The music is embedded on the right-hand side of this site, so you can listen to most of the tracks before downloading for a very reasonable price. In addition to the music I have already featured on this site, the final album includes another 16 pieces of music that were recorded at the same time, but not released (these do NOT appear in the track list shown, but are included as bonus tracks in the final download).

The whole album has a Creative Commons (BY-CC) licence, which means you can freely share it, use it in podcasts, films or online projects, just so long as you credit it to Mick Bordet and include a link to this website in whatever you produce.

In addition to the music, the download contains a full-colour pdf booklet that describes each track along with photographs of all the instruments, and a pdf file of a novella that accompanies the music.

The novella (also called “Obscurities”) introduces a character from a forthcoming book, who discovers a box full of instruments and learns the story behind each one: a story that forms her own personal history and leads her to learn about her ancestors and herself. Yes, each of the instruments she finds is one of those used in the album and each has a very different tale to tell.

The eBook is also available at Smashwords in formats for all the usual eReaders.

As if that wasn’t enough, the story will also be appearing in audio podcast form over the next few weeks at Every Photo Tells…
The audio version of the story includes snippets of music from the album, so is also a good way to hear some of the music and immerse yourself in the story at the same time.

Everything together

The weekly deadline to the challenges meant that some pieces that I started were left incomplete, so that I ended up at the end with 8 or 9 tracks in various states of readiness. Some were little more than a piano riff or a line of meeblip improvisation over an organ pad, while a couple were more structured but needed more time to complete. I spent the last week doing just that: editing pieces down to decent length, recording some more melody, textural or rhythm parts and generally finishing things off.

As a result, this last week steps out of the neat lines drawn for the challenges and mixes the instrumentation up, though always within the bounds of the original set of instruments – there are still no bass or guitars or other instruments used in these. Consider them as bonuses, overlapping between challenges and seeing what happens when you mix an iPad synth, an electric organ from the 1960′s and a flute made from a walnut together. They may lack the strict definition and limitations of the preceding weeks’ music, but it seems a fitting way to end the cycle, to just let everything mix together and see what emerges.

Let’s kick things off with a short three-part suite built around the piano, starting with a slow, funereal march that builds into a crescendo and finishes on an insistent beat, backed by percussion in the form of rainstick and gong as well as some drum sounds from DM1.

Next we have a delicate piano arpeggio that starts off with a rising, slow synth pad as bedding, before being joined for a glimpse of ocarina, and then fades away, but only for a moment, as everything comes back for a last run away from the woods with egg shaker, DM1 and walnut flute.

Then we end on a piano melody with a slightly sinister synth backing is joined by pizzicato strings (on DM1) and rainstick for a short up-tempo moment before changing direction as the synth takes over.

Rührtrommel and SoundBrush

On further investigation, the experience of using the program is revealed to be less than ideal. For example, although the images show it is possible to create long flowing curves, in practice these just result in a series of steps instead of the sweeping glissandos they imply. A more damning problem lies in the sound production, which is highly flawed: there is no natural decay or looping to any of the four available sounds. This results in short notes sounding unnaturally truncated, while the longer notes fade out before they should, making it awkward to produce certain combinations of notes. On the positive side, four colours represent the different instruments and this makes it possible to build more complex arrangements than is possible in most standard step sequencers, though the lack of any control of dynamics and the truncated note lengths can just result in a bit of a muddle. I guess this app would be fine as a toy, but it misses the mark as even a basic musical sketchpad.

The Rührtrommel (literally ‘stirring drum’ in German) is another handmade instrument from klingklang.at, picked up at the Christmas market in Karlsplatz (as with the Walnut Flute). It consists of eight wooden keys arranged in a circle in ascending order of size, rather like a short, rolled-up xylophone. A wooden mallet is used to strike the notes, which can be done individually or in a circular, stirring motion producing a unique character of its own.

The first track has two slow layers from SoundBrush (flute and strings) playing a melody that is overlaid with a pair of tracks played xylophone-style on the the drum.

Multiple layers in SoundBrush (piano, flute and strings) meet a simple Rührtrommel accompaniment that becomes more complex towards the end of the piece.

Finally, this last SoundBrush track is based on the picture shown here (my signature in four colours), slowed down as much as possible for playback, then passed through a filter and delay (resulting in the accompanying deep bubbling effect). Two tracks of Rührtrommel are also heavily processed through different chains of distortion, filtering, pitch-shifting and delay to create the squeaking, burbling percussion.

Piano, Ocarina & Rainstick

I have never even tried playing an ocarina before this year, when I received one as a Christmas gift. It is a ten-hole ocarina in C, produced by the Ocarinamusikhaus where you can a museum, workshop and a shop full of ocarinas of all varieties, from tiny piccolo-size to huge contrabass instruments. Mine sits somewhere in the middle of the range and has a pleasant tone at the low end of its scale, though it gets a little shrill towards the top. It is certainly easier to play than some of the other wind instruments in my collection, though it seems to better suit short, staccato notes rather than slower pieces, as the pitch can wobble around a bit. As a result, on most of the pieces I recorded, the ocarina parts only really worked on the more up-tempo tracks, so does not appear on all of them.

The rainstick was picked up in our local Spar for a couple of euros, part of some strange ethnic craft sale that has never been repeated. Originally an Aztec instrument used for summoning the rain, they are made from hollowed-out cactus, embedded with thorns inside and filled with beans or stones that would bounce off the thorns when the instrument is turned on its end, making a sound similar to rain. My version is made from bamboo, with matchstick-sized slivers of wood in place of thorns. I have no idea what is inside, though it sounds more like rice than anything else. For these pieces, as well as using the rain effect, the stick doubled as a shaker for a more rhythmic sound. And yes, it has now started raining.

The first track is a short homage to the most famous ocarina solo in rock music and its creator, Reg Presley, who passed away earlier this month. The rainstick is used as a shaker, the piano plays a riff based on a minor version of the ‘Wild Thing’ chord pattern, whilst the ocarina is used for a melody line which uses the same four notes as are used in the Troggs’ solo, though certainly not in the same order.

Next comes an improvised piano piece that centres around a simple repeated two-note interval, with occasional rainstick percussion in the faster, more rhythmic sections. For the slower parts, a heavily-processed rainstick sits low in the mix, providing a swelling atmospheric backdrop.

This is a fairly long piece, recorded as a single improvisation and not edited in any way. It slips between very sparse, simple melodic lines and dense, aggressive clusters of dissonance. The rainstick has again been mangled through a chain of processors and underpins certain sections of the piece with a ringing cymbal-like sound.

Here is a shorter piece in a pentatonic scale with two gentle counter-melodies twisting around each other as the rainstick trickles through in the background.

Finally, we finish off with a melancholy melody on solo piano that sits within mostly minor chords, all improvised with no editing.

Launchpad and Thai Gong

What makes this app stand out is the space at the top of the screen, where you see rotating nodes, each of which represents a set of parameters (e.g. chorus amount, filter, attack, etc.) as well as an addition set of virtual knobs that can be turned to affect those same parameters. Each node results in a very different sound, though based on the same waveform (different patches have different waveforms, further extending the range). As you touch the screen between the nodes, the sound balances each parameter depending on how close the nodes are, so if you move your finger between an aggressive lead guitar sound over to a more gentle acoustic sound, the effect is a subtle transforming of the parameters, like morphing between sounds. It is very intuitive and easy to get to grips with and some great sweeping sounds can result. In particular this synth is suited to long pieces where the gradual shift in tone can be fully appreciated – it isn’t something to use to play just one sound.

There are some drawbacks, for example there is no MIDI out facility, which is a shame as this would offer a great way to control other synths and is a simple approach to changing multiple parameters at once. Another minor problem is that the control knobs allow you to adjust the current sound only – as soon as you touch the screen near a node, the sound jumps to that set of parameters instead of slowly transforming, but this could also be seen as an advantage. It would be good to be able to adjust the node settings, too. Maybe in future versions?

The little Thai Gong came from the fantastic music shop, Gandharva Loka, based in Vienna’s ‘bohemian’ quarter. This is one of a small chain of music shops that has a wonderfully eclectic range of instruments from all around the world: from gongs and monochords to bagpipes and hurry-gurdies. As well as four shops in Austria, they also have branches in Switzerland, Germany, New Zealand and Canada. Their website alone is a great place to browse and find out about instruments you might never have heard of. Well worth a visit!

Now onto the music, with two pieces this week: one very short and one much longer. Firstly, the gong tolls a melancholy note as a fleeting counter-melody appears on the Launchkey, backed by a soft pad sound that modulates into nothingness.

A repeating chord progression sets the basis for this long, evolving electronic piece which is introduced and ends on the chimes of the gong. The bass line changes from soft to aggressive, delicate arpeggios sweep across the soundscape and sounds slowly transform, often hinting at melodies where there may be none.

