls me to Armenia
My blood flows to Armenia
Through a humble Austrian drain
Mixed with the Salt of their mines
This thick red river of time
And this mystery of mine.
Step in inside the sunset
If she doesn´t tell you everything
It´s because it´s too marvellous for words. Salzburg 23.07
I ride to the lake to escape the Opera
Sit and rest my inner ear bruises with a pride of overgrown swans
Watching the diffusion of the mirror´s liquid sky
Contemplating a third life in my own.
I stand and break the image with an overtone
Then walk in a spiral to the mini-golf course
For a cold beer amongst living shipwrecks
And a dreamy caravan song of the Saharan Tuaregs. Salzburg 22.07.08
I bike in the sun through the Schloss Park of Salzburg. After my Chi gung I drink two double espressos quickly, pray to an unutterable god, and hurry to the Opera. I give you today a track from Nine Horses: Snow Borne Sorrow. This was the one I loved to play most with David and Steve during the tour last year. “We´ll inhabit the sunset…” :
There is a lot of movement in the music we rehearse here each day and by that I mean a lot of changing intervals, abstract sounds, and absolutely no space in which to rest. All that is fair enough and on the Opera stage one can get away with blue murder but to accompany the rest of my day and stop me from slipping into the deep abyss of zealous atonality I listen to Akria Rabelais´s gloriously titled Spellewauerynsherde, released on Samadhi Sound :
Rebecca´s knives and whips have arrived on the scene, now the blood and fun can finally begin in the church. And as I slip deeper into the abyss of flat nines and minor seconds massaging my eardrums for nine hours a day in much the same way a 200 pound Chinese woman would do stamping up and down my spine, I move deeper into the safe sonic harbour of the man this whole death drama is based on. I found some more recordings of Gesualdo by the Hilliard ensemble and offer them here for you to savour, just like I now do daily in the blutige blaue Stunde of my design in Salzburg. If a heart can bleed so profusely each day, and an ear can resonate in unison to the dull thump of the city, could music like this fill the gaping holes of unspoken desire?
Today after five hours of rehearsing scene six from the opera, which by the way sounds like this:
I came up with this short poem :
Out of the pain grow again
The candle burned you from the inside
The moth´s wing, still untouched
escaped into her absence
to beat against you
from an unreachable distance
It´s amazing what so much opera a day can do to you. Here is a ballad from April with Matt and Jochen to pull you and me back to the dream we usually live :
The opera in Salzburg with Rebecca Horn in which I am now working is called “Luci mie Traditrici” and is based on chain of events in Naples when the composer Gesualdo killed his wife with her lover. Gesualdo himself, despite being an hysterical maniac in his day job, wrote some of the most divine vocal music of the 16th century. After I wake, swim, espressiero and wander the lonely woods of Salzburg, wondering why and how, it is this music I listen to. Sometimes I dance to it next to the mini golf course and alcoholics morning hang out, none of whom mind kiwis performing chi gong hip twists to a cappella music. There are some glorious dissonances within the chromatic textures. Here are two of my favourites :
I was writing some time ago about the sound of music as we fall into a slumber. Here is a dream-like duo, so much so that that I dreamt it last night and then realised it today. My 5yr old son Maxim is playing harmonica in Lawrence, Kansas, and I am playing inside a piano at the Festspielhaus in Salzburg. Skype is on our side. It originated deep within phase three sleep last night- is this how dreams come true?
On the way into a cellar today to take two casks of wine to be transported to the rehearsals in Salzburg (artists fuel) I ran through a giant cobweb, covering my face and neck - is that a sign? Once arriving at the house I find a silver river running directly into the sunset and before I could reflect long a bat flew into my face - is that a sign? Whilst driving to pick up some Austrian earth apples and a pair of speedos for the pool tomorrow the navigation started speaking backward sand and another bat flew by. Signs of life or the lives of signs?
