Approaching the Eternal Now

I had been working on a new album of auraloramas since the Promenade event at the local arts centre (Norden Farm), when I was fortunate enough to work alongside Julie Potter as she went through her yoga routines. It was a tremendously worthwhile event and opened my eyes to possible applications for my soundscaping.

Some of the results of this session can be found on my Youtube page. The event threw up four basic improvisations, which then became Clearing the Mind, Relaxation, Uncertain Start, and Walking Home in my studio over the next couple of months.

I was actually getting into gear with the pieces and was about to start work on others when that old beast called desire stepped in and I decided that I wanted to get a guitar synth. Well, as is so often the way with desire, obstacles throw themselves in front of you in order for you to be absolutely sure that this is what you really want.

Immediately became Christmas, became the New Year, Became February, became March and, finally, in April, I was up and running with the new Roland GR-55 guitar synthesizer – and a jolly fine piece of kit it is, too.

Thus, six months after I started work on the Meditation album, the direction has changed considerably – not to mention the sound. Before I was using a selection of Boss and Digitech pedals to create the pieces, but now I am down to the delay unit, a echo unit and the synth – it has certainly made the floor before me when I play a far tidier space.

While trying to get a handle on the synth, I did what I assume anybody would do and simply went through the patches, making note of what sounded good, often getting distracted by a particularly nice noise and going off on a tangent to see how an idea might develop. At one point I came across a number of brass instrument sounds close together and started noodling with these.

The effect was, I thought, extremely dramatic, so a couple of weeks later I was back in the studio working on the piece. It starts off with some bells and vibes, played quite randomly and then a ‘Dark’ trumpet comes in, followed by a high trumpet. Then a French horn and finally trombone.

The sounds of these synthetically produced instruments is not quite natural, yet certainly reminiscent, and the looping creates a quite ethereal sound when each sound begins to layer over itself.

I remember speaking to Theo Travis after the Travis & Fripp gig at Gloucester University and he said how he liked the looping of woodwind instruments because it created a sort of Mellotron sound. It certainly does – and it lifts my spirits very much to be able to create such drama.

I chose the title of the song from something I have heard along the way from various people that are into spiritualism of one sort or another – the Eternal Now… a moment when everything is in harmony and time seems to stand still. I certainly can’t claim quite such a moment, but I thought this might be something like the moment before everything falls into place… What happens afterwards goes beyond representation, I should think. I am really pleased with this first synthesized auralorama and I hope you are too.

Quantifying the process

Just finished writing my private diary – a good old-fashioned notebook, which I make entries using a pen (gosh! How quaint!). It is something I am trying to make a habit out of, in order to compile something of a record of this final ‘push’ in my life to achieve something I value.

Robert Fripp says ‘to try is to fail’ and how right he is. But my trying here is a step on the road to a discipline and it is more succeeding than failing and it will become less trying and more doing until it is established as a habit. And a habit is a hard thing to break.

I mention Fripp because (a) I always do and (b) because shortly before writing my own diary, I saw this on his entry for April 11th 2011…

The Aims Of The Diaries.

Public Aims:
1. To engage the listening community at an earlier stage of the creative process than is commonly available.
2. To inform the listening community of the practicalities of that process.
3. To de-mystify the process which is, essentially, practical.

Private Aims:
1. To encourage the Diarist to recapitulate their experience.
2. To provide the Diarist with a pointed stick.
3. To expose the Diarist to public ridicule.

And, of course, this is exactly what I had wanted to do with this blog, only hadn’t been able to articulate it quite so succinctly.

Now, some might say it is an act of sensible modesty to consider one’s work with music (which nobody much listens to nor cares about) uninteresting enough to leave well alone, but it is precisely points 1.1 and 2.3 that encapsulate everything I want to do. I want to show that even I can make music and it is no big thing as far as I am concerned (music, is a big thing, but the fact that it is willing to work with me means (a) music is utterly wonderful and (b) music doesn’t care who it works with – it simply wants to work with you/one/etc…

Pont 2.3 explains that, while putting one’s self in the ‘limelight’ by saying, here I am, I am a musician, one is actually still a human being and needs a bit of humility in order to prevent the (oh so frequent) crawling up one’s own arse in search of illumination.

I certainly hope I never do that.

So, blogging will be my public diary. There won’t be the revelations of scandal of anything any publisher might be interested in, in fact, it will all be a bit dull, but it will provide a simple man’s search for music and how that process is available to all.

Tomorrow will see the first public airing of a new auralorama, so please stay tuned, as I feel that it will also herald a new direction – all tied in nicely with the various social faces I have on show and all, hopefully, indicative of normality.

