Joe And World Domination

Joe has joined me in the yellow room and is busy working on his various projects and assignments for school. He's far more diligent than I ever was at his age.



Reading through his business studies project I discover he's planning to set up his own record label. The label would seek to provide rehearsal and recording facilities for its users and generally take over the world with a pungent blend of death metal and prudent commerce.

When I was a teenager I think my business acumen extended to er...nothing. Come to think of it, I didn't have anything remotely resembling acumen of any kind.

I think the extent of my understanding of business studies was to learn to play bass so I could join King Crimson.

A Change Of Programme

Chris T called round today and brought with him a few tour programmes. I don't think I ever bought any myself (or if I did I certainly don't have them now) but Chris is walking archive of memories and memorabilia.

I gather we saw Tangerine Dream in December 1974 somewhere between Phaedra and Rubicon. I can't recall that much about but Chris tells me we sat at the back where we could see the much-trumpeted laser light show (it was rubbish apparently) and the quad sound.


Sometime in 1975 we saw Al Stewart headlining at the City Hall with the legendary Brinsley Schwarz as support. I don't remember anything about the concert at all.

At the time, Stewart was touring in support of Modern Times which I think I really liked at the time. Listening to the album now, I struggle to hear what it was that attracted me to the music back then.

Whilst Past Present & Future still gets attention, I can't hear anything on Modern Times that connects any more. Needless to say, anything by the Brinsleys gets my toe a-tapping and my pulse racing.

This next one I remember as if it were yesterday - honestly. The newly reformed Van Der Graaf Generator were on cracking form that night in December '75.

Not long after this gig I got my head shaved and took to wearing clogs and white boiler suits just like Peter Hammill! I blush now but it all made sense at the time.

I remember our party of dazed VdGG fans walking home from Newcastle singing selections from Hammill's In Camera at the top of our voices at about 1.00 a.m.

Off The Shelf II

Jeff Nuttall
1970

Weather Front

Street Life CLXVIII

Nominations For God LXXIX

Thelonious Monk

Street Life CLXVII

Light At The End of the Carpe Tunnel Syndrome

I don’t think I’m very good at doing several things at once.

Sometimes when I’m busy I let all kinds of things slide. I mean I still do chores, I get my kids up for school, put food on the table and all that kind of thing.

But I obsess around the task in hand so much so that I generally don’t leave the office except for bladder breaks or bed time.

As Stakhanovite as this might sound, it isn’t always productive. Sometimes the best work occurs far from the desk and computer.

Usually, for me this means getting fresh air, talking a short walk, hearing waves breaking, traffic rumbling past me or, best of all, hearing the lonesome drone of an airplane echoing across from heaven’s dome.

Last week I took on a rush job that needed to be turned around in short order.

Before I knew that short order turned into five days without crossing the front door. Although I’m hardly the brightest button in the box, even I can work out that this isn’t the best way to be doing things.

So today, the rush job now out of the way I took a walk outside - the first time in five days - and joined Debra as she walked up to the bus stop on her way to work and took in a few lungfuls of the good stuff.



After saying our fond farewells I veered right...


and walked past the singing wall. Why the singing wall? The ivy creeping over half of the house is packed with of birds and what looks like dozens of nests. They make a mighty racket when they all get going. Think Beethoven's 6th. In quad!

And over to the right...

Then into South Parade where lots of (mainly) young people come at weekends to wet themselves, discard red cabbage on the pavement and generally make merry in this street of pleasure palaces.




One the things that gives me a lot of pleasure these days is being able to take a walk around Whitley Bay and bump into my sister, Lesley (That's her in the distance looking out to sea).

I know I’ve said this several times before, but I’m ever so glad Lesley and Bernard decided to leave Milton Keynes and relocate up here.


We crossed over to take in the view of the beach....

and from the lower promenade heard the voice of our neighbour from heaven, Jude, setting off to walk her dog...

as were quite a few other folks this morning...

a little bit further up the beach the beginnings of Seaton Sluice can be seen in the morning sun...

Oh, and there's Jude again...

As Lesley and I sat looking at the beach, bathed in the morning sun, the topic under discussion, as it so often is, was parenting.


Sometimes, you have to remember not to paint your kid into a corner and understand that in the long term, the quality of the peace you have with your kids is more important than scoring victories, pyrrhic or otherwise.

It’s these kind of impromptu meetings that really make the day. After days being stuck in the house it was marvellous getting out and more importantly, getting out from under my tunnel vision.

Putting The Force Into Parcelforce

In my line of work I get a lot of deliveries through the week.

From where I sit in the yellow room, I can see the delivery men (and they are all men) coming down the street which gives me time to get up, go downstairs and have the door open before they get halfway up the path.

I do this because delivering stuff is hard work and the people who do it are usually under a lot of pressure to get in and get out as quickly as possible.

Today I saw the guy coming but was so quick, I was only able to get as far as the bottom of the staircase when through our lovely stained glass door I saw him loom up and start hammering on the glass.

Just like in a movie I lunged toward the door in slow motion yelling "Nooooooooo" but too late.

The glass cracked under his fist.

Whisking the door open, I said to the bloke " Good day, my fine fellow on this wonderful sunny morning. I do declare that in your haste to provide me with the untold aural delights contained in the package in your other hand, your undoubted enthusiam for your job has inadvertantly broken the expensive stained glass in our door!"

