s o f t s p e a k e r s

Sao Paolo 2

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:57:49 +0000

Grey and humid in Sao Paolo. Helicopters buzz past for those who can afford to avoid the traffic jams. Hotel pool 13 floors below (no fear here about the 13 moon phases of the year) is deep blue and deserted. Penguin-like business crowd fill the streets around here.Brazilians seem to like their white flour going by the bakeries I see and they seem to like bags- there are bag shops on every corner. I find a copy shop and hand over a juicy stack of Bach and Telemann to keep them in business today. Stacks of D. Foster Wallace essays next to the bed- a few weeks worth of food there. My hotel room is subjected to some incense and chanting, the wall art is cursed at/laughed at and hidden under the bed, the air conditioning switched off, windows flung open, pencils sharpened- now we can get down to work.
My 500GB hard drive is filled to the digital brim with mp3s though I hardly listen to them. Once in a while I put in a CD though I prefer the feeling and the effort of vinyl and have all but returned fully to it (funny perhaps coming from someone who has this particular site loaded with digital sound). I use my Iwhatever mainly for putting myself to sleep on planes and seldom for listening to anything with intensity. Right now it feels like there are simply too many releases so time is better spent selecting with care from the past and giving them the attention they deserve. Also I feel that modern recording, cutting, and mastering can verily turn shit to gold but that’s a whole ‘nother story innit.
Hotel fitness center: treadmills lined up against a glass wall which overlooks floors of office workers going overtime, smelling of apples and sweat over bossa nova tracks.
Hotel Bar: espresso cups are filled to the brim and CNN is played 24/7 over a massive flat screen.
Hotel Basement: saxophone practice is discouraged, though they have “nothing against music”.
Hotel Lobby: scores of american flight crews smile and re-assmeble themselves for their 8 hour lay over- I envy them not.
Room 1315- the quiet hum of hard drives, the distant flickering of TV towers, a maze of mobile receivers on buildings- otherwise emptiness.
Most coveted objects: a shruti box recently purchased, a pencil collection.
Here’s an old cassette mix for driving I made once, recently dug up:
One hour later:

Sushi restaurant with fish tanks galore
The pre-sushi swims in spiral formations
As the world reaches terminal velocity the last red tuna sure taste good
And the quiet bossas supplement the spiced rice wonderfully here in Brazil
Not so far away there are cold shootings
But right here there is raw fish and hidden sub woofers in the afro-black upholstery
The Sake smudges the epiphany
Outside, a transvestite blows smoke out into the night through it’s nose

Sao Paolo Guild

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:07:03 +0000

Sao Paolo’s arrival hall this Sunday morning is flooded and the hundereds of of passengers stream towards the one exit which lies behind the customs check. The barriers are similar to the ones I described in Barcelona a few days earlier, only now they are even longer( each sweep being a good 30 meters) and more uneven, sweeping around like lazy rivers. The amazing thing I observe here is that the passengers waiting before the barriers begin automatically start to curl in the same zig zag formations in rows, as if this kind of cattle line up has been somehow engrained into their cueing mentality. It is beautiful to watch. Scores of people passing by each other and making sudden turns for no reason.

Does a friendly smile and some idle chatter increase the chances of having overweight baggage overlooked and flagged through? After much thought I have decided it does not. There are greater forces than us at work at airport check-ins. Lady luck is in the game too. I encourage young musicians to go for light and compact instruments.

The flight passes with a few hours with Gould- I have his Well tempered piano and Webern recordings with me. Hardly light and compact his vehicle but how he gives it wings. Lovely.

Gould plays C major:
Gould plays not C major:

My Didj history

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:19:21 +0000

As I’ve been asked this week to reach into my didjereedu bag and play it on a certain open ear gig in Stuttgart, I thought I would write a few words about my history and my take on this instrument. Although I spent a few of my very early years on the burning continent called Oz I never remember any didjs anywhere, all I do recall is searing heat, red sand, nose-bleeds, the scent of sunscreen and the buzz of a thousand mosquitos. Much later, in the early nineties I came across one in a drum store in Germany whilst searching for nose flutes. I tooted away for a bit after the shop guys told me about where this piece of hollow wood came from. I’m sure if you’ve ever tried to buy a didj you will remember the didj seller’s pupils dilating and his words start to tremble slowly as he relays with excitement and respect how the original dijs from the great red mothership are hollowed out by termites and simply “found”. Anyway, I liked the sounds more than the sales pitch and I had already been into circular breathing (by the way, one thing on my first solo cd Circe I never liked in retrospect is the constant use of circular breathing, back then I thought it was something different, something special- it’s not, it is one of the easier “advanced” sax techniques and I think it should be employed with caution- it’s ok to breathe ) and so I took it with me on my next trip to Iceland. That was 1995. No one in Iceland had seen one of these things before and each weekend, when most of Rekjavik are busy spending a good portion of their weeks wages on bottles of brenavin and could hardly stand straight, I coerced them with my long rod into giving me the rest of their wages. I made a very tidy living in those two months thanks to the Aussie sound stick debut on the Nordic island. By the time I recorded Circe in 1996 I used it as I liked the contrast to the Soprano which I was playing all the time. Is that really enough justification for using such an instrument in hindsight? I’m not so sure.
What exactly do I mean when I write such an instrument. What gives this one a special position as opposed to the sax I’ve always played on. I think the thing that unsettled me most about the modern euro-didj in all it’s dancefloor/jazzed/groovy splendour is that it is constantly used as an “effect” as opposed to how it is used in it’s original context. (It’s immediate “getting” of people I put down to some of the same reasons as overtone singing does – it bypasses certain levels of surface musical cognition and appreciation and cuts through to a deeper one without much pomp and circumstance. Admittedly,that can be a good and useful but only in doses and away from the stage in my books). Now, is that necessarily a bad thing? There’s no straight answer to that and all the arguments will be long and futile when it boils down to what exactly an effect is. Feuerbach sums it up well when he writes for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, representation to reality, appearance to essence…only illusion is sacred. Save it to say I shelved my didj in public and only pull it out at home once every few moons. If a layman were to ask me to put all this in a street sentence I would advise him thus: Don’t fuck with it, it’s holy. And still I am as far removed from 40 thousand years of Dreamtime and the spirits a Didj could evoke within it as one could possibly be- at least now I know that much for sure. Long journeys begin with such recognitions. As a certain little Skye Chisholm yesterday spake: “I want to cry, I want to watch the stars and cry”

New York

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:52:49 +0000

The spanking new Terminal ONE at Barcelona airport sports a couple of features which I find not only amusing but also fairly representative of the modern condition in all it’s glorious absurdity. The first is the cattle-like separation barriers before the security check which makes you walk to and fro (a distance of 25 meters each to and each fro) 6 times before you are allowed to take your leather belts and shoes off, making the distanced walked around 150 meters instead of around 4. I think this might serve a purpose if over 1000 people suddenly and simultaneously descended on security- I’m yet to see that. The interesting point to notice is the vacant stares on the passengers faces, the unquestioning acceptance (and with this wonderful system you get to see each face at least 6 times)I didn’t even see any one smiling at this feature. All the same, these are most excellent training areas for breathing. Well, onward to number two.

These modern wonders are found at various airports now and are coined “SmokersPoint” (joined words with a capital in the middle a twist of modern German that sends shivers up the spine) or “Smoking Box”, even ” Smokers meet”. They are small glass boxes, usually smattered with Camel adverts, and if you can manage to make out any figures on the inside, they will all be in there, puffing away before take off. Sometimes if you are lucky you see them without ventilation, making for incredibly beautiful accidental hazy mirages spiked in the middle of pristine airport walkways. Although I’m a non-smoker, the current assault on smokers makes me enjoy the taste of passive smoke once in a while, depending on which lungs it is passing in and out of. Sometimes it tastes just a bit like freedom.

Whilst writing this: although I’m eternally into doing the right things health-wise I can never resist the self inflicted pain of a dodgy little Nescafe machine where the lurid black gold costs a mere 1,50 (compared to the 2,60 cokes and sugar treats next to it. The machine shakes and rattles, loud sine tones emit when the beverage is finished being poured into the dodgy little plastic cups and the dodgy scent begins to spread out, a dodgy little cloud of processed coffein floating out towards the smokers cabin as shoe after belt after shoe is removed behind me and another machine beeps for no reason.

Post scriptum, in my home town of New Plymouth in NZ there is no security checks, only a few placid gazes from some roaming sheep (actually not so far away from the looks in paragraph one of this post). You walk out onto the runway and board a sleek little Air New Zealand jet. Not a beep to be heard. End of story. I shouldn’t give away secrets like that, they’ll probably change it tomorrow.