Another classic few hours in Germany spent repacking and preparing myself for Salzburg. To fully use the 2 few hours I had a shot straight to the sauna where the attendant informed me apologetically that the water temperature today in the main pool was 0.5 degrees less than usual. I told him that I would let this through once.
After the sauna another attendant cautiously advised us to begin cooling ourselves with ice ( “moeglist herzfern” meaning as heart-distant as possible). And now I sit right behind the cockpit of an ICE train, cruising at 300 kmph to a feast of Mozart Balls and Thomas Bernhard, chatting to the driver about magnetic powered trains. To get into the spirit of Austria I recommend “Gathering Evidence“.
Who ever said that Taranaki kids couldn´t make afrobeat? You can find an Embassadors track in the latest Rare Trax CD in the July issue of Rolling Stone.
We are moving close to the launch of Plush Music this summer. Here are two little teasers for you, this one from my concert with John Taylor at the Plush Concert series last year and Tout de Moi from the Trio gig in Loft with Jochen and Matt.
I´ve been mentally preparing myself to stay longer than one week in a single place. It´s going to be tough but I have been building up my resistance slowly and now feel ready to smash my record and manage a whole month in Salzburg of all places, where I will be working as assistant director in this production of Sciarrino´s Luci mie traditrici. Should I fail I will certainly give a valid excuse on this blog.
The other day I ran into one of my favourite stories read by the author himself. It is a rare thing when a writer or poet is gifted with a fine speaking voice, and even rarer when they make the music to the story as well. All of these elements are fused perfectly in this rendition of The Giving Tree.
Here is another quarter-tone ballad from the recently released root70 on 52nd 1/4 St : Tight out of Sight :
Last year I read some texts by Cornelius Cardew in a composition of Marcus Schmickler´s entitled “E-uropas” performed with the MusikFabrik ensemble in the Radial System in Berlin. Here is a short excerpt from that night :
I now write from Belgrade where it is swelteringly hot. To combat the oppressive heat and even more oppressive turbo folk/house soundtrack that proudly booms out of most bars here I have been listening to Byzantine Chant, especially an album by Souer Marie Keyrouz.
The other day I found some of my early sketches I did in the Kalahari desert. They were all done on tiny bits of paper and thus quite hard to scan. In fact they are so tiny you can hardly make them out. That was because I did most of them at night with a spider web- like white draftsman pen to the sound of Gagaku Voila…
I will be giving again a Master Class on Mount Pilion in Greece from August 26 until September 1st. This year I will be focusing on developing a language for Solo Saxophone. Taking as inspiration some of the ancient Greek modes and embellishing them with our individual instrumental possibilities in very different playing situations, all students will present a solo performance during the week. We will also be extending some of the micro-tonal work we began last year as a larger Saxophone ensemble. Christos Noulis will be working with us on body mapping, continuing his incredible work from the last workshop.