But feel free to ridicule…

Adele better

I’m working from home now… That is, I’m doing the work the earns me money at home now as well as the work that doesn’t (but there’s still time). This has had two immediate effects: First, I have a heap load more time to do both the money earning work and the non-money-(but-hopefully-one-day-will-earn-money) work. Second, I am now free of the (generally) bland garbage that people mistake for music and insist on having pumping through the office. I have often said ‘can we have no music at all one day?’ but people always seemed to think I was joking. I was not. When I do listen to music here at my desk in my home, it's music I want to listen to – and God, I am enjoying it immensely. Third, I am more relaxed now than I have been for well over ten years, possibly more…

Three immediate effects…

Listening to music I really enjoy got me to thinking about those poor souls in offices where only shite is allowed through the speakers. Where does all this shite come from? Is it chart music… Well, yes, of course it is. I checked out the UK chart website (which makes it very clear that we should use its right and proper name when referring to it, but I forget what that is, so ‘the UK chart website’ it shall remain) to see what kind of awful, pitch-corrected, aural monosodium glutamate sort of noises were being passed off as music at the moment in order to ridicule them on this blog…

Then I got to thinking. The singles charts have always been rubbish. Even when The Beatles and Stones and Kinks were regular participants of Top of the Pops, the vast majority of music hauled in front of us was pretty lame. To say that the charts today are in any way worse would be open to some serious argument – and it’s an argument I’m simply not ready to take on just yet.

Then, across the screen (all of three inches to the right, but it took me while to see it – I am a man, after all [so my wife keeps telling me]) I noticed the album charts. Aha! I thought to myself in a sort of watery ‘eureka’ moment. I can take the piss out of this…

Well, the Foo Fighters are number one, and although I am not a fan, I would be effectively putting myself in front of a firing squad to say that they were bringing music down in any way. They play hard-hitting rock that they write themselves and are as tight a unit as one could hope to find.

In the number two and three slots was someone called Adele. I had absolutely no idea who she was, but I figured that this was what I was looking for. I licked my lips and prepared for acrimony. The first thing I discovered was that she is 22 years old and already has three albums to her name. I was positively salivating now. Surely this was exactly the sort of record-company excrement I was after.

Then I listened to some of her songs. Okay, so the ones that aren’t saccharine ballads are, at best, quasi-chirpy, but godammit the girl can sing – and she writes her own material. Further perusal revealed she has publicly agreed with critics who have said her voice is far more mature than her songs and that she has said her music is for the ears and not the eyes. Even more maturity.

I gave up on looking for anything bad to say about Adele. She doesn’t deserve it. She’s actually as good a guardian of the singer/songwriter throne – if not better – as any. But then came my release. On the wikipedia page, a bloke called Paul Rees, who is apparently editor of something called Q magazine who said in praise of Adele that it was ‘refreshing to hear something different after a thousand years of identikit bands who want to sound like The Libertines.’

Identikit bands that want to sound like the Libertines? Are there many? I mean apart from Babyshambles and the other Libertine spin-off (which I can’t remember the name of). A thousand years? I mean, come on. A bit if exaggeration is a good thing, but let it match what you are talking about.

There are a couple of ‘dudes’ that truck around the open mic nights in my area who obviously try to sound like The Libertines, but they all deny it – and all of them seem to be pretty unpleasant blokes, actually, but I can’t say I had noticed the sort of epidemic that Rees seems to be implying.

Rees has got it right in one respect, Adele is refreshingly different, albeit from the recent school of Duffy and Joss Stone, but with sincerity and soul. But what she is different from is the trail of pitch-corrected, bland RnB stretching back over 20 years, Bland, ballad singing, tonsil gymnasts that are the worst kind of musical bubble gum, as they are the bubble gum that has been chewed all week and plucked from the bed post in the morning to chew some more, tasteless, formless and utterly pointless, but thankfully as forgettable as they are unpleasant.

Just look at the singles charts at the moment and rejoice that the album chart still seems to maintain some degree of quality and musical nouse.

Good on you Adele (and get your comparisons right, Rees).

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…

It’s Alive! (The Joys of Mediocrity 3)

Okay, so there are a couple of glitches to be ironed out – and those are regarding my general inability with systems and processes in the html world – but the Mechkov website is now very much up and running.

Thanks to the unbelievably patient and imaginative Timothy Read of Ripplenet for the design and tutorials, who, from a few scribbled notes on the inside of a Rizla packet, got the whole thing finished pretty much exactly as I had imagined it. It took a couple of months and I am just so chuffed.

I suppose some people might be thinking ‘why?’ Why would an almost completely unheard of singer songwriter with a penchant for the left-field and the obscure want to fork out the time, money and energy necessary in building and maintaining a website when the chances are no-one is ever going to even visit it, let alone buy anything? In this age of ‘access all music’, why would anyone want to visit an isolated website to listen to music that has had no influence on his or her life, when everything and more is easily available cruising along the mainstream superhighway?

Well, I suppose the ‘because I can’, one-size-fits-all answer fits here, but I also think precisely because of the plethora and dominance of the mainstream in music, whether that is mainstream television (massive cult success of the X-Factor and the like), mainstream rock, metal, pop, R&B, blues, hip hop, garage, trance ambient – whatever – I am certain that there is someone (and maybe only one) out there who is looking for something that he or she simply has not found elsewhere.

