After sitting out the last couple, I’m back in the game with twist. As “Drei Viertel Drei”, Katharina and I entered our song “Lollipop Lady” into the first round. The challenge was to write a song about a childhood nightmare that featured rubato, so we worked up a song about a little boy and his fear of his local lollipop lady (or crossing guard for those of you outside the UK). Here it is:

Thirty-four entries were made into the first round, with some really strong competition. My personal favourite was Rebecca Angel’s song “Monster’s Lullaby”, but there were several really good songs and a healthy number of pretty good (if needing work) songs. Our song came in at position 28, which sounds worse than it is, because we suffered badly in the public vote by not really doing too much promotion of the song. It wouldn’t have made that much difference, but it could have been enough to see us into the second round. One of the great things about SpinTunes over Song Fu is that each judge (5 in total, plus ‘Spin’ himself as backup judge) provides a review as well as a score. This, from Denise Hudson, really made me laugh:

This is terribly weird and really interesting. Psychological and troubling. I don’t really like it, but it’s because it BOTHERS me. And it’s not because it’s not well done. It’s because you are creepy.

or this…

As I hate this more and more and swear never to listen to it again, I put it higher in the rankings.

The general consensus amongst the reviewers is that the chorus and pre-chorus are much better than the verses. They were certainly more fun to write the music for, letting loose the creepiness, but they actually didn’t come together like that until the mixing stage. When the song was still being recorded, the verses were actually the strongest part, but that may have been because of some fairly severe tempo changes in the choruses that made them quite tricky to record certain parts for.

We’re out of the official competition now, but can still produce “shadow” entries. We already have lyrics and a little music worked out for the next challenge: a slightly dark and sad love song. Keep an eye on my Twitter feed for more regular updates.

All 34 songs from round one are also available from Bandcamp. You can listen to the songs below or download the whole album – a great way to get hold of some creepy and fun songs without spending a cent/penny.

In the early days of SOS, I wrote a short story that appeared at “Great Hites” called “The Cave pt1″. It was prompted by the ‘polar bear’ news item that came up and was set about 4,000 years ago, providing an outside view of a historic meeting. There was always going to be a second part to the story and ‘Glimpses’ provided the opportunity to tell the rest of the tale. This new story is set in the same time period and focuses on a meeting between the clans and the advanced civilisation featured in the main storyline. Throw in a mind-controlled polar bear and some bad attitude and you know that it’s not going to end in cuddles. If you haven’t been following SOS, then this story gives you a flavour of the main story, but if you have then this is probably the most ‘essential’ of the Spin-offs I have written.

The story has been available in audio form at Podiobooks for months (there is an audio promo below), but has just been released in eBook format. You can find it in a range of formats for all e-readers, or to view on your computer, at Amazon(for Kindle users) and Smashwords(in many formats).

You can find out more about the book on Goodreads or Shelfari – please leave a review if you enjoy any of the stories. We really want to get the news out there about the collection.

Until the end of December, sign up to my newsletter to receive occasional news about my writing and music, and you will receive a voucher code to enjoy a copy of the Glimpses eBook for free. That’s 11 great short stories that will introduce you to new worlds and new authors, without spending a dime/penny/cent.

At the other end of the creative line is an article by Julia Sherred at Geek Mom about new music marketing models. There you’ll find a range of opinions from musicians working on getting their music out to the public (including me), using some of the tools available online. There are some interesting ideas included and many are applicable beyond just music distribution. Worth a look.

I have started using Bandcamp for my own recordings, as I believe it offers the best experience for listeners. You can listen to the track right here and if you like it, download it straight away in whatever format you like – from high quality FLAC files to standard mp3s. Lyrics and artwork is all included, so when you view the song in a suitable player (e.g. an iPod touch or iPhone) you can view all those as the songs play. You can also choose to pay whatever you like, so you can download it for free, or pay something to encourage me to write more! All the music is also released under a Creative Commons licence, so you can download it and share it with your friends. If you liked it, then chances are good that they will too!

If you have use Goodreads, you can also add it to your shelf and download it directly from their site, using the following button:

The short story has been available previously only in podcast audio format from Every Photo Tells…, but you can now read it at your leisure on your eBook reader of choice.

If you enjoy the story, Katharina has also made her short story “The Ladder” available in the same format, as well as the whole novel of “Wiener Blut“. Have a look at the links below (click each cover) – short preview copies are available to give you a flavour of the story if you want to try before buying.

Enjoy a trip to Vienna!

However, they do form a thematic album of some sort, so I’ve pulled them all together and stuck them into an album on last.fm. All the tracks are free to download, though you can only play short clips on the website itself. It’s not ideal, but if you want them they are all there.

The songs are presented in reverse chronological order, meaning that they get older and rougher as the playlist progresses. Highlights for me are ‘What is wrong?’, the song that features one of the longest words in the English language (the official chemical name for ‘Tryptophan Synthetase’) in a sort of mock-opera style, the ridiculously so-happy-I-could-punch-you fun of ‘Happy People’ and the rather silly charity song ‘Big Red Nose’

First of all, a new episode of the podcast series was posted yesterday and it features something that was set up back in episode 4. Admittedly, because of the nature of the podcast and its audience-influenced plot-lines, at that time I had no idea what it was set up for, but once I did, it was just a matter of sitting on it until an appropriate time. The pace will be stepping up a gear or two over the next few episodes, as a result of this event. I have already started writing the next episode, so keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

Polls

There is a new poll, ready for you to vote on. In the past I had to rely on third party poll sites that were either awkward to work with or didn’t do what I want them to do. The new, integrated poll fits the design of the SOS site, lets me include links on each poll item so that you can visit the original news items before making your informed decision to vote for the three things you’d like me to inflict on the characters. The new system even lets me provide a poll archive, so clicking on the ‘Polls‘ menu item will show all the polls from the past. Unfortunately this ability will only be available from this week’s poll onwards, but I hope you find it useful.

Wiki

Over on the SOS Wiki page, there have been a number of additions to bring the wiki up to date with the plot, such as discovering the name of the ‘Sidhe‘, adding in new locations, characters and items of technology. There was a spam attack on the wiki a few weeks ago, which slipped past because of some settings that have now been changed. It is a really useful resource for listeners of the podcast and don’t forget that anyone can register as a user there and make their own additions to the information there.

Subscribe!

There are a number of existing spin-offs that I will be dropping into the feed as well, in between regular episodes. In the past these have been spread around all over the place, but I am keen to bring them all into the main feed. For a while there has also been the ability to choose a special feed, for example if you are a podiobooks.com listener, but would like to grab all the spin-offs to enjoy. It was never very clear how this works, though, so I have added a Subscribe page that lists the special feeds you can access along with a nice shiny iTunes button to press if all that sounds too complicated and you just want to listen to the whole podcast.

This weekend we hit two milestones over at Every Photo Tells….

First of all, we published our fiftieth short story on the podcast. That’s rather impressive, considering that we would have been happy to have been publishing our twentieth by this stage and that is due to the writers who have been inspired by our monthly photographs to write stories of their own.

Thank you to everyone who has submitted a story to us since we started. We have had some really positive feedback about how we are treating people’s stories and listener numbers continue to climb steadily, so we must be doing something right.

Secondly, February sees the start of our second year of production. Yes, it has been a whole year since we started the podcast! By the end of the month we will have included a total of 52 episodes in our feed, effectively one story per week.

We’re already looking forward to compiling ‘Book 2′ for release on podiobooks.com, as well as some other new ideas for the website.

Mr Lowell reads the stories himself and has a very relaxed and clear delivery that is easy on the ears, but if you’re not a fan of podcast fiction, the series is also being released in book format.

Thanks to Nathan for providing such a great series for free download at podiobooks.com and I look forward to future explorations in the same world. He will also be appearing in later episodes of Wiener Blut, where he plays a major character who is important in the second half of the story.

From Every Photo Tells… comes my other new story this week. It’s another Wiener Blut spin-off, longer this time, set in another character’s past in the midst of one very cold winter. It could be considered a bit of a spoiler for the main story, so you might want to leave it until that is complete, but it certainly won’t ruin anything major.

Every Photo Tells… has just been added to the Duotrope writers’ market listings, so we hope to be bringing some stories from a whole new group of authors to our listeners in the near future.

For the moment, it’s back to writing on Some Other Scotland and then I have a couple of other short story projects that I might consider, if time allows, before the end of this month.

A more successful story from NaNo this year is Wiener Blut, a novel written by Katharina Maimer, who you should be familiar with from our ongoing Every Photo Tells… podcast. Wiener Blut (Viennese Blood) is a modern fantasy about two very different worlds, set in Vienna and steeped in the history and traditions of that city’s café culture. Katharina has made the first chapter available as a free PDF download, but is also in the process of releasing it in podcast form, with the first three episodes and a stand-alone short story already released. Here is the short introduction, for a taster of the story:

My own input into the podcasting process has been the editing of the episodes as well as recording all the music. The theme tune is ‘Es wird scho glei dumpa’, a traditional Austrian Christmas song. I have mixed several versions with different instrumentation, though the one appearing in the podcast is a simple classical guitar arrangement. Katharina has also released it in song form, with her singing the lyrics (in German, of course) alongside a slightly different arrangement. You can find this at the Music page of the official website.

I have also been invited to delve into the world of Wiener Blut in my own writing, so expect to see my next EPT story being set in Vienna, as well as a very short story for the 100 Word Stories podcast in the not too distant future.

My rate slipped a little on Friday as I was en route to the wonderful city of Vienna to visit Katharina, who you may be familiar with from her work on the Every Photo Tells… podcast. She is blazing ahead with her own NaNo story, which is coming together very nicely. We have worked well together at pushing ideas around about our respective stories.

The plot of my story is not yet fully formed, but I know enough to get me through the next week or so.

Tonight we ventured out into the city centre to our first NaNo write-in, hosted by ‘damole’ and ’01′ above a fantastic little bookshop. The large room was fairly dark, lit only by two small lamps and the screens from almost twenty laptops. There was coffee, chocolate, crisps, NaNo stickers and well-read rubber ducks.

Topics for the evening included kilts, the difference between evaporated and condensed milk, tribbles, word counts (of course) and the ongoing battle against Germany and Switzerland for best average daily word count. We had a twenty minute word sprint that gave me an extra 600 words, though that was far from the best score in the group – some people can type really fast!

A great day of writing and indulging, being productive and having fun. I’m here for another week and hoping to return to Scotland with a much enhanced word count.

• He is something of a stereotypical big-business type, very much old school, somewhere between Simon Cowell, Victor Meldrew and Gordon Gecko, with an insatiable appetite for money and young flesh and very little else.
• She is an experimental clarinettist, making a comfortable living by giving her music away online for free and performing around the world to a growing and loyal following. She’s still young, but has been around for long enough to know what works, what doesn’t and how to jump over some of the common pitfalls of the music biz.

Click here to see my NaNo profile, where you can read an excerpt from the start of the story.

I have two main characters worked out and a pretty good idea of the first three or four scenes. Beyond that is where there be dragons: uncharted and unplanned territory. Now that I’ve made this small start, I’ll go back to the planning and fill out a bit more, in preparation for further writing after sleep and work. Until then it feels good to have got this off the ground and I’m looking forward to drinking far too much coffee, suffering finger cramps and doubtless the odd time or two questioning my sanity for starting this endeavour. It was worth it by the end of NaNo 2008; I have no doubt the same will apply this time around to.

I have stuck my word count and progress meter on the site – it’s over on the right hand side above the NaNo logo. With luck and grim determination, each one of those little boxes will be green by the end of the month and I will have a new novel of at least 50,000 words.

Back to the story!

Well, they’re not.

And as of today, even fewer are, with a group of musicians deciding that ‘un oeuf is enough’, leaving Myspace en-masse and making a statement that, whilst it was once, for a short time, a great way to find music, the world has moved on, leaving it far behind. Today has been designated “Quit Myspace Day”, so why not do what I’ve been considering for months now, but do it as part of a movement seeking to send a message to the powers that be: “Myspace is broken and it’s too late too fix it.”

For more information, take a look at New Music Strategies where the idea was spawned, and I would also recommend taking a look at Steve Lawson‘s blog.

Steve is a perfect example of a musician making a reasonable living (not a superstar, but really, who would honestly want all the nonsense that accompanies that lifestyle?) I first came across his music on Twitter, through a link that someone else had posted, about a year ago. He plays solo bass, speaks on the ‘new’ music industry, Tweets like crazy and comes across as a sensible and well thought-out spokesman against the traditional record company model. On top of all that, his albums are released online and generally available on a ‘pay what you want’ basis and are full of great music. I would recommend his latest live album as a taster of what he does.

Once this blog post goes live, the Mick Bordet Myspace page will be gone within a matter of minutes. I suspect nobody on Myspace will notice.

The first thing to do is to clear the boards to make room for the novel. That means I can’t afford the time to be writing other things. No Some Other Scotland and no Every Photo Tells…, but don’t worry. The second part of the plan is to make October an almost-equally busy month by preparing those things in advance. By tonight I will have another episode of SOS and a short story ready for EPT ready to go. Before the end of the month I will have yet another SOS episode and another EPT story, so that I can release those in November and keep the podcasts ticking over whilst NaNoWriMo is in full swing.

The next thing to do is to start planning my novel for NaNo. I have made the decision what it will be and have a very sketchy outline drawn up in Scrivener (my writing software of choice), as well as starting to work out the background to the world in which the novel will be set, some 60 or so years in the future.

I’m planning on attending a few NaNo events too, mainly the regular “write-ins”, but possibly also a planning meeting if there is one held locally. It will be good, I hope, to get to meet some fellow writers and see what comes of these events.

I will be blogging about the whole experience on this site (just select the ‘NaNoWriMo‘ category on the left of this page to see all posts made to date about the topic) and probably doing daily wordcounts on twitter. Do stop by for updates, to leave comments or just to ask “Have you met your target today?”

As I write this, I have two rough ideas for what to write this November. One is the follow-up to the first book I wrote in 2008, set in the past and probably includes murders and time-travel. The second option is a riches-to-rags-to-riches tale set in a not too distant utopian future. Since my ideas for both are no more than basic sketches, I probably won’t decide on which one to go for until mid-October, at which point I will start the planning process.

So that I don’t slack off, for the following two months there will be a little graph of my progress on display here. Feel free to kick my virtual arse if you find me falling behind!

Fellow NaNos, if you’d like to add me as a buddy, my username is SOScotland (Click to view my profile).

Appearing on podiobooks will, we hope, bring in some new listeners as well as potentially some new authors too. The podcast is taking a break for August (there will be a photo and a single story, but no guest writers) whilst we get the podiobooks version completed, then will return in September. Over this period I’ll be working hard on ‘Some Other Scotland‘, so you can expect that to return to a much more regular schedule – Episode 20 has just been launched and there is plenty more to come.

Digital Magic

I played the role of ‘Captain Jack’ in Philippa Ballantine’s Digital Magic podcast novel. It’s just a short few lines in the middle of chapter twelve, but it was good to be asked and made a nice change from the norm.

Scotland Burns

Over at HorrorAddicts.net I voiced a couple of parts for Rhonda Carpenter’s short story about the Loch Ness Monster and the end of days, featured in Episode 37. You can hear just her story at her website here.

You can download the tune here or visit the album page where all the tracks submitted to the competition can be downloaded in a single file. All for free!

Octobass

I’m just back from a week in Paris where I visited the fantastic Cité de la Musique, home to the Musée de la Musique with its extensive collection of instruments from centuries ago up to the modern era. The focus of the museum is classical music, with only slight nods to folk/world/rock and other popular genres, but the collection is well-presented with many of the instruments on display accompanied by audio examples provided on a headset included in the ticket price. This is a great way to see and hear some really obscure old instruments.

Of particular interest to me were the wide range of lute-based instruments, glass wind instruments (the flutes in particular looked amazing), a glass harmonium, some truly bizarre brass instruments and the 3.5m tall Octobass (pictured here).

Moog Series 900

It was when I got to the top floor of the museum that my eyes popped out on stalks. The very first thing I saw as I came up the stairs was their RCA Theremin, complete with original RCA speaker enclosure. Beside it sat an Ondes Martenot and behind them a display of the more unusual instrumentation used in Varèse’s “Ionisation” – gongs, castanets, maracas, two sirens and the “lion’s roar”.

EMU Modular Synth

I should have taken out the camera by now, of course, but as I moved along the instruments I whisked it out and started clicking away. First up and close to hand (but not for touching or playing, unfortunately) was a Moog 900 Series modular synth.

Behind that sat the imposing form of the E-mu modular, but not just any model, oh no, this one was owned by none other than Frank Zappa.

EMS VCS-3 'Putney'

It’s hard not to love the VCS-3 ‘Putney’ synth, apparently simple in comparison to the big modulars, but overflowing with flexibility thanks to the pin-matrix used for shifting signals around and the rather dainty joystick. These little critters were all over the 70′s, from Pink Floyd to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Synclavier

Synclavier & DX7 mk1

Zappa was also a big fan of the Synclavier and there was an early model here too. Now, I don’t feel like I should be in a museum, but there behind the Synclavier is a DX7 mk1, the same model that sits in my studio. Yes, folks, I’m playing with a museum piece.

Gmebaphone (right side)

Gmebaphone (left side)

I had never heard of a Gmebaphone, a half-hexagonal synth console that wouldn’t look out of place on a low budget scifi movie from the 60′s, but one sits out at the end of the modern music display. Designed to synthesise sound within a 3D space, it certainly looks impressive, though I suspect its use is mainly in fairly academic circles.

The Cité de la Musique is certainly worth a visit – I just wish there were somewhere like that in Scotland.

If you are interested in what goes on behind the scenes to put together an episode of ‘Some Other Scotland‘, you may like to visit two blogs that have been running interviews with podcasters over the last few months.

First of all, Rich at Random Pimpage has a series called “8 Questions”, where he asks 8 simple, if sometimes a little bizarre, questions to a number of people from the world of podcasting. Since this tied-in with the launch of Every Photo Tells…, you’ll find Katharina’s and my answers together at the site.

On the subject of Every Photo Tells…, we’re now into our third month of photo-inspired stories and already up to episode 8. So far there have been tales of love, assassins, pirates, monsters and even a classic whodunnit. There is plenty more to come!

More recently, a more detailed set of questions were put to me about writing and podcasting by Odin at his View From Valhalla blog. His questions go into depth about writing podcast fiction, techniques and equipment for recording and the goals of podcasting. Since he has had a number of people answering his questions in this “How I Do It” series, I would recommend it as a great introduction for new podcasters to pick up tips from those of us who have been through the learning experience already. My answers can be found right here. Incidentally, Odin also runs a regular review of podiobooks, so if you are enjoying ‘Some Other Scotland’ and would like to delve into other podcast fiction, he has some good recommendations for you to try out.

Every month a photograph is posted on the website and the hosts, Katharina from the Luscious Leftovers podcast and myself, take it in turn to write and record a short story that is inspired in some way by the photograph. The stories will be podcast twice a month, then a new photo will be posted and the whole process repeats.

In the first month, we have a photograph taken from Edinburgh by Katharina, looking across the river Forth. We’re also pleased that Odin from View From Valhalla has been inspired by the photograph to write a story too, so this month there will be three stories to listen to. If you would like to submit a story based on the picture, full details of how to submit can be found on the ‘About‘ page of the website.

Katharina’s story for this month has just been posted on the site and mine will follow within a week.

I went to investigate the reason for one of my favourite bloggers’ recent quiet spells today (he has changed blog host before and I suspected that was the reason) to be met with some tragic news. Doug died following an incident where he was tasered by police at a store for a minor misdemeanour. Anyone familiar with his writings (and they are usually not for the faint-hearted) would recognise the events leading up to his run-in with the law, as he had described numerous similar encounters, all good-natured and almost always resulting in someone (okay, usually a teenage redhead) being left feeling good about themselves.

The fact is that Doug lived the rock ‘n’ lifestyle to the best of his ability; not the drug-addled, constant partying mythology, but the real, gritty, struggling musician fighting for good, live music in the face of audiences who want to hear the same crap as they are spoon-fed on x-pop-idle-factor. It took him a while, but he did find a venue for his own blend of cover versions and original compositions that took a Zappa-esque delight in mixing the serious with the absurd.