The Speed of Scent: Listening to a certain piece of music will often take me back to a certain moment. Watching a particular scene may remind me of another time. Tasting a certain vintage of Marmite could bring back days gone by. But nothing will whip me up and transport me faster to another time and place than a particular scent. In the time travel race of the senses, scent wins by a light year. Writing this now at Barcelona airport, someone behind me unscrewed a bottle of god knows what- something like the perfume version of summer rain on hot concrete tinged with freshly cut grass, transporting me instantly to a place I am now writing in. I call this the “Speed of Scent”, and I dedicate this little piece to it: “Lifetime” sung by Tony Williams, it´s worth waiting for the lyrics in this one (sorry to say, but those were the days) :
This weekend we will be playing in Israel with root70 here. I hope to find a few moments to take some shots around Jerusalem and post them on my newly resurrected Flickr account. This post is being written with my feet dangling in the water on a Barcelona beach and a Salsa crew behind now moving into second gear. My Mojito is only moments away, there is a huge wave coming my way and work to be done. Here are some sounds by Matano Juma to put you back to Zanzibar in the late 60´s:
Last week I was driving around Bavaria filming this trailer about German Folk Music. No one could tell me exactly why most of the pieces they play are in major, not minor. A little digging brought me no closer. Perhaps is because they can cushion lyrics like “the mother stabs the father to death” in a major tonality without rousing too much emotion. (This one was sung by “the three others“, a musical family I spent a fantastic day with on Sunday)
I have always been attracted to music that manages to shift gracefully between the poles of major and minor. When I say “garacefully” I mean not simply part to part but within the melody itself. There is one electronic work I have with me at the moment which achieves this effortlessly. It is “Pourtant, Sous La Tutelle Invisible D’un Ange” by Akira Rabelais. Do you hear what I mean? :
These days we are shooting the trailer for a road movie about German folk music. No, I havn´t lost it completely, but almost. Basically, a New Zealander rides around Germany in leather playing his little saxophone and drinking beer with bavarian brass groups and other oddities. My weapon of choice for this is a MZ1000sf - a sturdy beast they still make in Germany and a Saxello, an odd-looking, badly tuned Sax made in Taiwan and expendable if it falls off my back on the road or gets drowned in beer. We began on the beautiful harbour of Eckernfoerde with a team of sailors/musicians and are now heading to Bamberg. Summer is here and it is pleasant indeed to be back on the open-speed autobahns before the Eurocrats remove this last great freedom of the roads.
Last night I was about to fall asleep in downtown Belgrade when the wind suddenly picked up and began to whistle in through the open window. As I lay there I was reminded of two types of listening, two of the many parts of the elusive art of hearing.
The first isn´t really so much an art as a pleasure. When the wind lifted its voice I could only hear some parts of a violin melody from a nearby bar, a phrase here and there. As I was drifting off my mind and my ear put together the rest of the band and the melody without hearing it directly. Between the wind and the fragments of melody drifting above I now had a beautiful dialogue utterly unrepeatable and strangely inhuman and elegant. This kind of state is related to standing in the no mans land at festivals and listening to the blend of music from different stages at the same time. The beauty here is that the intention is taken out of the music making and beauty in my ear occurs purely through accident.
This state led naturally into the next which is in my view more of an art form that needs cultivation to develop. It consists of extending the “falling asleep” phase in a conscious way. What is important here is the way sounds change in our perception as we leave the waking state, achieving a new clarity and position in time. Perhaps you remember voices from the next room as you fall asleep and how they change? For many of us this state may only last a second or two but I try with my hearing to extend it as long as I possibly can. Why? Because of the depth in the open space I perceive here through my ears, externally and internally. Music itself seems to slow down and “stretch out”.
This is hearing without the constraints of the conscious mind; it is the appreciation of the direct effect of music on our brains through simple vibration without the hindrance of our other senses. It is also in my view the closest we can get to the experience of death and the moments after the physical body has ceased to breath but when we can still “hear” sound.
To train this I let myself drift as far as possible into the realm of sleep and simply listen ( the best for me is distant music from the neighbours or down the street), constantly pulling myself back shortly before the point of no return. Each time I do this I find I can go a little further until now I can rest with my hearing (here-ing) in this in-between state for what seems to me like 10 minutes of our “earthly” time measurement. I find it easiest with vocal music without a defining beat. Drifting too far out now? The best thing about this is art is that it sounds beautiful, it´s that simple. Falling asleep? Then let me pull you back. There is a new Root70 record out soon. Here are the liner notes and a sneak preview :
There was a recording I organised a few years ago in Berlin with a quartet where the pianist was a few hours late. As we only had a short time in the studio I was forced to sit behind the keys and thus it became my first and only jazz piano trio recording. This is one of the tracks , called Desire Exposed :Â
Last week I installed the sound component for the Jupiter im Oktogon installation in the Wiesbaden Museum. This work of Rebecca Horn´s uses rotating mirrors and light around the central axis of the Oktagon and will be a permanent part of the museum.