A few hours later and I am on Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, marvelling at the sea of Russians before me. The Brighton Bizarre is packed with Russian treats and most people talk to you in Russian right off the bat. I love it.
On the beach itself it is early in the morning and contrasts abound. A group of around one hundred what I believe to be Haitians are dressed in white, drumming, and deep in the throws of a mass baptism, right in the middle of a group of fleshy Russian pensioners enjoying the morning sun. Asking one of the Odessa Jewry (all seated on their portable deck chairs) what is going on with this baptism he replies with a think accent: ” I don’t even know my own traditions and you expect me to know what the hell they are doing”. New York is good for these kinds of scenes.

Here’s some sensual Afrikaans that took my fancy:

Penedes

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:39:40 +0000

Villafranca del Penedes
Since days I’ve heard nothing but cicadas and wind
A searing heat blisters the grapes and white stones of the town
Come afternoon, the wrap-around shades and señoritas disappear
Café amb gel- the hot coffein hits the ices and lets out muffled screams
A white room with a lawyer doing her best to bite the Catalan and let the Spanish flow
I nod
The orthodox Maria on the wall is weeping
There’s endless sadness in the heat
Outside, a baby cries then coughs then cries again
Tears and sweat meet alchemistically like the coffee on ice
High noon on the Peninsula in no man´s land.
A boy, blinded by the sun, asks me what “sophisticated” means.
The Maria, sobbing, points to her burning solar plexus.

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 21:13:05 +0000

Another German Wings flight from Cologne to Spain. Empty airports and seamless check ins fill me with hope. Cologne has a nice invention shop at the airport that sports individual banana flight cases so as not to get your banana squashed in a bag. Security lines are empty- bliss. I board the plane last and my ears pop automatically. The train ride to follow, the boarding and deboarding are all blurred into one long familiar gesture. Observing endless scenes for the xth time it hits me again- surely consciousness and not matter must be the fundamental. Norbu then comes to me ” Duality is the real root of our sufferings and all our conflicts…”- it’s worth breathing deeply through that one and the plane rides give us endless time for that. Here’s a good cleansing breath well explained from my favourite soho yoga teacher- I often use it when the air is good.

Touching down in Spain we get to walk on the run way- I always consider this a good omen. After the endless cattle-like bus transports, this uncommon leg usage rehumanizers us and earths us ever so slightly. My favourite 80yr old geomancer always tells me to bath to shower after long plane rides to rebalance the body’s charge after the long enclosure in metallic cases. In the train I’m reading some chapter’s from Pinchbeck’s 2012 book and loving it. One quote from the leaves sticks:

“What appears to be the established order of present-day civilisation is actually only the inert but spectacular movement of a high velocity vehicle whose engine has already stopped functioning” Arguelles

An intellectual vibration smack dab in the middle of the spectrum:

Stammtisch

admin — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:42:50 +0000

The Stammtisch was a blast. Around twenty 80 year olds were mad keen to tell me all about the Erzgebirge and order me one Schnapps after another. Outside the sun was burning down and Rudi was playing and singing in the corner. The whole affair went on for a good 4 hours. Twice I was asked which latitude New Zealand lay on. Here is a song of Rudi’s which gives you a good idea of how hard it was for me to follow him at first. By the way this was one of the forbidden songs in the old East.

The next days were spent in the forests of this beautiful region, sampling one deer goulash after another until we headed north to the festival at Rudolstadt. Large festivals always make me nervous and this one was no exception. The festival iteslf seemed to me to be a very large Djembe and didjereedon’t magnet but there were some highlights in between. I spent some time with Bobo, the angel of Rammstein I had once seen behind the burning cage ( the cage is gone now)- these days one of her projects is a re-working of folk melodies and we exchanged memories of Rammstein and other permeations of Teutonic verse. One of the nice things about this film apart from the great team around me is that they are are ready to go deep into every possible hue of German music- this in itself is already taking us to some very interesting spaces. There are of course, walls of cliches to go through and also a lot of misunderstanding from within. But from what I have experience so far, their years of research into this area is well worth it.
On Saturday Germany played Argentina and our filming took place in the think of in the town of Jena- with 1000’s of screaming fans and flags around me I could softly whisper to myself some of the songs I had learnt over the last few days. Some of them may seem a little odd at first until you hear the stories behind them. After there performance today in the soccer I decide to burn my Scottish passport (not the Kiwi one, I may need that if the world caves in) and simply give in, I like wurst and precision, I like punctuality and black bread, I liked those 4 beautiful goals and the dark beer that showered me on the market square of Jena. O, du alle schoenste Zier, scheiden das bringt Graemen.