As well as music, he loved writing, most often in a style influenced by Hunter S Thompson or H P Lovecraft. His occasionally posted recipes were always entertaining to read (and yes, his Gumbo recipe is pretty damn awesome), as were his tales of how he discovered certain bands and his explanations of his own bass and guitar-playing influences.

I can say with confidence, that it was Doug’s blog and his dedication to music that helped get me back playing music regularly after a break of many years. It gave me great delight to hear his enthusiasm for the piece of music I constructed around his original solo bass tune, “Requiem”, which then featured on our first album, Eponymous Debut.

I had hoped that I’d get to work with Doug again in the future on another project, but that was not to be. He leaves behind him two great achievements. Firstly a small, but thought-provoking and entertaining body of written and musical work and secondly his daughter Katie, his pride and joy, whom he taught to question everything and enjoy a good fart joke.

So long, Doug, keep on rocking!

Mur Lafferty, author of “Playing for Keeps” and the “Heaven” podcast series amongst other things, has recently posted an article written by me on her “I Should Be Writing” blog.

The blog is the companion to her regular podcast aimed at new and aspiring writers, one that has provided a great deal of help and inspiration to guide me on my way. The article deals with the particular challenges of writing an ongoing piece of interactive fiction like “Some Other Scotland” and how I keep track of where it is going and ensuring it stays on course.

It is aimed at fellow writers, but if you are interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the SOS podcast, you might well find it interesting even if you’re not a writer. Do take the time to check out Mur’s own podcasts at the site; they are quite different to SOS, but you’re sure to find something of interest.

First of all, since I last posted, there have been another two stories posted to Great Hites, both ‘Some Other Scotland‘ spin-off tales.

Since these are spin-off, they will both appear in the main SOS podcast feed in the future.

In addition to those, I recently included a 100-word story in the SOS feed that was to have been submitted to the 100 Word Stories podcast. It also gives more information about the first attack on the ‘Merk’ in a highly-condensed form.

There was also a bonus prompt for Great Hites recently for a 100-word story, written with a tight deadline, on the subject of “Spicy Mustard”. Like “Kelvin’s Last Message”, this is set in the future of SOS and may never come to pass. I will post the link to this when it becomes available.

Finally, just a reminder that there is a link on the right of this page that will take you to all my short stories, headed “Mick’s Short Stories“.

This week’s Great Hites episode includes the biggest number of stories to date, with a number of new authors joining in and existing authors pulling out all the stops to make this a really good stepping-on point if you’ve never visited the site before.

The prompt for the stories was “Silver Bullets; the real reason that some cowboys carried them” and as you can imagine this has resulted in a number of werewolf-westerns as well as a few more unusual approaches. There are 12 stories in total, so Jeff has split it into 4 chunks, but it is all well worth a listen or two.

Two of the stories are mine: “Waltzing with Werewolves” is a 100 word love story set to music in a sort of spoken-song format, whilst “Silver Solves The Dilemma” is a fairly traditional western tale, but with werewolves and a somewhat skewed moral code.

Incidentally, the introduction music for each part that Jeff talks over is the theremin solo from The Ballad of Rufus Amos Adams – the country song I wrote some time ago for the Masters of Song Fu. Follow the link for the whole song.

Over on ‘Some Other Scotland‘ this week, the action heads over the Atlantic to New York where the final scene shows how the influence of the story is reaching far beyond the shores of Scotland, with some devastating consequences. I was delighted to have Philip ‘NorvalJoe‘ Carroll join me as the guest voice for Razer’s American friend Kyle, who provides him with a place to lay low for a while. The two of us also concocted the creepy promo for Great Hites that you’ll hear in the same episode, which was fun to put together.

Live Interview and Chat

Finally, I have been invited to do a live interview and call-in chat with Podioracket.com on BlogTalkRadio on the 10th of August. I will have more information about this shortly, but in the meantime, visit this link to set an email reminder of when the show will be broadcast.

Over at Great Hites, my story “Take It Away” has proved reasonably popular amongst the people who take the time to vote. It tells of a great pianist who returns to his old school, whereupon he sits down at the old wreck of a piano he last played in his youth. The music teacher who stands watching him is surprised by the result.

This coming week is going to see a bumper Great Hites episode, with 12 stories being included, no doubt due to the prompt being related to cowboys and werewolves. More details when the episode is posted online, but I wrote two stories for the prompt, one of which just so happened to also fit the prompt for 100 Word Stories this week, which was “The games we play”. That means you’ll be able to read and/or listen to one of my stories from next week’s Great Hites in advance. It is called “Waltzing with Werewolves” and is in a spoken-song format with musical accompaniment.

Some major changes are afoot in the world of ‘Some Other Scotland‘ later this week, with something that will force the plot out into the public view in a rather impressive fashion. I’m keen to get another interlude episode out this week as well, so keep an eye on the website.

Finally, I have had some great support from Seth Harwood, author of “Jack Wakes Up”, following his appearance on the live Podioracket talk show. He has very kindly played the promo for SOS on the latest episode of his “Hot Tub” podcast, side-by-side with one for Arlene Radasky’s book “The Fox“. Arlene has been a strong supporter of SOS from early in the life of the podcast and I’ll be talking a little about her book in the next Interlude episode.

My latest short story to appear at ‘Great Hites’ is called “The Cave“. It is another short spin-off from ‘Some Other Scotland’, taking us back to the events (thousands of years ago) that set in motion much of what is taking place with Harald and Razer in the story at the moment. Remember the seemingly innocuous comment about cloning polar bears back in episode 8? Well, this story returns to that topic. The events mentioned here will be covered in SOS, though from a different perspective. This story is subtitled “part 1″, as there is more to tell about what happened in the cave…

The short stories will be taking a break from linking to SOS for a couple of weeks, covering different topics for a while. I don’t want to go overboard with SOS and make you all sick of it!

Podiobooks

Welcome to new visitors coming here from Podiobooks.com. The version of the story on podiobooks does not include the news items or the extras I include in the main podcast feed, the spin-offs and Interludes, just the story itself. I was delighted to gain over 100 new listeners within the first three days live at podiobooks, putting SOS into their top ten for this month, alongside some of the big names in podcast fiction. If you are enjoying the story on podiobooks, please do take the time to rate the podcast and leave a comment, as well as stopping by the main SOS website to vote in the poll. Follow @SOScotland on Twitter to be notified of news, poll postings and new episodes.

Finally, I was interviewed recently about SOS by Rhonda Carpenter of Podioracket, a podcast that covers everything new in the world of podcast fiction and features interviews with authors, news, competitions and promotional details of new books. If you are enjoying SOS or Great Hites, I would recommend paying them a visit for lots of ideas for what to listen to. I’ll put up a direct link to the interview when that episode comes out.

No, it’s not a UFO or an airship – it’s the blimp flying over T in the Park, just down the road.

This week’s Great Hites story is ready and waiting to be read and/or downloaded. It is called “Dandelions Of Memory” and is another ‘Some Other Scotland‘ tie-in, probably the most direct so far, featuring Erica at the airport before heading off towards Skara Brae. Go and have a listen and don’t forget to vote for your favourite!

My 100 Word Story last week had the most votes (thank you to all who enjoyed it enough to vote for it), so I got to choose the topic for this week, which is “Shrouded in mist”. I had no great plan for the topic, it is simply what I saw when I looked out the window at the time. However, it did result in me writing the shortest SOS spin-off so far. I’ve had something of a Harald special for this week of writing and both that story and my next Great Hites story give a little more background to him, tying into him being the focus of the latest SOS episode.

There is a new episode of ‘Some Other Scotland’ ready for download, the topic this week being ‘Ghost’. Please have a listen and don’t forget to vote for the future plot twist! On the SOS site you’ll find a couple of audio promos for the podcast, set to some Song Fu tracks from the past. If you have a podcast or can use them in any way – please do! Let me know what you do with them, too.

Finally, I have just had confirmation that SOS will soon (17th July) be available at Podiobooks.com – probably the best online source of free podcast stories, with all sorts of things available there, including several that have gone on to become published novels. They are very focused on the story, so the version of SOS that will appear at podiobooks will lack the news items and any other chat from me, having only the story itself. Note that subscribing to the podcast there will not include ‘Interlude’ or ‘Spin-off’ episodes which can only be downloaded from the main SOS site, but if you want to hear them you can still just download those individual episodes.

It has been a busy week for writing, with a new episode of ‘Some Other Scotland‘ and two new short stories.

Over at Great Hites episode 59 you will find “Kelvin’s Last Message”, a tale of two UFO hunters trying to follow a pattern of sightings and ending up getting more than they bargained for. The prompt this week was “It is verboten”, which had me struggling for a while until I remembered that ‘verbo’ is a word that appears on my mobile phone’s predictive text when I try to type in ‘tesco’ (the biggest supermarket chain in the UK, for those unfamiliar with it). Upon further investigation, I found that the keys used to spell ‘ten’ could also spell UFO and the idea came from that. I like the idea that so much can change at the delicate interface between man and machine.

Although I didn’t set out to create another spin-off from SOS this week, this could be read as one, given what we know about unusual flying contraptions in that world. It is open-ended enough that it could foreshadow what is coming in SOS, but don’t hold your breath – the story changes tack every week, so anything is possible.

The 100 Word Podcast features my story “Gruel”, taking the run of animal-related diseases we’re in the midst of and extrapolating a little, where eating meat becomes a game of chance with more serious consequences.

Don’t forget to vote for your favourite stories at both GH and 100WS!

The first of the Great Hites Anthology episodes will be coming out fairly soon, so I have done a couple of short promo recordings to (hopefully) help Jeff reach a wider audience. One was just me chatting, whilst the other was a collaborative effort with Norval Joe, another Great Hites regular, and was really quite fun to do. I’ll certainly be including it within the SOS feed as well as linking to it from here once Jeff is ready to launch.

Great Hites episode 58 is ready to view and download now. My story this week is more of a short character study than previous entries have been, dealing with a single woman struggling to come to terms with bereavement despite her familiarity with helping others do so.

Although it is a stand-alone story, it is set in the ‘Some Other Scotland‘ world and features Sarah Fullarton, a minor character we last saw back in episode 2 of SOS. It takes place at her home shortly before the events of SOS.

The latest prompt at Great Hites is “arriving at the airport”, probably the most open-ended prompt for several weeks, and will almost certainly end up being related to SOS as well.

There is a new episode of Great Hites with an impressive seven stories this week, all inspired by the prompt “Running Shoes”. Mine takes place in a not-too-distant future where there is a ban on footwear, a seemingly innocuous and silly law to pass, but one which has major implications. The tale provides the viewpoint of one person who’s life has been turned upside-down from the day of the announcement.

I must give a big “Thank you!” to everyone who voted for my last two stories at GH, in particular for “Signal”, which has been one of my personal favourites since I started submitting to Jeff’s site. The three ‘winning’ stories will be appearing at some point in the future within a special anthology edition of ‘Great Hites’.

I have just completed another story for the site, this time based on a minor character from ‘Some Other Scotland’ – more on that when it surfaces.

There’s another of my short stories available to read or download and listen to over at Great Hites this week.

This one sets up a tale of lost love, interplanetary travel and homecoming around the recently discovered primate fossil, claimed by many to be the ‘missing link’. Does it seem like I have a thing for ancient, advanced civilisations? You might think so.

There is some very subtle sci-fi background music in this latest tale. It comes courtesy of The Lunacy Board, and is called “Japan In A Trashcan”. You’ll find it on our third album, the entirely instrumental Stockholm, which is available to buy on CD or as a digital download. Follow the link for most information about the album, a couple of samples of other tracks and an order form.

There’s also a new episode of ‘Some Other Scotland‘ ready for download. There seems to be a link between Charles’ letter and another letter written to William Wallace – interesting, since around 400 years separates them. We also learn a bit more about the object Razer found in the underground tunnel.

Vote!

The Euro elections may have passed, but there’s still plenty to vote for. Both ‘Great Hites’ and ‘Some Other Scotland’ feature polls that affect future episodes – if you are enjoying either of these podcasts, please take the time to vote and make your choice count!

There’s another story from me, now ready at Great Hites. This one is musical in nature, after a fashion, and puts a bit of a spin on the question “What kind of band would you hire if money was no object?”

I’ve been doing quite a lot of behind-the-scenes work on “Some Other Scotland” this week, which should hopefully allow me to forge on with the story with out interruption. I now have a massive chart with all the character details, who they have interacted with, who they will meet in the future (subject to change, of course) and a rough idea of where the next 5 or 6 episodes are heading. Now I just need to get writing.

Finally, I’ve been giving some thought to promotion of the podcast. It has been reasonably low key to date, partly because I wanted to be sure it could work and that people would actually want to listen to the ongoing story. Now that I know this to be the case, I’m ready to start pushing it out a bit more. I have a few ideas so far, so will probably pick the best of them and plan around doing something in line with the 13th episode (i.e. 1/4 of the way through the story).

Another week – another episode of Great Hites – this one is very short, and you’ll either love it or hate it. It’s about a little dog that rescues a group of shipwreck survivors.

After this, I have another couple of short stories headed towards Great Hites. I have been intending to put it aside for a while to focus on Some Other Scotland, but Jeff does insist on putting up prompts that keep the stories coming. The one I have just completed is my favourite since ‘To The Clouds’, but I have yet to finish recording it.

Yet more podcast short fiction from the Bordet pen. This one is a very short tale for the “100 Word Stories” podcast. It was based on the prompt “Elvis drives a bus” and goes somewhere along the road of trying to explain just how that could happen.

Obviously, it takes place in some other reality. It isn’t the ‘Some Other Scotland’ world, though there is some common ground. It’s based on Elvis’ Scottish roots, it’s fun and it only takes seconds to read. Alternatively, download the whole podcast and enjoy a barrage of stories with roughly the same theme, albeit with very different approaches.

Three bits of theremin-related news popped up this week:

Don’t Mind Me

My short fictional tale of the effects of excessive theremin-playing is now available at Great Hites for you to read or to listen to as part of the podcast. The advantage of the podcast is that, not only do you get to hear my dulcet tones reading it (oh deep joy), but it is backed by some reasonably subtle theremin effects, hopefully adding to the atmosphere. It’s a fair bit less serious than my last GH story, but I’m quite happy with it. Whilst you’re there, check out the other stories and vote for your favourite.

The Beat Frequency Theremin Method

Experimental thereminist and Lunacy Board collaborator, Gordon Charlton (a.k.a. Beat Frequency) has released a rather special double package that incorporates both his treatise on experimental theremin playing, “The Beat Frequency Theremin Method”, and his debut solo album “The Chordless Chord” for the bargain price of only £8. The book is an interesting read for anyone interested in making electronic music, or in the experimental process, and not just budding theremin players. The order form is available on his blog along with video clips and an online preview of the book.

Hands Off 2009

It really doesn’t seem like two years since the last Hands Off event, but here we are. This time round there are no workshops and no concert, with the event being a completely different beast. The aim this time is to use the combined theremin might of those attending (around only 20 in total – a select bunch), along with whatever additional noise-making equipment we can get hold of, to craft an album within two days. I believe the idea will be to split into smaller groups to work on pieces, recording them as we go, before picking the best to go together on an album. Given that the Lunacy Board managed to pull of an album in a single day, I don’t think this is an impossible task and wouldn’t be surprised if we got a double CD out of it. Time will tell. What will be interesting is the mix of people attending, from instrument builders and experimentalists through to classical theremin players – it is certain to feature lots of strange and unusual stuff. I’m looking forward to this, but it’s not until the end of August, so the wait begins here…

You’ll no doubt have seen my previous posts about a couple of my short stories that have been included on the ‘Great Hites‘ podcast. There is a section for voting on the site and I’m pleased to say that my first two efforts both came in first place on the list, so I must be doing something right.

To celebrate the podcast’s first year of existence and to secure a wider audience, Jeff (top man and head of the ‘secret council of three’) has recently announced that future poll winning entries at Great Hites will be eligible for inclusion in the forthcoming Great Hites Anthology (name to be confirmed – Jeff is still looking for suggestions) . This ‘Greatest Hites’ will be available through podiobooks.com, which has a fairly large audience. I’m delighted to say that, as the ‘winning’ story in the anniversary week, “To The Clouds” will be the first tale in the anthology. Since writing that, I have submitted another two stories, so this seems like a good time to provide a quick summary of recent writings.

Update

I have created a page with links to all my online writings that I will update regularly. It is linked from the front page of this blog and can be found here.

Great Hites – Short Stories

GH Week 51 “Anthropomorphism”

Gregory and Friends
What can you do to squeeze the last drop of earning potential from something? Anthropomorphise it!

GH Week 52 “It has been a year, what have I done with myself?”

To The Clouds
One man’s view of the historic R34 airship crossing of the Atlantic.

GH Week 53 “My mind has been going places without me lately.”

Don’t Mind Me
The theremin is a mysterious-sounding instrument, but does it affect more than just sound waves?

GH Week 54 “A pound of flesh”

Fido
A touching tale of man’s best friend.

GH Week 55 “Robots, they are all robots!”

The Robot Band
If money was no object, what would the band be like?

GH Week 56 “Missing link primate likely to stir debate.”

Signal
A tragic loss sends Maart miles from home, but his return years later holds some surprises in store.

GH Week 57 “Running Shoes”

Running Shoes
A seemingly minor change to the law has major implications. A barefoot world.

Life can take you on interesting detours.

I sat down a couple of nights ago to write the next episode of ‘Some Other Scotland‘, only to find myself some time later digging through the internet for every scrap of information I could find about the R34 – the first aircraft to make a return Atlantic crossing. Why? It all ties in with the first ‘spin-off’ story from SOS, and I was checking some facts from the past before including them in the main podcast so that I wouldn’t end up contradicting myself when I come to writing the off-shoot. It seemed like a logical course of action.

What I ended up with, in conjunction with the latest prompt from Great Hites, was a short stand-alone story providing background for the main character of that story. It is, in effect, a spin-off from the spin-off.

This new story tells the tale of one year in the life of a rigger on the R34 airship, which was based at East Fortune, not far from North Berwick. As it stands, there is no direct link with the podcast story, but the forthcoming special episode will tie the two together.

Pay a visit to Great Hites’ latest episode to read the story or listen to me reading it, along with a number of other short tales read by their authors. Great Hites celebrates a year or podcasting short fiction this week, so drop by and show your support!

First of all, I’ve signed up to do a song for the ‘Viva la Fry‘ project. Click on the link for more details of what it is. I have no idea what to do for this, but my inclination is to keep it very simple, maybe just uke and vocal. No deadline has been set, other than ASAP, which is pretty non-specific. They’re still looking for participants, so if you’re interested in going head-to-head with Coldplay, take a look.

If you’d like a bigger challenge, there is still time (until Monday) to sign on for the next edition of ‘Masters of Song Fu‘. Having done a few now, I can recommend the experience as a way to develop your songwriting chops and getting some useful feedback about your songs. I’m sitting this one out to concentrate on other things, but will be following along as spectator.

Finally for now, I have submitted another short story to the Great Hites podcast. My first one seems to have been well-received, so the new one may appear within the next few days. More details if and when it does, but it is a more serious story which feeds into ‘Some Other Scotland‘. If you haven’t heard (or read) the first one – have a look at the site – you can subscribe to the whole podcast or just read the individual stories if you prefer.

The short story I mentioned in the last post has appeared in Episode 51 of the Great Hites podcast which features short stories based on a common weekly theme. I have enjoyed several of the stories featured over the last few weeks that I’ve been following it, and the prompt for the latest week, “Anthropomorphism”, inspired me to pen a short tale of (perhaps) the world’s first marketing department.

It has been a nice little departure from the ongoing saga of twists and turns at Some Other Scotland, light-hearted with a tang of cynicism. Next week is the first anniversary of Great Hites, so I hope to submit something to that episode too, though that will depend on whether I get this week’s SOS completed in time.

