Simon Cowell is NOT responsible

A recent letter from an old acquaintance – once lost, now re-established, albeit by email only at the moment – contained this…

“The music industry seems so strange, a lot of the stuff I see on TV now is such boring and utter rubbish. More about posing in bling than about the music and singing as far as I can tell. I hear people's stuff on Soundcloud, and it just sounds so much more passionate than the manufactured dross.”

From my response…

“The points you make about music are so valid, but unfortunately very, very few people put two and two together. The problem is somewhat ironic – even paradoxical.

Obviously, artists need to eat and drink and have a roof over their heads, need to produce their art and disseminate it. All of this costs money. The spending and earning of money for whatever reason falls into the category of ‘business’. Because ‘business’ essentially controls the money, it has come to control the art. The skill sets needed to be a good businessman are almost totally exclusive to those needed to be an artist.

As soon as business considerations begin to govern the creative process, limitations of time and space begin to constrain that process. Mistakes are made in the production.

Further to that – and there should be a thesis to be written on this some day – the moment business considerations and financial motivations begin to control, the art dies in the artist. There is nothing left save technique. The pictures, the shapes, the words, the music all wither to become the sum of the parts.

So, yes, your observations are very astute. The stuff you hear on myspace is often created for the sole purpose of being created and being heard. The stuff on tv has no purpose other than the preening of the ‘star’ and the gleening of the cash.

In the music business, this has been ongoing since the 1950s. As the skills of the artist have improved and evolved, so have the skills of the businessmen – but unfortunately the latter has had no empathy with the former. The artist to the modern music businessman (in the vast majority of cases) is nothing more than a tin of baked beans, a brand of underpants, a service (supplied by another) to be delivered.

Simon Cowell and the like are not directly responsible for this phenomenon, but they are the latest brick in the walls that separate the artist from the music and the music from the audience. Scrawled hastily on these walls are the two-dimensional representations that the business world would have us think are music. And the vast majority lap it all up, mistaking mechanics for music and celebrity for talent.

The problem with trying to ‘do something’ with music is precisely this. The money is in the illusion of music and what people expect it to be – and people’s expectations are overbearingly restrictive.

I organise an open mic night at my local pub every Thursday. I often do a couple of my own songs, but people simply aren’t interested. The moment you start playing something they don’t know, the audience switches off. The only way to progress in the rock and pop worlds is to work the circuits and hope that someone picks up on what you are doing. The reward is to be placed into the mincing machine that feeds the public's expectations.

On top of this, you also need to work with other musicians, which is a difficult, angst-ridden, unpredictable environment at the best of times.

For me, the future lies in solo efforts. I don’t know if you listened to any of the ‘auraloramas’ such as ‘Relaxation’, ‘Hillside Wind’ or ‘Twilight to Night’, but these are all spontaneous pieces, sometimes partly planned, but always improvised and recorded live – just me, a guitar, and a bank of effects pedals. They utterly rebut the idea of ‘commercial’ music in terms of intro/verse/chorus/bridge/middle eight/coda, which, combined with the improvised nature of the pieces means they begin from a point of making expectation redundant. No-one, not even the musician, knows exactly what is going to happen.

From the musician’s point of view, it is a very exciting way of making music. The looping of sounds means that whatever you play will come back at you in a few seconds – you have to take responsibility for everything you do. Mistakes have to be used and blended to become part of the music. I find it totally absorbing and very thrilling.

Trouble is, of course, is that the moment you turn your back on the ‘expected’ you leave yourself out in the wilderness in terms of performance and audience. This is one of the many tasks I shall be taking on this year: trying to find venues and audiences that would be open to such a music.”

And so begins 2011…

What is an auralorama?

The Norden Farm Tenth Anniversary Celebration Promenade Performance is coming. Huzzah! As I have mentioned at least a couple of times before, I will be performing some soundscapes (or, as I prefer to call them, auraloramas) at the event. This is all very well and while I am quite excited, I thought it only fair that I should let you know a bit about my method of making (what I think are) some delightful sounds.

Auralorama is the name I use for a simple system of utilising extended digital delay in order to create a loop of sound that can be continually added to. This means that a note played will ‘come around again’ and harmonies and counterpoint can be added with each passing of the loop.

The resulting sound, generally speaking, is an amorphous wash of harmony (or dissonance) that can be either (or both) dramatic and demanding of attention or ‘ambient’ and atmospheric, adding to a space’s feeling, as well as being a performance.

While my auraloramas are often played using ideas of structure that are premeditated or planned, no two ‘playings’ will ever be the same, due to the inconsistencies of delay length (controllable) and of my being human (uncontrollable). That said, the nature of the improvising and the inconsistencies is such that total improvisation will often occur and the player will have as little idea as to what is going to happen next as the audience.

