Aperitif

Morsels part four

Photo by Allan Gray.

Other gear / sound credits: Hologram Microcosm for guitar glitch and reverb; Boards of Deluge for the melting synths; Meat Beats’ Juno Works for more conventional but very useful sounds.

Morsels part three

Morsels part two

This actually may be a bit more focused. Fewer very short bits, anyway. And I wondered: should I have mentioned the Deluge specifically? I don’t want this to be about the gear used to make it. It’s also a bit unfair on the Loupé looping pedal. On the one hand, they’re great bits of kit; on the other, who cares how?

Morsels

I haven’t been writing much the last few years, but have been trying to make music quite a bit of the time, without really finishing anything, so here’s a thing I might do: gather the fragments as I go, and put them online. Last month I got my Synthstrom Deluge back from having a new screen fitted, which is what caused this particular burst of activity, and is I think why there are so many different techniques in use here. I worked out how to record guitar loops on it, synchronised to my looper pedal. I tried using a volume pedal for the first time, to fade notes in, à la early Tenniscoats. There’s some cacophonous FM synthesis, and a harpsichord. There’s all sorts. Future installments may (possibly) be more focused. Drums crackle a bit as they’re from the lovely Vinyl Drums From Mars sample pack.

Calling Orson

at twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can’t tell twenty about this; that’s the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty. (Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons)

At eighteen or nineteen I saw Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons for the first time. You know, the greatest film ever made, and the greatest film ever destroyed by studio cuts. Neither really helped to explain their creator: Orson Welles swaggered in the first, fully in control of a new, wildly ambitious kind of film, bristling with virtuosity and confidence. The second seemed, at the time, a third rate melodrama, mitigated only slightly by its nice camera angles. Soon afterwards I saw him again, on a repeat of Michael Parkinson’s 1974 interview, the 26-year-old boy wonder of 1941 inflated into an unrecognisably grey, podgy 59 (only 59! He looked much older). The interview was fascinating in a way neither film managed, Orson emerging as a vulnerable, infinitely generous raconteur, modest to a fault, and expansive in a thoughtful and endearing way. As he spoke the mannerisms and expressions of Kane lit up the face of this prematurely aged man, it was very moving. I wrote a song about it, which you can hear near the end of Pomp and Circumstance. In the midst of some recent Welles-related repeats on BBC4, I thought to look up the 1974 interview on YouTube, and the whole thing is there.

Also more highly recommended than I know how: Orson Welles – The One Man Band

Anti That

The best short record review I have ever seen:

ohh!
I love the song!
Your singing is dreamy, the electric beat machine sounds electro pop, and acoustic instruments give me heartwarming atoms.

Not that I am totally impartial – the electric beat machine and acoustic instruments that Hiroho is referring to were played by me, the dreamy singing and the song being supplied by Anne Bacheley, to whom that message was addressed. Isn’t the internet brilliant?

Listen to ‘Anti That’ at Anne’s MySpace page.

____________________

Post MySpace update: ‘Anti That’ is now here.

How Could You Be So Cruel?

Yesterday evening, raking through some old four track tapes retrieved from my parents’ attic over Christmas, looking for one or two missing Planet Sunflower songs which must surely be in this shoebox somewhere. I found the saddest song I ever wrote. Thought it was lost. Christ. Happy Valentine’s Day.

The Long Vacation – How Could You Be So Cruel?

When You Disappear

Anyone who’s read this or that post from several whiles ago will have some idea how much I love Anne Bacheley’s songs. It’s a whole lot, anyway. I had a go at recording one, ‘Mixtape Babies’, half in response to Candy Cane’s version, and half to try out a new fangled digital eight track I impulse bought a few months ago after a particularly boring Saturday in work. Eight tracks! What freedom, after years using (or not using) four track tape machines. ‘Mixtape Babies’ uses three. Oh well.

You can hear it here, under ‘Misc’. Thanks so much for putting it up, Anne. You are great.

When Yer Twenty Two

In the Proust biography I’m reading at the moment, the startling thing is the man’s dedication to gathering a certain kind of experience – heightened, precious, fleeting – then ‘translating’ it into art. His vision is extraordinarily pure; his life is neurotic and painful. Along the way he falls in love about once every eighteen months. Most of these attachments are traumatic in one way or another, and most provide material for In Search of Lost Time. Just at the moment he’s taking six years out from writing fiction to translate Ruskin (it is a little slow), in which task he gets immersed without losing sight of the fact that he’s not actually doing anything creative. There’s a sense of things falling into place: source material, and the incredible digressive, luminous style for which he needed to assimilate Ruskin. He uses things up, and (eventually) gives them back transfigured.

Which is as pretentious a way as any to introduce my own brush with creativity, ten years old this month, an album with a dodgy title (Loss Angeles) and an opening song so down it’s almost guaranteed to discourage further investigation. It picks up fairly quickly after that, but still. And, believe it or not, I did what Proust does: I took the two women my heart was bounding hopelessly around after at the time, and sort of spliced them together – in song, I hasten to add – and wound up with quite a good record. Of which I am still really proud. Around the time I was making it, at the expense of an Eighteenth Century Literature course and sleeping, my love of The Pastels was at its height, and I marvelled that they could make such great records without any of this angst nonsense. I wished I could do without it too, but when it did disappear along with the appearance of the lovely S. (who is so worth singing about), the songs seemed to go with it.

Maybe if I say here, in public, that I’m going to write some non-grumpy songs, it might help me to actually do it. If it does, I’ll post them. In the meantime, happy birthday, if you please, to this:

http://www.archive.org/details/loss_angeles

Update: Tim / Richard's inlay card for the cassette:





Credits read: ‘All songs by Chris except ‘In My Eyes’ which is by Catriona (who also plays flute on ‘Tremolo’) and Chris, and ‘God Rest Her Soul’, which is by Chris S. and Chris. Completed April 1998.’

‘God Rest Her Soul’ was subsequently re-named ‘Tunnel Vision’, which was what Chris S., whose digital transmutation of Sonic Youth into Lady Di’s car crash constitutes most of the song, wanted to call it.

Further update: stream the whole thing below.