Busilacchio Organ and Meeblip

The Busilacchio Organ (affectionately known as Mr. Wheezy) is a small electric organ produced in the 60′s that gives a sound not unlike a harmonium, but without the pump action sounds. It contains a number of metallic tines, across which air is blown using an electric pump. This is not a quiet instrument – perhaps this could be improved by replacing the pump with something more modern an efficient. I have already used the instrument on several of The Lunacy Board tracks as it has a certain warmth that is lacking in electronic versions.

On to the music; first of all we have a legato Meeblip melody that slides from note to note as the Busilacchio organ skips along at its side, pretending to be an accordion.

The second track features a brassy synth riff on the Meeblip with gentle organ underpinning (including rotary speaker simulation). A second Meeblip follows along in the upper register for effect.

Now for some sleazy slow meeblip synths with an organ baseline.

Garageband and Egg Shaker

The range of instruments on offer is also impressive, from grand pianos to mono synths, upright bass to distorted lead rock guitar, as well as offering the possibility to plug in your own guitar and use built-in effects or record your own voice or other instruments. As an introduction to sequencing and multi-track recording it is fantastic, but for someone already proficient on a more professional DAW, some things can seem confusing or, in many cases, missing altogether. For example, there is no way to edit sound levels (velocity) other than by individual note and no way to see what the velocity settings are without editing.

The egg shaker was a little bargain we picked up from Klangfarbe, the huge music shop housed in a former gasometer in Vienna. It produces a sharp percussive sound when shaken and is the shape of an egg. Not much else to say, really.

The first piece is a mini string-section, created with various ‘smart’ string settings within Garageband and features a slow, deep cello and bass section flanked by two short pizzicato melodies. On the final section, the shaker joins the party to accentuate the pizz.

A synth-heavy, atmospheric piece using pad sounds from Garageband, an electric piano sample running through the built-in arpeggiator and some effected virtual guitar. Further atmospherics come from a slowed down and highly warped (with resonant filter and delay) shaker. In this case the shaker was turned, rather than shaken, to create a swirling effect.

The first of these is February Album Writing Month (FAWM), where the aim is to write 14 new songs (or instrumental pieces) within the month – that’s a song every two days! Since I have already been producing at least three new tunes a week, I don’t think that is too much of a stretch.

The second is the Record Producing Month (RPM), which is focused on recording an album in the same month. This can be a collection of existing songs, but there should be at least ten different tracks or 35 minutes of music in total. Again, I don’t think this will stretch me much beyond the existing challenge, but it would be nice to hit the 35 minute mark, since the tracks I have already recorded last for just over 20 minutes in total.

Neither of these challenges will add that much extra to what is already planned, but both push the boundaries a little. It will be nice to be amongst a pair of communities where everyone is under the same pressure for the second half of the challenge, though.

Don’t forget that there is ANOTHER musical challenge going on at the moment. SpinTunes is back for its sixth season and the first album full of songs (about memes) is already out and free for download. Here it is:

BeatPad and Mouth Organ

The harmonica is not an instrument I have used often – I think the last time was on one of my first rounds of Song Fu – and it’s certainly not something I find easy to play. However, after a while jamming around on it I can usually find my way around it well enough to get a tune out without it sounding too wretched.

The first track uses a few different built-in pad and percussion sample kits on BeatPad, with three different harmonica lines, one of which is unprocessed, one is fed through a rotary speaker simulator and the other through a complex echo modulator to build up a thick, ambient backdrop.

This was a real test of BeatPad, using all eight available tracks and eight different sample sets, including a custom set constructed from the harmonica. Each layer is added progressively, then they are gradually stripped away, first to last, exposing the later layers towards the end. As the harmonica samples drop out of the track they are replaced with a live overdubbed harmonica melody at the end.

A simple repeated motif on percussion, harmonica and piano sample sets starts off, then it drops away, leaving the piano and a live harmonica overdub to lead out.

Mouth Organ Sample Set

For some of these tracks I decided to use the sampling feature of BeatPad to create my own samples based on the mouth organ. This process is really straightforward: record using the built-in microphone or edit any existing music on the iPhone/iPad, tidy the sample using an on-screen, touch-controlled waveform editor that also allows fades and cuts and then move onto the next sample. The application allows you to save and share these custom sample sets, so here is the one I put together for these tracks – just click on the image to download it.

Alto Recorder and Whirlie

The first piece is a short folky tune using the recorder for the melody, a gentle drone set up with the whirlie and some percussion using the end of the tube tapped with the palm of my hand.

The second tune is rather more free-form, with the whirlie to the foreground, filling the stereo field while the recorder takes a more textural role, being highly mangled by a range of effects. Some additional percussion sounds come from running a fingernail down the side of the whirlie.

Kalimbas and Celtic Flute

The first track starts off slowly, building to a breakneck pace until my fingers could not move any faster across the kalimba tines. Five different kalimba tracks play different parts across the stereo spectrum, melting into a flurry of chaos by the end, while the flute remains fairly understated until the final third.

This is a multi-layered improvisation created by continuously recording all the parts across many loops, which were then picked apart so that the interplay between instruments could come through. Two main kalimba parts are accompanied by the ndenge as basic percussion and the flute echoes the kalimba motif.

Finally, after the slow, rather creepy first tracks, here the flute takes the lead for a short up-tempo piece, while the kalimba drives it along with the help of a little filtered delay and some more percussive ndenge.

NodeBeat & Clarinet

The second challenge for ‘10 Weeks : 10 Sounds‘ is a little more complex than the first and resulted in three long pieces in a fairly laid-back smoky jazz-club sort of style.

NodeBeat is a graphical sequencer for the iPad and iPhone that is simple in concept, but can result in some complex music. It uses a series of ‘nodes’ that trigger either a musical note or a drum beat according to how close the nodes are together. This can be further refined by use of specific scales and waveforms, tempos and transpose levels, as well as the ability to turn on movement and gravity. Under these last options, the nodes move around on their own accord, introducing a gradually changing random factor.

I’ve worked with NodeBeat before, to provide the rhythm for Drei Viertel Drei’s ‘Igor’s Jigsaw‘. For that song Katharina put the rhythm together and I used NodeBeat’s MIDI-out to trigger body part samples; this time I stuck to using NodeBeat’s own sounds, rather than introducing another instrument, but the MIDI facilities really turn the software into a serious tool for creating musical patterns.

The clarinet is a Rudall Carte Graduate model, B-flat, which is a bit of a culture shock for a guitarist used to playing a ‘C’ and hearing the same note. I’ve only used the instrument a few times before, mostly on The Lunacy Board’s ‘Difficult Second‘ album, but I needed to dig around to make sure I was using the right fingerings, since there are rather a lot of keys on a clarinet.

NodeBeat Track 1

NodeBeat Track 2

NodeBeat Track 3

DM1 & Walnut Flute

I picked up the walnut flute at one of the two musical instrument stalls (klingklang.at) at the Karlsplatz Christmas Market, my favourite of the many markets running at this time of the year in Vienna. It is a very simple whistle made from a walnut shell, a single piece of wood which serves as a frame and a short length of bamboo that forms the mouthpiece. A small hole in either side of the shell gives a little control over pitch, but the range is only really three notes, so getting an interesting melody out of it is quite a challenge.

Fingerlabs’ DM1 is an iOS application with versions for both iPad and iphone/ipod. It is, at heart, a recreation of a set of classic drum machines, but set within a very easy-to-use touch interface that makes it a joy to work with. I have never been much of a fan of drum machines; in the right hands they can be incredibly effective, going far beyond the basic machine rhythms that were so over-done in the early 80’s, but to get a quality performance out of them requires delving into their workings and, on most machines, that means multiple button pressing or navigating through menus. The DM1 puts everything on screen and makes it simple to adjust pitch, note length, volume and various other parameters without jumping through hoops. You can manually enter a pattern with 9 large drum pads or via a graphical step programming page, then there are two touchpad effects units that allow control of reverb, delay, phaser, distortion and more. Not only are there sounds from classic drum machines of the past (from the ubiquitous Roland boxes to Farfisa rhythm sections, but there are also several acoustic drum kits, latin percussion, household objects and even orchestral kits. These can all be used to create customised kits of your own, or you can sample your own sounds (in the iPad version only, unfortunately).

I started out with some simple patterns in the DM1, just to get an idea of how it works. I started the first using the Farfisa kit (having a soft spot for its cheesy sounds from my days in The Deserters). Once I had strung a couple of basic patterns together, I moved into the effects section and used the built-in automation to apply some delay and filter effects to make it all a little more unusual.

Then I moved on to try out one of the instrumental kits, in this case a set of harp samples. This first piece was created from four main patterns, building up and adding more detail over time. Since the melody notes of the kit were all used up, I decided to try out the wireless synchronisation via the WIST system, setting up a simple drum pattern on my iphone and using the iPad to trigger it. WIST allows you to set the tempo and have two devices start in perfect time with each other, though it doesn’t seem to track tempo changes, so changing the playback speed on one device results in the two going out of sync. This does have its own advantages (Nancarrow-inspired multi-tempo pieces may work well), but prevents live adjustment of tempo. Although the DM1 responds to MIDI-in signals, it cannot act as a controller for external devices (at least, not in the current version, though this is being developed according to their website), which would be a great way to control other instruments or apps. The ability to sample and the wide range of built-in sounds makes this less of an issue, but it is the only real weakness in this great application. The only other thing I would like to have seen would be a way to share songs and patterns between the iPhone and iPad versions, perhaps using iCloud sync.

