Free Gig Tonight at the Full Stop, Brick Lane

This is a gig organised by Jude Cowan that features herself, Kath Tait and a host of others playing Americana-themed songs, improvising and all sorts. It starts bang on 8.30 and I'll be playing some of the skiffle songs. It's a lovely little caff towards the north end of Brick Lane.

Vinyl Cultures at Brilliant Corners

To follow up on last Friday's fascinating seminar at the British Library, I decided to go along to this event which was run by colleagues at the University of the East.

http://culturalstudiesresearch.org/?p=1318

It was interesting to stroll past the Russian Club Bomonti, where Diana Mavroleon and myself used to run the Songbird night many moons ago. It has now been re-branded, still as something Russian, but it looks as though the studios which appeared to gestate many rude arts professionals trying to get in free and treating the door person as though they were a subhuman-spawn-of-a-slug (that was me, btw), have now taken over the building completely. I hope they enjoy the real tree trunks holding up the bar canopy!

To digress more: I walked into a cafe to buy some coffee, and the staff were buzzing with excitement at the fact that Yoko Ono is due to eat there tonight. East London is surely star-studded; This was merely a stone's throw from where a table is laid each night for Gilbert and George in a Turkish cafe, given away by the sparkling wine glasses and smart silver tableware.

To digress even more, when I was a graphic novelist, I drew a story for some people whose postman was the son of either Gilbert or George, I'm not sure which one. So there's a story for you.

Brilliant Corners is as much art space as a bar, and an OK place to visit on one's own. I have always enjoyed going out on my own whether to see bands, listen to lectures or whatever, because if the mood takes you, you can leave without having to persuade a companion to leave with you. Take a good detective novel and feel comfortable in your own skin and you will have an absorbing time. 

(Martin, my Champagne Friend, Caroline, Gina and the Offsprogs are notable exceptions to this but trading quirks makes the whole process easier).

Colleen Murphy (of http://classicalbumsundays.com/ ) and whom I interviewed recently, sat at one end; next to her, Jeremy Gilbert and Tim Lawrence from the University of the East; then Dominik Bartmanski, author of the forthcoming Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury) and the journalist John Harris.

In turn, starting with Dominik, each speaker spoke of their engagement with vinyl. Their stories were engaging and delivered in different styles. I learned a lot: for instance that vinyl used for records is black because of a graphite additive that optimises the frequencies; that humans like distortion in music and that's what analogue sound recorded onto vinyl gives us, and as a scientist (missed who that was) commented, 'the ear is an analogue device'. Jeremy Gilbert remarked that since digital streaming, music has been decommodified but not decapitalised.

I thought about the Norwegian student that I interviewed about ten years ago who made money as a vinyl speculator. He bought the rare Oasis vinyl that was released as a specialist product and stockpiled it. 

I also thought back to the guy round the corner who advertised his entire vinyl collection on Freecycle. I asked him for all his 12" disco singles (he gave the whole lot of his albums to an unemployed man who just listened to music all day); but the thing was, they had no special meaning for me as did the vinyl that I bought and traded and was given back in the day, and I ended up leaving the lot in the lobby at the University of the West for the dance music producers to take away with them.

Dominik said that the toppy production on early CDs was because the format was originally tailored to Classical music; their length, after consultation with Karajan, was based on the length of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. 

I'd heard last week that this tinny sound was to do with the mastering process not being specific to CDs and I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between.

And I thought back to cutting the Helen and the Horns single Freight Train at CTS studios in Wembley with a guy called Groucho who was a live reggae mixmaster in the evenings. It was he who told me about the fatigue caused in the brain as it tried to process the stream of on/off signals caused by the clumsy sampling rate on CDs, in a similar process to the way that the pulsing of fluorescent lighting irritates the brain. Many years later I sat next to a chap from Philips at a wedding and asked him if this was true. "Yes', he said. 'We are spending a lot of money on trying to trick the brain into hearing those myriad samples as a constant wave of sound that's as pleasurable to listen to as analogue sound is'.

Colleen talked about working in a record store in New York and the sudden change to CDs from vinyl, and John Harris gave a very funny overview of his own joy in listening to vinyl.

Overall, the panel (as was to be expected) came out very much in favour of vinyl and I resolved to get my turntable out and purchase a small amplifier so I can set it up and listen. I used to feed my turntable through a boombox because we had big empty kitchen units in our old house that acted as makeshift bass bins. 

The drawers here are stuffed with things and I can't get the bass end of the disco singles to thump, so I'll have to think about doing it all properly. I've been yearning to play The Young Marble Giants on vinyl, and also of course the cathartic disco and lover's rock 12"singles,  and it's high time I fought back against next door's endlessly-howling Spaniel puppy with a bit of bass end. A lot of bass end.