I need to devote more time to the Some Other Scotland podcast for a while, as Song Fu deadlines meant that podcast episodes have slipped back. I have a special non-story episode coming up soon (after episode 10 launches) that will deal with some questions I’ve had about the story. That has yet to be recorded, so please feel free to send questions and/or feedback to me at mickbordet {at} gmail {dot} com and I can reply on the podcast.

When the podcast started, I hoped to be able to expand the world with a few spin-off stories giving some background to certain characters or events – short tales that would stand on their own as well as giving more depth to the main story. I have come up with a rough plan for the first of these, though it has turned out to be a bit more ambitious than originally planned because it will be more of an audio drama than the main podcast. More news on that as I settle the thing down in a script.

I’ve also completed a short story for possible inclusion on another podcast, so details of that will follow if it comes into being. If it doesn’t I may just post it here instead.

All of this writing and podcasting activity does NOT mean that the music has been abandoned, though. There are a couple of possible guest appearances in the pipeline, a Lunacy Board session of some sort is long overdue and I have a few half-completed songs still kicking around from the FAWM challenge that need to be finished off. At some point soon I’ll also revisit the Song Fu material I have amassed and combine it into an album, though there are some parts to be re-recorded with the luxury of no deadline, as the originals make me cringe in several places. Finally, I have a top secret plan for a podcast-related musical piece that will surface at some point and, who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll get round to sorting out the pile of Dunoon songs.

Another ‘Masters of Song Fu’ comes to a close with the final voting round posted today and it’s been fun. The format of the competition has changed significantly from the first time I entered, with all contestants staying in until the final round and letting us enjoy a much bigger collection of new songs. ‘Shadow’ entries for the final have also been encouraged, so my latest song can be found at quickstopentertainment.com, even though I didn’t make the final as a competitor.

As for the outcome, taking a look at the last set of vote results, I placed 12th out of 22, so just in the lower half – not exactly a shining star, but not too bad against some strong competition, and substantially better than the showing in the first Song Fu I tried. It’s interesting to see that several other people with lower scores in the first round (Jutze, Insane Ian and especially Edric) went on to pull substantially more votes in the following rounds, as I did.

I think I’ll probably take a break from Song Fu after this – there’s just too much other stuff to do at the moment, both on the ‘Some Other Scotland‘ podcast and other musical ideas I’ve had simmering slowly for a while. I’ll be pulling all the songs together shortly to make them easier to download in one go.

#onedayintwitter

The challenge:

FRANKENSONG. For this fourth and final challenge, you must craft a composition that contains AT LEAST THREE (3) distinctly different songs within your final song, but which fit together into a cohesive whole. By distinct, I mean both tempo and style.

I struggled with this for a while, looking for three or four things that could be grouped together, yet remain unique in their own right. It finally struck me whilst looking for something on Twitter that it could be used for the song – indeed it could form the cohesive entity around a group of otherwise unrelated topics. I used the twitter search facility to find ‘trending topics’ and came up with four I thought I could write unique songs about that would fit under the heading “One Day In Twitter” – these were merely the most popular topics at the time I looked:

#susanboyle

Despite everything from Cyrano de Bergerac to Shallow Hal suggesting otherwise, it’s apparently been a common belief that you need to be beautiful to sing/act/dance/etc. Like some warped version of a fairytale (with Cowell, Morgan and Holden as fairy godmothers?) the World has suddenly woken up to discover that ugly people can have talent. Welcome to the party, guys. The fact is that ugly people probably make better artists because they don’t get handed their career on a plate because some sleazebag wants to get them on his casting couch (or whatever the equivalent is for musicians). The music business took a massive detour thanks to MTV, resulting in the rise of the drop-dead-gorgeous-but-musically-bland artists we’ve been subjected to for so many years now, but maybe this will signal to them that there is something beyond airbrushed beauty.
I jest.
Of course they won’t, despite the fact they’re wishing they had a tenth of the sales that Ms Boyle has had YouTube views.

#ashtonkutcher

He entered a race with CNN to get to one million twitter followers first. He had at least one company offering prizes to people who signed up – shame on you EA. How desperate for fame and adoration do you have to be to post pictures of your wife’s arse on the internet just to get more people to sign up to receive your inane drivel? Apparently he’s an actor. I may have already seen one of his films – I don’t know – but I do know that if I hear his name associated with a film in the future, I’ll probably be a little less inclined to want to see it.

#queryfail/#queryday

Literary agents opened themselves up to questions and provided insight into why they knock back many book pitches. Some writers praise them for being open and honest, appreciating the feedback, learning from the experience and maybe going on to produce a pitch for their own book that may get them noticed one day. Others throw their toys out the pram, rant on about what the agents should be doing for them, complain about even the most common-sense of advice and end up looking like unprofessional prima-donna numpties who will doubtless be avoided by every agent on the planet.

#badscifi

Twitter is full of little internet memes like this – change a word in a well-known science fiction title (book or film) to make it a little less inspiring. As with all these things, some work better than others.

I wrote a verse for each topic and recorded a mini-song in a suitable style – mock-operatic for #susanboyle, emo rock for #ashtonkutcher, wistful waltz for #queryfail and robotic electronica for #badscifi. They are bound together not just by being twitter hot topics, but by the same chorus lyrics (the words stay the same, but the music is different each time) as well as some instrumental overlaps and a theme from the start that reappears later on. I had intended to feature a theremin part at the beginning and end, but ran out of time to practice it – hopefully I will get around to this and release a version which includes it. The whole thing is rounded off with a title that both describes what the song is about and serves as a hashtag for searching twitter.

#onedayintwitter

[Operatic/Musical Style]There are thousands of less than beautiful peopleWith voices to make a nightingale proudBut thanks to Mandy and Piers and CowellThere's one who won't throw in the towelPlease step forwards Susan Boyle, That YouTube clip will help you alwaysStand out from the crowd.

[CHORUS]Tweet tweet tweet tweettweet tweet tweet tweetWhat'ya twittering on about?Tweet tweet tweet tweettweet tweet tweet tweetWhat's this twitter thing all about?

[Waltz style]Authors harassing agents in a bid for Rowling fameQueryfail sparked off the "he said, she said" gameBut queryday has showed how much common sense is lackingIn some people sending manuscripts in the hope of getting backing

* CHORUS *

[Emo rock]How needy is the boy who craves a thousand, thousand followersDesperate to outnumber the avid newscast swallowersI'd never heard of Ashton Kutcher till his name came up on twitterBut will a million followers and Demi's arse stop his career going down the shitter?

* CHORUS *

[Tangerine Dream Style - robot voice]Making up names to substandard showsTwitter hive mind, borg-like compliesAvon visits a corner shop in "Blake's 7-Eleven"Art from the chronosynclastic infundibulum in "The Sirens of Titian"Noddy's looking for Replicants in "Slade Runner"All available on #badscifi

* CHORUS *

I’ve been listening to Jutze’s album “HETEROSCEDASTICITY” on and off over the last week and thought it was worth a plug here.

Jutze provided a couple of sets of backing vocals for ‘Big Red Nose’ and is the only other person to complete a shadow Frankensong for the final round of the latest ‘Masters of Song Fu’. There is a nicely eclectic selection of songs on his album, which is named after a statistical term (and why not), ranging from acoustic ditties to heavy rock. He manages to out-R.E.M. R.E.M. on the song “I Wish Natalie Portman Was My Neighbour”, covers similar territory to Katie Melua’s “If You Were A Sailboat” with more wit on “If I Could Paint My Feelings” (“If I could weave my heart, I’d just make towels”) and even get a little serious with “Spirit She”. All of the songs are performed in English, apart from two statistical songs in German, which is a language built for rock.

The wonderfully chirpy “In Love With Michael Owen” reminds me of Judge Smith, which is high praise from me, and in fact the whole album does share a similar sort of low-budget charm with Judge’s earlier efforts “Democrazy” and “Dome of Discovery”.

So give Jutze a little listen – his whole album is available as a free download and would be a bargain at ten times the price!

Here’s a low-budget video for the latest Song Fu challenge song. Only the title was set for this round, so I took a little inspiration from the rather mixed reception the finale of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ received on the internet. Like several other popular cult series, it finished with several untied loose ends, some of which are quoted in the song. When it is running, you should be able to click on the little upward-pointing arrow at the bottom-right corner to switch on subtitles which display the song lyric.

If you enjoyed that, then please head over to Quickstop Entertainment and vote for it!

Red Nose Song Fu Special

Quickstop have also now made the songs from the Red Nose Day special available, right here. During the webcast show one of the Song Fu-ers, Joe ‘Covenant’ Lamb, composed another song which can be found along with the other songs here. Incidentally, in the same way that a number of people guested on my Red Nose song, Joe’s Red Nose song also featured guests including me (playing yobstick and singing).

Don’t forget to donate – the Red Nose Net event raised over £4,000 for Comic Relief!

I finished the song at the weekend, but today is Red Nose Day, and so at some point today it should appear for your delight over at the webcast on Red Nose Net. It starts at 12pm EST (which I think is 5pm in the UK), and runs for 24 hours – I have no idea what time they will play the songs, but watch the video below for a brief preview. Once the song itself is available to download, I’ll provide a link to it as well.

This was a much more collaborative Song Fu effort than the others I have done, specifically because the challenge was to write a song that encourages the listener to join in. A select band of volunteers sent me their contributions to the song and they have been glued together into some sort of a consistent whole I have named “The Furfurescent Choir”. A big thanks to all of them for taking the time to do their bit and entering the spirit of the event with a wonderful selection of singing and other vocal strangeness. Their names are listed below.

The song is just a bit of fun, starting as an upbeat pop number and degenerating into a vocal meltdown. It may not be to your taste, but it’s all in a good cause – see Red Nose Net for more details.

Big Red Nose============

Intro - F C Bb  F C Bb

[verse 1]            D        G      DWhen you're standing in the stormC           G            DRain soaked through your clothes    D      G        DAnd people laugh at you            C              D'cos of the colour of your nose

[verse 2]And you there, in the pubHeavy drinking prosLabelling yourselfwith the colour of your nose

[chorus]F                   C       Bb  Everybody loves a big red nose  Everybody loves a big red noseF             G7          C        F  It brings a grin and it makes us laughF                   Bb      C  Everybody loves a big red nose  

[verse 3]You've got the man fluIt's running like a hoseTissues make it worseBringing colour to your nose

F                   C       Bb  Everybody loves a big red nose  x14


Music & Lyric: Mick Bordet

Mick Bordet: Keyboards, guitar, bass & lead vocalA-DooM: DrumsThe Furfurescent Choir: Vocals (from left to right)    Andy Roberts - http://distributedresearch.net/blog/    Paul Davison - http://stormcock.net/    Cruella Bordet    Matt Walton - http://matthew-walton.co.uk/    Angela Brett - http://angelabrett.wordpress.com    Jutze Schult - http://www.jutze.com

I’m pleased to announce I’ll be doing something musical in support of this year’s Red Nose Day, via the online efforts of Red Nose Net. They are a group of internet folk who are using the web to promote Red Nose Day all round the World. Whilst Comic Relief is based in the UK, they do a lot of work in developing countries, and this initiative aims to give them much more attention than they currently receive outside these little islands.

My part in this will be within a special one-off edition of ‘Masters of Song Fu’ which has the aim of creating songs to get everybody involved. To that end, I’d like to invite you join me on the chorus…

Just send me an email to mick @ lunacyboard . com (without the spaces) OR leave me a comment below with a contact point, and I’ll send you a copy of the chorus to the song to record yourself singing (or shouting, whispering or talking) along to. I’ll then combine all the voices into one massed choir for the finished song.

The final deadline for song submission is 10th March, so please let me know if you are interested as soon as possible!

My entry into the latest “Masters Of Song Fu” contest is now available on their site, ready and waiting expectantly for your vote.

It looks like my decision to abandon my initial idea has paid off, with some support for the one-word-that-lasts-three-minutes approach, to the extent that after only a few hours of voting I have as many votes as I did for the whole of the last round.

Without counting premature chickens, it is very nice not be right at the bottom of the list. Of course that could all change, but I’ll just enjoy it while it lasts!

My entry into the latest “Masters Of Song Fu” contest will shortly appear on their site, ready and waiting expectantly for your vote. Thanks to everyone who voted for my song in the first round – a small and select bunch!

The challenge was to use only 10 words in the song, though each word could be repeated. The idea clearly being to get our brains working overtime on combining those ten words in different ways to change their meaning. Nice idea. I did try it, and will post my first attempt shortly (I have a very rough demo which I’ll tidy up and post), but it just seemed too obvious. Thinking cap back on, I decided that if I couldn’t fill a song with variations on ten words, then I would just fill it with a single word. A single l-o-n-g word. One with over 1900 letters.

It’s the name of an enzyme, Tryptophan Synthetase, and amazingly is NOT the longest word – that is the technical name for another enzyme and runs to almost 190,000 letters – I’ll leave that one for somebody else to sing as a whole album!

Instrumentation is just guitar, bass, piano and vocal. I did try some drums, but the song is so damn fast that they sounded ridiculous. And yes, I had Danny Kaye firmly in mind as I sang it!

Lyrics are as follows:-

What is wrong?
==============

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My entry into the latest “Masters Of Song Fu” contest is up on their site, ready and waiting expectantly for your vote.

It’s a happy little ditty featuring uke, yobstick, synth (the old Crumar Performer string synth) and shaker. Comments on it so far include ‘dystopian joy‘, ‘sounds like toads playing tiny tin digeridoo‘ and ‘there’s something ominous here‘!

Lyrics and chords are as follows:-

Happy People
============

[Chorus]
G
When you are happy
C
it makes me happy
G
to see you happy
       D
to see me

When I am happy
You say it makes you happy
to see me so happy
to see you

[Verse]
Dm
    We're happy people
Gm
   We're happy people in a happy
Dm
World, we're happy people
Gm
Happy people in a happy
Dm
World.  We're happy people.
Gm
   We're happy people in a happy
Dm
World, we're happy people
C

~Chorus~

   C                          Bb               A
Apparently my joi de vivre's getting on your wick
My natural exuberance is making you feel sick
     Your grumpy face just makes me want to laugh
Even when you're drowning me for singing in the bath

   G               A7           Bb6                    A7
So turn that frown upside down, smile, your face won't crack
I'll keep on singing happy songs 'til I receive a  smack, because...

~Chorus~

~Verse~  (rinse and repeat)

If you’ve arrived here via the link on the latest ‘Masters of Song Fu’ page, then Welcome!

On the off-chance you enjoyed my entry into the first round (which is due to be made available later this week), you can find a wealth of additional music for free download (as well as real, physical CDs) by clicking this link right here.

More details can be found at the following places:-

www.lunacyboard.com

‘The Lunacy Board’ have three albums of quirky, eclectic rock, one available as a free download. If you like Pink Floyd, Krautrock, The Bonzos, or other cerebral rock music, it’s worth a try.

someotherscotland.blogspot.com

‘Some Other Scotland’ is my weekly fiction podcast, based around a warped version of current events in Scotland.

www.the-deserters.co.uk

‘The Deserters’ date back into the early 80′s – a world away, but worth a trip for the sheer hell of it.

twitter.com/MickBordet

If you do the twitter thing, this is my feed – find out about the latest new music from chez Bordet as it happens.

Thanks for visiting, and don’t forget to vote!

I mentioned this project in passing a while ago, but since I’ve just completed the third episode, now seems like a good time to let you know a bit more about it.

Some Other Scotland is a podcast novel. Huh? In effect, it is simply a book read in weekly episodes, not unlike a radio show. There are quite a few of these about if you look around the internet, but I like to think this one is a little different from the rest.

Why?

Rather than the more rational method of writing, then editing, a book before reading it and broadcasting the podcast, Some Other Scotland is much more immediate. It is based on a week’s news in Scotland. Every day I pick out one item of news that I think could be interesting to incorporate into the bigger story, then I post a poll at the end of that week. Listeners (YOU!) can vote for the feature story. This feature will appear in some major way in the following week’s podcast, though altered in some way. This creates an alternative Scotland, full of ‘paths not taken’. For example, in the most recent episode, a mansion on a West Coast island was burnt down in the real world, but in Some Other Scotland, the fire came to nothing, stopped by a new character to the story.

The first few weeks have run without much to join each story thread together, but as new items crop up in the news, changes in direction become apparent, and already I have a general plan for the larger plot.

It is my intention to run this until the end of the year, unless the story draws to a natural conclusion before then. In the meantime, please visit the link above to sign up for the podcast feed, or you can stream the story from the little widget on the right hand side of this page.

Your feedback would be very welcome.

RIP John Martyn

Another month, another rock legend passes on…

It’s been over 20 years since I saw him perform (as a duo with Danny Thompson). It was the first gig I had been to where I had never heard anything by the performer – I normally dip my toes in with an album or two before dragging my carcass along to a live show. This was Cropredy 1987 and I was happy enough to be seeing Fairport, Jethro Tull and Richard Thompson live for the first time that anything else was a bonus. There were several bonuses that year, but John Martyn was the one that really stuck with me.

He’s performed not far from my door a few times recently, but at ridiculous ticket prices, so I haven’t gone, but I’ll never forget that glorious summer night in ’87 when he came so close to outshining Tull (my favourite band at the time).

Solid oaf (for Iain D McGeachy)

Free love/free with…
The drunken mouth,
The soft fists,
Of the trip-hop king;
Can’t hear you anymore,
Can’t separate the beast,
From the alleged beauty…

~ Rev Dr Stanford Razall

February could well go by the moniker of “Crazy Challenges Month” for this psychonaut…

First of all, the Masters of Song Fu challenge is opening up again early this month. If I make it into the arena, I’ll be repeating my last ‘shadowing’ of the event, writing songs to meet the challenges despite being knocked out in the early (or first) rounds.

Next up is the “February Album Writing Month” (FAWM), with its challenge of writing 14 songs within the 28 days of February. If that seems a bit of a breeze, then I would add that I’ll be combining it with the RPM Challenge, which is to record an album of at least 10 songs in the same period. In other words, by the end of the next month, expect a new album from yours truly.

I’ve given the project the title “Furfuressence” and I’m hoping for some new collaborators to join me, but nothing is set in stone as far as this one goes.

Finally, you may have noticed a new addition to this site – a little box on the right labelled “Some Other Scotland“. I’ll be posting about this shortly, but in the meantime, please try it out. You might like it!

I have been giving some thought to starting a podcast, but without sufficient material it would die off fairly quickly. I’ve still got some ideas to iron out and work on so that it can fill enough time to make the download worthwhile and compelling enough to encourage people to listen every week. My current plan is for it to be some kind of alternative history in the making, with listeners able to influence events on a weekly basis. More information to follow as I start to pull it all together.

It’s been quite a while since I last waved my hands in the air to produce music, but tonight I recorded four theremin parts with varying degrees of success for “The Mandelbrot Set.”
We currently have three songs started as works-in-progress, with “Skullcrusher Mountain” being the most advanced in terms of completion. I’ve done basslines for all three, theremin parts for two of them and even dug out my mandolin for a little section, too.

In other news, the band I do sound for had a bit of a crisis of confidence in December – a somewhat underpopulated audience and a series of fluffed songs all contributed to a general feeling of concern that there were not enough rehearsals or too much emphasis was being placed on learning newer songs. However, we did a gig at Hogmanay which turned out to be a bit of a blinder, so that sorted those worries out. Nothing definite for the coming year, yet.

Mr Coulton has given some positive comments about the ‘Mandelbrot Set’ and our first effort HERE.

We’re currently going through the democratic process of selecting the next song for our treatment. Why not drop in if you liked our take on “Re: Your Brains” and cast your vote.

The Mandelbrot Set is comprised of the following:
Angelastic - Zombie Chorus
bigcambridge - Banjo, Ukulele
Bry - Vocals, Zombie Chorus
Colleenky - Vocals, Zombie Chorus, Sound Editing
Lunacy (Mick Bordet) - Electric Bass
MaW - Vocals
mtgordon - Vocals, Zombie Chorus
Shruti - Flute, Zombie Chorus
SpaceParanoids - Piano
The Doifter - Ukulele

[UPDATE-AGAIN!] The link below has been updated to the NEW final mix.

You can find the finished article for free download right HERE.