The music uses mainly alto saxophone, voice, cello, and viola. Why does this installation need music at all? What function does the music have? How is the music “composed” for the space? All this could be condensed into “what the xxxx am I doing here?”, a common question in our times and acutely valid in any artistic space that aspires to a higher kind of spacial order.
In short, the music has plenty of air for the work itself to “breathe” inside . The use of acoustic instruments and a careful panning and separation of the sound within the Oktagon compliments the movement of the mirror and serves to define the space itself. The music is composed intuitively based around the design sketches of the artist and mixes our live performance in the Oktagon, now a kind of “frozen music”, with my studio recordings of the piece. It is a 4 channel work mixed for the space by Robert Nacken. Here is a stereo excerpt of the work, Jupiter im Oktogon :
Last year at the Music Village Master Class series we performed a concert with all the Saxophonists involved. We had being focusing intensively on micro-tonal structures during the week but also injected our performance with some Armenian Duduk music and some Pontiac Dances which we performed with an incredible Lyra player. Here are some excerpts from that magical night.
Today is the birthday of another great friend of mine. He likes to talk about solar rotations rather than years ( yes, he´s one of those), his best friend is a puppet, he loves 80´s Sax solos, and he too, like Jaki, haarps on about distant social utopias we will likely never reach. Happy Birthday Biped no. 66270575! Here is one of your favourite tracks and good luck getting through the next few spins of your rather interesting home planet:
Today is the 70th birthday of a dear friend and one of the most uncompromising musicians I know - Jaki Liebezeit. As there will be nothing in the press anywhere I decided to write a small homage and wish him all the best. He looks not a day older than 50 and is for me like a solid sound rock in the middle of a sea of mild confusion. He often speaks of better times and travelling the world with him is like seeing it through the lenses of the past in a way that doesn´t shine too brightly on our present moment. He can ruthlessly tear apart our naive respect for the 4/4 bar and other “artificial” musical symmetries. Above all, he is as we would say in New Zealand, a really great bloke. Here is a track I played with Jaki and Burnt on Secret Rhythms 2 (nonplace)- “Broken Wind Repair Kit”, Happy Birthday Jaki! :
Here is a little radio program I put together for the Red Bull Music Academy Radio, it has a selection of some of my current favourite tracks.
For the last few months I have been working again with Japanese Death poems- those words written by monks, poets, and warriors when death was calling The edition I have and the one I treasure is this. My Japanese can now be laid out under the microscope, ready for dissection, but let it be said that my intention behind these words is clear- I fully entered into my perception of the writer´s for a moment before I recited here. live in LOFT in mid- April together with Marcus Schmickler :
If your name is Maxim, or Matija, or if your name is Aliya, then listen very carefully to this song. This is the Alpha- Beth song with some animal friends as well. The ABC Song…. This one is eternally dedicated to my Mum, the one unwavering reader of this blog who never fails to correct my spelling or give the right advice.
And for those with more or less serious tastes you will perhaps enjoy this small edit of some recent installation works with Rebecca Horn as presented in Berlin.
It was another normal Sunday in Germany- lonely villages, train rides, a Church service with a wonderfully experimental Priest who read the texts backwards. Instead of writing a blog entry I uploaded a little film, here it is: No Comment.