Why do I do this? Simply, because I love the sounds that are created. A good band will always produce music that is greater than the sum of the parts. This is a way that one person can create music that sounds veritably orchestral, despite being played by one man and his guitar.

Auraloramas have evolved from a system of tape looping that goes back over 50 years. Here’s a brief look at the history of this remarkable way of making music…

The origins of tape looping are somewhat hazy, although it is largely credited to the composer Terry Riley, who began working with tape loops as far back as the 1950s. During the 1960s, Riley would put on all-night concerts, performing on an old pipe organ (which he would ‘power’ with the motor from a vacuum cleaner blowing into the ballasts) and on saxophone using tape delay. When the time came for a break, he would leave the tape loops playing in order to maintain a non-stop event. Riley called the system, using two stereo Revox reel-to-reel recorders, the ‘Time Lag Accumulator’. People, including entire families would attend these concerts, usually armed with food, drink and sleeping bags.

Riley first used the TLA on his 1963 album Music for the Gift.

And there tape looping might well have remained in an obscure left-field territory where classical meets jazz had a young Brian Eno, fresh from his successful few years with the nascent Roxy Music, reverted to his art college type and began experimenting with various forms of sound generation.

Eno would be the first to laugh at any suggestion that he is a musican, but his knowledge and ability in the studio, using technology and manipulating sound, whether synthetic or natural, is regarded by many as second-to-none.

He came across Riley’s dual Revox system around 1972 and immediately called upon his friend, the guitarist Robert Fripp, to help him create some sounds. The two worked for a few hours in Eno’s flat, with Fripp playing guitar notes through Eno’s VCS3 synthesizer and layer upon layer of sound was created. The finished loop was then played back and Fripp soloed over the top. The result was the album (No Pussyfooting).

From here the techniques grew in popularity and diverged in use. Eno continued to use the system (sometimes setting up several pairs of Revoxes) to create ‘chance music’, where non-synchronised machines would play simple motifs over and over, but at different time lengths and constantly shifting in relation to each other, creating a virtually non-repeating ‘sonic landscape’ or ‘soundscape’.

Fripp, on the other hand, saw in tape looping something approaching a personal discipline, which he called Frippertronics, for guitar playing that also fed his desire to play improvised music. From 1979 onwards, Fripp began touring, initially at small and unusual venues, such as pizza restaurants and record shops. He would create three or four loops and then play them back and solo over the top – in much the same way he had done with Eno.

By the early 1980s, digital technology had begun to surpass the possibilities that analog tape systems could offer and state-of-the-art, digital delay products became widely available.

Despite the critical success of Brian Eno (particularly and to a lesser degree Robert Fripp) the creation of soundscapes remains a niche taste and far from the mainstream.

While there are hundreds of artists around the world using delay systems to create loops, it is still difficult to find much outside the work of these two.

My approach, which I call auraloramas (aural panoramas) because I feel uncomfortable utilising someone else’s labels, follows more directly the work of Robert Fripp in that I use a guitar to create the notes and I value the discipline of being forced to contend with what I have played, rightly or wrongly, well or badly a few seconds later and deal with it, adapt it and add to it to a better end. (There is always the alternative of simply switching off and starting again when you make a mistake, but this is still widely considered a performance faux pas and, well, when mankind fucked up, God didn’t take that route either. We can only move forward from where we are.)

To date, the equipment I use is simple in comparison with Fripp’s ‘Solar Voyager’ set-up, which utilises expensive Eventide delay units and harmoniser and a couple of guitar synthesizers. My gear is a simple Boss Giga-Delay pedal (offering 23 seconds of looping capability) with an echo unit, a Boss ME-50 multi-effects and a Digitech overdrive, but I am planning to use a guitar synthesizer in the near future to exponentially increase the number of textures and effects.

And there you have it. Click on some of the links above to listen to the sort of sounds Fripp and Eno make (together, as well as individually) and I hope you like them.

Click here to hear a couple of mine, too (Meditation, Hillside Wind, Twilight to Night) – and you can take in a few of my songs, as well. I hope you enjoy them.

Norden Farm gig

Right, back to that gig I’ve got coming up. As I mentioned before, it is essentially the first time I have been asked to perform my auraloramas (some might say Soundscapes, but I prefer to leave others’ definitions for their work to them and think of my own) at the Norden Farm Tenth Anniversary Celebrations Promenade Performances… It’s a bit of a mouthful, but it does do what it says on the tin (or rather, on the website pages that announce it).