Jimmy Carl Black RIP

1-2-1938 to 1-11-2008

Another rock legend has left the stage…

JCB was the drummer with the Mothers in their earlier days and stamped his unique sound onto some of the finest albums in the Zappa collection. What he may have lacked in the technical skill of later Zappa drummers, he more than made up with character and humour.

I was lucky enough to see Jimmy perform a couple of times, both as drummer with the Grandmothers and vocalist with the Muffin Men, and on both occasions his presence filled the stage. We’re starting to run out of rock’s great characters…

Just to finish off the Song Fu experience and tie up any loose ends, I have stuck all the songs together up on Last.fm, which is worth a look as a way to find new music similar to what you already listen to.

Last week I made the trip back West to see one of the ‘Masters of Song Fu’, Jonathan Coulton, doing his thing live on stage in Glasgow. A great show, slightly curtailed by the management of the Oran Mor imposing a 10pm curfew – probably the earliest finishing gig I’ve ever attended. A great night’s entertainment all round, with plenty of amusing between-song banter – something often sadly lacking in many modern acts. Mr Coulton enthusiastically embraces the creative commons licence, meaning that live recordings and videos are positively encouraged. So here is my recording of his Glasgow show:-

Jonathan Coulton – Oran Mor, Glasgow, UK – 25th Oct 2008

We were supposed to be seeing the ‘Bad Shepherds‘ next week. They’re a folk band playing punk songs, and include ex-members of Jethro Tull and Iona within their ranks, as well as former ‘Young One’ Ade Edmonson. However, their tour has been cancelled for reasons still unknown (no details as yet on their website. Pretty annoying.

You must choose one of those 1970’s Williams-scored Spielberg/Lucas flicks (JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, 1941, or STAR WARS). and write “The Song From…” that the film never had, in the style of a 1970’s pop tune (particularly in your instrumentation).

And thus ended Song Fu…

Here is my final non-competitive effort. The instrumentation could have been a bit more lush and over-the-top, but I was running too short of time for such luxuries. The bassline is a bit more mundane than when I first recorded it, as it became the subtle reference I mentioned last time. Then I blew any subtlety away in the last few bars as the bass reveals itself much more blatantly – it’s super-corny, but I just couldn’t resist it. Sorry.

Click here to hear the song

I don’t know whether there are plans for another run of the Song Fu challenge and, if there are, whether I should re-apply. A couple of the deadlines have been pretty tight (usually due to being away with work), but I’ve got 4 new songs out of it of varying quality, with inspiration for a couple more. What do you reckon?

Anyway, here are the lyrics and chords:-

[verse 1]C              Gm7  My, what big teeth you have,          Am             FSaid the swimmer to the fish    C                    Gm7One drop (of blood) in a million    Am             FAnd she became the dish       C        Bb     Fmaj7   Fmaj7of the day.       C        Bb     Fmaj7   Fmaj7of the d   -    a   -  y.

[verse 2]The mayor of "Shark City" isA sceptic through and throughIgnoring the problem until itSwims up and bites youon the ass

[chorus]         C   FIt was a bad fish       Am               Gm7->BbLike a piscine Jack the Rip-per  C   FA bad fish Am           BbA giant psychopathic kipper Fmaj7 x4 bars

[verse 3]Swapping tales of scarsWith buddies and a drinkYou'll need a bigger boatThis one's going to sinkfairly soon

~Chorus~

[verse 4]You'd be a much more efficient killerIf you didn't have that tell-tale finAnd you could still be alive todayIf you'd swallowed that oxygenSmile you son of a bitch

~Chorus~

Fade out on Fmaj7

You must choose one of those 1970’s Williams-scored Spielberg/Lucas flicks (JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, 1941, or STAR WARS). and write “The Song From…” that the film never had, in the style of a 1970’s pop tune (particularly in your instrumentation).

The song is written, both music and lyrics, and is called “Bad Fish”. It has four verses, each one of which deals with a key scene in the movie, and a silly little chorus that’s somewhat scathing about the protagonist of the story.

There was nearly an accidental reference to ‘The Man in the Boat’, which would have been quite apt, but it interrupted the flow of the song, so it was left out. There is another subtle reference, though, which I’ll leave you to work out when you hear it.

The next step is to start the recording process and dig out suitable quantities of funky 70′s pop sounds…

I’ve got a few possible verses put together for the Song Fu challenge, though no music as yet, but my research into Jaws and the history of the film and book has given me inspiration for another new song. I did think about making it the challenge song, but it is a couple of steps away from the plot of the film and too serious to be done as a 70′s movie-pop song.

The off-shoot comes from the story told by one of the film’s characters, Quint, in a monologue not in the book and apparently substantially ad-libbed by actor Robert Shaw, about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during WWII. Having read some actual survivors’ accounts of the event, there’s a lot more to the story that resonates with the best and worst of human character. I’ll elaborate more about it soon, once the Song Fu song is done and dusted and I can concentrate on bringing the story threads together in a way that makes sense within a song.

The fourth and final challenge has been posted. The competition is now between the remaining challenger, Jason Morris, and the leading master, The Rifftones. The challenge is another genre-specific one, though the remit is a bit more limited than previous rounds:-

You must choose one of those 1970’s Williams-scored Spielberg/Lucas flicks (JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, 1941, or STAR WARS). and write “The Song From…” that the film never had, in the style of a 1970’s pop tune (particularly in your instrumentation).

I can think of a few possible options for this, but I think I’ll go for Jaws as the one with most scope for writing an interesting song about. Time to put the string synth to the test – cheesy orchestral washes coming right up…

Incidentally, I actually had a dream last night that I was attacked by a shark whilst swimming in Loch Lomond (which is freshwater and shark-free), defending myself by punching it on the nose (which apparently CAN work as an act of last resort). I don’t know what prompted that subject, as I’ve not been aware of shark-related news since this article caught my attention a couple of weeks ago, however it is too good a coincidence to ignore!

I’ve been away for a week, removed from phones, TV, internet and the World in general. It’s been bliss. I took along my guitar, uke and micro-studio, but neither wrote nor recorded anything new. Just doodled. Sometimes that’s just what is needed.

You may have noticed a couple of changes here. Firstly to the look and layout of the blog. I’ve moved over to the newer Blogger templates which supposedly offer more flexibility and nifty add-ons, taking the opportunity to make the blog fit in with the Lunacy Board site, thanks to the colourful header image provided by my daughter (she did this when she was just five).

You’ll find a new section titled ‘Common Topics’ to the right hand side – this will let you look at all posts dealing with certain topics, e.g. click on ‘Deserters‘ to see posts relating to the Deserters in some way, or for more detail about the steps leading up to the first Lunacy Board album, click on ‘Eponymous Debut‘. It’s also a quick way to pick out all the posts with links to downloadable music. Hopefully it will make this blog easier to navigate around. You’ll find these ‘labels’ at the bottom of each post as well, so you can skip between related posts quite quickly.

On the subject of blogs, when I first started this blog I simultaneously started a couple of others with the same content. The idea being to see which one generated most interest, was easiest to use and read. Blogger won. The others have not been updated for a couple of months now, and most likely won’t be again. It’s a pain in the neck to copy & paste all the details between them, but more importantly I don’t think it’s a great idea to have several copies floating around the web – hopefully anybody following the others will pick up from here, which will be the definitive place for my waffle outside the Lunacy Board and Deserters sites.

I’ve had a few queries about making the Lunacy Board albums available on iTunes or similar, which I can finally answer, having looked into a number of possibilities. iTunes is not really an option for us at the moment, though I wouldn’t rule it out forever. For the moment we’re going with a crowd called ‘Scotloads’, who (surprise, surprise) focus on Scottish bands.

I say ‘for the moment’, because they have a pricing scheme which I think is too steep for downloads, with a fixed price of £7.99 for an album. This is pretty reasonable compared to high street CD prices, but is actually more than our standard CD price for UK buyers (though it is a bit of a saving for overseas listeners).

What is good about their system is that it will allow you to listen to a clip from every track on both albums before buying, as well as letting you buy single tracks for 79p each. Hopefully a more reasonable alternative for album downloads will be available soon, but if you just want a couple of tracks – go for it!

Just click on the scotloads logo above to see The Lunacy Board on their site.

Your task is to write a country ballad – using a backstory of your own creation – called “The Ballad of Rufus Amos Adams“.

Here’s the song for Round 3 of the Song Fu challenge (you know, the one I was knocked out of at round 1):-

Click here for the song

For some background to the song and the additional challenge I set myself, see this post. It does include all the items I mentioned, including a wobbly theremin-pretending-to-be-a-pedal-steel-guitar solo. Having now listened to the other challengers I realise that there was no yodelling, but I don’t know that would sit very well in a ballad, plus it was not in my original list, so too bad.

Here are the lyrics and chords (non-Scottish readers – minor translations included – move your mouse over a word you don’t understand):-

[verse1]  G        G           C               GI left the farm in the morning, around 6G       G             D       DFed the cattle on the wayG                G         C          GHeaded South for Dallas to pick up my girlG                  G         D        D And that's when my life went astray.

[verse2 - same chords as v1 except last line]She was waitressin' in the Korean restaurantNoodles on poodles she'd serveWhen a truck, red 'n' green, with the name of Christine    G              D          G         GToo fast round the corner did swerve

[verse3]Gm                 Gm      Cm        CmWhat happened just then, I fail to recall       Gm       Gm           Dsus4    D7But my world it descended to Hell          Gm         Gm          Cm     CmThere was kimchi and shitzhu and bodily parts in    Gm         Gm              Dsus4    D7The rubble and dust where they fell

[verse4 - same chords as v3 except last line]I grabbed the truck driver and gave him a kickin'For killin' my sweetheart so swellBut she wasn't dead - she'd just banged her headGm          D7          Gm         GAnd I spent time in the Bar-L

[chorus]G                        CI'm known around here as Amos AdamsG                     DSometimes as Rufus or Hank       G                   CI'd consider it lucky if I lived in Kentucky  G                  DInstead of a village just West of Buckie          G                    CWhere the trains are sporadic, money is tight  G                       DA bottle of Talisker gets you through the night  G                   CI wish to God that my Mama, that sod,    G        D              G         GHad named me something like Shug.

[verse5 - same as v2]Let out of prison this Christmas just pastI hoped for a change in my luckWhen I got home she wrote, on a tiny wee note"I've left with the man and his truck"

[instrumental verse - same as v2]

[verse6 - same as v2]Now I'm only a jakey from a wee Scottish townBut my life's like a Johnny Cash songMy name isn't Sue, but Rufus will doI guess Nashville is where I belong

~Chorus~... Had named me something like Tam.... or named me something like Doug... or even something like Shug

Your task is to write a country ballad – using a backstory of your own creation – called “The Ballad of Rufus Amos Adams“.

The song is now written, having walked around all week with a list of the requirements in my pocket and no idea how to get them all together. The answers came once I had the story behind the ballad, and the various items then all slotted into place fairly well.

It’s the story of a Scottish lad with a country and western name and the trouble that follows because of it – it sits somewhere between ‘A Boy Named Sue’ and Billy Connolly’s version of ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’. It features ALL the subjects required for the ‘perfect’ country song as well as a little reference to ‘Stobby‘. I’ll post the lyrics when the recording is complete, probably tomorrow night.

The third challenge is up and ready to begin. They’re down to just two Masters and two Challengers now, with the final round approaching soon. The latest challenge is a bit of a stinker:-

Your task is to write a country ballad – using a backstory of your own creation – called “The Ballad of Rufus Amos Adams“.

To me this is a bit of a wide-open challenge – really the song could be about anything so long as Rufus is mentioned somewhere. Time for some self-imposed restrictions to get the brain something to grab onto, but what should they be? Country is not a musical genre I’m particularly familiar with beyond the ‘classics’, and have almost no experience writing anything in that vein. The possible exceptions to that being ‘The Middle Eastern Western’, which was just a country backing to some Gulf War (v1) and old cowboy film samples, and more recently ‘Stobby’, which has a bit of a country-rock sound to it in places.

So, what makes a good country song? 10 seconds googling gives us a list for the attributes required for the ‘perfect’ country song. They are as follows:-

1. Clever lyrics (a pun, a joke, or a play on words, preferably in the title of the song)
2. Regret
3. A stalwart, but flawed, protagonist
4. A pedal steel guitar
5. Alcohol (of course)
6. Reverence for the land, especially the South

Steve Goodman and John Prine also suggest:-

1. Mama
2. Trains
3. Trucks
4. Prison
5. Gettin’ drunk
6. Farms
7. Dead dogs
8. Christmas

Arguments about lists like this could rage for decades, but it seem like a good start based on the country songs I’m familiar with, so here’s my additional challenge:-

Include at least 10 of the subjects required for a perfect country song from the supplied list.

Of course, I will try to get them all in the song, but that might be just too much to ask!

Your challenge is to choose a famous inventor and craft a song proposing a “dance craze” based on either the inventor or one of his/her most well known inventions.

Just finished mixing this non-submission to Song Fu.

Here is a link to the song.

It’s called ‘The C5 Shuffle’ and the inventor in question is, of course, Sir Clive Sinclair. For those outside the UK or too young to remember, Sir Clive designed the best-selling home PC in the UK. It was pretty wretched, even for its own time, but was the door into computing for thousands. His follow-up invention was eagerly anticipated, but the battery-powered C5 was something of a failure, being both before its time and far from reliable or even practical. There are plenty of them still about, see here, but I think I’ve only ever seen one on the roads myself. From the way the vehicle is driven in the picture and the chorus of the song, it should be pretty clear how the dance works.

Here are the lyrics for the song, along with some chords for the musically inclined:-

[Verse1]GTrundling alongBSo close to the groundC3 wheels are spinning, butCmwhat's that clicking sound?

Watch out for the fumesRoundabouts are deadlyHills are out of boundsIn our electric pedalled medley

[chorus]      G            D  D7  Dm7We're gonna do the C5     C            G  G6 G       DIt's kinda like a three-wheeled jiveInvented by good old Sir CliveLet's take it for a MicrodriveAnd the Hoover motor might contriveTo get us all home alive

[Verse2]Arms close to your sidesGrab the handlebarsShoulders up and downWiggling your arseBattery's gone flatPedal for a whileNow get out and pushYou're dancing with such style

[chorus]We're gonna do the C5It's kinda like a three-wheeled jiveInvented by good old Sir CliveLet's take it for a MicrodriveAnd the Hoover motor might contriveTo get us all home alive

Gm                   F                       C2      Am7I've got used to the scornful looks from the passing carsGm                     F               Am7        C2and their comments and mocking tone so derisoryGm                             F                   C2         Am7But they'll be laughing on the other side of their facesGm                F         Am7           D              D(higher)In 10 short hours once I've recharged the battery

[Verse3]Arms close to your sidesGrab the handlebarsShoulders up and downWiggling your arseBattery's gone flatPedal for a whileNow get out and pushYou're dancing with such style

[chorus]We're gonna do the C5It's kinda like a three-wheeled jiveInvented by good old Sir CliveLet's take it for a MicrodriveAnd the Hoover motor might contriveTo get us all home alive

[alt chorus]We're gonna do the C5 (ah ah ah)It's a miracle we're stayin' alive We're gonna do the C5 (it's so delicious and moist)I dunno how we're still aliveWe're gonna do the C5 (we're heading for home)Let's hope we all arrive alive

The second round of Song Fu has begun and the next challenge has been set. As expected, I didn’t make it through to the next round, but I’m planning on following through with each of the challenges anyway. It focuses the mind and sets an unbreakable deadline to create something new. So…

Your challenge is to choose a famous inventor and craft a song proposing a “dance craze” based on either the inventor or one of his/her most well known inventions.

This struck me as a much more interesting challenge than the first, as within the space of a minute of reading this challenge I had 3 ideas about subject matter, though it quickly became apparent that only one of those was really workable. I won’t reveal any more at this stage, though I’m pretty sure that it won’t be duplicated by those still in the competition as it has a bit of a UK bias. I will say that I have already got a first draft of the lyrics written, which I’m pretty happy with. Just need to work out some music to go with them and I can get stuck into recording.

I’ve just completed a couple of tracks (bass and guitar) for internet-based Jonathan Coulton covers band ‘The Mandelbrot Set’. Cover versions are something I generally steer clear of, mainly because I have little enough time to record my own music without revisiting something that somebody else has already recorded. However, I like JC’s approach to music, and his use of the Creative Commons licence (as we used to release ‘Difficult Second’) means that people are free to record or perform covers of his songs without fear of having their arse sued out from under them.

The song (about zombies in the office environment) is still a work-in-progress, but a basic mix can be found by visiting the JoCo forums at www.jonathancoulton.com and following the link from my post tonight. When it is finished I’ll stick a copy up here for easy access.

End of the offer

The 3-for-2 offer on our CDs has now come to an end, so your chances of getting hold of a limited ‘Difficult Second’ are slim if you missed the deadline. We have a handful left that will be distributed by other channels… Most likely as competition prizes or similar.

Of course, the album is still free to download via the web, and you can burn your own CD. In fact, burn a stack of them and give them to your friends!

Song Fu

The final day of voting for round one is here, and I think I can safely say that it’s the end of the road for this song fu disciple as far as the official competition goes. I enjoyed the challenge, though the song is not a great piece of work – certainly it didn’t deserve to be in the top of the pile, though I did personally prefer it to a couple of others in the competition. Of course, my tastes are pretty far from normal songwriter fare, so I’ll not name names.

So thanks to those of you who voted for my efforts – 1% of the vote may not seem like a lot, but it means that almost 20 people thought my song was better than all the rest, which is fine by me. Or maybe I just got the ‘pity’ vote.

Whatever the reason, thanks, and you’ll maybe be pleased to hear that I’m planning on continuing to follow the challenges even though I’ll be out of the official competition. I think it’s a good way to keep flexing the old songwriting muscle and building up my Fu for the next time…?

100 Posts

Yes, this is the 100th post to this blog. I’m really pleased how far things have come since I kicked this off a couple of years ago. Thanks to those few of you who pop back for a visit now and again, and also to my family who put up with my musical meanderings.

Have we got a video?

There is now a video to accompany the song ‘Choices‘ from ‘Difficult Second‘. You can view it in miniature above or at the Lunacy Board site, or click here to see it on YouTube – please leave your comments and feel free to give it a nice high rating!

After quite a bit of fiddling about I finished the new song last night, and it is now available for download at the Quick Stop voting page.

Don’t forget to vote!

The song is called First Impressions and is a “Moon’s-eye” view of the Earth and the influence of the Moon on us and vice-versa. The uke part I recorded didn’t really sit with the style of the song, so I dropped it, but did keep a gentle little harmonica introduction and outro. I think this is the first time I’ve recorded a song with the mouth organ – it’s not something I play very often, but it sits here quite well and is a little reminder of the portable nature of this recording.

Bad planning.

Here we are, two days left to the Song Fu deadline, and I’m away all week with work. South of the border with half a song.

Over the weekend I worked out the music and lyrics, ably assisted by my lovely wife. I laid down drum, bass and guitar tracks, but a bit of a mixing desk crisis on Saturday night put pay to normal working conditions.

A couple of weeks ago I was doing my live sound role at a gig up near Inversneckie, when my car was rear-ended on the way there. The desk was beside the damaged part of the car and suffered a substantial shunt – not enough to write it off completely, but it did stop one main channel from working and apparently dislodged the workings as the channel LEDs all disappeared into the body of the mixer. It was okay to continue for the gig as the room was reasonably small and one set of speakers was enough to fill the room, but far from undamaged. This weekend I used it again, and wasn’t so lucky, as within seconds of plugging it in, smoke started seeping out the back. Not good. We got by with an old mini-mixer we carry as a back-up, but the normal desk is well and truly gubbed.

And so, sat in a Midlands hotel room with as much gear as I can pack into my case, which amounts to just the ukulele, a moothie and my trusty boss handheld recorder, I’m embarking on recording the rest of the song as best I can. Sometimes limitations can be creatively inspiring, sometimes a pain in the bahookie… time will tell which in this case.

Fresh from creating a whole album in a day, the latest challenge I’ve undertaken is the ‘Masters of Song Fu’.