Here is the small chapel we were recording in on Majorca a few weeks ago : 
And much more importantly here is our dear friend who was with us from beginning to end with all kinds of honks and e-ows : 
When he wasn´t going for gold in the race for the longest solo Donkey soliloquy I managed to record a solo or two like this; in it a simple mode is embellished occasionally with microtones, it is one of my first recordings on my recently repaired Balance Action :
Would you like to see where I go to practise overtones with my Lady? Here you are : 
And here´s another , this time with a biped holding her aloft : 
Today is one of those days where I tread lightly, always trying to maintain a tiny layer of space between my shoes and the ground. I even grip my espresso lightly and make sure to speak carefully and listen quietly. Here in Odenwald the bird song is so loud it even drowns out the church bells close by. But when the birds are sleeping and the bells can ring out without competition I like to practise my old routine of “hearing into” the overtones of the bells. This works best when you have two bells ringing together and no other background noise. I lock in to the first overtones and continue hearing up the row until they begin blending together around the 12th in the series. Once I have isolated them in my ear they then begin to dance and move in fantastic ways. I can sit like this for hours as long as the bells keep ringing which is why I love weddings, funerals, and Sundays in this part of the country. I once asked the local pastor how much I could pay him to keep the bells ringing for a whole day but things don´t seem to work that way this side of the alps and my overtone argument only resulted in even more confusion and suspicion.
When I am not lost in the ecstasy of overtones then I am listening to Shakuhachi tracks like this (dangerous stuff as I also easily lose myself in overtones here too and forget about the “music”) which fit well with the forest I am now in (yes, a forest with wifi, vee Germans have it all, ja) :Â
When I step onto the smoke filled regional train to Frankfurt I choose something more suited to the fog of enduring wore and piece, a track I have always delighted in:Â Song to the Pharoah Kings by Chicky Dee :
I was literally blown off my feet when the Bahia Girls under-19 Volleyball squad showed up at Jochen and my gig last night at Nublu and then had us play along to their training today in Brooklyn. I wished someone could have filmed the session today, us two in black suits playing fast electronica while the 27 girls clad in Brazilian national colours were smashing away winner after winner.
Some upcoming performances: tomorrow night at NUBLU in NYC with Jochen starting at midnight; May 16 I perform the premiere of Jupiter im Oktagon at the Wiesbaden Museum. This is the work I wrote to accompany the Rebecca Horn work and will be a permanent sound installation in the space. From May 19 to 22 I will be lecturing with Rebecca Horn in the Goethe Institute in Jerusalam. Early June I will be driving around Bavaria on a motorbike visiting bavarian brass ensembles as part of a film trailer I will have to write more about soon lest your feline be slaughtered. It´s sunny in NYC, I walked down to ground zero today and stared (ok, squinted) into the sun for 25 minutes, beating my record by 4 minutes, blinding me for 3 more, and forgetting to even glance at the site. I then bought a New Zealand wine out of nostalgia and headed to the closest dive in China town to let Coleman and Ben flow sweetly; it´s New York and I can allow myself to get sentimental with a track that always gets me, if not kills me :
We survived all kinds of production tests in a lonely valley in Majorca and came away with a great recording of the Bach Cello Suites for Plush Music as well as a solo night of Gareth Lubbe, soaking us as always in beautiful overtones. The donkeys warmed to us as the week progressed and even eased of the reproductive gas pedal, allowing Bach to sing out without the orgasmic whines between the movements. Now I sit in Soho with a strong espresso and and even stronger wifi signal, contemplating what actually happened and preparing for a day of dub tomorrow with Jochen and Matt in Brorby´s studios in Brooklyn.
I think it was a healthy dose of some fine Rioja that made me reach for my horn and tambura one dark and bleak friday night in Berlin. I had an Indian love scene in my head and the voice of a Rajasthan princess telling me to “walk into the music”. A few minutes later, this spilled out of my horn with nature sounds courtesy of Robert Nacken. It could be a throwback to the days when I studied sax and flute in Madras. Whilst walking through the moonsoon rains up to my knees, holding my ol´lady above my head and chatting with my master, I was often astounded by his adoration of Kenny G (which of course in the meantime I completely understand). Walk into the Music :Â
Right now the biggest problem I have is copulating donkeys in a lonesome valley on Majorca being heard behind the recordings of the Bach Suites. If only they could do it in G Major we could let it through. Fingers crossed they will rest today.