Finally, I tried out the sampling facility on the iPad version – this lets you add new samples from existing tracks on your device (in iTunes, for example) or to record new ones. Since I don’t have any sort of audio interface for iOS, I just used the built-in microphone, which is far from ideal, but still allows reasonable-quality samples when compared to beat boxes from the 80’s. I recorded the three possible notes from the walnut flute, as well as some percussive sounds from tapping the nut and some other effects like overblowing the flute. By doing this, I was able to easily fill the nine sample slots. The sampling process allows you to record and then trim the samples using a waveform display and sound playback – there are no advanced facilities like looping, but you wouldn’t really expect those on a drum machine anyway. Once in the system, it is easy to use the ‘mixer’ page to adjust the stereo spread of the samples, their relative levels and fine-tune the pitch. I found that pitch-shifting the percussive samples down made them a little more substantial. The following little ditty is the result:

I have been gathering quirky little instruments and musical odds and ends for quite some time and, whilst many of these have made their way into my songs, there are still some that remain stubbornly under-used. We were discussing this a couple of days ago and as a result, Katharina set me a challenge, or rather a series of challenges:

The Rührtrommel

For 10 weeks you will produce sounds or tunes with the instruments listed below. There is always more than one, which means both need to be used for the melody – not after each other or two different sound snippets. You can record the sounds separately and mix them together later. Once you have recorded the sounds or melodies, you need to blog about it. There’s a prize at the end. Now go out and make a noise!

Week 1 (24.12.2012 – 30.12.2012):
DM1 (iPad App) and Walnut Flute

Week 2 (31.12.2012 – 06.01.2013):
Node Beat (iPad App) and Clarinet

Week 3 (07.01.2013 – 13.01.2013):
Kalimba and Celtic Flute

Week 4 (14.01.2013 – 20.01.2013):
Alto Recorder and Whirlie

Week 5 (21.01.2013 – 27.01.2013):
Beat Pad (iPad App) and Mouth Organ

Week 6 (28.01.2013 – 03.02.2013):
Garageband and Egg Shaker

Week 7 (04.02.2013 – 10.02.2013):
MeeBlip and Busilaccio Organ

Week 8 (11.02.2013 – 17.02.2013):
Launchkey (iPad App) and Gong

Week 9 (18.02.2013 – 24.02.2013):
Piano, Ocarina and Rainstick

Week 10 (25.02.2013 – 03.03.2013):
Sound Brush (iPad App) and Rührtrommel (stirring drum)

There are some interesting combinations of instruments and software to work with – some of which could be a real challenge to make musical. I’ll post the results here as they are completed!

It is full steam ahead from now on, as I spent some more time working out plans and timelines using the still-in-development tool ‘Scapple’, the latest software from the developer of ‘Scrivener’, which is the writing software I use to put together SOS. Here’s what I put together using Scapple to help me work out the order of events, the items that still need to be dealt with and the trail of evidence to be followed by Sykes and Co. (yes, it is too small to make out any details, so no spoilers!).

I have found Scapple to be great for throwing together a whole load of ideas and showing the links between them. Standard mind-mapping software can tend to limit layouts to a hierarchical structure, but Scapple lets links flow in many different directions, which is ideal for my way of working. It outputs in a variety of formats, so I have a copy in pdf format that can sit within my ‘Research’ folder in Scrivener, letting me check back on the plan without having to open another program.

When I first started putting together a timeline for the story, I used a trial copy of Aeon Timeline which seems to be ideal. In fact it was very easy to use, had all the features I wanted and even has a straightforward way of synchronising with Scrivener that made the whole process work smoothly. Unfortunately, the way the software works meant that my long timeline (4,000 years approximately) was too much for it to cope with. It let me enter the events in the timeline and was able to display them, but when I wanted to zoom into any time period less than a month it could not display any further detail. As a result it was no use for plotting out events that happened within the course of a single day, of which there are many in certain sections of the story.
According to the support website, this is a known issue and the way around it would be to have separate timelines for each set of events (e.g. one for neolithic times, one for 18th century, one for early 20th century and one for the ‘current’ time), which is really not practical and would make the otherwise perfect software a pain to use. I ended up switching the timeline to a LibreOffice spreadsheet for comparison purposes and using Scapple to identify the actual flow of events (i.e. event X must happen before events Y and Z).

Now that I know how the story will end, it is just a matter of keeping on with the writing and then beginning the editing process. Look out for another new episode in the next week or so, depending on how well I progress with the writing over the next few days.

Almost there!

The whole process of writing SOS in this way, instead of on a weekly basis, has made it flow well, though fitting it back into a twenty minute episode can be more tricky than writing it in specific, episode-friendly chunks. Nevertheless, I am currently finishing off the end of the second act of the story and will soon be starting to bring all the final threads together and wrap it all up. The story has taken some unexpected turns, even without the last of the polls being included, but I am very pleased with the way it is making its way to the conclusion.

Porgy’s is unlike any venue I’ve ever been to, I think. Red velvet chairs sat in fours around small round tables with waitress service and a very relaxed atmosphere, all very civilised. Even better than the layout was the attentive audience; every song played out to the very end, with not a single clap of premature applause. That made listening to the rich dying chords from the grand piano a real pleasure, though PH was a bit heavy coming off the sustain pedal, which sometimes resulted in a bit of a noisy clunk. Indeed, the only noise at the venue came from bar staff dropping the occasional glass and the waitresses jangling loose change as punters paid for their drinks.
Perhaps because of this attention to quiet, I had the feeling that PH played some songs more delicately than normal. ‘Stranger Still’ live usually ends with him yelling “A stranger, a worldly man” over and over in a crescendo of seeming madness. Last night it played out almost the polar opposite, getting quieter until almost a whisper. Real pin-drop stuff. Simply stunning.

After a dark ‘Friday Afternoon’, we were then treated to a song that PH claimed he had been carrying around for years, but had never put any chords to. Inspired by the quality of the piano at Porgy’s he sat down at rehearsal and worked them out: ‘Not For Keith’, one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite albums, the classic ‘pH7′. I’m not sure he did manage to get all the chords right, but it was very powerful and a delight to finally hear this song live.
Another highlight was ‘His Best Girl’, a song that was perhaps a little over-played during the early 90′s, but hasn’t seen the light for a while. Last night he combined it with the version from ‘Offensichtlich Goldfisch’, singing the last few lines in German and making the song in general seem every bit as threatening as the lyrics imply.

‘Shingle Song’ started off a cappella, with some very understated guitar coming in for accompaniment. This would have been a perfect performance, but for PH starting before the applause from the previous song had died down, which took away from the impact a little.
The gig finished with an encore of ‘Your Tall Ship’ and it was all over. Another fantastically emotional night in the presence of a musician who is never afraid to bend and twist the phrasing of his songs until they show all their hidden secrets.

Thanks to Katharina for her concert photographs.

With just two weeks before NaNo kicks off, I have been writing up Every Photo Tells… stories in advance, so there is nothing to get in the way during November. One of those is set in the SOS world, which is a gentle way to dip my toes back into the story. Over the next week I will be looking at the plot lines as they currently stand and working out how they will resolve over the second half of the story.

The chart of my progress on will be on display here. Do drop in and see how it is progressing and make certain I don’t fall behind!

Fellow NaNo writers, if you’d like to add me as a buddy, my username is SOScotland.

Time for a knees-up

For various reasons of time, place and illness, I have managed to miss all of the Tull (and Ian Anderson solo) trips into Scotland and, as the years passed by, the tales of Ian’s vocal problems seemed to become more and more regular and worrying. Listening to the occasional concert recording only served to confirm this; it seemed that I should consider myself lucky to have seen them at least close to their prime (since I’m too young to have seen them in the mid-70′s). No, really, I am!

When they announced a tour of the classic concept album ‘Thick As a Brick‘, along with its sequel, I was in two minds about buying tickets. Some part of me wanted to see if the magic was still there to some degree, whilst the rest thought it would be best to remember them as they were, especially since this would be Ian Anderson alone, with no Martin Barre and not bearing the ‘Jethro Tull’ mark. When it turned out that one of the closest two gigs would be in Budapest, my mind was made up. Not only was it a city I had yet to visit, but since Tull have a song called ‘Budapest’, I thought it might make for an interesting venue, so I decided to give them another chance.

Ian Anderson and Florian Ophale

For the last few albums Tull/IA have been playing more and more music with an eastern or world music influence. That in itself is no bad thing, and some of those albums are excellent, but Tull were always a band of change, both in personnel and styles, and it seemed to me like another change was overdue. From that point of view, TAAB2 feels a bit like taking stock before jumping off in a new direction, rather like saying “this is where we’ve come to and how we got here, now let’s see what happens next…” At least, I hope that’s the idea!