Click the logo above for more information about the whole event, but in short it takes the form of a series of knock-out challenges to write songs against the ‘Masters’ including Jonathan Coulton, Paul & Storm and the RiffTones

I’ll be providing updates here where people are welcome to leave comments about the song(s) I submit to the challenge, as well as giving a little bit of insight into the creative process.

The first challenge is to write a song about the Moon at least 1 minute and 45 seconds long. What better topic could there be for a member of The Lunacy Board? Give me a day or two for ideas to form…

To give a little more insight into the Board’s songs, the lyrics from all the songs in the first two albums are now available on the website.

Simply click on a song name on either the Eponymous Debut page or the Difficult Second page to be taken to a more detailed view of each song showing the lyrics and credits for the song. Over time we’ll probably add to these details to give some more background about the songs and their inspiration.

I thought this blog would be very busy over the time we were putting together our 3-album release, but in fact the whole process has been so demanding of time that nothing has been posted here about the albums. So over the next week or so I’ll try and rectify that with a series of posts about the albums, starting with a quick run through of all three before I go into more detail in the next post.

Eponymous Debut

Some artwork problems (of my creation) created a delay in getting this album completed, and there was some to-and-fro between the duplication company and myself to fix it, but once sorted and the CDs arrived I was very pleased with the results. Thanks to Stuart of Gillies Audio for providing a great service and being patient in the face of my errors.

Difficult Second

There was a lot of preparation involved to make the ‘Album-in-a-day’ work smoothly, but it paid off and despite a couple of glitches (no sound on the webcast and me falling asleep unexpectedly) I think the results speak for themselves. The finished result is certainly rough around the edges, but we came up with some tracks that I’m really quite proud of that could easily sit beside anything on the first album were they subject to more rehearsal and a less rushed recording process. There are elements of everything from progressive rock, folk and blues through to the avant-garde, music hall and even country all tinged with a bit of a punk spirit.

To mirror the collaborative nature of the first album, we put out a call for guests for this album, resulting in an album with three different theremin players. Gordon Charlton of Beat Frequency and Wilco Botermans added a wide variety of theremin parts, from simple melodic accompaniment to wild and weird sound effects, to six of the nine tracks – thanks go to both of them for taking the time out to join us.

Stockholm

All the music on ‘Stockholm’ is improvised instrumental music, but some of it was recorded as far back as our second rehearsal on fairly basic equipment, so some editing and noise-removal was required to bring those pieces up to a similar sound quality as the more recent recordings. There are a few tracks for which only a few seconds will be audible in the film of Stockholm, but the whole track is included on the CD for the sake of completeness.

Incidentally, the picture above shows the artwork for all three completed albums in almost all its glory. What you don’t see in the picture are the insides of the CD booklets – all three have two pages of liner notes about the songs, including a short extract from the Stockholm script in the case of that album.

Last Chance

And finally, the pre-order offer was due to end on the final release day, but with the delay to ‘Eponymous Debut’ we decided to let it run until we had sent the first batch of discs out. In that time we got a few more orders for all three discs, so I’m going to let the offer run until the end of this month or until the ‘Difficult Second’ discs run out (which won’t not be long as only 50 were made). Once they are gone we’ll not be producing any more, so the only way to get the second album after 31st of August will be by download.

Click HERE to order the 3-disc collection before they’re gone.

This just about marks the halfway point of the Album-a-Day project, “Difficult Second”, and I’m pleased to say we have an album’s worth of material. It is perhaps a little rougher around the edges than our usual fare, but such are the constraints of time under these circumstances.

I’m pleased to say that we’ve already had some submissions from some of our previous collaborators, Beat Frequency and Wilco Botermans, which will be included in the tracks already recorded, and hope to have some more by the end of the 24 hours.

Having been out last night until 4am doing live sound at a wedding, I’m feeling more than a little tired, but now comes the time to sit down and work through the various takes we’ve had at the new songs and instrumentals, adding the occasional overdub and getting the final article into a shape worthy of the Board. In just over 12 hours you’ll be able to download the album for free and hear the full effect of our labours.

Finally, apologies for the lack of sound on the webcast – it was working this morning, but the PC froze and now I can’t seem to get the sound back. you’re still welcome to drop by and watch or chat!

Yes, we’re releasing three full albums in three days.

Eponymous Debut

The first album will be released on the 13th of July 2008. This is the one with all the songs, including a couple that have been available to download from www.lunacyboard.com for a while now. It has unexpectedly turned out to be a concept album, or at least to have an underlying theme. Full details are available here, including the ability to pre-order a copy now to be amongst the first to hear it.

Difficult Second

The second album will be released on the 14th of July 2008. It will be part of the ‘Album-a-Day’ project, being written, recorded and published within a 24 hour period immediately following the release of the first album. Sounds like a suitably daft thing to do, but the idea is to open up the improvisational and collaborational nature of the Board so that anybody watching the live webcast can contribute an idea, as well as keeping us well-and-truly on our toes for the day. I can’t describe what will be on it, as it will all be inspired on the day, but you’re welcome to be a part of it!

No risk with this one – not only will you be able to hear it being constructed, but it will also be available as a free download at the end of the 24 hours. If you really want it on CD, we’re doing a very limited run of signed, numbered copies for anybody who pre-orders both the other albums. Further details are available here.

Stockholm

Our instrumental soundtrack album will be released on 15th of July 2008. Featuring almost entirely improvised pieces recorded over the lifespan of the band, which form the soundtrack to the forthcoming animated film “Stockholm”, this album travels from rhythm-led rock numbers via jazzy interludes to sinister ambient soundscapes. Full details, pre-order information and downloadable samples are available here.

It’s been hard work and a lot of fun getting this all together, so get your pre-orders in and put the 13th/14th of July in your diaries to join us at the webcast!

Over two years ago I mentioned a re-mix that I had completed, but no more was said. Unfortunately the album it was destined for, a special re-mix version of Ninki V’s album “We Can Fly”, is currently on-hold, so the song, called “Count the hours, Fix the Wings”, will appear on our debut album.

The song is based on Ninki V’s original solo melodica piece, which has been warped and extended before adding several layers of theremin, guitar, mandolin and vocals. I have now also re-recorded the vocals and added some de Florette drums through the process of xenochrony, and so we now have another Lunacy Board track to add to the growing collection.

Ninki V’s style is certainly as eclectic as our own – she composes for a Wakemanesque collection of Casio keyboards, theremin, flute and melodica, whilst her stage show includes playing the theremin with her hair and extensive use of puppetry. Jump over to her website for some samples.

In a similar vein we’re pleased to be including our first foray into xenochrony on the album. “Xenochronous Requiem For A Head Laying In A Field In Butler” was based on a bass solo by Board collaborator Doug Boucher and was originally destined for the “Stockholm” soundtrack album.

Since the track fits within the style of the first album so well, and has already been regularly featured on Spellbound Radio, it has been placed where it belongs. Doug has been pretty busy writing new material for his solo shows lately, so a trip to his Myspace page is worth a regular visit as he swaps new material in and out on a regular basis.

We got some good recordings for the three ‘big numbers’; “Performance Evolution” where we managed to navigate through several time signature changes and vocal styles, “Fairytale Propaganda” which we’ve tended to play too fast in the past, but settled on a more laid back tempo today, with a long building introduction partly inspired by Pink Floyd’s “Shine on you Crazy Diamond” and the new song “Freeman” which came together quite naturally and took on a new life with bass and drums.

The two atmospheric spoken-work songs, “PKD Dum Dum” and “The Bell Curve” had a few layers of percussion and vocals added, which I’ll be editing down to fit into the style of the music. “The Parallel Curve” also started life as a slow spoken-word thing, but we’ve tried a number of approaches to it over the last year without success. Today Sean started singing the lyrics at a much faster tempo and it fit well, so we quickly pulled together a rhythm part for him to sing along with and we finally had a recording of the song that actually works.

With all that put together, I have some further overdubs to add, then work can begin on mixing, so I’ll probably not be reporting back on here until I have some completed songs to comment on (i.e. Hype!)

There will also be some lead-up PR work being done over the next few weeks to let people know what’s coming from The Board, including the cover for the album, which is now complete and agreed and the ability to pre-order the album with a special incentive!

I’ve just finished off the first of the three songs that have been worked on for the last week or so, ‘The Winning Smile’. I ended up taking out all the midi tracks and keeping everything analogue – vocals, guitar, ukulele and the Crumar Performer string section – it sounds totally different to the first attempt.

Then, after posting this and looking through the lyrics to the song it dawned on me that I had missed a whole section out, which explained why the song had ended up about a minute shorter than I had expected.

Currently busy with the artwork for the new album…

No update on finished base tracks, as I ended up working on three at once, two of which are our longest songs, so are taking a while. The other day I spent a lot of time on the introduction to ‘Fairytale Propaganda’, which builds up gradually from a quiet and gentle start to a full-blown rocker. When I returned to work on it at the weekend I realised that it was just too ornate and over-orchestrated, so it will need to be stripped back a fair bit.

‘The Winning Smile’ also had to be changed, as I had set it up with a simple piano backing, but it just didn’t sound as good as it had done previously, so it now has a gentle guitar backing to start it off, but is still in the early phase of construction, so will also be getting some bass and strings.

‘Performance Evolution’ is our big concept number in about five sections which vary in style from ethereal dream-like harps and strings via neanderthal punk waltz and sugary pop to aggressive guitar serialism. Needless to say, this is taking a while to come together, though all the basics are there – it’s really only needing drums, vocals and lead guitar parts added. More on this when it’s done.

This was a very productive evening, following a bit of research over the last few days, I have written and recorded the basic backing parts for a whole new song. It is an upbeat, almost 50′s style, song about the antics of neurologist Walter Freeman. He came up with the idea of the transorbital or ‘ice pick’ lobotomy, featuring the practice of inserting sharp implements into the eye sockets of patients and waggling them about inside their brains. No, really.

What I think is more jaw-dropping is that he traveled the USA in his lobotomobile (yeah – see what Batman was missing!) performing this procedure without surgical equipment or even any surgical training. Sometimes it worked, but there are many documented examples, of over 3000 he carried out, where things didn’t exactly go to plan.

Although lobotomy in general has been widely banned and replaced by antipsychotic drugs, there are still a few places in the world that practice a more refined variation. Like Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, just up the road from here.

Nice to know.

Another set of backing tracks have been completed, this time for a short spoken-word piece by Sean, called “The Bell Curve“. It is a very laid-back track, starting with an atmospheric build up of synth textures which give way to a gentle string-based backing. This was the first time I’ve extensively used my ‘new’ Crumar Performer on a recording – the resonant synth-brass sound sits in the background of the introduction, then the string sound was used in the main part of the track. It can be quite noisy compared to modern synths, but has a great feeling of movement which helps keep the fairly simple chord pattern interesting.

Some of the effects noises in the introduction came from the depths of my old TX81Z sound module, several of which were originally designed for the instrumental “Mick’s Astonishing Megamix (parts 1-4)” back in the Deserters – slowly evolving drain-like sounds. Great fun to revisit those things and find another use for them.

Collaborations

It’s been a hectic month or two, mostly due to the day job, but there has been a little progress on various musical fronts. Non-Lunacy Board collaborations are ticking over very slowly. One is a duo with an electronic musician from Manchester – so far I have a handful of his pieces that I’m working through – adding, warping and generally abusing to create something new, and we’ll also be meeting up occasionally for more spontaneous creations. The other is a local band which is in a fairly embryonic stage at the moment – still waiting to confirm the final line-up – playing original blues/rock material. Something of a change for me, but as they say, a change is as good as arrest.

The outside world is still holding up things in the world of the Board, so in the mean time I have been working on some basic tracks from a few songs we’ve put together over the last year or two, but only played in rehearsal. Fairytale Propaganda had a live airing at last year’s “Hands Off 2007″ gig, but the studio version builds more slowly and is a bit more complex than the original rocky take. The other song is a bit of a prog epic – the demo comes in at around 15 minutes long. We’ve practiced it in sections so far, and I did prepare a cut-down version for HO2007, but the looper packed in before I got to it, and as a solo piece it needs the looper to pull it off, as there are about 5 main sections to it, most in different time signatures. Once I have these together it should make the recording sessions for these run more smoothly and hopefully let us catch up some lost ground in time for…

Project Quintilis

Just a working title… suitably pompous? I’m really quite excited about this, if we can pull it off. I’m just working on the plans for it, but I need to keep it under wraps for the moment until I know we have the time to make it work. Let’s just say it involves our first album and related activity. More details in June if it is going ahead…

New Songs

And finally, a significant number of lengthy roadtrips over the last two months have given me various bits of inspiration for some new songs. I have vague outlines for 5 new songs and another is almost complete. They are all character-based, rather than my other recent songs which have had a large element of social commentary. Two of them are Dunoon-centric – yes, I’m rapidly heading towards having a whole album’s worth of Dunoon material, which seems to be almost writing itself. I suspect my muse is trying to tell me something…?

Anybody wishing to get their hands on the first CD appearance of The Lunacy Board, before any official release, now has the chance with Splinters 3.

This is a double CD compilation of artists influenced by Roy Harper and includes everything from progressive rock extravaganzas to simple folk songs in a single package. At only £6.50 it’s a bit of a bargain, too.

The Lunacy Board track featured is ‘The Unofficial National Anthem‘, so if you like the song and want a copy in its full CD-quality glory, rather than the mp3 version on the website, get yourself over to stormcock.net now to order it!

Other news from the Board… Not so much to report – we’ve had a couple of unsuccessful attempts to get together for more recordings, but various factors have conspired against letting these happen, so no new songs or recordings to report. Work on ‘Stockholm’ continues, though at a fairly slow pace. More news on that front when it arrives.

Finally, I may have another slow-boiling collaboration on the way – something quite different to the Board, but it’s all a bit tentative at the moment to let any more out of the bag at this stage.

I have done a bit more writing over the last few months – putting a better structure to The Parallel Curve, a song about corporate lunacy, which we first tried recording back in March this year. I’m hoping to put a new demo together for it in the next week and possibly record it at the next session. I also have some bare bones of a song started which covers some themes about power, leadership and control through the ages – a verse, a chorus and some chords exist so far, and even a little bit for the celtic flute. I’m still struggling to get Jim Crow into a finished state – it rolls along rather nicely in its new doo-wop styling, but needs another couple of verses to do the subject justice.

That’s about it for the moment – I’ve been without a studio for a couple of weeks as I’m shuffling it around a bit now that I’ve had some time to live with it and can see improvements to my original plan. I’ve also got a very cool new-but-old keyboard which I needed to make room for – more to follow on that shortly!

I investigated Joanna Newsom’s music after she featured Roy Harper as support at a recent UK gig, and having heard some positive mumblings from some reliable sources, I have to say that I was instantly enthralled. She gets labelled as ‘freak folk’ apparently, but to these ears there’s a healthy mix of not just folk, but classical chamber music, progressive rock, blues and plenty more – a real eclectic acoustic brew.

To me her vocal style and the cascading flood of lyrical images reminds me of Captain Beefheart around the Trout Mask era, which is high praise indeed. That’s not to say she sounds LIKE Beefheart, but she certainly appeals to whatever bits of the brain and soul that thrive on the Captain. Long may she continue to follow her own unique path and avoid being swallowed and spat out by the media monster – the world needs more gems like this instead of the music-by-committee z-factor drivel that the public is being fed intravenously at the moment.

Here’s a performance of a song from her new album, Ys…

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, those of you too tight to buy tickets, those too distant to travel, those too drunk to care and everybody else can now see The Lunacy Board’s performance last week from the comfort of home.

It was a night of mixed emotions, stress, compromises and arguments, but above all a night of music in various guises…

It’s been a while since I last drove around Glasgow and numerous new one way streets (as well as unexpected roadworks en route) meant that I didn’t arrive as early at the Classic Grand as I had intended. A rant for another day, but it added unnecessary stress before the show was even underway. As it turned out Glass were still setting up, so we had a bit of time to unload and prepare to shift our gear on-stage. With four bands on stage over the course of the night time was tight for soundchecks, and as first-on we drew the shortest straw with a check that everything was making a sound without the luxury of any fine-tuning. Not to worry – the doors were open and people were arriving, so we took to the stage to kick off the evening.

The intention had been to play a new short song, Morning Rolls first, followed by an instrumental improvisation, then finishing off with The Unofficial National Anthem, but the time restrictions meant that we had to drop something, so Morning Rolls got the chop. The improvisation we started off with was based around a delayed loop on guitar which I varied between a gentle acoustic sound and a slow e-bow background pad. I knew we wouldn’t have the luxury of time to set up the ‘Sooper Looper’ system I used at the Theremin Symposium, so the loop came from a standard effects pedal, meaning the sound looped, but gradually degraded in clarity and faded away so that the piece changed texture as the looped sounds piled up. Having rehearsed this method a good few times over the last couple of weeks and come up with some interesting and varied music (different every time), we knew this could work even though the risk of it being a total train-wreck was high. On the night I don’t think it worked as well as it had in rehearsals, but these were really just wobbles on the corners rather than full-scale derailment. The fact that we had to keep it fairly short instead of building the piece up gradually meant that there were a few places where we changed directions earlier than we would otherwise have done, so I don’t think the piece flows as well as it might have, but neither does it stand still for long.

The Unofficial National Anthem mutated out of the dying echoes of the improvised track, and we kept it simple with no instrumentation apart from guitar, drums and voice. We had tried a number of variations on the song recently, including with a full drum kit, but the little set of digital drum pads just seemed to be the right sound for this song. I built a mount so that it could be attached to a mic stand which meant that Sean could stand at the front of the stage to sing instead of being hidden behind a wall of drums, and was also able to easily switch between drums and bass guitar where necessary. Since there are only two of us, this arrangement means we’re both up-front and visible, even if we need to play on a relatively small stage area.

As is usually the case, the venue didn’t really start to fill until nearer the time for the headliners to take to the stage, so we weren’t playing to a crowd by any means – probably a few more people than were at the Theremin gig, but it was more of a toe-dipping exercise for us. We wanted to see how we’d do on stage, how the songs would hold up to being stripped down from multi-layered arrangements into more direct and raw pieces of music, if we could pull off a totally unstructured improvisation live, and finally if anyone would even listen. As with my previous stage outing, we did get some positive comments. We know we’re only likely to appeal to a tiny section of the population, but if just one person enjoyed what we did at a gig, then our mission is worthwhile.

The Lunacy Board’s first proper live gig is set for the 25th of October. We’ll be playing at the Classic Grand in Glasgow. Headliners are US progressive band Glass and also playing will be local acts Oswald and The Twisted Melons.

Doors open at 7pm and tickets are £6.

I’m really looking forward to this – the ‘subcommittee’ set at Hands Off 2007 was great fun, but I’m hoping it will be even better to play the music as it was intended – in a well-rehearsed group with a solid prog-rock drum section and a house full of prog fans. We’ve stepped up the rehearsal rate significantly so that whatever we play will be as tight as possible.

Yes, it was a whole 25 years since The Deserters came into being following a showing on BBC of The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” that inspired four young and impressionable Scottish lads, with barely a modicum of musical experience between them, to form a rock band capable of performing music with as much fun and enthusiasm as those boys in Sgt. Pepper’s band.

The band may not have played together for several years now, but we never actually split up, and the spirit lives on. Who knows what the future may hold.

I came across this headline today, which reads like a collection of The Deserters‘ and The Lunacy Board‘s favourite songwriting topics:-

– Woman Tries To Steal Fire Engine Half-Naked –

The young lady, recently released from a mental hospital jumped on board whilst the firemen were on a call, but caught her before she managed to drive off. Full details here.

Mental health problems and fire-fighting apparatus in one charming story – what more could you ask for?

Well, apparently there’s something going round… A few months previously on the other side of the World, a young Australian chap drove around a town in New South Wales in a fire engine full of naked passengers. More details here. With a number of firms now operating fire-engine-as-limo services, it will likely not be the last story of this kind we hear.

RIP Joe Zawinul

The legendary jazz keyboard player passed away earlier today.