To say that I was asked is probably pitching it a bit – I put myself forward, although I like to think not in a pushy way. I asked, I sent in a couple of examples, I was told ‘come along’. I’m pretty chuffed.

But what, I hear you ask, is a ‘Promenade Performance’?

It is a bit of a misnomer, in my humble opinion, as it is not the performances that are moving, but the audience.

That audience is expected to be about 150 to 200 people, and it will be split into half a dozen groups, which will then follow a predetermined route around the Arts Centre, stopping along the way at the most unlikely of spots (a corridor, a cupboard, a disabled toilet… That’s a toilet for disabled people, not a toilet that has been rendered unusable), where a short performance will take place for ten or so minutes. Once complete, the group will move on to the next performance and the next group will take its place as the first performance is repeated.

It’s a very cool idea and is promising to be a really interesting and rewarding night out for all concerned.

It’s a double – even triple – whammy for me, as I will be performing auraloramas (in the scene dock as it turns out, which I am very happy about because it is a high-ceilinged space, so the reverb will be monstrous – coupled to that, one of the theatre’s techs said he would open up the scene dock lift doors and we can position one of the amps pointing up the shaft for even more reverb and spaciness), as well as having the mighty Maidenhead Players performing one of my monologues.

The Players are putting on the Angina Monologues, a series of short performances concerning old age. My wife, Lorraine Forrest-Turner is directing the monologues, and she has written one of them as well.

It’s all very exciting and is, I’m certain, the result of Lorraine’s and my extra effort in concentrating on our creative pursuits over the past few months.

The auraloramas will be accompanied by a local yoga teacher, Julie Potter, going through her moves… At least, that is the plan. I sent her, as we agreed, a couple of ideas for the sort of sounds I will be making, but have heard (ominously) nothing back from her. I’m hoping that I have got her email address wrong and not upset her with amorphous looped guitar harmonies… We shall see.

Anyway, the Players will have a table out front for people to sign up to the group for the best dramatic group in the area and I will be sneaking a few of my albums in there for the flood of appreciative supporters I am intending to garner…

(yeah, right)

So, get along – there is bound to be something there for you to enjoy.

Keen

I’ve got a gig! Not a particularly earth-shattering piece of information, particularly as those of you reading this blog (hopefully all six of you) have: a) played with me at one of my recent gigs; b) seen me at one of my recent gigs; c) known about one of my recent gigs but had something much better to do on each occasion.

Most of my playing these days takes place either in private (not listening to my own advice), with my wife at our local pub (strangely lacking in invites to return after four or five appearances… Could it be we simply don’t attract the right quantity of audience – regardless of the undoubted quality) or at my local open mic night (here, most definitely taking my own advice).

The only time, however, I have played my own version of soundscapes/Frippertronics was at a sort of ‘freestyle’ open mic night at the Firestation in Windsor – the so-called Professor Hitchen’s Art Lab (or some such).

I’ve been down there a couple of times, actually, just to make some sort of observation of the reaction to a bloke standing there making bleeping and droning noises with a guitar, a giga-delay unit and various knobs, switches and pedals to make the whole experience as unearthly as is humanly possible.

Which was great – and the response was great, too. The thing is, it was, like any open mic night, a ‘blind’ performance. I emailed the organiser, explaining what I wanted to do, they responded saying ‘great, come on down’ and I played – although it was clear on each occasion that the MC had no idea who I was or what I was doing and on each occasion implied that I would be getting on stage with my guitar ‘to sing us a few songs’.

In a way, that was kind of cool, because if anyone was expecting a song, they would have been extremely surprised to hear the amorphous swoops and whooshes emitting from my guitar…

But I digress, yet again.

Yes, I have a gig – a gig playing my auraloramas – a gig in an arts centre – a gig with loads of other artists, musicians and dramatists… A gig where I had to send in some examples of my music to see if it was suitable.

An da man, he say ‘yes’.

It is the tenth anniversary of the Norden Farm Centre for the Arts in Maidenhead and the establishment is holding a special, all-comers celebration of the arts in Maidenhead. There will be drama groups, musical theatre groups, dance groups, artists and who knows what else, all performing in every possible square inch of the centre.

I’m telling people that I will be in the disabled toilet… I don’t know if that’s true, but it is possible – and who cares. The fact is that an arts centre thought my strange noises suitable for a multi-arts celebration.

I’m jumping the gun a bit here. I’ve just been on the Norden Farm website and the September 26th event isn’t even on the calendar yet, but hey, take this as a suitably previous teaser for the eventual blog I will write again once the chance to book tickets has arrived…

Bloody hell – that’s the problem with the mediocre: too damn keen…