Banker Bets, Banker Wins

The fact remains that IA is not going to get his voice back and if you want to hear Jethro Tull songs performed live in as authentic a way as possible, then this is how it has to be. In short, IA has hired a stunt double, a young fellow by the name of Ryan O’Donnell, to do the vocal and physical athletics. And very good he is at it, too. The way it works is that IA generally starts a song, then Ryan sings a verse and they sing together on the choruses, which lets you hear the recognisable Anderson voice, but makes use of the younger vocal chords to actually hit the melodies. Anderson used to run around the stage, jumping and mimicing the other musicians, dancing and twirling his flute like a mad man. Now O’Donnell does almost all of that stuff and has clearly worked his way through the Tull back catalog of live DVDs, as he really seems like a young Ian Anderson (as played by Benedict Cumberbatch). Their two voices are fairly complementary, blending together when required, yet different enough that it is easy to tell who is singing.

The real beauty of this whole thing is that some of the great flute counter-melodies that appear on the albums behind the vocals and had to be dropped when played live, can now return to the arrangement, so we can hear flute and vocal together. If I have one complaint about this approach it is that Ian should have passed more of the vocals over. I accept that, at this stage, this may still be something of an experiment and that he is trying to ease fans in gently, but quite frankly there are some songs that he just can’t sing and made me feel uncomfortable with the way he was straining for the notes. There were other songs where the vocals swapped in the middle of a verse which seemed to break the flow. O’Donnell also seemed to be hanging about at times with nothing to do, which was rather a waste of talent, as he is clearly trained in a full range of stage performance skills, not just belting out songs. I hope he stay on with IA/Tull, as he has brought back the sense of fun and spectacle to Tull shows, along with vocals that do justice to the rest of the music.

To be thick… as… a… Brick!

The music for TAAB2 stood up well in the concert setting, and hearing the same band play both albums back-to-back made the whole thing feel more coherent than the original albums when compared directly. As the gig finished up, the video screen switched to introducing the band members and backstage/FOH crew, which was a different touch to the normal band introductions, which would have seemed a bit out of place in the middle of one of the songs. It also made the whole event feel more like a staged performance than just a regular concert. Locomotive Breath served as an encore, following some sort of apparent protestation by IA with the keyboard player. Perhaps he was trying to get him to play Budapest instead? (there were a few audience grumbles that they didn’t play it). The classic show-closer was very effective with two sets of voices, particularly in the last choruses, and make me keen to see a regular Tull show in this format.

Ryan O’Donnell and Ian Anderson share a tender moment

A note of thanks to Katharina for taking these and other photos throughout the concert. You can find more of her photos of Budapest on her Flickr page.

Since I already have a ‘main’ computer, the Pi is a bit of a foot-in-the-water for me, following on from the purchase and successful construction of a MeeBlip earlier this year. I have a couple of projects I would like to try out on the Pi, which are fairly different in scope.

1. R-Studio server
My recent dabblings in ‘R’ have been interesting (to me at least), but I only have it installed on my laptop and it would be really nice to be able to access it from work or from a mobile device. My programming environment of choice for R is RStudio, which has the ability to run its own web service, which is a great facilty that I hope to be able to make use of. There may be problems getting it to do much, if anything, on the Raspberry Pi due to the memory limitations, but I would like to give it a shot.

2. PureData thingie
PureData (PD) is a visual programming environment for music (and other things) that I have been wanting to investigate for some time now. It is incredibly flexible, letting you control synths with just about anything that can be attached to a computer. The small size and fast start-up time of the Raspberry Pi should make it ideal for using as a sort of music interface brain. I’m not QUITE sure just what the result will be, but I think it could lead to some sort of bespoke music performance device, not necessarily an instrument, but maybe something to control effects whilst playing.

I think the possibilities for this little computer are vast and I’m looking forward to seeing just what it can do!

A couple of years ago I wrote a song for SpinTunes #1 about a superhero getting into a huff because neither the Avengers nor the JLA will have him. This is it…

Whilst I did post about it very briefly at the time, I completely neglected to mention anything about the song’s content, leaving the music to speak for itself. That is all very well, but completely fails to draw it to the attention of comic fans who might enjoy the song, but are not regular SpinTunes followers. Time to rectify that with a proper title and something to play with whilst you listen. Here are the lyrics as a force diagram – wiggle those superheroes around!

I have been doing a bit of work recently with the stats package R and trying out the visualisation library d3, so it seemed reasonable to load them up with some musical data and see what I could come up with. Here is the first result. It’s a force-directed graph of the lyric linkage within every one of the SpinTunes songs, showing how common words appear in a song and how they flow. Common words like ‘the’ or ‘and’ appear in the middle with lots of links, whilst short, uncommon phrases float around outside. Some of the longer or more complex songs don’t fit very well into the space below, but you can grab the circles and play around with them.

Just select an artist and one of their songs and the network will automatically update. Don’t forget to listen to the song using the embedded player above!

[UPDATE]
I have changed a few things since I originally posted this. The thickness of the links represents how often the two joined words appear together. As a result, you’ll often see choruses or repeated verses standing out because of common lines. The circle size now also represents the number of times each word appears in the lyrics.

Finally, I have posted a version that adjusts to the size of your web browser. This version will let you get a better view of more complex songs and let the visualisation fill your whole screen. Have fun!

David LeDuc – Fear

The tone of this song comes across as being much lighter than the lyrics would suggest. Vocals in the chorus are sad and sound good, but we struggled a bit with what David was trying to get across with this song. Of course, vague has its place, too, but for example, the second line seems to take away from the first. As for the verses, there’s a feeling of trying to squeeze prose into a rap form and it doesn’t really work – it was as though the sentences’ meaning were more important that their musical flow (which should raise rap above being just speaking over music). I did enjoy the line “I used to be afraid of singing you my songs, but now that’s overshadowed by how loud you sing along”. The backing sounds were not particularly interesting (just rhythm with no melody element) and the song would have benefited from some more variety in rhythm.

Edric Haleen – Exultation!

We’re not entirely sure whether a rain dance is a song, but at least it didn’t affect Austria. This sounds like Edric had a whole lot of fun putting it together, with a rhythm and feel that seem authentically African, despite Edric’s refusal to say which language this is (and Google translate’s inability to assist). So, is this a language or a code or something else? It’s not backwards masking – we checked. That is our problem with this track. Without a translation, no matter how well the song is performed, then it ceases to be a song with any form of meaning and is instead an instrumental performed with the voice. On that basis, we would have been very tempted to disqualify this song, but then, that’s probably the point, isn’t it Edric?

Jess Scherer – Threadbare

Why is the song sung from the point of view of a man? Surely women can have bad reputations too? We did enjoy the sentiment behind the lyrics, however. The backing music was a little lacklustre. Certainly, simplicity has its place, but here we just felt wanting a little more. The tempo makes the song feel defeated – a little faster would make it a bit more hopeful. Some nice harmony work on the backing vocals – very sweet sound.

Steve Durand – A Beautiful Voice

We love the idea behind this song, but Steve, really there’s nothing wrong with your voice – nobody could call Dylan’s voice beautiful, but he coped okay. This is a great song – I don’t think we can fault it. It skips along, has a wonderful variety of sounds and some very effective imagery. And I wish I could whistle like that.

You can listen to the tracks below or download the whole album in one go to listen to anytime:

This time we started with the lyrics. For a song played on body parts, it seemed logical to write a song ABOUT body parts, and who knows more about body parts than Dr. Frankenstein’s sidekick, Igor? There are a couple of historic references stuck in the midst of the bad puns for those digging a little deeper.

We recorded a whole range of body noises, sampled many of them and created a few common sounds to use. Various short slaps and pops became a rhythm section, clicking teeth formed a xylophone-type sound, a hum became the baseline and a few other recognisable sounds were used as spot effects. Katharina put the rhythm track together using NodebeatHD on the iPad to control the sampler, then I added some bass and vocals.

Here is the finished song, complete with lyrics, which can be downloaded from bandcamp:

The second SpinTunes challenge was to write a love song in the form of a valentine’s day card some OTHER than your significant other. Katharina wrote the lyrics and melody to this one, so it seemed only right that she should sing it too. Since all our songs are shadows of the main challenge from this point on, we had no official placing in the rankings, however some of the judges still reviewed our songs. This time around Denise Hudson said of the lyrics:

there was some real poetry in them and they were sweepy and rainy feeling and cold and sad

Round three asked for a song with lyrics having to start with a choice of seven letters. After a little thought we settled on the letters C, A, R, N, I, V & L, having just returned from a visit to the carnival in Venice. Whilst there we saw a sight that could not help but be an inspiration – a gentleman dressed as a viking, but also entirely in pink. I think this was possibly our most successful SpinTunes song so far. Doctor Lindyke said:

Tell me truthfully… you guys get up in the morning and suck down a pint of Weird just to start your day, don’t you?

whilst Denise said of this one

This was perhaps the most creative and arbitrary song of the entire round. Go. Take your place next to Raptor Jesus in the Halls of Asgard. I raise a tankard in your honor

as well as

I have no idea how you even wrote this song so I have to admire it because I just listened to it with my mouth hanging open. The melody and way of being were completely alien to me.