I first came across his work with Weather Report back in 1987 in a TV concert presumably broadcast following the death of bassist Jaco Pastorius, was immediately transfixed and bought “Black Market” the next day. Although I have only a handful of his recordings in my collection, his playing (and that of his collaborators) formed the bulk of my introduction to modern jazz and paved the way in preparation for my brain and ears to appreciate Zappa and more freeform improvisers.

So long, Joe.

I’ve been doing a lot of mixing of live recordings over the last few weeks, and needed a little break, so last night I messed around a bit with a couple of video editing programs to see which would be the best for the forthcoming Lunacy Board Subcommittee live video. Here’s the result. A suitably daft video accompaniment to the ‘Inverbegnac’ advert.

Cheers!

It has been a number of years since I last went to a music festival to experience the delights of multiple bands, dodgy catering and never-ending queues for toilets. My first such event was the Cropredy festival in 1987 which featured Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention and John Martyn amongst others, ran like clockwork and had record-breaking good weather – nothing I’ve been to since has measured up to that weekend, so how did Belladrum fare?

It has won awards for being the most family-friendly festival, amongst other things, and there were indeed stacks of activities for ankle-biters from puppet shows to storytelling and creative workshops. A very good selection of food stalls was on offer – from the traditional festival fare of burgers through to smoked salmon and stovies. The quality varied as much as the variety, as you’d expect, whilst the prices were uniformly high. Then there was the usual range of cash-in, boutique and generally peculiar shop stalls for those wishing to buy hats, wellies (essential), healing stones, etc. So far, so good, but most importantly… what of the music?

Friday

Nick Harper

We arrived slightly later than we had intended on the Friday, so by the time we had unloaded our gear into the tent (pre-pitched by Martin – what a star!), then found a copy of the ‘Garden Times’ (the mini-newspaper detailing running orders and events), we only managed to catch the end of Nick Harper‘s set. He played a monsterous version of his ‘Love is Music’ mutating epic, which grows more arms and legs and nods and winks every time I hear it played live. His singing was as strong as I’ve heard it, and guitar playing superb as ever – I just wished I could have heard more! The only downside was that the sound in the tent was pretty poor – almost as if the sound team underestimated the power that could come from one man with acoustic guitar – it seemed to be overdriving something in the system.

Peatbog Fairies

After a wander about we settled down to see the Peatbog Fairies over at the main stage – the only stage not covered due to the size of the arena. They have a mix of instruments from bagpipes and fiddle via horn section to standard rock guitar, bass and drums, and play a sort of high-octane ceilidh music intertwined with jazzy horn riffs and funky guitar solos – ideal for a festival audience in the Highlands, and it certainly got plenty of people up and jigging about. As a dance band they were great, but musically I found them fairly repetitive and lacking in dynamics, a fact which was not helped by a very poor mix which lost several instruments which were clearly supposed to be playing solos, and which had the bass so loud that we actually moved to the back of the arena because it was painful on the ears.

Alabama 3

The bass was still a bit on the heavy side during the Alabama 3 (or A3 in the US) set, but the mix was generally a bit better. They play a brand of country music with a strong flavour of modern dance music – I’m not familiar with the correct label, as this is a type of music that generally I try to avoid, but I’d guess house or acid or something like that. It works quite well, with three vocalists singing and rapping against each other, electronic noodlings warbling in the background and a pretty tight set of country/gospel/blues songs to carry along. An interesting and entertaining act with mock evangelical zeal and some nice cynical references to world politics.

The Magic Numbers

Having been disappointed by the poor sound of all the artists so far, I was pleasantly surprised by The Magic Numbers, for whom the mix was just right, with a strong, crisp (but not overpowering) bass and clear vocals. I wasn’t expecting great things, as none of their songs that I’ve heard before particularly appealed to me, but I really enjoyed their set which had a great variety of songs, with lots of dynamic range and fun little time signature changes backed by that clear and busy bass and smooth harmonically-interesting backing vocals. A very polished performance which shone with humour and a sense of fun.

Saturday

James

Headliners for the Saturday night were James – one of those bands which, from back in my student days when they were big news, I always considered to be over-rated. Not bad, I just couldn’t see why so many people thought they were SO good. Nothing I heard at Belladrum changed my opinion. The sound wasn’t great, the songs uninspiring, and the early ‘last number’ seemed like a push for a second encore. I don’t know if they got it – I left after the first one – as did many others, but there was no change in lighting or on-stage clearing-up activity, so I think they were expecting it. In all I was surprised to see they had as big a fanbase present as they did, but they were the least interesting of all the acts I saw on Saturday. They pulled a bunch of people out of the audience for one song (which seemed to repeat the same riff endlessly) to dance on stage, but made no attempt to interact with them once they were up there. Perhaps I’m just spoiled by Zappa’s approach to audience participation, but I thought it was a pretty empty gesture.

Kharma 45

Back at the start of the day, before the daily rag was available and we knew where to go and who to see, we stumbled upon an unadvertised band Kharma 45 – good lively rock band, with an energy I’d imagine in an early U2, and a bit of a hint of their progressive influences. A unexpectedly good start to a day of great music, despite the rainclouds starting to empty overhead.

The Dangleberries

Next up for investigation, purely on the basis of their name, were The Dangleberries – another bagpipe-rock combo in a similar vein to the Peatbogs, but this time more of a pipe and drum band with a rock group tacked on. And with an altogether different remit. If Jack Black had lived in Scotland and learned the pipes, this is probably the sort of thing he’d come up with. Sabbath’s “Paranoid” played on the bagpipes? “Roadhouse Blues” with a pipe and drum solo? Rock meets folk head-on and some sort of hybrid mutant music comes out. Not entirely successful all the time, but certainly a lot of fun. If you’re going to do a cover version, then at least try and bring something new to the song – and the Danglers certainly do that!

Paul Steel

At this point we headed over to the ‘Hothouse’ tent to see String Driven Thing, but apparently the string driving the generator had snapped earlier in the day and the whole schedule for the tent was delayed. Another happy coincidence. Paul Steel was leading his band in his upbeat, quirky style, swirling his moptop around and jumping between keyboards and guitar with timing-perfect changes in style and tempo. Maybe I’m avoiding the radio too much, but I’m amazed that I hadn’t come across them before – definitely one to watch.

Orkestra del Sol

Back to the other side of the festival arena to see Orkestre Del Sol – a wonderfully eccentric, but very well rehearsed brass ensemble playing great Eastern-European flavoured tunes with a great sense of humour and an engaging way of switching between band leaders. I could imagine this band doing great things with lots of Zappa’s earlier instrumental music – great fun to watch and heart-warming, uplifting, crazy music.

Fake Bush

Slightly disappointing was the fact that Fake Bush was just one woman and a backing tape, rather than a full band, but she was very entertaining covering Bush songs from “Wuthering Heights” to “Breathing” (the latter done very well). A very visual act, half the enjoyment lies in seeing the moves and expressions familiar from KB videos and performances. She struggled with (or avoided) a few of the more awkward notes in the range, and some of the expressions were more like Fenella Fielding than Kate Bush, but this just added a bit of comedy to the mix which wasn’t out of place. The only thing missing (minor, but an important part of the song) was the rifle sound in “Army Dreamers” which had been replaced in her backing track by a simple percussion sound – just not the same. Towards the end of the set there was a large influx of people into the tent to avoid the rain – I appreciate the need for shelter, but it was pretty damn rude to come in and talk all through the rest of the set – some of us did go to hear the music. FB carried on regardless of the pushing, shoving and noise and put on a great show. On leaving the tent it was apparent that the rain people had been trying so desperately to escape was no more than a standard Scottish shower – not some massive downpouring of biblical proportions. What a bunch of jessies.

String Driven Thing

Having only heard of String Driven Thing through their links to Van Der Graaf (Graham Smith played violin for both), I wasn’t sure what to expect from them. What we got was a great old-school rock band with elements of folk and blues – no frills, no gimmicks, just good live music, played well. I hadn’t really done much to find out more about them in the past, but certainly will now.

Misty In Roots

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the weekend for me was just how much I enjoyed Misty In Roots. Whilst I don’t think I’ve heard a Bob Marley track that I didn’t enjoy, reggae has really never done much for me and I’ve steered clear of it in the past. That’s probably got more to do with the likes of UB40 and their ilk, but at Belladrum I finally got to hear a reggae band good enough for me to ‘get it’. Sat down near the stage to get the full trouser-flapping effect of the bass (though still not as loud as the previous night’s Peatbog mix), it was a pleasure to let the laid-back rhythm carry me along. But these guys can rock too – some of the guitar solos by Kaziwayi wouldn’t have been out of place on a Pink Floyd album, the horn section added all the right touches and the vocal harmonies were stunning. The chatty rhythm of the lead vocal (Poko) seemed very spontaneous until the backing vocals came in exactly on cue to reinforce the rhythm and showed just how tight these guys are. A great performance.

So hats off to the organisers of the festival – it really was a cracker.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been on stage, and never as a ‘solo’ act, so it was with some trepidation that I set off on the road to Bushey (near Watford) for the ‘Hands Off 2007′ Theremin Symposium. Various people have posted reports of the main event, which was a great success, but of most interest in these pages is the little set I did on the Sunday night for the ‘survivors’ of the whole weekend. This came after a packed weekend of workshops, demonstrations and a truly wonderful concert by a variety of thereminists from around the World, so it could easily have been a total wash-out with everybody drained. I happen to think it all went rather well.

I rehearsed a batch of new Lunacy Board songs, along with a couple of old Deserters numbers – just me playing guitar and singing, using an old Linux PC running the ‘Sooper Looper‘ software to set up sections of repeating chords to play solos (either guitar or theremin) over the top of. At some point prior to the event it occurred to me that it would make life a bit easier for me and a bit more interesting for the audience if I was to have some collaborators up on stage, so contacted a group of performers with the offer of the post of ‘Stunt Thereminist’ for The Lunacy Board Subcommittee. I received a couple of positive responses, so re-arranged my setlist to fit around their choices of song, and I was ready to go.

Nerves were absent as the performance drew near – probably just because the day had been so busy and I had barely time to think about the evening show. I got the stage more-or-less set up as soon as the main concert had finished, took half an hour to get refreshed, then returned to the stage to finish off. At which point I discovered that I had not brought a video cable for Sooper Looper. It can run quite happily without one, as I control it from a set of effects pedals, but should anything go amiss I would not be able to reset it or see what was wrong. Live and learn. The audience came into the room and chatted as I prepared for the first song.

To warm up my fingers and voice I kicked off with ‘Morning Rolls’ – a very short song with no instrumentals or frills. With that complete and with only a small fluffed chord change I invited Wilco Botermans to the stage. Previously in the weekend Wilco had demonstrated his theremin effects set-up which he controls using a specially wired glove to control parameters of a group of Moog ‘Mooger Foogers’, as well as the visually stunning ‘Croix Sonore’ – a unique instrument with similar properties to a theremin. For the purposes of his guest appearance he was using his TVox Tour theremin (the Russian-built instrument favoured by Lydia Kavina and Barbara Bucholz), and the Mooger Foogers, though without the glove controller.

We started off with ‘The Unofficial National Anthem’, followed with a very laid-back version of ‘Requiem For A Head In A Field In Butler’ – using Doug’s original bass part which we improvised along to, and finished off with ‘One Night In The Back Of A Fire Engine’ complete with audience participation (cheesy, but fun). Wilco played a mix of melodic accompaniment and weird special effects which worked well – ‘Requiem…’ seemed to really benefit from this approach as far as I can recall. The concert was recorded in full, but I’ve only had a chance to hear a few snippets back.

Wilco left the stage and I played another short song – ‘Jim Crow’, then Hypnotique came up onto the stage. We played ‘The Man In The Boat’ followed by Lee Newe’s ‘The Woman In Red’ – both fairly slow songs, to which Hypnotique added some legato cello-like theremin parts. Her solos on ‘The Woman In Red’ were particularly effective at bringing the sad nature of the song to the fore.

At some point during the previous song, the looper had stopped responding, so this stopped me doing the new multi-part song we’ve been working on, which needs several looped layers to work, so I called for another stunt thereminist and Terry Bowler came up to play on ‘The Winning Smile’ (a rare love song I wrote last year, which now also incorporates the music from ‘Goodbye Mr. V.’) and ‘The Ballad of Serenity’ (the only cover version I’ve tried, with lyrics which fit into the Lunacy Board remit). I finished off with one more guest thereminist, Captain Ants of ‘The Jaw-Line of Julianne Moore‘, playing the somewhat rockier ‘Fairytale Propaganda’.

It was good to finally get some of these songs out on stage, and great to be able to play them with a group of musicians from a range of backgrounds. I hope to get some video clips posted in the near-future from this.

This gig forms the grande finale of the theremin shindig I mentioned a while ago. I’ll be part of the ‘UK League of Thereminists’ playing a few structured improvised pieces as part of a ‘theremin orchestra’. There are a number of very good thereminists going to be attending, so well worth the money if you are in that neck of the woods this coming Sunday. Book soon, though, by clicking on the picture here.

More daunting for me will be the post-concert wind-down party, for which I’ll be providing some of the music…

This will be the first time that the Lunacy Board material has been played live, albeit in a somewhat more spartan form than usual, as it will just be me playing guitar and singing with a looper and theremin to make things more interesting. The original plan was to use the yobstick as well, but I might limit this to just one or two songs due to the way the looper works, as the rhythm can become a bit too repetitive.

I have also dusted down a couple of old Deserters’ numbers to include in the set, which will be fun, and for a few songs I will be joined by special guest stunt thereminists.

The whole event is being recorded and videotaped, so watch this space for more news early next week…

We had a bit of a crisis at our latest gig… The mixing desk made a rather loud bang and stopped working just before the start of the 2nd set. Everything was lit up, but not a whimper of sound came through. All was not lost and our back-up plan for just such an event came into action, but it was a pretty embarrassing, annoying and uncomfortable half-hour to get back into action. Now we can, with a small degree of certainty, put our finger on the culprit.

Beer.

Beer and pubs and music go hand in hand – without pubs and beer there would be a substantially smaller consumption of live music in the world. However, pouring beer into the mixing desk essential for presenting that music to the audience is not a wise plan, and a couple of clues (not least of which was the liquid seen pouring out of the desk earlier today) suggest that is exactly what happened.

Such are the risks of sitting the desk in the midst of the audience, especially in a fairly cramped venue.

Amazingly enough, after a spell drying out (rehab?), the desk seems to be performing as well as it did before – no noticeable difference, so our wallets can breathe easy for a while longer.

Something I’ve never come across before for some reason is Captain Beefheart’s “10 Commandments for Guitarists”. I found this at the ever-informative Music Thing, though it appears on a few sites around the web. The annotations in italics are mine.

LISTEN TO THE BIRDS

That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren’t going anywhere.
Which reminds me that I once wrote a piece of music on the old CX5m that was based on dozens of transcribed birdsongs – what the hell happened to that?

YOUR GUITAR IS NOT REALLY A GUITAR

Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re good, you’ll land a big one.

PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH

Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn’t shake, eat another piece of bread.
Strangely enough, I have done this, apart from the bit about the bread. Next time…

WALK WITH THE DEVIL

Old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts demons and devils. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
So what does a yobstick attract? Nearly Headless Nick?

IF YOU’RE GUILTY OF THINKING, YOU’RE OUT

If your brain is part of the process, you’re missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

NEVER POINT YOUR GUITAR AT ANYONE

Your instrument has more power than lightning. Just hit a big chord, then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.

ALWAYS CARRY YOUR CHURCH KEY

You must carry your key and use it when called upon. That’s your part of the bargain. Like One String Sam. He was a Detroit street musician in the fifties who played a homemade instrument. His song “I Need A Hundred Dollars” is warm pie. Another church key holder is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty making you want to look up her dress to see how he’s doing it.
I never leave home without mine.

DON’T WIPE THE SWEAT OFF YOUR INSTRUMENT

You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.

KEEP YOUR GUITAR IN A DARK PLACE

When you’re not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don’t play your guitar for more than a day, be sure to put a saucer of water in with it.
Mine does live in a cool, dark place, but usually gets left a half-cup of cold, black coffee – maybe water would be a better bet.

YOU GOTTA HAVE A HOOD FOR YOUR ENGINE

Wear a hat when you play and keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house the hot air can’t escape. Even a lima bean has to have a wet paper towel around it to make it grow.
Well now, I used to have a hat – the “Silly-bugger-time hat” as it was known (actually a tweed deerstalker). I refuse to wear a baseball cap as a matter of principle, but may need to invest in something with a modicum of style to meet this rule.

Inspired in part by Sonicstate’s top 20 greatest synths and Matrixsynth’s The Most Underrated Synths, here is my alternative. This is my top ten list of synths. Not the greatest by any margin, though there are some classics in there. Not the most historically interesting, though one or two certainly have their place in history. Just 10 synths that I’ve enjoyed using over the years, despite or even because of numerous obstacles they’ve thrown in the way. Most were end-of-line bargains or second-hand gems, but they’ve all served me well.

10 Yamaha FB01

For such a little unit this comes with one of the most comprehensive and awe-inspiring manuals complete with extensive MIDI implentation charts and sysex data. The sound out of this is not great – 4-operator FM is not going to win many prizes these days, or even in the days it was first launched. However it is 8-part multitimbral, which was pretty impressive at its launch, and it does work will for a filler. I usually use it for background layers of choirs, brass or synth strings.

9 Casio CZ1000

Casio didn’t stay in the pro synth market for long, but the CZ series has endured. In theory it is a variant on FM synthesis, but in practice it is much easier to program and tends to sound a bit warmer, with some great synth bass sounds and a nice line in brass blasts. This is the full-sized keyboard version of the very popular CZ101. I don’t use mine very often these days as it is a big keyboard to house for the sake of its 4-note polyphony, but it does get dug out every so often to bring its own charm to the occasional piece.

8 Yamaha PSS780

This is a pretty wretched FM workstation with mini-keys, built-in drum pads, sequencer, auto-accompaniment, effects and basic synthesis controls. It is generally pretty weedy sounding, with less oomph than half a FB01 on a bad day, and is really a home keyboard with pretensions of being a synth. However, it is multi-timbral and MIDI-controllable and when the sounds are layered up and a decent drum pattern programmed, it can sound okay. Add some real guitar and vocals and you might just pull it off. This was the first ‘synth’ I had that I could control via MIDI, and it more than doubled the range of sounds I had available at the time. For that I pay it my respect.

7 Akai S950

Akai were several generations of their legendary samplers on by the time I joined the fray with this 3rd-hand bargain. Only 12-bit sample quality, but with all the bells and whistles of the pro favourite S1000, the S950 was quickly pressed into service as an enhancement to the meagre drum sounds of the PSS780, allowing me to mix professionally recorded samples with yobstick, bucket and kalimba samples amongst others, adding more detail to drum parts. I never did manage to get hold of the SCSI disk interface for it, so to this day I have to load it up with several floppy disks, which puts me off using it as much as I might do.

6 Yamaha DX7

What need I say about the DX7. THE classic late 80′s synth. Wonderful electric pianos and bells, wonderful evolving FM washes and great hammered percussion. It is a beast to program, but blessed with a bucketful of computer programs to make it easier, and my first synth was FM-based, so I was in familiar territory. The DX is still my master keyboard for controlling synths, though only occasionally do I use the on-board sounds – usually only for piano or pads. Mine is a mk1, with limited MIDI capabilities, annoyingly curtailed keyboard response and horrible membrane buttons, but it still has a great feel, is built like a tank and is easy to fall back on.

5 Kawai K4R

My first foray into Sample+Synthesis was with the K4r, the rackmount version of the K4. It took the place of the PSS780 as a general dogbody machine with a good collection of drum kits, 16-part multitimbral sound source and a selection of waveforms suitable for everthing from acoustic guitar to analogue lead synths with a filter section good enough to do it justice. I still use this regularly, and probably still could find new things to do with it.

4 Yamaha TX81Z

Another 4-operator Yamaha FM synth, but this one’s a little bit special. First of all it has a significantly improved synthesis engine over the old FB01, with a wide range of waveforms to base sounds on. Secondly it has the ability to store micro-tunings for more experimental music. Thirdly it has good support for breath controllers, making it an ideal partner for my Casio digital wind controller (DH100). It also has a range of good software supporting editing, which is just as well since it has a DX7-like unfriendly editing system. Like the DX it is great for metallic sounds and crisp basses.