There was one piece which never made it on the Healing the Music album although it was on the list right up until the last moment. I called it “Eternity”. It is of course an arrangement of a movement from Messiaen´s Quartet for the End of Time. “Tell me the Time of an End” she once asked me in a dream : (excerpt)
Couldn´t quite make it to the Loft last night? Here is the first song we played :
And here, dear listener, is a little more swing for you and a drum solo to boot : “Tout de Moi” :
If you want to hear more, tune in or log into Cologne Campus Radio tonight.
It´s off to Mallorca today for a week of recording the first three Bach Suites with Claudio Bohorquez in some of the countryside chapels I discovered last month. May the potent sobresada, grapes and olives of the island inspire the local muses to sing clearly through the wood and resin of his 300 yr old lover, vamos hombre!
In case you are in Cologne there is a small concert tonight in LOFT tonight at 2030 which isn´t listed . It will be a live version of the album “Nearness” with Jochen Rueckert, Matt Penman, and myself. Expect slow swing tempos along the lines of this :Â
My thought of the day : “To declare that the end justifies the means would bring terrible retribution.”
I´m writing from the heart of Saarland, a tiny German province tucked away in the kidney region of France´s voluptuous form. Our audiences this tour have been fantastically quiet, you could hear a penny drop during the concerts. And so our set has become quieter and quieter. Perhaps by the end of the tour there will be simply hot air coming from our horns with no more tone at all - AirJazz.
Two wonderful pieces I read today : an interview with Burnt Friedman who discusses a lot of critical issues and the philosophy of nonplace, and a beautiful text about Andric, one of my favourite writers.
As this is supposed to be a music blog I have to apologise up front about today´s entry which has a slight “political” taste to it (the word already feels funny in my mouth) but I was asked (and even paid) by a German Jazz rag to write about it. I have the English version for you, hold on to your seats….
“There´s no more revolution
Our fathers missed the train”
Asked to give a musicians perspective on the proposition that Improvised music has lost it´s political relevance and hence last year´s audience reactions at the Moers Festival were somewhat subdued, these two lines of a song I once wrote came to mind, along with a few other ideas that I will write about now. To deal briefly with this theme we need to look at why there is no more social or musical “revolution” as we once knew it but rather only a “personal” one, and why the idea that music needs political relevance to succeed is outdated and not relevant to the real issues we musicians face. Read more of this article.
Every year, once or twice a year even, I ritually lose my contact lenses down the plug one day before the start of a root70 tour. It is as if a greater force wants to prevent me from reading music. This means I either have to have the music stand 15 cms in front of my face, or wear my dark prescription sunglasses. This time round I have found a spare right lens meaning my world is a very strange mix of clarity and a dream-like haze. With the right angle in this state I can even see auras around objects, living and inanimate.
Anyway, enough about by ailing eyesight, this entry was supposed to be about how to prevent people clapping after your solo (one of the many banes of Jazz and no, it wasn´t always that way). The most effective method I have found is to insert a long decrescendo over your entire last chorus and then keep playing at pianissimo for the full first chorus of the next soloist- even the most ardent jazz fan will be at a loss as to where your solo actually finished.
Shortly before Gesshu Soko died on January 10, 1696, at the age of 79, he wrote these words :
Inhale, exhale. Foward, back. Living, dying. Arrows, let flown to each other meet midway and slice the void in aimless flight - Thus I return to the source.