However, the limit imposed by the challenge meant that we had more to say about our pink viking. For a start, we needed to poke some fun at our viking-monikered friend, Odin1Eye. So Katharina wrote another set of lyrics for Odin and we changed the structure and arrangement of the song to arrive at what is really a new song with a common ancestry. See which one you prefer…

You can find the first two of the songs above on the SpinTunes albums for each round, along with a selection of songs that fit the same challenges.

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.

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!

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 people
With voices to make a nightingale proud
But thanks to Mandy and Piers and Cowell
There's one who won't throw in the towel
Please step forwards Susan Boyle, 
That YouTube clip will help you always
Stand out from the crowd.

[CHORUS]
Tweet tweet tweet tweet
tweet tweet tweet tweet
What'ya twittering on about?
Tweet tweet tweet tweet
tweet tweet tweet tweet
What's this twitter thing all about?
 
[Waltz style]
Authors harassing agents in a bid for Rowling fame
Queryfail sparked off the "he said, she said" game
But queryday has showed how much common sense is lacking
In some people sending manuscripts in the hope of getting backing

* CHORUS *

[Emo rock]
How needy is the boy who craves a thousand, thousand followers
Desperate to outnumber the avid newscast swallowers
I'd never heard of Ashton Kutcher till his name came up on twitter
But 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 shows
Twitter hive mind, borg-like complies
Avon 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      D
When you're standing in the storm
C           G            D
Rain soaked through your clothes
    D      G        D
And people laugh at you
            C              D
'cos of the colour of your nose

[verse 2]
And you there, in the pub
Heavy drinking pros
Labelling yourself
with the colour of your nose

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

[verse 3]
You've got the man flu
It's running like a hose
Tissues make it worse
Bringing colour to your nose

F                   C       Bb
  Everybody loves a big red nose  x14
  
  
Music & Lyric: Mick Bordet

Mick Bordet: Keyboards, guitar, bass & lead vocal
A-DooM: Drums
The 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?
==============

"Doctor,what is wrong with me?"
"You need some methionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylseryl-
leucylphenylalanylalanylglutaminylleucyllysylglutamylarginyl-
lysylglutamylglycylalanylphenylalanylvalylprolylphenylalanyl-
valylthreonylleucylglycylaspartylprolylglycylisoleucylglutamyl-
glutaminylserylleucyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucyl-
isoleucylglutamylalanylglycylalanylaspartylalanylleucylglutamyl-
leucylglycylisoleucylprolylphenylalanylserylaspartylprolyl-
leucylalanylaspartylglycylprolylthreonylisoleucylglutaminyl-
asparaginylalanylthreonylleucylarginylalanylphenylalanyl-
alanylalanylglycylvalylthreonylprolylalanylglutaminylcysteinyl-
phenylalanylglutamylmethionylleucylalanylleucylisoleucylarginyl-
glutaminyllysylhistidylprolylthreonylisoleucylprolylisoleucyl-
glycylleucylleucylmethionyltyrosylalanylasparaginylleucylvalyl-
phenylalanylasparaginyllysylglycylisoleucylaspartylglutamyl-
phenylalanyltyrosylalanylglutaminylcysteinylglutamyllysylvalyl-
glycylvalylaspartylserylvalylleucylvalylalanylaspartylvalyl-
prolylvalylglutaminylglutamylserylalanylprolylphenylalanyl-
arginylglutaminylalanylalanylleucylarginylhistidylasparaginyl-
valylalanylprolylisoleucylphenylalanylisoleucylcysteinylprolyl-
prolylaspartylalanylaspartylaspartylaspartylleucylleucylarginyl-
glutaminylisoleucylalanylseryltyrosylglycylarginylglycyltyrosyl-
threonyltyrosylleucylleucylserylarginylalanylglycylvalylthreonyl-
glycylalanylglutamylasparaginylarginylalanylalanylleucylprolyl-
leucylasparaginylhistidylleucylvalylalanyllysylleucyllysyl-
glutamyltyrosylasparaginylalanylalanylprolylprolylleucyl-
glutaminylglycylphenylalanylglycylisoleucylserylalanylprolyl-
aspartylglutaminylvalyllysylalanylalanylisoleucylaspartylalanyl-
glycylalanylalanylglycylalanylisoleucylserylglycylserylalanyl-
isoleucylvalyllysylisoleucylisoleucylglutamylglutaminylhistidyl-
asparaginylisoleucylglutamylprolylglutamyllysylmethionylleucyl-
alanylalanylleucyllysylvalylphenylalanylvalylglutaminylprolyl-
methionyllysylalanylalanylthreonylarginylserine."

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             F
Said the swimmer to the fish
    C                    Gm7
One drop (of blood) in a million
    Am             F
And she became the dish
       C        Bb     Fmaj7   Fmaj7
of the day.
       C        Bb     Fmaj7   Fmaj7
of the d   -    a   -  y.

[verse 2]
The mayor of "Shark City" is
A sceptic through and through
Ignoring the problem until it
Swims up and bites you
on the ass

[chorus]
         C   F
It was a bad fish
       Am               Gm7->Bb
Like a piscine Jack the Rip-per
  C   F
A bad fish
 Am           Bb
A giant psychopathic kipper
 Fmaj7 x4 bars

[verse 3]
Swapping tales of scars
With buddies and a drink
You'll need a bigger boat
This one's going to sink
fairly soon

~Chorus~

[verse 4]
You'd be a much more efficient killer
If you didn't have that tell-tale fin
And you could still be alive today
If you'd swallowed that oxygen
Smile 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               G
I left the farm in the morning, around 6
G       G             D       D
Fed the cattle on the way
G                G         C          G
Headed South for Dallas to pick up my girl
G                  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 restaurant
Noodles on poodles she'd serve
When a truck, red 'n' green, with the name of Christine
    G              D          G         G
Too fast round the corner did swerve

[verse3]
Gm                 Gm      Cm        Cm
What happened just then, I fail to recall
       Gm       Gm           Dsus4    D7
But my world it descended to Hell
          Gm         Gm          Cm     Cm
There was kimchi and shitzhu and bodily parts in
    Gm         Gm              Dsus4    D7
The 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 swell
But she wasn't dead - she'd just banged her head
Gm          D7          Gm         G
And I spent time in the Bar-L


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

[verse5 - same as v2]
Let out of prison this Christmas just past
I hoped for a change in my luck
When 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 town
But my life's like a Johnny Cash song
My name isn't Sue, but Rufus will do
I 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]
G
Trundling along
B
So close to the ground
C
3 wheels are spinning, but
Cm
what's that clicking sound?

Watch out for the fumes
Roundabouts are deadly
Hills are out of bounds
In our electric pedalled medley

[chorus]
      G            D  D7  Dm7
We're gonna do the C5
     C            G  G6 G       D
It's kinda like a three-wheeled jive
Invented by good old Sir Clive
Let's take it for a Microdrive
And the Hoover motor might contrive
To get us all home alive

[Verse2]
Arms close to your sides
Grab the handlebars
Shoulders up and down
Wiggling your arse
Battery's gone flat
Pedal for a while
Now get out and push
You're dancing with such style

[chorus]
We're gonna do the C5
It's kinda like a three-wheeled jive
Invented by good old Sir Clive
Let's take it for a Microdrive
And the Hoover motor might contrive
To get us all home alive


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

[Verse3]
Arms close to your sides
Grab the handlebars
Shoulders up and down
Wiggling your arse
Battery's gone flat
Pedal for a while
Now get out and push
You're dancing with such style

[chorus]
We're gonna do the C5
It's kinda like a three-wheeled jive
Invented by good old Sir Clive
Let's take it for a Microdrive
And the Hoover motor might contrive
To 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 alive
We'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 more about 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?

[UPDATE]
Now that the Deserters website and my blog are combined into one, the music links have been changed to embedded music players so that you can listen to the song on each post. I’ve also tagged the Track of the Week posts, so that you can read through them in order.

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 misnomer – ‘Heavy Metal Ballad’ – as it is neither heavy metal, nor a ballad. It has a similar feel to ‘One Night in the Back of a Fire Engine’, but deals with the teen angst of spots, dental hygiene and body odour. Simple and upbeat, with a bit of a nasty streak. Lyrics by Lee Newe, once again, with music by yours truly.

The whole album, The Album That Never Was is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

The Complete 1978 Song

Week 14 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

This song has a similar feel to ‘The Woman In Red’, however this is certainly no love story, but a very sparsely arranged murder ballad, inspired by the story of Lizzie Borden. Music and Lyrics are by Lee Newe on this one, which has a bit of a strange history.