3 Moog Etherwave Pro

It’s a theremin – does that count as a synth? I say yes. It’s my list. It is the top of the range Moog theremin and a thing of beauty. Curved walnut surface with gleaming chrome knobs. It is has a nice linear playing range, classic preset tones and enough filter and tone controls to provide a wide range of sounds from pure voices to cutting sawtooth buzzes, as well as CV controls for controlling analogue synths like a theremin. It’s my favourite of all the sound creating gadgets I have, but there are two more items that are currently in the lead for historic reasons.

2 Casio CSM10P

This is a tacky little black box with only 5 sounds – electric piano, piano, organ, harpsichord and vibes. I think it uses 12-bit samples – they’re certainly not great quality. It is preset-only with no editing, being designed to plug in and expand a home keyboard. I have used it time and time again, especially the piano and vibes, and it always wins me over with its simplicity. Just select the sound and play. Nothing more to it. It does have pretty good polyphony, or at least good enough for my keyboard playing, and I find the sounds sit comfortably in a mix (though the pipe organ can be a bit overwhelming at times). It really shouldn’t get used as much as it does, but I just can’t help it. Try listening to Yet Another Granfalloon (pt1) for an example of it in action.

1 Yamaha CX5M

WHAT? Surely I’m joking? Well, no. I cut my electronic / MIDI / composing / keyboard teeth on this bizarre creature, and for all of its many, MANY faults, it holds a slightly rose-tinted place in my musical heart. When I had the opportunity to buy my first keyboard, some time after The Deserters were formed, I spent endless hours scrutinising music magazines for the best synth for me. I had a few front-runners, including the DX100 and CZ101 which had just come out, though I wasn’t too keen on their small keys. Then the CX5M Music Computer came to the end of its commercial life and dropped significantly in price – I was able to pick up the equivalent in sound quality to a DX9, with in-built computer and sequencer for about the same as a CZ101. I pontificated for a while over this, even passing over the opportunity to pick up a Korg MS10 for 50 quid (ha ha, how very different things could have been had I gone down that route…), but eventually came to the conclusion that it was too good a deal to miss.

I wasn’t aware that it couldn’t be played from another MIDI keyboard, despite the presence of a MIDI in socket, so that blew the longevity of it out the water. The only useful sequencer for it at the time was the step sequencer which required some very tedious manual progamming. And the included keyboard was pretty pathetic. However, like so many limited things, these drawbacks just focused the use of the thing, and I soon got my head around FM synthesis using the built-in editor, complex harmonies and rhythms with the score composer sequencer, and drum programming by linking it up to a ZX Spectrum with “SpecDrum” fitted. So it was flawed, but it formed the musical base for a large number of Deserters tunes, try Phill Up the Glass to hear it in action, but most notably the 20-minute-plus instrumental extravaganza that was “Mick’s Amazing Megamix”. Unfortunately the only version of this recorded comes from a badly distorted tape – it has been converted into a more modern sequencer format so may eventually see the light of day using the TX81z to emulate the CX5 tones.

So that’s the lot. Not to everyone’s taste, and probably more biased in favour of a certain Japanese manufacturer than I would like, but impoverished gear junkies can’t be choosers.

Forty whole years have passed since the world first heard “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band“. A pretty good innings for a piece of pop music, ephemeral as the genre usually is. It’s not an album I even own (The White Album is the only beatles album I have on CD), but it does play a big part in Deserters’ history.

Several songs from the album appear in the animated film “The Yellow Submarine”, which was the inspiration to start the Deserters. Looking for a name, we started off with various derivatives of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” until it finally changed into “The Deserters”. The Beatles were a fairly strong influence on us back in those days – probably more due to the eclectic range of styles shown on their later albums than anything else.

Whilst I have heard of others playing similar stick-based instruments every so often, I had never heard of the name. I suspect the name ‘Yobstick’ may just be due to a mispronunciation of ‘Zob Stick’, but the instrument has also been called the ‘Monkey Stick’, ‘Lagerphone’, ‘Freedom Boot’ and many other names from around the world. In fact it has a history going back to asian shamans, and possibly beyond, where it was used as a symbol of power. I’ve stuck some more details about this up on the Deserters site, along with links to some related sites.

For me the most interesting of these is The Groanbox Boys – a London band who I had already heard about in the last couple of days as they just happen to feature Michael Ward-Bergman. He plays some superb accordian (yes, perhaps it seems like a contradiction of terms, but it is really VERY good) on Judge Smith’s album, “The Full English“.

At last, I finally got around to finishing the new yobstick. It’s quite a departure from previous efforts – lots of natural wood and more emphasis on playability instead of durability. I’ve only played it for a short time tonight, but it feels great and sounds lovely (far better than a stick with a welly at one end and a load of bottle tops at the other should do!)

I’ll stick some audio clips up once I’ve worked out how to mic the damn thing up. Imagine a drum kit that moves… I may need to get contact mics for it to work, but it is in effect three linked sound sources, so a single mic won’t do it justice, and certainly wouldn’t make it easy to be heard over electric instruments.

This picture of it makes it look somewhat scrawny, but looks aren’t everything. I’ve set out the process I used to put it together over on the Deserters’ page, under Instrumentography, so you can get a flavour for what is required to build one, and find out really interesting facts like “who makes the best bottletops for a yobstick?”

I’ve also been experimenting with some software called “SooperLooper”, which turns a standard Linux PC into a long controllable delay loop. I’ve worked out how to get some control over it with my guitar effects pedal, to the extent of being able to play a series of chords, then bass, then solo over the top. Once I’m more familiar with it I’m hoping to be able to set up a rhythm with the yobstick and guitar, then play theremin over the top. Early days, but if I can get it working together and hit the timing spot on, then it could sound pretty good.

They have been running a competition for new electronic compositions, which is not something I’ve done for many years, preferring to work with at least some acoustic, hands-on (or off in the case of theremin) instruments. Listening to some of the tracks on the site only confirmed that this was pretty hard-core electronica – mostly not the sort of music I would listen to, let alone attempt (or wish) to play.

Sounds like a challenge.

So here you’ll find the latest creation from The Lunacy Board. No lyrics. Lots of effects and electronic twiddles. Buckets of theremin. Not our usual fare, but what is usual for us?

Kurt Vonnegut RIP

Of the small group of writers I would categorise as my ‘favourites’, Kurt Vonnegut has always felt like the one whose writings were closest to my own feelings and thoughts. He has put into succinct words and touching stories concepts and concerns that I have had over the years in a down-to-earth, often conversational style which can be both amusing and disturbing in equal measures. To me he has always seemed the eternal optimistic pessimist – knowing the worst is likely to happen, but focusing on the best of mankind – that certain ‘something’ that brings hope that doom is not totally inevitable, or at least that some part of us might actually learn something from it. These are themes that have appeared in The Lunacy Board‘s material, from The Unofficial National Anthem onwards – that there is “some spark within” that may see us through the madness.

The new ‘epic’ we’re working on covers the evolution of mankind – we ran through some of it a couple of weeks ago before I went off, and it’s sounding good so far. It includes a section which was a tip-of-the-hat towards Mr Vonnegut’s Galapagos, with the future human race (by then evolved into sea-living, flippered mammals) describing how our current actions are shaping us for the future. It is somehow appropriate that this part of the song should become our eulogy to Vonnegut as well as to the human race. As he wrote himself, so it goes.

I’ve finished mixing all the music from our last session. Most of it is just for our own use as demo reference for future practices, but there were also some new instrumental pieces for use in the Stockholm soundtrack. One of them is available for download over at The Lunacy Board site. It is based around a simple evolving, echoing guitar riff, with synth textures, found sound samples (including some yobstick) and a meandering rhythm backing.

The big one

We’re working towards a new extended piece to fit in with the repetoire we’ve already built up. Since we first started this project, we’ve been throwing ideas around towards a longer song which touches on a few topics we feel are linked around the area of evolution, mankind’s journey and definitions of good and evil. I’ve recently come up with an idea to link these topics within a narrative setting that has the potential to be our ‘big number’.

It’s still in the early stages, so I can’t give too much away, but the aim is to have a piece that both covers the topics of interest and also lets us demonstrate all the aspects of what we are as a band. It will have an evolving instrumentation, so we’ll start off with two instruments at the start of the piece and swap around between guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, theremin and whatever else we come up with. The sections of the song will deal with different characters and reflect that in the instruments chosen and the style of the section. This will let us cover everything from ambient soundscapes and avant garde rock to upbeat pop or country and western – anything is fair game. It’s going to take a while to put together and get it working fluidly, but we’ll start on it at the next session and hopefully will have a clip or two to post on the web site in the not-too-distant future.

Then I came across a beautiful bass solo written by Doug Boucher over on his MySpace page. It’s called “Requiem For A Head Laying In A Field In Butler” and is dedicated to the very wonderful Mike Keneally. I really enjoyed the piece and tried playing some haunting theremin over the top, some of which came together quite nicely, and other parts of which were less successful. I then tried putting the piece together with some of Sean’s drumming for (I think) The Winning Smile – two unrelated bits of music coming together to form something new altogether. To this new hybrid track I set about playing guitar and theremin, with pretty good results. There are places where the bass and drums drift apart to give a very laid back feeling, and others where they synchronise exactly, including some where the drums and bass reach a crescendo at the same time before gently tailing off.

As usual, you can find the track over at The Lunacy Board site.

Our current feeling is that we would feature our own material, but have a few cover versions on hand to whip out according to the audience – e.g. for a dedicated progressive audience we might include a Jethro Tull or Rush cover, but for a more general audience we’d maybe think about something that has had some more airplay like Gabriel, The Who or Marillion, though still keeping within the progressive genre, more or less. We’ll probably try out a range of possible covers over the next few practices we have, but don’t want to get too bogged down in them when we have new material to play with.

The studio session was VERY productive, lasting all day and covering a total of 5 new songs, 1 old song, some more soundtrack work and Stockholm dialogue.

We started with The Man in the Boat, which is an old song of mine from years ago that we’ve stripped down and rebuilt. It deals with the temptation to play it safe and end up missing out on actually living life. It is a bit more downbeat the The Unofficial National Anthem, with an extended instrumental section in the middle which has a bit of a Pink Floyd feel to it. At the moment we’ve only done drums, guitar and vocals, but the structure is coming together well – we just need to practice it some more before committing it to a proper recording as there are some switches in the dynamics of the song that need to be tightened up.

We then moved onto Fairytale Propaganda which is a brand new song I’ve been working on over the last couple of months. It asks the question “what would fairytales be about 500 years later, if the characters written about were living now?”, casting a critical eye over the less than noble way our ‘fairytale’ characters of the present day conduct themselves. The song builds slowly from a quiet instrumental introduction into our most outright rock song to date.

After these two fairly long songs we switched over to do some improvisational music with a view to including parts in the Stockholm soundtrack. Starting with a drum and bass backing we layered various solos, textures and effects over the top using guitar, keyboard and samples (including an old sample of the yobstick I came across). The results were much more avant-garde than our previous improvised music, closer to Zappa than anything else we’ve tried. It will need a fair bit of editing to make some of the layers work together, but there is definitely some unusual and interesting music in there.

After a bite to eat and a blether, it was back to work on some shorter songs, kicking off with Morning Rolls, which is a short song about bereavement (or traditional Scottish fare at the most literal reading of the lyric). It came together quite well with just vocal and guitar, though it is still in its early days and may change a bit in time.

The Parallel Curve was next up. This is a song about careers and insanity that doesn’t really have any music yet, so we tried a few things out, mainly around a march-like rhythm and slide ebow guitar – kind of a rising and falling pulse over which the lyrics were half-sung, half-spoken. The idea being to have a number of non-fixed pitch instruments including the theremin and slide guitar and bass all providing a constantly shifting backing. Parts of this worked well, though some verses simply didn’t come together properly, so it will need further work. The version we worked on was significantly different from my original demo attempt, and I suspect it will change as much again in future iterations.

A quick run through of Jim Crow was next – we tried this a while ago and it mutated from a choppy, almost Buddy Holly, style into a more laid back doo-wop number. This time around we went straight into the doo-wop and after a couple of false starts it was a nice bit of fun. I have some ideas for additional verses for it (it currently only has two which are repeated), and we need to agree on the backing ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ to make the vocals rock-solid as they need to be for this style of music.

The final song of the day was one I wrote for my better half earlier this year, called The Winning Smile. It’s a happy little number about the power of a smile in a World with too few. I originally recorded it as an acoustic piece with just guitar and vocal, but we tried it as a full-on power ballad and it worked a treat.

To finish the day off we recorded a big chunk of Stockholm dialogue which I’ll be working through over the next few weeks. The first part of the film (of the three episodes we have split it into) has been ‘filmed’ and is ready for dialogue and music to be added, so progress is good and it looks like we could have the first part ready for viewing in a month or two.

So, a good day all round, with plenty of things to take forward. I’ll be putting a bit of the soundtrack work up on the website within the week, so keep an ear out for that.

Work is progressing slowly but surely on “Stockholm“, both in terms of the visual side (with animated scenes progressing well – almost 20% complete) and the audio. We have a growing collection of soundtrack material to choose from, ranging from our first ever recording session through to the latest pieces, and will be putting some short selections up on The Lunacy Board website. The first piece is already there, a 2 minute piece of improvised instrumental music reminiscent of Meddle-era Pink Floyd.

Finally, for the moment, we also have a dedicated forum area over at Melos’ Prog Bazaar, so drop in any time and let us know what you think about the band, the music, the weather or anything else.

The Lunacy Board have now officially launched, with our first track “The Unofficial National Anthem” being available for download from our website at www.lunacyboard.com.

The song is an unusually upbeat number featuring a fairly standard rock base (drums, bass, guitars), layered vocals, a little theremin and a spot of organ. It is probably the most accessible music we’ve attempted so far, though there are enough weird things going on to appeal to more warped tastes (such as my own).

The new website will be our base of operations for the foreseeable future. As well as musical offerings, we’ll be providing various other creative outpourings including poetry, prose and videos. As a small taster I’ve put on a test demo of a scene from our forthcoming drama “Stockholm” – watch out for more little nuggets in the future.

Wishing you all the best for 2007, with The Lunacy Board providing the soundtrack!

Back in the mists of time (1985) the Deserters produced a short run of magazines for those following our music at the time. They featured interviews with members of the band, articles about the music and anything else that happened to be of interest at the time. I’ve recently come across scans of them and for your pleasure they are now available for download from the Deserters site at www.the-deserters.co.uk. Some of the references may be a bit obscure, but reading through the biography page first should be all that’s necessary to acquaint you with the players. Some of the humour is also firmly on the juvenile side, mostly influenced by “Monty Python” and “The Young Ones”, but there are some gems in there, too. So cast your mind back to the mid 80′s and enjoy a trip through Deserters’ history…

I haven’t forgotten about the new track – watch this space over the next few days. I’m working on the 3rd (and hopefully final) mix at the moment.

We then followed this up with a first run through ‘The Man In The Boat’, which I haven’t even finished writing yet. I’ve been working on it with just voice and acoustic guitar, so it was great to hear it come alive with drums and electric guitar. It’s still pretty unpolished, with only a guide vocal (which was VERY ropey) and no bass or other accompaniment, but has given us a good starting point to work from.

Finally, we also tried a quick run-through of ‘Jim Crow’ which is at an even more embryonic stage – just a few choruses exist as I threw away the original verses. As I’ve been writing it, this song had a kind of Buddy Holly feel to it, with choppy acoustic chords and a fairly standard harmonic structure, but as we played the first chorus slowly through it picked up a swing rhythm, and backing vocals, resulting in a wonderful and most unexpected doo-wop style. Given the subject nature, or at least one aspect of it, this seems quite fitting, and hopefully we can pull it off when the rest of the song is written around it.

Hopefully my next post here will be to reveal our work to date. Stay tuned!

Since the days of the Green Shed Studios and the big Farfisa organ we had there, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the sound of the organ. Nothing else sounds like a proper pipe organ being played well in a cathedral and echoing round the space, filling the audio spectrum with trouser-flapping bass and angelic overtones. And the latest addition to my sonic arsenal fits the bill – it sounds nothing like that, but perhaps a bit more like an asthmatic monk playing an accordion in a public toilet.

Introducing the J. Busilacchio electric reed organ – it’s a keyboard in a suitcase, includes 4 legs which screw in to the bottom and an on/off switch. Turn it on and a fan starts pumping a cool breeze across your fingers and you’re ready to go. It has a great sound – effectively it’s a harmonium without the bellows, or a horizonal accordion. The air gets pumped over metal reeds which results in a rich sound a bit like a pipe organ with a bad cold – not as bold or clear, but with a dignified, if slightly dishevelled, air. It’s defintely more Ivor Cutler than Van der Graaf Generator, but that’s certainly no bad thing. It sits quite well with theremin, so I may create something to feature the two together.

There’s really not a lot of information available about these – they do crop up fairly regularly in online auctions, along with similar items by other manufacturers. I’ve seen them described as dating from the 40′s, which I find a little hard to believe, as they have more of a 60′s feel to them. They’re also known as Chord Organs, due to the panel of accordion-like chord buttons to the left of the keyboard, though this tends to lump them in with some pretty ugly-looking plastic things with plastic reeds which really are not in the same league. If anyone has more information about the history of these critters, let me know.

UPDATE

I’ve done some more digging around, and discovered various different versions of the organ. I’ve put details on a new page on the Deserters site, here.

Note to eBay sellers: You are welcome to use the details about Busilacchio/Lorenzo organs from this page on the condition that you include a link to this page (http://www.the-deserters.co.uk/inst_organs.html) on your listing so that your potential buyers have access to all the information.

Hold onto your hats – this is a long one…

Tourist Tat

I’ve followed two generations of family working in various parts of the Scottish tourist industry and have therefore been thoroughly steeped for years in views of garish tartans, shortbread of various shapes, endless piper dolls, Nessies, clan memorabilia and spurtles (damn, but I love that word!). Billy Connolly once said something along the lines that “we’re the only people in the World who actually believe all that tourist crap IS our culture”, which is either a sad reflection on the commercialisation of our culture to the extent that it has become a pale imitation of itself, or an endorsement of the scottish ability to take ourselves too seriously, but with good humour.

Our culture is, of course, something of a moveable feast, as most are in these global village days, with influences from all over the World making themselves known, but even locally we have a reasonably large population of second and third generation immigrant communities who are combining their culture with our own – changing both in the process. Such is the nature of art – it thrives on collaboration and cross-pollination, despite the best efforts of critics and big business to categorise and rationalise it.

Useful Sports

I don’t like football. There are probably about 5 males in Scotland who don’t like football, which always strikes me as amusing that a country so bad at something can have such a love of it. It’s perhaps the national sense of humour at play again – we like underdogs, so let’s go crazy about a sport that we’re inherently useless at. If there’s one thing we’re good at (and this applies to the whole of the UK), it’s inventing games. We’ve invented loads of games – golf, rugby, football, cricket, the list goes on. Then we tell the World about them, win for the first couple of years and they thrash us. Soundly.

I do wonder about the origins of sports, and why some should be more popular than others. Running, hurdles, javelin, high jump, skiing – these all make some sense, being throwbacks to our days as hunters or foragers, but football/basketball/hockey/rugby/polo? They’re all basically the same game with variations on the ball, goals or method of movement, and go back to ancient Greece (or earlier, for all I know) when they used the head of the previous losing team captain, but what is the significance of sticking a ball in a goal? Lost on me, for sure.

As for the game of golf – where to start? Cross-country snooker. Waste of a good walk. Pick your favourite insult. Golf is just weird, through and through. From the Rupert the Bear outfits through to the electric golf carts for the people too lazy to walk a couple of hundred metres between holes, it is a strange parallel universe. People come to Scotland from all over the World to play golf – we have (according to those in the know) some of the best courses in the World.