312 years later I pick up a newspaper to see what is happening in the world and maybe have a laugh. The Guardian informs me German orchestras are using new EU regulations and refusing to play pieces louder than 85 decibels, condom factories using local tree resin are being built in the Brazilian jungle to save the Amazon, and walls are being built around the immigrant community in Padua, north Italy, to keep them in. I skim through these gems with Moroccan trance music to guide me back into the void, still in aimless flight :
Constant travelers like myself survive in a world limited to 20 kgs luggage. Taking away the weight of my Alto Sax and Bass Clarinet from this already paltry amount leaves me with 11.5 kgs to live with on the road. This is filled with 2.5 kgs of books and writing materials, 3.5 kgs of garments, 0.5 kgs of food supplements (ginseng being the main component in tea and bonbon form), 1 kilo of Sax repair kits, and 0.5 kilos of incense and essential oils to block out all the offensive perfumes and cleaning products and purify hotel rooms. The rest is taken up with my thoughts which vary between 1.5 and 3 kgs depending on the season. Adding my weight to this means that 94 kgs of thoughts, music (the carbon offset part) , and baggage is catapulted at an average distance of 97000 kms per annum.
This morning I walk through the “Temple of Heaven”. There are old men practicing calligraphy by writing with water on the concrete. Right next to them there is a group of elderly Chinese dancing Tango, then behind them a choir singing a rousing melody against the backdrop of one of the temples. Sublimely twisted Juniper trees encircle the tracksuit-clad pensioners who dance and dart around plating with a metal shuttle cock, trying to keep it up in the air as long as possible. Small red boxes on poles emit the sound of solo flutes and whispers. Soon, I find my square.
It´s magnificent tumult can be heard from afar through the cherry blossoms. There are dozens of elderly men sitting on park benches and bowing away on their Chinese violins. Women move in gracefully in front of the men, face them squarely, their handbags gripped tightly, and sing excerpts from Chinese Opera melodies as if the world were about to end. Standing in the middle of this square is pure joy, I can focus in on a mad duo or I can just let the heavenly chaos wash over me. Tears well up but my moonglasses are dark.
I set up my little stand of Master Fu CDs close to the Tai Chi practitioners and begin to hand them out. They are received with curiosity, as if I was handing them a strange animal. Actually I am in a way. Later, I leave 80 CDs lighter, zero yuan richer, and wearing a smile.
Not far off, an 80 year old cross-dresser performs comedy for a group of enthralled old women. Once this was the park where the Emperors gave thanks to heaven accompanied by their entire court. Now, sun burnt and fickle New Zealanders with a modest smattering of Chinese but all the best intention in the world to learn more give praise to the same forces who created such a perfect circus of the absurd. It as if we had all just fallen out of this deep blue sky over Beijing.
This music could either be Wullu Love Song from the Miao Villages of China, or a celebration song of hyperdimensional intellegence and goodwill from deep within the Cassiopeia constellation. You decide:
You can always rely on Harold Bloom for some entertaining annihilation of the likes of JK Rowling or Stevie King. The phenomena of Harry Potter was always a strange one for me, especially the argument that it is better our children read Harry Potter than nothing at all, well Bloom deals with this fallacy nicely here. Bloom 7 Potter 0.
My first impressions of Peking :
Cars where ever the eyes rest Green algae beer the colour of New Zealand grass
Old couples dancing tango in the parks with the grace of tai chi
A hotel room looking over an empty art gallery
I walk the grey streets in peace
Holding my sad black laptop like an orphaned baby
Until my wifi bar says yes, Hayden, use me now.
I see Sam Hunt does corporate functions now- my heart sank.
So I sing overtones to the picture of Mao
People look in vain for the source, police too.
The source is not easy to find, not even for me.
I am working on a new version of Moon Mirror for the museum in Peking. Here is the last part of the older one :
Storms and high winds whip through the northern tip of Mallorca. I am hunting for small chapels in which to record the first 3 Bach suites with El Señor Bohorquez next month which will be a Plush Music exclusive. I have also had a great time trying to find a local carpenter to build a cello podest to elevate the young soloist towards the firmament and explaining the task in Mallorquien. It is also quite a challenge in this day in age to find a spot where you cannot hear any traffic, often just when you think you´ve found one an aircraft comes thundering through.
Here is today´s little pearl cast out into the digital desert : a choir recorded in Beagle Bay, Australia early last century :