It started life as a heavy metal celebration of biker life; “Motorbike, Motorbike, Do what you like. I’m gonna pull a chick on Saturday Night.” The original lyrics by Lee were put to music by yours truly, but never recorded. Probably just as well. I do still have a backing track for it somewhere, but the final song was a definite improvement on the original.

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Jerry Springer – The Opera

At the start of the week we treated ourselves to a night at the opera; ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’, to be precise. It’s had quite a bit of press about some of its content and indeed, the local holy Joes were out in force with leaflets condemning us all to hell for even setting eyes on it. But really, what a great show! It’s probably closer to rock-opera than plain opera, but the very sound of trained opera singers belting out a string of obscenities is worth the ticket price alone. Add to that the fact that the content of your average Jerry Springer-type show is EXACTLY the sort of stuff that makes for all the best operas (yes Puccini and Verdi may be more high-brow, but they’re writing about THE SAME STUFF) – adultery, murder, cross-dressing, journeys to Hell – it’s all here.

As for the content the moaning Minnies are upset about, it’s pretty tame stuff, and in fact most of what they’re shouting about isn’t even true (big surprise, there). Yes, they do a Jerry Springer show in Hell, with various biblical personalities including Jesus and God included, but it’s looking at the battle between good and evil, the grey area in-between, and acheiving some kind of balance. It’s more about the issues, values and choices that most religions claim to be about (basically be nice to each other), rather than the figureheads that organised religions end up concentrating on. And no – they don’t have Jesus wearing a nappy.

So if you’re not easily offended (by swear words – a lot of them – or the use of religious figures to tell a moral [kind of] tale) then I’d thoroughly recommend seeing this show. It is ‘fall-off-your-seat’ funny, with plenty of memorable songs – lines like “Dip me in chocolate and feed me to the lesbians”, a coherent plot and a Zappaesque sense of humour. There’s a trailer here.

Hayseed Dixie

I’m no great fan of AC/DC, nor of bluegrass music particularly, but when I was offered a ticket to see a band playing AC/DC in a bluegrass style, I just had to know more. These guys can play – guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle and bass – pretty much as well as any bluegrass band I’ve heard (not that many, admittedly), including a pretty nifty version of ‘Duelling Banjos’ from ‘Deliverance’ in their setlist.

You’ve just got to smile when they kick into ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ or ‘Highway to Hell’ whilst dressed in authentic(ish) hillbilly gear and singing with that mountain-man drawl. It’s an assault on the senses – 2 hours of high-octane (moonshine) finger-pickin’ acoustic rock, but somehow it works. It really shouldn’t, and yet it is disturbing how easily AC/DC (and other rockers like Aerosmith and Motorhead) translates into bluegrass, and the original version of ‘Ace of Spades’ sounds like a laid-back ballad compared to the speed these guys take it at.

Certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, not even mine really, but definitely an entertaining night out and a must-see for lovers of heavy rock (especially AC/DC) wanting to try something new. Have a look here for more info, including a video clip of ‘Ace of Spades’.

See y’all later, y’hear?

My Wee Green Buddy

Week 13 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

If you liked the ‘Yet Another Granfalloon’ pieces, then this short instrumental ditty should be of interest. It’s an earlier attempt at a similar style, in this case purely electronic, owing much to Zappa’s ‘Jazz From Hell’ album.

It takes its name from a series of books by Robert Rankin which feature (amongst many other things) a time-travelling sprout called Barry who takes up residence in Elvis Presley’s brain and uses him to re-write history. Yep, it sounds pretty daft, and it, in fact, is. But it’s a bit of fun, and if you like Douglas Adams and / or Frank Zappa then why not give it a try. Rankin’s a bit of a Zappa / Beefheart fan, and loads of references appear all through most of his books, not least of which is the brilliantly titled “Sprout Mask Replica”.

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Drevulon Poseiden

Week 12 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

Another track featuring the Newe/Bordet – lyrics/music writing combination, this track deals with urban alienation and the suppression of the man in the street. Guest stars Andy on guitar – a pretty nice solo – and features yours truly on vocals for a change.

That’s us caught back up with schedule, so back to normal next week, hopefully.

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Makkie’s Rhythm

Week 11 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

Time to wind the clock back again… This track comes from our second single, ‘Banned Practice’, and is a solo keyboard piece performed by Montepaldé Pentel on the Farfisa organ. Some years later this piece would be digitally combined with samples from the ‘Banned Practice’ sessions to create an extended piece, but this is the original in its simple, lo-fi glory.

The whole album, All It Took Was One Night In The Back Of A Fire Engine… is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Yet Another Granfalloon (3rd movement)

Week 10 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

The final part of the Granfalloon piece exists in two versions. This one is a computer generated version used to write the score; the other is a recorded version with four guitar parts: electric, acoustic, bass and ebow. The live version is unfortunately dreadful, so this version is the closest the suite gets to completion. Without the real instruments the piece lacks the variety of parts 1 and 2, so hopefully I’ll get round to re-recording it some day. Don’t hold your breath, though.

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Brain Drain Rap

Week 9 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

OK, I missed a couple of weeks. Here’s a concerted effort to fill the gap…

This song was written by Lee, and deals with the general user-unfriendliness of computers. This was written in a time before Windows, when the Sinclair empire was still king (in the UK, at least), hard disks cost about the same as a small car and held less data than a mobile phone does today. Things have improved since then. Or have they?

The song is written as a kind of cheesy rap, totally programmed into the computer with only a short acoustic (mandolin) part at the end, and represents an ongoing battle against the computerised world. The part of the computer is played by a ZX Spectrum speech synthesiser – cutting edge stuff in its day!

The whole album, The Album That Never Was is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Mask of Deceit (excerpt)

Week 8 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

Here’s last week’s missing track… It is an EBow solo from my song ‘Mask of Deceit’ which deals with and was inspired by similar circumstances to Peter Hammill’s excellent album, ‘Over’, i.e. the breakdown of a reasonably long-term relationship under less than honest conditions. It was an exercise in venting of anger and feelings of betrayal, but the vocal on it is just so awful that I always skip past to the good bit. Which is what we have here.

It’s about a minute’s worth of an EBow solo, backed by piano and electric guitar. It has a very languid and fluid style, and is probably one of my favourite bits of my own guitar work. For those not familiar with the EBow, it is a gadget which attempts to allow guitarists a bit more expression like a violinist, by creating a magnetic field close to the strings which allows the notes to sound continuously without fading away. Due to the way it works it also seems to generate overtones of its own, creating a quite recognisable sound. It has been used by many guitarists, usually as a special effect for a single track, but John ‘Fury’ Ellis (of the Stranglers and the K Group) uses it regularly, and it was also apparently used by Big Country as part of the ‘guitars-as-bagpipes’ sound.

Click here to download.

Being a bit of a skinflint, almost all of my musical gear is either second-hand or end-of-line stock, but I’ve got a deep hunger for the new Moog synth. It’s the last project from the legendary Dr Bob, and what a send-off it is. It definitely looks like a Minimoog for the neext century.

Not only does it have all the usual MIDI paraphenalia required of today’s digital synths, but it has several CV inputs that are just begging to have my Etherwave Pro plugged into them. I want one of these. Really very much. But I know it will be at least a year away before I can even consider thinking about it.

I haven’t forgotten about ‘Track of the Week’ either, just been incredibly busy this last week or so, and will make it up to you with 2 tracks for this week.

I’m beginning to think the green clarinet was merely the tip of the iceberg of silliness. I nearly fell off my chair laughing at the “new eximious rare larruping blue electric guitar” I came across today. Surely somebody’s taking the extreme mickey? I thought this was a joke, but looking the words up confirmed that they are genuine English. I feel humbled that my vocabulary can be expanded by someone with only a passing acquaintence of the language. Or maybe he just needs a somewhat less eclectic thesaurus.

Personally, I’m going to make every attempt to make use of these eximious words in my everyday larruping conversations.

The only song I did reasonably well in was ‘Every Breath You Take’, which I suspect was because I know it fairly well and it is reasonably close to my own limited vocal range. Less successful was ‘Tutti Frutti’, and I totally crashed and burned on ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, but I was trying to sing the female part, two octaves lower than normal, so not entirely surprising.

I found I did better by ignoring the on-sceen guide, apart from the lyrics, as the notes shown are in proportion to the line being sung, so can be two words or a whole sentence; 1 bar or 4. One of those things that is probably easier to follow if you can’t read music. What is interesting, though disappointing for me, is the read-out shows how far out from the notes you are singing. I found that I was wobbling around notes much more than I realised, though once I saw that I was able to address it.

I hope to have another shot soon – I think it could actually be a reasonable tool for improving pitch awareness, and helping my own singing skills (or apparent lack of them).

I’ve done all this just by ear so far, with my acoustic guitar close at hand for occasional assistance, so my next step is going to be to get a sound source to try and play along with some pre-recorded music. Trying to keep in tune with another instrument could well prove to be more tricky than keeping in tune with myself. We shall see (hear). Hopefully, in another couple of weeks I should be ready to put some theremin parts down onto some tracks I have set aside, albeit pretty basic ones. That’ll be the acid test.