But here’s the thing – no matter how stunning the landscape around the course, the course itself is identical to every other course in the world. Okay, the layout is different, the holes are further apart or whatever, but they have to be more or less similar in the same way that all football pitches are rectangular with a goal at each end. Arguably the most famous course is the Old Course at St Andrews, set beside a wonderful beach with the town watching over and the constantly changing sea scenting the air. It’s very flat and sandy, and golf courses the World over have modelled themselves on this, which is all very well, but just because it sits in the landscape of the Fife coast very comfortably doesn’t mean the same automatically applied elsewhere – a fact which doesn’t seem to have registered with golf course designers. For example, millions were spent on landscaping a vast swathe of Loch Lomondside to turn it into a flat, bright green carpet covered in sand pits. Loch Lomond is a freshwater loch. It doesn’t have perfect yellow sand. It has rugged hillsides of brown bracken, pale grasses and purple heathers – not flat, near-luminous green manicured lawns.

Please, if you’re going to dedicate an unhealthy proportion of the country’s first national park to the rich and stupid, would it be too much to ask to at least keep it in sympathy with the surrounding area? The local people struggle with endless forms of planning permission to make the slightest change to their house, but big money golf can come along and plant a monstrous eyesore in the middle of one of the country’s most beautiful locations and for some reason (money, obviously) that’s fine. And who decided that golf courses had to be placed in beautiful locations – you don’t see football stadia or racetracks in the middle of picturesque countryside? End of rant.

One thing that can be said of golf is that it seems to be all-encompassing. The obscenely rich who play at Loch Lomond pay thousands for the privilege to do so, but take a trip through Glasgow and you’ll see shell-suited youths en-route to their local course with golf club in one hand and carry-out in the other.

Highland Games

For the first 17 or so years of my life we spent a day each year at the local highland games – usually Luss, or occasionally the spectacle of Dunoon with its massed pipe bands. In recent years these have become the stomping ground of the “World’s Strongest Man” competitors, keeping up their profiles and earning a few bob in between pulling trains with their teeth or lifting boulders with their nostril hair, but back in the day these would have been local strong men, usually from the surrounding farms.

The games include various stalls, displays of highland dance and a number of sporting events. The events range from standards like flat races and shot putt, to hill races (who can get to the top of the nearest mountain and back the quickest), hammer throwing and the old favourite, tossing the caber. For those not familar with this event, it is probably even more phallic than it sounds – in a nutshell you have to pick up a long log and throw it up and through 180 degrees in the air, or as Iain Banks puts it; “…some thick-necked twat in a skirt trying to outwit a telegraph pole…” I always enjoyed watching these events, and felt they were a pretty good way for farm workers to show off the muscles they’d built up over the years, with reasonably unique sports aimed at their skills.

One event always seemed at odds with the rest, and I suspect probably owed more to “It’s a Knockout” than traditional scottish competition. It involved teams of two, one of whom would push, and the other sit in, a wheelbarrow. The barrow occupant would hold a long pole which would have to be inserted into a hole on a contraption housing a bucket of water, under which the barrow had to pass. Should the aim be off, then the team would be soaked (which was almost always the outcome), otherwise they would pass into the next round. I suppose this is really a less dangerous variant of mediaevil jousting, but don’t know what relevance it may have had to highland life.

Raw Spirit

This whole article was inspired by the Iain Banks’ line above which I’ve been chuckling about all day. It comes from his fairly recent non-fiction book “Raw Spirit” which is a sort of hybrid between travelogue, autobiography and whisky-tasting guide. I’ve never read any sort of travel book, partly on the basis that I’d just be jealous of the places people travel to, partly because I wouldn’t necessarily be interested in the sort of things the writer would, but mainly because I find them about as appealing as a slushy romance novel or a guide to cross-stitch – just not my thing.

However, this book is written by one of my favourite authors who has written some wonderful contemporary fiction (much of it based in Scotland), and is probably second only to Frank Herbert in the SciFi genre. It covers Scotland, so no need to be envious of exotic locations. It offers up history, information and assessments of various single malts without being pompous or technical. And finally, it contains lots of amusing Banksian anecdotes to bring life to the locations he visits. To bring us back to the the issue of Scottish culture I’ll end with another apt quote; “…music of extreme Heederum-Hawderum-ness that’s patently been dredged from the very lowest, most crud-encrusted sump of the great festering bilge tank that is Scottish Cliché MacMusic from Bonnie Glen Grotesquo.” So, if you want a guide to either Scotland or whisky by someone who lives and loves both, has a wry sense of humour and a knack for storytelling, as well as an appreciation of decent music, I’d recommend it.

Sean brought a few ideas for lyrics and music, which we mulled over and mangled into the skeleton of a song. I think we managed to capture the intent of the original text, but the music went off in its own direction, as often happens. What we thought would be a deep and meaningful anti-anthem became a perfectly formed 3-minute pop tune, albeit with deeper than the average lyrics.

The piece (“The Unofficial National Anthem”) features Sean on vocals and drums and yours truly on guitar and bass, which was all recorded fairly painlessly with a couple of back-up takes just in case. The result was very pleasing, and positively catchy, if a little ragged around the edges. We’re planning on doing some rehearsal of it before the next session to tighten it up before re-recording, as well as trying something more suited to our musical roots in a Can / Robert Wyatt style.

So, that’s all very well, but what could I play?

Tempting though a freeform improvisation would be, I don’t know that it would go down very well with an audience who’ve paid to see a covers band, so that got me thinking. Our next public gig is December, and there are some festive tunes which should sound pretty good on the theremin. I tried some out today – a mixture of popular Christmas tunes like White Christmas, Rudolph, etc. along with some traditional carols – Silent Night is particularly effective on theremin.

Here’s the thing. I tried ‘Walking in the Air’ – the theme from ‘The Snowman’ – which is a song that really gets my hackles up. I don’t know why, but it always seems to conjure up in my mind the sugary, sickly, commercial worst of what the Christmas season has become. To paraphrase Roy Harper “I’ve not read the book (or seen the film), so I cannot recite”, but it just grates on me for reasons I cannot explain. It may be a lovely, touching story about one boy’s love for a talking ice-pop, but that music has put me off it for life. HOWEVER… What a perfect piece of music for theremin. It’s in the right register, it’s fairly ethereal, it’s fun to play, and it’s not Aled bloody Jones.

The band do a great version of Squiggle’s (or whatever he’s calling himself nowadays) ‘Kiss’. I have never liked Prince (as was), or any of his musical output – he always seemed like he was trying to be the best bits of Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson and Johnny Guitar Watson and ending up being the worst excesses of all of them. Maybe I’m being unfair, but he had his chance with me and blew it. Maybe I’d like him more if he wasn’t so hyped – I do tend to automatically put up barriers to hype, hence my similar dislike of REM, INXS, Simply Red; the list goes on. The point is that despite not liking the song ‘Kiss’ (including the self-mocking, good-humored Tom Jones version), the first time the band tried it out they completely rocked its socks off. In fact it is one of my favourite songs they do. Somehow or other it just fits, and similarly, somehow or other that awful Snowman tune just comes to life on the theremin.

Or maybe it’s just me?

Another two live sound gigs – one very cool show in a barn as part of a party/barbequeue/dance/shindig event, and another more local gig which was almost a sell-out. We’ve also almost sold out a gig in December, and may have a slot in a big charity bash in the new year, so keeping busy on that front. Proceeds from a previous gig went to purchase our own PA system which is loud, clear and a significant improvement on the previous system. I’ve done a couple of multitrack live recordings of the band, with the aim being to put together a demo for future promotion and possibly even a live CD for the punters to buy.

There have been a couple of suggestions that I might join them on-stage for a song, playing theremin, which would be fun. I don’t know how practical it would be however, since the venues we’ve played so far have been too crowded on stage for any sort of theremin playing (which needs a couple of metres space to avoid interference with the antennae). Another problem is monitoring what I’d be playing in the midst of a live-band – unlike any other instrument which can be played to some extent without hearing the outcome, the theremin HAS to be heard by the performer just to keep on pitch. I would need a dedicated monitor for this, preferably at ear-height, so the practicalities may well outweigh the desire to do a guest spot. I’ve tried to do more practice with a view to maybe doing a piece or two as warm-up for the band, having the stage to myself and possibly using a delay pedal or similar to accompany myself, but I don’t think my theremin playing is just quite ready for public performance yet.

I’ve also been to see Pamelia Kurstin playing live last week, which was inspirational. She is one of the few masters of the theremin, and plays it with a combination of delay pedals and effects to produce densely-layered, almost orchestral sounds. Opening for her were an avant-garde trio of cello, guitar and monosynth which didn’t really do much for me, and IME – a solo artist using guitar, location recordings, chimes and various gadgets to build up a very slowly evolving, atmospheric sound on the border between music and sound-sculpture. Not a type of music I normally listen to very often, but it did prompt me to dig out Czukay and Sylvian’s ‘Flux and Mutability’, which is probably the closest thing in my music collection.

Between listening to these ambient pieces and playing around with delay loops on the theremin, I’m feeling the creative juices flowing again, which is good, as we have a Lunacy Board session coming up this weekend. As well as the usual improvised jams we’ve had in the past, we also have a little project which may or may not bear fruit, but offers us both a specific focus and potential for an instant audience. More details about the success or otherwise of that to follow.

Well, okay, here’s some background about the one we used… It came from some club or other and was on its last legs when it arrived at the Green Shed for us to use. It had a solid veneer of nicotine mottled with beer and grew progressively smellier as it warmed up with use. I don’t know what model it is – I did a bit of research recently for more information, but came up with very little, but it had a built-in rhythm section (as used in the aforementioned track) and tape recorder. It also supposedly had a Leslie cabinet built in, but the switch to turn it on did nothing. At the time none of us had any idea what a Leslie was, sowe didn’t realise what we were missing, or even how we could go about fixing it to get that unique sound. Oh well. At the time we did think it was an incredibly cheesy addition to our instrumental ranks, but it served us well whilst it lasted.

Unfortunately, one day it just died in a shower of sparks and our association was almost over. I did manage to salvage the rhythm unit from it and get it operating as a stand-alone analogue drum machine of sorts. It was not programmable, but you could jam two or three rhythm type buttons down together to create new composite and quite dense mega-rhythms, which was pretty nifty. I don’t know what happened to that part of it, though – I can only assume it was ‘lost’ in a house move.

I finished building the frame and shelving over the weekend. I’m no joiner, but it all seems very sturdy, if not exactly a thing of great beauty. It has taken the best part of 2 days to get all the cables and gear in site and connected up. There are still some tweaks to go in order to have everything running smoothly, but I’m at least able to get a sound out of everything, which is much more than I’ve been able to do for the last few years.

I’ll be running it all on three computers – the good old faithful Atari ST for controlling keyboards and any forays into the world of algorithmic music, my regular PC for running virtual instruments, which I’ve never really got to grips with beyond the odd demo here and there, and a bargain basement (under £1) old PC for actually recording everything. It was great to get back to the ST with its simple-to-use and crash-free environment after years of using PCs, but weird to be back on a little 12 inch screen instead of this 19 inch monster. Hopefully this arrangement will give me the best of all worlds, as I’m not convinced this PC is really up to handling all chores on its own.

Give me a couple of days and I should come up with something new to post on the site…

When I did a search on this myself, this blog was the only entry (a Googlewhack, I believe?), so I dug around for anything else about ‘green shed’ that could be remotely related to progressive rock. Not a thing could I find. So the question is; is there somebody over in Japan creating prog rock under the name ‘Greenshed’, or was this a return visitor to the site who’s enduring image of the band is of us recording in a green shed? Who knows (or cares)?

Studio Bordet (or whatever it will be called) is on the road to construction – it has power, light and walls. The next step is building a frame to hold PC, keyboard, mixing desk and various other bits of musical gear. With the addition of plasterboard, sound insulation and flooring there is just under 2m² of useful floorspace, which is even less than I had hoped for, but should still provide enough space to have a usable setup and be able to play bass or guitar in the room. Playing the theremin in there will definitely not work, though, due to lack of space, so I’ll still need to cart it around the house depending on whether I’m practicing or recording.

I did a recording recently for the local band using my new multi-input interface which worked out really well (apart from running out of disk space), but having listened to the mix I initially put together it has become painfully clear that I need a decent set of monitoring speakers. I have a good set of headphones, but mixing on ‘phones is never a good idea, so I try to get a reasonable sound using them, then switch to my PC speakers, which are pretty good quality for a PC, but still far from HiFi. The mix I ended up with sounded pretty good on the PC, great on the ‘phones, but unfortunately lousy in the car or through the little box we have in the kitchen. I knew the day would come when I’d have to fork out for decent speakers – it’s one of the things you really can’t skimp on (like microphones) to get a good sound, but it’s not as exciting as the wonderful wealth of fancy studio toys available. So… Some research, testing and budget-balancing later, I’ve finally bought a new set of speakers, and the winners are… Tannoy Reveals.

Revealing

I got a pair at a good price from good old eBay, and they’re sitting in their box waiting to become centrepieces of the new studio, such as it is. Apart from the great balance between sound quality, tonal range and price, they have a couple of other ‘feelgood’ bonuses. The Tannoy factory is about an hour’s drive from here, so supporting local business is good. I went on a fantastic guided tour there back in my early days of getting interested in sound engineering and have two lasting memories. Firstly, getting to spend a few minutes in their anechoic chamber – a really weird feeling having NO echoes at all, and particularly disorientating when they shut off the lights (to complete darkness) and you realise how much of your balance is dictated by audio and visual cues. Secondly was getting a demo of their top-of-the-range speaker systems at full tilt – revealing a level of detail in the music that I simply hadn’t heard through normal speakers.

Plus, what’s good enough for Mr Keneally is good enough for me!

In other news – I have finished my theremin/ebow remix and look forward to hearing the final album – details to follow soon, I hope. I ended up submitting two versions – one with vocals and another without – on subsequent listenings the vocal-free version is more pleasing to the ear!

I’ve been doing a remix of a short piece of instrumental music for an on-line acquaintence and kindred spirit (theremin player and electronic gadget abuser) over the last week or two. It’s pretty much finished now, but I came up with a set of lyrics to the piece which I’ve been trying in vain to fit into the music. I’ve got the rhythm sorted, but can’t seem to sing notes which fit in. This may be because the music isn’t in a great key for my voice, or it may just be that my voice isn’t fitting the music. I suspect the latter. It will be finished this week – one way or another. Not my greatest work, but it does have lots of ebow, some mandolin, and my first recorded theremin, albeit as a part of a wash of sound.

New Toys

I’ve managed to pick up a decent multi-input audio card for my PC at a good price from eBay. It will let me record up to 8 tracks simultaneously in high quality sound, which will be great for Lunacy board stuff, letting us swap instruments around (as we do) without worrying about changing connections, as well as allowing recording of a whole band at once.

Studio

Since starting this blog, any musical activities, apart from theremin and acoustic guitar, have required some digging around in boxes. I haven’t had a dedicated music space to focus my writing, playing or recording, and that hasn’t helped get things done as it’s a hassle to set things up for the sake of a single song. I’m pleased that due to some changes going on around Chez Bordet, I will be getting a small studio. Whilst this won’t be anything to give Abbey Road or Realworld any sleepless nights, and there really won’t be room for cat-swinging, it will give me enough space to set up my recording gear and instruments in a more creative environment, ready for me to use whenever the muse starts tweaking those creative juices. It will still be a couple of months away before it is complete, but work has started and I hope it will be ready to go by the end of the summer.

To start with, the local band I’m doing sound engineer duties for had their first gig in the local pub – great turnout, with all tickets sold, and about 100 people in the audience. They went down really well – the vocalist really captured the crowd – he’s a true entertainer in ways that are lost to a lot of live acts these days. They ended out cutting some of the slower songs out, as so many people were up and dancing, which is a good sign. Several parties expressed an interest in future bookings, so all in all a great result.

The sound was generally pretty good, though I was a bit too close to the band to get a good handle on the balance without squeezing through the audience, plus a buzz developed in the second set, which now appears to have been due to a speaker dying. Proceeds from the first gig will therefore be going towards a new PA system…

Not much on the Lunacy Board front either, due to circumstances out of our control, though I have gone through the recordings we made at the last session and started to work on some of the best bits.

Finally, I’m doing a bit of work on a collaborative track which is still under wraps, but hopefully should turn out to be interesting. More news on this soon – within the next week or two.

So, if you’ve enjoyed a track or two, they’re now all handy for downloading in a thrice for the full Deserters experience. What are you waiting for?

Phill Up The Glass

Week 17 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

For the last ‘Track of the Week’ (at least for the next few months), here’s another original track from the Bordet / Leigh spin-off album ‘Mux-Ip’. You may have guessed from the name that it is inspired by the music of Philip Glass, in which case you’d be correct. However, the track started life quite differently as a study in using bird song in music. I transcribed the songs of a number of birds in the local area, with the plan of building up a whole piece of music, but on listening closely found that the repetition occuring naturally, when put in a musical context, ended up coming out like a minimalist piece, so I went the whole hog and filled out the birdsong themes with those repetitive-sounding arpeggios beloved of the minimalist movement.

This was one of the last pieces I wrote using the music computer I bought some years earlier (a Yamaha CX5M) and which required every note to be manually entered one at a time.

That’s it from the Deserters archives for the time being. I hope you’ve enjoyed the music as much as I’ve enjoyed re-visiting the past. Normal service will now be resumed, so don’t forget to check back for news of current activities (or use the RSS feed if you know about such things).

Click here to download.

A good week for music…

Engineering

The local band I’m doing sound engineer for are gearing up for a couple of gigs in the next month – they’ve build up a decent setlist now, and feel ready to perform in public. Should all be good fun, I hope. Final practice session next week, then the first gig after that.

Recording

Today also saw another get-together for the progressive project mentioned previously. I think it is safe to reveal we’ll be calling ourselves…

The Lunacy Board

Still a two-piece line-up so far, but we’re building towards a more cohesive vision of what we’re looking to achieve. We recorded a number of pieces this afternoon – some complete improvisations, some based on riffs or chord changes we’ve been playing around with, and swapping instruments between guitar, bass, drums, keyboard and theremin. This was the first time I’ve played the theremin within an ensemble environment, as I usually either pratice solo or with a quiet backing track, and it quickly became clear that the monitoring system I had tacked together was not going to be as useful for theremin as it had been for the other instruments. You can afford to not hear the odd note or two when playing most instruments as long as fingers are in the right place, but with the theremin this simply results in out-of-tune notes. I will need to invest in a little monitor amp for the theremin in the future…

The hope is that we can put some of these together to start to form some longer pieces, which can then be further tweaked and potentially lyrics added. We’ll be approaching our music from a couple of different angles including improvisation, music for film and music for the spoken word, which covers most of our interests at the moment.

Gear Hassles

I set out a selection of musical gear for us to use, but made the mistaken shortcut of using a previously unused recording package to record the music. For some reason the correct input to the computer was distorting, so I ended up using the microphone input, which is never a great idea. In this case it led to a pretty high level of background noise as well as our inputs being summed to mono. Not a problem for the recording stage, but it will make things awkward for the editing. A little lesson learned for the future, I think. Irrespective of this problem, I think we got some good base material recorded today, which will help to set us on our way.

Watch this space…

Soundtrack of a B-Movie

Week 16 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

In one of the periods between Deserters activity in the late 80′s, Jennifer Leigh & I recorded a limited run album called ‘Mux-Ip’, which was a collection of cover versions and originals performed as a duo. This week’s track, ‘Soundtrack of a B-Movie’, comes from that album (as does next week’s track).

This was one of my earliest uses of multi-track recording, and was recorded using a mini keyboard (a Yamaha SHS-10) and a dodgy Strat copy guitar. The low-budget nature of this track is emphasised by the lack of the original recordings to take this from, so this is a 3rd generation cassette copy. It does, however, have a certain charm, despite its failings.

The piece is effectively a 6 minute guitar solo with cheesy auto-keyboard percussion, some synth pads and the occasional effect (tubular bells, radio clips, etc.)

Click here to download.

Heavy Metal Ballad

Week 15 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

We’re coming towards the end of this run of free downloadable goodies. Whilst there is more Deserters music in the archives, it’s not yet in a form suitable for the web. I’ve probably got enough for another two weeks, so enjoy it while it lasts.

This week we have a song which has a title which is a bit of a misnome