At the end of the talk, a fellow from Vinyl's Back Pages took rather an exception to the whole thing, which was to miss the point. Yes, yet again, the concept of innovative pop belonging to the young who can decode it and give it meaning was lost (we were an extraordinary audience, being still so absorbed in pop, reggae, dance music and so on that we gave up a Friday night to attend a talk about it instead of sitting at home listening to Dire Straits through a docked iPod); but this was a stimulating event.

I was half expecting to see Richard Osborne there, who is the author of Vinyl: a History of the Analogue Record (Ashgate); I'm sure he too would have had something to contribute.

I can recommend reading the articles on the website. Knowledge is bliss.

Sometimes You Just Have To Fool About

I can't face life today so I'm fooling about.
I have 13.9 days of songs on my iTunes (6159 'items')
I'm trying to play lead guitar along with all of them, on my Spanish guitar, craply.
The tunings are wildly out- The Three Degrees' Year of Decision is much flatter than Young Marble Giants' N.I.T.A. for instance. And the blues and rockabilly are somewhere else.
I am really, really bad at it but it's extremely therapeutic.
See you in 13.9 day's time.

Honey Ltd - Come Down Live

More Interviews and a Gig

The barrel of interviews for the transcriber is beginning to run dry so I've spent most of this afternoon arranging to top it up. You have a landscape (oh those metaphors!) of people to talk to and then you think laterally and that helps when you get stuck; and then the original interviewees come back into the picture again (sometimes).
I'm going to be presenting a paper on my research at the Studying Music conference (in honour of Simon Frith) in Edinburgh next month and thought it would be great to have some hot-off-the-press (mtphr agn) information to share there.
Ah... a gig... at the Full Stop in Brick Lane on Sunday evening, organised by the other two members of the once Desperado Housewives, Jude Cowan and Kath 'Lentils' Tait.
There will be lots of other people playing and poeting too and it will be free to get in. so come on down: it's Americana themed which means that I'll be playing some skiffle (although that's British, it's got enough American in it and so have I). Starts 8 p.m. and come early to see Kath and Jude.
See ya there, yee-ha!

Medieval Cartoon Strip

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/01/a-medieval-comic-strip.html#

Skiffle Group Skiffling

Soundcloud Preview of Skiffle Song

Martin, who produced the forthcoming skiffle album, has uploaded a preview track here: https://soundcloud.com/the-daintees/if-youve-got-the-blues

Martin Stephenson on Stageit Tonight!

Here's the link- see you there!
https://www.stageit.com/martin_stephenson/sunday_night_special/35318?enter=Enter+Venue

Beards

If you've got one that's not in my collection, please let me know:

1. Chin skimmer
2. Dipped-in-glue-'n'-iron-filings
3. Also-flowing-down-the-neck
4. Walrus kiss 'n' mouth surround
5. Butch chinthrust
6. Underchin Only
7. On-the-way, soon
8. Wholeface eyepeeper
9. Suburban Hedge
10. Chindot
11. Foursquare chestcover

Review: Claudia Heidegger

I was going to review two CDs today but I've been unexpectedly busy, and I also have to get on with designing the cover for the skiffle CD (which is going to be titled Anarchy Skiffle after one of the songs). After a spiritual quest this morning and a walk along the Camden Towpath at lunchtime in the moody spring sunshine (sun-hail-rain-wind-snow-sun), I sat down to listen to the one I chose to review, Claudia's E.P. Tell Me Your Dreams.
Claudia is an Austrian songwriter who is studying in London which is why we met. There is something distinctive and classic about her songwriting which puts her music a cut above the average, and she is writing yet more songs as you read this and with any luck will have an album to release before the end of the year.
Good music is difficult to describe: of course, you can't disentangle your own engagement from it. But also, it's the way that a line ends on an unexpected chord, perhaps, or tiny emotional nuances that pull a singer out of perfection and into expression at just the right moment.
Claudia's songs remind me a little of Peter Hall's, a songwriter who comes to the Songwriting Weekend in Dumfries. He spent hours sitting in the shade of a tree writing a song to his girlfriend and brought the house down with it that evening when he played it.
This is an E.P. which she has released herself although you can listen to her songs here https://soundcloud.com/claudia-heidegger
The title track, The Other Side, has shades of Terry Callier and showcases Claudia's violin playing (as do some of the other tracks). Tell Me Your Dreams is a jaunty folk song about disappointment driven along by the ukulele. My two favourites, which are fighting for top billing, are Come Back for Me which features a chord-piano of layered harmonies that form a bed for a lovely, high and wistful vocal performance, and No Reason to Reason. The first of these, in spite of its unusual arrangement, has such a strong melody that it could be covered in all sorts of different genres and still hold its head up. No Reason to Reason, listed as a bonus track, is the star of the show. It reminded me of Judy Collins and the orchestration could have been arranged by Peter Asher (the arranger on James Taylor's first album).
Cathartic listening this Sunday afternoon, and recommended for you to listen right now, whatever day of the week you read this.
Hot off the press: https://soundcloud.com/claudia-heidegger/shape-of-your-shadow/s-gWUbR