My previous post about the clarinet has just been included on MusicThing – I’m quite honoured. Thanks Tom!

I don’t want to get into the habit of posting items of weird-but-true instruments and other musical items – I’ll leave that to the experts at (the very entertaining) MusicThing and others. I have to make an exception for this, I’m afraid.

The Fluorescent Green Clarinet

Why?

I was trawling around the shark-infested treasure trove that is eBay, looking for a little bargain, when I came across this item. A bright green clarinet. Wow. Got to have one of those! Or not.

The black tube of the beautiful green

The seller, a Mr jianada0377, is from China and has a wonderful way with words. So, once he’s introduced his ‘black tube…’ he goes on to say “If you like Chinese culture and Chinese arts, please don’t miss this item. As you know, the Chinese has long history around the world.” Indeed. I’m sure thousands of years of Chinese culture have passed in order that the very pinnacle of artistic endeavour can be attained by crafting this fine instrument. He sums up by letting us know that “It will bring you and your family happy”. It certainly made me smile. He has a whole range of products, including “The electricity guitar of the elegant white” and “Chinese kissable bran-new superb guitar” amongst others. However, leaving aside the results of an auto-translator gone haywire, it got me thinking.

What self-respecting classical clarinet player is going to turn up for a concert with one of these? Not too many, I’d wager. Okay, what about a jazz clarinettist? Not much more likely, I suspect. Well, it would look eye-catching for a rock clarinettist, but when did you last see one of them? No, nor I. So who is buying these things? Somewhere in China there’s a factory churning the little critters out (just do a search on eBay for “green clarinet”), so there must be a market. And they can’t just be toys – not only do they look like they might actually work, but they cost about £100 or more to post from China to the UK. Yeah, right.

[Update]

Amazingly nobody snapped this up, so it went unsold at £4.99 (plus £150 packaging, of course!). Looks like probably the same guy is (trying to) sell them under various names (just search for “black tube beautiful green” on eBay to see) starting at only 27p this time. “Pay attention to the color and the skill”. Yes, indeed. And where on eBay would you look for this latest little gem? Why, ‘Jewellery & Watches > Vintage & Antique Jewellery > Vintage Costume Jewellery > Pre-1837′ – of course! It just gets better…

White Silk

Week 7 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

From the ridiculous to the sublime. White Silk was written by me after seeing a mysterious dark-haired young lady, dressed all in white, walking towards the water in the distance. Viewed from the other side of a small wooded area, she seemed to appear and disappear as she passed behind the trees, like a scene from a Brontë Novel.

I wrote 3 pieces of music, all aiming to be mysterious and sad, and bundled them into ‘The White Silk Suite’. White Silk itself is the middle of the three pieces and has lyrics, unlike the other two.

Getting self-critical for a moment, I have to say that I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this song. I love the simplicity of very basic acoustic guitar and clear voice (Jennifer Leigh provides vocals here), but feel it’s still missing something. I love some of the imagery in the lyrics, but some of the words make me cringe. All in all, not a classic, but it does have a certain attraction. One for further work in the future, should the muse dictate.

And yes, the chord progression does borrow a section from Jethro Tull’s “We Used To Know”, but it’s not as blatant as “Hotel California”. Is it?

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Fire Engine Disco Remix (part 2)

George the Bedford Fire Engine

Time for a little light relief. This one goes way back to 1985 and our first album. It features the whole band playing a minimalistic theme repeatedly on the range of instruments we were playing at the time. The tune should be recognisable to anyone over the age of about 10 from the UK. It is that lovely lilting melody which used to be played by fire engines (big surprise, there) as they sped to save the day – before they replaced the sound with that dreadful banshee wail that seems designed to replace your laxative of choice.

Anyway, the theme goes ‘Nee Naw Nee Naw Nee Naw’ and is repeated by the following instruments; piano, Farfisa organ, Slydee (see earlier post for details), Castrol Can (a large oil can fitted with a trumpet mouthpiece), VL Tone, Yobstick (see another earlier post for details), Yodeller (a large water tank fitted with a trumpet mouthpiece, voice and finally our friendly Bedford Fire Engine, George.

This was all recorded (apart from the fire engine) in our tiny Greenshed Studio on a wonderfully low tech mono cassette recorder, so don’t expect miracles with this little historical (hysterical) gem. All very silly and a lot of fun.

The whole album, All It Took Was One Night In The Back Of A Fire Engine… is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Although I had heard mention of him over the years, I had always put off investigating him as I’m not really a great lover of poetry in general, which is how he is usually remembered. I’m pleased to say that I finally rectified this a couple of years ago and discovered that he had so much more to offer. A fantastically drole sense of humour, a surreal and childlike appreciation of life and some of the funniest mournful songs I’ve heard. Things like “Where the river bends, the blind men fall in”. All performed in a strong, but soft Scottish lilt accompanied by a wheezy harmonium.

A breath of fresh air in a crazy world. He will be missed.

A range of what is known as ‘pod-safe’ music is available now for people running podcast shows. This is music which the artist has allowed to be downloaded freely for inclusion in podcasts, the aim being to keep podcasts financially viable to all and enable artists to spread their music to new audiences.

Seems like a good idea to me, so if you are a podcaster and would like to include some Deserters or Mick Bordet music on your show, pop over to the Podsafe Music Network to see what I’ve made available. All I’d ask is that you let me know if you’re including any of our music, so that we can link to your podcast from here.

Yet Another Granfalloon (2nd movement)

Week 5 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

No, I hadn’t forgotten about this week’s tune, but some positive comments about part 1 of Granfalloon have inspired me to re-think my choice and use part two instead.

Part 2 of this piece was composed in the same manner as part one, and shares certain common features, but is written for percussion and sampled vocals, This was very obviously inspired by Frank Zappa’s Jazz From Hell, with plenty of fast percussive runs and various bent vocal belches and snorks.

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Whilst I don’t really want to end up being scattered all over the place when it comes to providing a web presence for the Deserters and my music, it also seems daft to miss out on something potentially useful. I do find it a bit cluttered in places, but if you don’t like it just stick here and ignore it… You won’t miss anything important!

So if you feel the need to live the MySpace dream, you’ll find me there too, at www.myspace.com/mickbordet. Don’t expect to see anything Earth-shattering that you haven’t already found on the blog or Deserters sites, but it does offer the following:-

• The latest 4 ‘Songs of the Week’ as streamed mp3s
• Links to other bands/musicians with similar interests/influences/etc.
• A blog with slightly different content and some links to other interesting music

They played a range of songs from the 50′s through to the 00′s; rock and pop through to more folky material, so there was plenty of musical interest as well as enough changes to keep my fingers busy on the board. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and hope to do it again before too long.

The Woman In Red

Week 4 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

Both Lee and I have written ‘Mysterious Woman in Colour X’ songs for some reason. Mine was called ‘White Silk’, and may make its way here eventually. Lee’s song was called ‘The Woman In Red’ and is probably just about the slowest and most ballad-like song the Deserters recorded. It was recorded in a single shot with just Lee and myself featured, though I later went back and recorded some extra keyboard backing to fill out the sound a little more.

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Inverbegnac

Week 3 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

Many moons ago we came up with an idea for an exciting new drink, which was to be based on a mix of fruits which would be fermented and then distilled, before blending with a mix of fresh berries. The effects of this potent cocktail were elaborated upon in the song ‘Remembering the Juicy Berries’, but the actual drink itself was never produced. Probably just as well, since it would almost certainly have involved explosions or poisoning at some stage in the process. Some years later I was inspired to write this little ditty as an advertising jingle for the drink that never was.

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Yet Another Granfalloon (1st movement)

Week 2 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

This mp3 is the first part of a three-part instrumental piece of music written in a semi-classical style for a small ‘chamber’ group, which would ideally have been the Deserters plus guests (on oboe and violin). However, it was never recorded in such a manner, and what we have here is a demo of the track with all instruments played by me, with electronic alternatives filling in where there should be flute, oboe and violin.

There is quite an interesting mix of electric and acoustic instruments – electric guitar and bass, mandolin, Nancarrow-like piano, e-bow (I think this was the first time I had used the e-bow on a recording). They don’t always blend entirely successfully, but I still quite like the overall result

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

Track of the Week

One Night in the Back of a Fire Engine

The aim is to make a song available every week until the well runs dry, and try and provide some insight to the track here. I’ve started off with a classic Deserters song, as featured in ‘The Songwriters Guild’ compilation mentioned previously.

The song was written by Lee Newe many years before it was recorded. Jennifer Leigh features on lead vocals, with the Porter Girls on backing vocals. The ‘NeeNaw’ sound is provided by George the Bedford Fire Engine.

The whole album, A Cavalier Attitude is now available for download. Pay whatever you think it is worth to you!