Erzgebirge

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:55:41 +0000

On the Sunday I travelled back to Liepzig with the film team where I met the Gewandthaus Choir who were readying themselves to travel to planet Stelzen to perform their Volksmusik program. On the bus I had a long chat with their conductor Gregor, a nice young guy with a tattoo on one shoulder and a small baby nursed in his other arm. He told me about the themes of the songs and why they are still as current as ever: love, separation, nostalgia, and the myriad of colours from the human heart. The Choir had put together a program of Silcher, a composer who had created one of the most important collections of German folk songs. Even if he is lesser known today than he perhaps should be his collection is important. I get to play with them back in the barn as above us the accordions still lazily stretch out from the roof and the manure organ hangs ominously behind us, waiting for the next chance to open it’s wings and croak out it’s wonderful microtones. After the concert and the euphoria of Germany’s 4-1 trouncing of England has subsided, we all gather on a hill and I get to sing some songs with them. I’ll never forget this one:
Morgen muss ich fort von hier, und muss Abschied nehmen…..

The next stop is the heart of the Erzgebirge close to the Czech boarder. It is here I meet the bandoneon player Rudi Vogel- German Soul music with a capital S. His story is a long one and I get to take it over a few days as he shows me the little bandoneon workshop in Klingenthal (sound-valley as I like to call it) where his instruments were made. Rudi is now in his 70’s and only plays the odd wedding, singing songs that were once forbidden under DDR rule. He tells me how he was asked by Honecker and co to accompany their parties until the mid 70’s when he couldn’t take that kind of society any more. He then was forced to stop playing in public and had to wait a good 20 years for the wall to fall before be began anew. He plays me songs that were once forbidden for the most bizarre of reasons. He talks and then he plays- all day long. His accent is so broad it makes the folk from Stelzen seem like English news readers. It takes me a long time to really tune in.

He is a tall man and he is walking breathing music. Without his bandoneon he doesn’t add up to much, he tells me. If he doesn’t play he suffers vicious pain and cannot sleep. His face is a mixture of an old man’s and a 7 year old boy’s. He’s never left these mountains. The songs seem simple at first but when I try to play along they are anything but- tonics become dominants become sub dominants become forbidden again. After a long day of songs and story telling my brain and heart are filled to the brim. It’s something else to meet a soul like this.

This film is supposed to be about German Folk music. Once you move behind the clichees you get into a different zone that for me has nothing to do with German culture itself but more with Ur-emotions- the very roots of human understanding. From a musicians perspective an old guy playing three chords on a bandonoen may seem like a quaint notion but hearing the stories behind the songs and listening closer reveals a whole new layer of meaning. This guy is on his own planet, he is as far away from the music I heard last weekend as a New Zealand Maori is from a Mongolian shepherd- only they happen to speak a similar language here. There seems to be a universe of variation within this German speaking music world and I’m sure it’s similar elsewhere. In general, the music here is more about Melody than Rhythm. There are no dances in the Erzbegirge, only songs. The rhythms are simple but the melodies can be complex and winding, even 3 chords can be combined to make difficult forms. I start to feel more strongly how much the European classical music owes to such folk traditions. With Rudi you also understand how politics tried to smother these songs which simply wouldn’t die. Another of Rudi’s favourite pain-killing schnaps quickly halts such trains of thought.

Tomorrow we go to a Stammtisch, a coffee and cake affair for pensioners which Rudi plays and sings at. It is deep in the forest in a small Gasthaus. I can’t wait to hear their stories.

Stelzen

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 07:47:05 +0000

For the last few days I have been at a place which isn´t easy to describe. Stelzen is a tiny village deep in the heart of the old DDR. Around the village are rolling hills and beautiful patches of forest and the local folk tell their stories with broad accents. Gareth had told me a lot about the annual ¨Stelzenfestspiele¨ but I understand now why it is something that needs to be experienced to really understand.

I arrived on the Wednesday and spent sometime outside the huge barn that the people of the village had built to house the famous ¨Landmaschinen Symphonie¨and other concerts of the festival. The mastermind of all of this is one of Gareth´s viola buddies from the Gewandthaus Orchestra in Liepzig, Mr Henry Schneider. Inside the huge barn, a handful of souls watched a soccer game with the flat b of the soccer trumpets, outside I watched a farmer turning hay and the sun turning red- in my headphones I had the perfect track, a Brahms sonata just made for hay turning:

Inside the barn (which can easily seat 1000 people) they have turned a manure machine into a large organ, beautifully detuned and hung above the stage. Where once manure flowed through pipes, compressed air now fires up the long trumpet pipes. Bowling balls run along the roof of the barn and fall into oil drums. Lengthened accordions fall 8 meters from the roof playing themselves. Tractors are driven in and the rhythm of the engine is used to count in Ellington numbers. Donkeys are amplified at the mouth so that the sound of crunching carrots blends in with the Haydn. Bycicles are turned upside down and Beethoven is played on the spinning wheels with sandpaper. Farmers play Xenakis-like textures on violins and the begin to chop wood whilst having their pulses measured for the next Haydn tempos. Films of Cows and Sheep eating are shown with my humble bagpipes playing fragments of Schubert. A Farmer sings an aria. More bowling balls. All of this is executed with a Teutonic precision and with only the faintest hint of irony- that’s because it is all about the sound of these machines. Some may giggle at the sight of all this but many simply close there eyes and fall into the rhythm and sound. It’s as perfectly natural as it is completely far out.

Not long before the concert Henry hands me some Bach scores- the Art of Fugue will run beneath some of the tractor engines. I like to think I am alright at transposing at sight and the rehearsal was fine but when the concert came and the barn was packed out with over a thousand fans and the spotlights were burning me in my tails more than any infra red sauna could do, my brain didn’t manage to quite compute the Bach. Henry didn’t seem to mind.

Behind me is Erwin on accordion- he is the guy who has built a lot of these strange machines and transformed the farm machinery into instruments.This year he had truck seats with him that trigger synthesisers as well as a host of gadgets. On keyboards is Wolfgang who, when he is not composing music to accompany his films about animals eating, stamps out the piano rolls for Nancarrow scores. Shortly before the concert his wife comes in with their donkey and some cake. Thomas plays bass in the Gewandthaus and comes each year to join this madness. The full moon is red moments before we go on stage. Wolfgang explains to me the point of wearing tails (something to do with large stomachs in days gone by). It seems like many pilgrims have travelled here from far away. Augen zu und durch Jungs.

As if all of this wasn’t enough the film team I am working with on the German folk music project have arrived and this is our first port of call. And so on top of the donkeys and manure organs we also have film cranes and steady cams in the mix. On the day following the concert I visit with them the “Bachwiesen”: a beautiful meadow on which the entire works of Bach are played nonstop for an entire week. I nervously play the fugue I had butchered the night before, asking Johann for forgiveness. Not far from that a caravan is set called “singing stones”, where I am allowed to listen with a stehoscope the sounds of various stones underwater, some sounding like soldiers’ steps, some like falling snow.

Henry’s master plan is to transform the barn into a huge instrument. He tells me it comes a little from sitting inside the sound of the Gewandthaus Orchester and wanting others to experience the exhilaration of sitting within the sound instead of simply being in front of it. As he tells me this his eyes light up and become crystalline. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years his barn is just that: an enormous Landmachinen Symphony which you can sit inside of. I can’t wait to come back to that.

More Breath

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:01:26 +0000

A little postscriptum to yesterday’s breath work- may sound a little ethereal but it’s as close as I can get to describing the act of sinking the consciousness. By observing and feeling deeply all of these sensations in the inward breath, you actually become the breath- you enter the hara, you are there via the breath. Now, as soon as you start to think about all of this you are already back in the head but don’t worry, just return to the breath and you will shift back. Everything seems to come in waves. Personally I can hold the practice comfortably for around 15 minutes. The more you do it the more you can shift into this state naturally and extend it, especially in playing situations.

Some of this practice reminds me of some lyrics in this song by David Sylvian that always used to get me. The stage sound was a whisper with all the in-ear monitoring and in my little wedge I had only his voice- whether he meant it or not he was certainly channelling something that struck a chord in me.

Sell, sell,
Bid your farewell
Come, come
Save yourself
Give yourself over
Pushing your consciousness
Deep into every atom and cell

On a slightly lower vibrational level I would like to share an email I received after landing from my Ryan Air odyssey. No commentary is needed here other than to say that even something like this is a an opportunity to practice sinking the breath.

Hi Hayden
We are looking for a really good looking Saxofpone (sic(for the rest of the mail)) player for the Europe tour of :
Sun Storke Project ! – you might have seen it at “Grand Prix de Eurovision”
Video
The tour will be end of 2010 all over Europe, it will be well boocked and well payed.
please let us know if you can imagine to join !
Olia the singer suggested you – she is a fan of you :)
so if you could alreaddy confirm end of october and novermber,
we should be fine ..- i think that is very good !
Best Greetings,
Peter xxxxxxx

HI Peter,
thanks for the mail. The track sounds fantastic- right up my alley. Could you send me the exact dates and details and maybe I can help you out personally I recommend you the right player, full of sound and fury,strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage.
Greetings,
Hayden