'Keeping Tracks: music and archives in the digital age' at The British Library

This symposium was dreamed up by Alex Wilson, the curator of digital recordings at The British Library, and I went along partly out of curiosity and partly because I lecture in the history of sound recording and also try to work out the future employment prospects for the engineers that we teach at the University. Lots of reasons.
After an introduction by Andy Linehan, the curator of popular music who I know from yonks ago, the Av scoping analyst Adam Tovell gave a very measured and informed presentation about preservation, conservation and storage; he was followed by Alex Wilson who showed a series of slides to the soundtrack of all 164 of the world's National Anthems being played together. he showed us the metadata templates for storing the information about the millions of recordings they have there, that are scheduled to take 15 years to digitise but will probably take 42 years. Metadata comes in from fans, record labels and many different sources, and it was interesting to see Marianne Faithfull credited as a songwriter on one of the Rollings Stones' tracks. I never knew that, no I certainly didn't. And there also were the players on the tracks- people like Ry Cooder.
Lesley Bleakley from The Beggar's Group followed, in interview with Rory Gibb from The Quietus. She has access to the whole of the Beggars Group archive, and she is foraging through it and beginning the process of catalgueing it before digital storage cane even be started. As she said, for a commercial organisation like them who make money from copyright, 'There is a pull between limiting what people can have and letting them have everything; we operate somewhere in the middle'. Streaming systems don't care so much about quality as labels do, and they are working out the highest practical bit-rate for their archiving and the best ways of the engineers re-mastering the music with suitable EQ for the format. They have to think about temperature control in the physical part of the archive, weed out duplicates, all sorts of things. This is all as insurance against the future collapse of the record industry.

I went home to rest my brain and picked up copies of Records and Tea: the best of The Chefs, and Footsteps at my Door, to give to Andy later on. He was astonished, but High Barnet's not far from King's Cross and I'm glad I went home because Offsprog One had locked herself out so I was able to provide a useful rescue service.

I missed part of the afternoon session but walked in on a Skype session from Music Tech Fest at the Microsoft Research Lab. It was rich with ideas: music as 'social connective tissue' whose sociality we can now see in the post-internet age. After that, Jennifer Lucy Allen from The Wire chaired a panel with Jonny Trunk from Trunk Records, Spencer Hickman from Death Waltz Recording Company (both one-man operations with quirky output) and Roger Armstrong from Ace Records. I'd taken the Ace catalogue home to read at lunchtime and even the catalogue is fascinating. For instance, there are CDs of various artists performing songs by songwriting duos like Goffin and King. I mentally noted to buy so many of them that I'd spent a head-grand before I got to my tube stop!
It seemed at some points during the the discussion that there was tension between the panellists, but this brought forth all sorts of interesting material: Hickman's conversations with David Lynch, Trunk's visit to Oliver Postgate's basement, and a wealth of information from Armstrong about not only business but also standards in archiving and data transfer that was fascinating.
I particularly liked his 'Pile 'em low, sell 'em high' motto, which he used to demonstrate the desire for a good quality CD representation of vintage material alongside specially-commissioned essays in the booklet that are unique to the release.
The final flourish was Mark Fisher's impassioned speech about the lack of innovation in music in the 21st Century. Now, I have a completely different perspective on this because I am the mother of two young women for whom music doesn't just mean 'now', it also means 'then'. I feel that if we don't understand the audio and lyrical 'now' messages in what young people listen to, then that is a problem with us, and not with them.
Did our parents understand the nuances of the music we listened to? No, they didn't. We have grown too old to understand certain aesthetic criteria; many of us have simply grown out of pop.
I was reminded of the way I could be obsessed by a song to the point of distraction as a teenager: it would hold magic, sex, emotions, a spiritual resonance and seem to contain all the answers to all the questions I could ever ask. Then one day, I would listen to it and all that would have gone in an instant. Pop music is ephemeral; one of the speakers earlier said that you were originally supposed to play a record, wear it out, get rid of it, and buy some new music.
Collecting and archiving is incredibly important, but allowing moments to pass unrecorded or allowing them to vanish is quite exciting too.
If we don't have some space in our cupboards, we can't see what's in there, can we?

A circular window and a circular CD- the first ever, released by the Jacksons.

The Ralph's Life CD

If you haven't done so already, check out this CD which features 40 artists (including Feral Five, Tom Robinson, and a rare McCookerybook track) and raises money for a mental health charity.
There is a review of it and more details here:
http://gcygnus.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/music-part-185-ralphs-life.html?spref=tw
The Hiapop Blog is well worth checking out in it's own write.

Scary Dolls in Barcelona Toyshop

Photographs from the 2014 Guitar Weekend