So now we’re going to focus on longer improvisational pieces, which may be overlaid with spoken word or singing depending on the music. We recorded a number of improvised snippets with just bass and synth, with fairly mixed results. Mostly it sounded like a part of a larger piece, lacking percussion and a lead instrument or voice, whilst some bits just sounded painful, like when we changed key to different keys, but time and practice should sort those things out, or at least address how to recover quickly. There were a few parts where the sounds and the lines we were playing meshed together really well, giving a hint of how good it could be with work.

What I particularly like about this direction is that it will allow us to swap between instruments and make use of our whole sonic arsenal, which means I’ll get to put the theremin and yobstick (when completed) into use.

Hopefully we’ll have another session within the next week or two, and more progress can be made…

Yes – and welcome to 2006. Eventually. I’m having computer problems by the handful – one thing gets fixed and another gremlin pops its ugly little head into the middle of the hand-crafted box of wires which connects me to the online World. The end is in sight, but I’m not taking anything for granted… Making the switch away from the Gates empire into Linuxland – it’s either going to be a breath of fresh air or a stream of expletives following a trashed PC. Digits are well and truly crossed.

Some good news, though. I wrote a new song, “12 Years of Christmas“, and did a fairly basic recording of it. It’s a bit slow and needs a little jazzing up, but most of my gear is still in storage for the time being, so it’s just bass, guitar and vocal for the moment. I’m going to set myself a target (or new year’s resolution, if you like that sort of thing) of a new song a month. Whether that is likely to happen is another matter, but it would be good if I could get some more new material under my belt.

He has a contact who plays drums, and we talked about looking to put together a recording over a long term with a couple of other like-minded folk. I’m really keen, though it’s almost 2 hours to get to him in the centre of Glasgow which is a bit of a pain, though hopefully worth it in the end. I’d like to focus on keyboards and maybe backing or acoustic guitar parts, and even bring in the theremin once I’ve got a better handle on it.

In the meantime, I’ve still to get the Deserters’ tracks onto CD, which has turned into one of those jobs that gets covered in fits and starts and will hopefully come to an end soon….
]]> http://www.mickbordet.com/2005/12/embryonic-prog/feed/ 0 http://www.mickbordet.com/2005/09/the-etherwave-has-landed/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-etherwave-has-landed http://www.mickbordet.com/2005/09/the-etherwave-has-landed/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2005 10:14:00 +0000 Mick http://www.mickbordet.com/?p=16 [...]]]> My theremin has arrived.

It’s quite wonderful.

It’s incredibly difficult to play, but that was expected. It looks fantastic – well-finished wood with 2 big wooden knobs and lots of shiny chrome dials. It sounds out of this world – with plenty of scope for altering tone colour and a wide picth range. It’s just so good to to finally have the Moog sound at my fingertips after years of using digital keyboards

I’m starting off with simple tunes to get the swing of it, then aim to move on to use it a bass and backing for other music before graduating to using it as a front-line instrument.

Having said that, there are some little gems in there which I’m going to revisit shortly. Which leads me on to the subject in hand… Dunoon

I don’t recall consciously writing so many songs about Dunoon, but it clearly made a significant impact on my psyche. A quick bit of highly condensed history; the town of Dunoon was a traditional seaside resort in the West of Scotland, which has a unique character compared to others as it is more accessible by boat than train or bus, and is still regularly visited by the steamer Waverley. After seaside resorts lost their charm, Dunoon benefitted (or suffered, depending on your point of view) from the nearby US naval installation at the Holy Loch, and had an economic boost from the many servicemen who stayed in the town.

Lee and I both have spent time in Dunoon, as our families had many ties to the area, with many fond memories. However, as youths we were quite disparaging about the town, mainly because it had passed its glory days, and seemed to be trying to hold on to the past too hard, as well as the fact that it had little to offer the younger generation.

In all I found four songs related to the town in some way. Kirn Beach is an instrumental inspired by the walk from Dunoon to Kirn and beyond, whilst Jim Crow is an upbeat look at the things that have passed around Kirn’s local landmark (a large glacial erratic painted with a black face). The Man in the Boat is a sad tale about the figure on the road to Dunoon who sits in a boat in the middle of a field, and … And the Rest is short song about the trek up the Rest and Be Thankful (a saddle between two glens marking the top of a long steep climb for travellers).

Add these to the already recorded Rage in Dunoon, and there’s nearly half an album’s worth of material. Jeez – a concept album about Dunoon, what next?

I finally got the push I needed to get a theremin.

I’ve been scouting round looking for one at a reasonable price, and had come to the conclusion that it was going to cost at least £130 for one that’s actually playable rather than just a special effect. Then I discovered yesterday that Turnkey are flogging off their stock of Etherwave Pro’s at a knock-down price.

The EW Pro is built by the legendary Moog (r.i.p. Bob) Music, and is just about the best theremin money can buy, with the exception of a couple of specialist dealers or an original RCA theremin (which now cost seriously silly money). So I paid more than I had intended, but what a deal! Like going out to buy a starter guitar and finding a top-of-the-range Les Paul for an extra hundred quid.

So, the order’s gone in and been confirmed – now I just have to wait for delivery – hopefully early next week…

The internet can be a delight on occasion.

There I was, searching around for something mundane, when I came across a link to a page about the compilation album the Deserters appeared on many moons ago; “The Songwriters’ Guild“.

This was a project put together by a number of bands, including the Deserters and Anekdoten, who host the information about the album. The tape featured artists influenced by Peter Hammill, but not playing his music.

The range of styles is pretty diverse, and there are some great tracks on it. It’s a pity that I don’t have a copy on CD, or I’d be playing it now.

There are 2 things I want to do with the next yobstick – one is to make it an electric yobstick. Not quite sure how practical that is, but it would be great to trigger samples with the welly end, or stick the string through a distortion and delay line. The other thing is to make the string more playable, i.e. instead of it being a single note I want to be able to play simple bass lines on it. Again, not terribly sure about how to do this, as one hand holds the stick and the other plucks the string – either some sort of tensioning lever (like a whammy bar) or a sliding bridge.

I just know I’m going to be dreaming about yobstick construction tonight.

Hmmmm.

I’m definitely the weakest link – the others played much faster and more fluently than I did. It’s been a while since I last played much bass and it showed, though I did manage to keep up most of the time by keeping it simpler than I would usually. I’ll need to do a bit of ear-training too – there were a couple of places where I got lost and took a while to work out what I should have been playing.

So, the cobwebs have been dusted off (the bass, at least) – now I need to get down to seriously polishing up on technique…

I’ve upgraded my website hosting recently, so Deserted, the website at www.the-deserters.co.uk, will be getting a bit of an overhaul soon.

I now have more server space and hope to fill it with some sound clips and other goodies…

Gotta love kids!

One of the self-built instruments used by the Deserters in our earlier days was an electronic gadget called the Slydee. It grew from a physics project about transistors where we had to make a circuit to flick between two bulbs. Lee (Newe) and I figured that if we linked this to a speaker instead of a bulb we would get a tone, and we were right. I then added a fader rescued from some old music system or something similar (Tandy, perhaps?) to give a very basic and almost totally uncontrollable keyboardless synth with a character all of its own.

I was wondering about the possibility of rebuilding it some time ago, as I’ve no idea what became of it, when I heard a radio programme about the theremin. After a bit of research I came to the conclusion that I deeply want one. No, need one!

Theremins (therema?) are controlled without touch. You move your right hand near its pitch aerial and left hand near the volume aerial to control the sound. It at worst it sounds just like a Slydee – at best it sounds almost like a human voice. Some folk use it for special effects, whilst others like Peter Pringle have gained sufficient mastery of this awkward littlecritter to make some wonderful music. I aim to be somewhere in between.

The last 3 years of my life have been a bit of a musical desert. I’ve hardly touched an instrument, and most of my music gear has spent its time in boxes. It’s been annoying and difficult, but a necessary evil due to various things going on in my work life – i.e. the stuff that pays to keep the wolf from the door, the children fed and the electricity flowing. Well, the time in the wilderness is coming to an end – 2 months to go and I should be back to living a more normal life where I can actually spend some quality time with family instead of having to schedule them in, I can get on with some of the projects that have peaked my interest over the last 3 years and I can live the music once more.

So – what’s new?

I’m refreshing all the Deserters material that I have transferred to PC, and will finally be editing and sticking it onto CDs.

I’ve dug out my bass from storage and am getting back into the swing (I think) – starting to work on some nice new callouses. Next will come the trusty old DX7 and finally I’ll fish out the guitar.

I’m getting together with some local musos to do some jam sessions, which may or may not lead to something better – I hope to report on this next week.

I’ve also got a couple of experimental music things I want to put together – I’ll probably start this in the new year – quite a bit of programming will be involved on the ST (old faithful music computer), which I’ve not really done much of in the past.

Finally, I want to build a new Yobstick – the last one disappeared during a house-move, and I feel somehow incomplete without it. Perhaps I can encourage my yob-luthier to return to the trade!

Exciting times ahead for me – here’s hoping we all enjoy the ride!