The great Robert Fripp, my hero for many and untold reasons, has many aphorisms he uses to provide distilled kernels (er, sorry, mixed metaphor there)… Distilled droplets of understanding – each one capable of being expanded out into whole areas of discussion or explanation and I take pleasure from time to time considering these.

One of them, ‘music will always find a way to its audience’, struck a particular resonance with me and it has become something of a motto. Another one (and I’m probably going to stagger into the realm of paraphrasing here) says: ‘Music so needs to be heard that it sometimes calls upon the most unlikely people to give it voice’.

A further (mis)quote from Fripp is that asking a musician not to play or create music is like asking a pregnant woman not to give birth.

Working Backwards, then… I am not a mightily gifted, talented nor even hard working musician. So much so, in fact, that I have spent many years of my life trying very hard NOT to play music. After the fourth such attempt (from 1997 to 2000) I ended up working in and around the musical instrument industry and finally realised that there was simply no point in trying to evade something that didn’t simply stir me, or stir within me, but it drove me, it compelled me. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, fragments of songs would form and I found myself itching to put something together.

Unlike Fripp, I am not a disciplined person – or rather, I have not been a disciplined person. Certainly not to the nth degree that the people I admire always seem to be (this is one good reason why I kept trying to walk away). As a result, as I have said in previous blogs, I have achieved a level of mediocrity that is almost good enough, but not quite. Because of this, I am the most unlikely person I can think of who should be putting himself out there and making any sort of noises before an unsuspecting public.

So, I feel driven and compelled to make music, despite my (many, various and sometimes quite terrifyingly large) shortcomings. I am thus left with what seems a requirement to try to work out why.

Could it be that at some point – I’m pretty sure it is not in the past, thus I guess it is in the future – the muse that pours this need in me to make music sees the opportunity to say and/or do something that no-one else can or would?

The answer to that question is: ‘I have absolutely no idea’, but it is the only reason that has struck any sort of chord with me, so until I find another chord struck that says something different, I’m going to carry on down the path that will allow my music to be heard. In this day and age, that is a website to feature what I have done to now – and to make space for what I will do in the future.

The next step is a return to performance – and, once again, I have absolutely no idea what form (or forms) that will take, but the empty pubs and clubs of the UK are beckoning and I fell obliged to… Yes, you get the picture…

Auraloramas move Norden Farm

The first auralorama gig took place at Norden Farm last night (Sunday, September 26th) and received a pretty resounding thumbs up in terms of comments, compliments and a few albums sold.

The performance was part of the Norden Farm Centre for the Arts’ tenth anniversary celebrations and saw groups and troupes from all around the Maidenhead and Windsor area presenting micro-performances, which an audience of some 150, split into groups of 25, witnessed in various (sometimes unexpected) corners of the centre.

My auraloramas were performed alongside a continuous yoga routine, performed by Julie Potter, a tutor with Yoga for Harmony and were to be found, very moodily lit in the scene dock of the main Courtyard Theatre stage. Combined with Potter’s area, with leaflets and pot plants, it made for an extremely relaxing little corner for the wandering audience.

Before the first group arrived, I set a simple loop in progress, while Julie got herself ready with some stretches and we awaited the audience. Before too long, the first group arrived, although, to be honest, they seemed a little unsure of what to do or where to go or even how to take in what they saw before them.

I resolved to help the next group along a bit, hopefully giving them the chance to feel a bit more relaxed and spend a few minutes at least with us in order to take advantage of the atmosphere.

Julie and I caught a few moments to discuss our feelings with each other and we discovered that being together like this was influencing our own performances – very much in a good way. She is unused to going through her exercises without explanations – or even anyone else making the moves along with her. The auraloramas were keeping that feeling of ‘oddness’ at bay, as the flowing sounds helped her to follow her ‘performance’ through more intently. They gave her a focus and a channel simultaneously.

"It’s like water,” said Potter of the auraloramas. “It flows and maintains a level, which makes my exercises flow, too. It’s really very lovely."

When the next group arrived, I advised them to pass right into the space and a crowd gathered around Julie, while I noodled away behind them – which was just fine. The idea of the music was to create an atmosphere for the movement and that's exactly what it did.

We were both very much in a our stride by the time the penultimate group came by and as they left, they broke into spontaneous applause. It was a very good feeling.

The difference for me, having Julie there, was that I was made much more aware of what I was playing. When playing alone, I am often tempted to let rip, let things get a bit out of hand and really make some noise before bringing things back down again to create some contrast. I was very conscious, however, that Julie needed something continuous, relaxing and without surprises. I kept the soloing ‘within’ the sounds, rather than cutting through them. I really got into it. It was a really uplifting little session.

For more auraloramas, visit the Mechkov website here.

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.