OK it may not have those exact words or indeed any words even vaguely resembling those but "What the fuck do you think you're doing? You've just broken my front door?" sounds a little too coarse.

He replied that he hadn't knocked at all hard, implying perhaps that the glass which had previously been unbroken was somehow defective and thus ready to split at the tiniest brush of a bee's wing.

I gave him a look and to be fair he backed off that one straight away.

I asked him why he didn't use the knocker. He replied he hadn't noticed it.

Here's a picture of the knocker just moments after the delivery man hadn't noticed it.


Here's the panel in a bit more detail.



Names and numbers were taken, apologies exchanged and now, because of Parcelforce's policy in these situations, I'm required to find three quotes for someone to replace the glass and fix the door.

Have you tried gettting any tradesmen out to give you a quote for work to your house recently?

Lots of fun.

Nostalgia 77 Sessions featuring Keith and Julie Tippett

Steady As They Go...
Nostalgia 77 Sessions
featuring Keith & Julie Tippett
Tru Thoughts

When producer Benedic Lamdin - the man behind Nostalgia 77 - first heard Septober Energy by Keith Tippett’s 50-piece Centipede project he was hooked by the audacious nerve and creative spirit it represented.

Lamdin's sleeve notes remark that working with Keith and Julie Tippett was anything but a nostalgic trip. Yet the results are easily the most retro-sounding release bearing the couple’s name. Unlike the epic and turblent improvisations for which they are best known, here they are cast in more restrained, moody soft-focus light.

Beautifully produced, with the kind of studio ambience heard on 1960s Impulse recordings, this is Julie Tippett as brooding blues singer and husband Keith as a daredevil accompanist with an emphasis on straight forward jazz songs and blues. Although there's the odd outburst of free-jazzing here and there, none of it has the off-the-map intensity embodied in Couple In Spirit or the work of Mujician.

The backing from drummer Adam Sorennsen, trumpeter Fulvia Sigurta, and bassist Risan Vosloo is reliable rather than racy and one wonders how many more sparks might have flown had players of the calibre of Louis Moholo, Mark Charig or Paul Rodgers filled those positions instead. Mark Hanslip’s perfunctory tenor makes a jazz noise for sure on the fast moving bop-scat fest Sketch For Gary/ Billy Goes To Town but doesn't exactly raise the stakes or up the ante.

Of course, anything that brings the Tippetts to a wider audience is undeniably a good thing and would be churlish to doubt an album as amiable and easy going as this one. Film Blues has an earthy charm, Rainclouds is both mesmerising and soulful, and the clean vistas of New Inner City Blues rattles and rumbles with the pianist's athletic runs.

However, like Benedic Lamdin found with his discovery of Septober Energy, it’ll be the back catalogue or a crop of new compositions, rather than this album that will provide the real white-knuckle excitement you normally associate with Keith Tippett.

A Close Shave With My Son

So there I was yesterday morning, tapping away at the computer when I turned around and noticed this spectre creeping up on me!

Closer inspection revealed this to be my son, Joe, ready to travel to Leeds with his rugby club.

Why the ninja costume? It's the done thing apparently. Everyone attending (including the accompanying parents) does the fancy dress thing.

When he returned this evening, he revealed the new look - apparently getting a mad haircut is also the done thing.


"Glad to see you're half way to having a hair cut like mine!" I told him. I have a sense Joe was disappointed that I didn't explode into parental apoplexy at the site of his shorn locks.


Parents, eh?

Bread Head Required

Another busy morning yesterday working on various Canterbury Sound related projects which included a telephone conversation with John Greaves. We're going to speak later over the weekend about his work with National Health.

Elsewhere in the house, Tom wanted to make ciabatta bread and required my presence.

Tom is going through something of a cookery kick at the moment which is a good thing. My mother taught me to cook from an early age and it still amazes me how many men I come across that can do little more than burn a pan of water.

On Thursday I taught Tom to make a basic cheese sauce using a roux from which he can then make other dishes. In the past he's helped me in my bread-making endeavours but yesterday he wanted to go solo with me hovering in an advisory capacity.




As we waited for the bread to rise we went into the backyard where Debra was busy restructuring the yard.




Then back inside to retrieve the loaves from the oven.



Tom was especially pleased with the results and with good reason. Dear reader, the bread was delicious.

Nominations For God LXXVIII

David Simon

Christy Moore Listen

Can I Have Moore Please?
Listen
Christy Moore
Sony

When Christy Moore sings you can't help but pay attention and, as the title demands, listen. That famously smouldering voice, pungently burnished by years of wringing wit and wisdom from an versatile songbook retains its commanding presence throughout his first album since 2005.

No stranger to having accolades heaped upon a recording career spanning 40 years (including the hugely influential 70s folk group, Planxty), Moore is heard praising others for a change.

Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond, sounds as though its always been waiting to be coaxed into this forlorn, softly-sung eulogy to Syd Barrett, whilst Moore turns on the flinty anger in Duffy's Cut, spitting questions about 57 Irish navvies who mysteriously lost their lives building America's railroad in the 19th Century.

Though that same indignation starkly articulates what happens when the people of South America get in the way of political expediency in The Disappeared, as a writer, Moore is just as exercised by the mundane stuff of everyday as he is by savage injustice.

The Ballad of Ruby Walsh, (a knowing-wink of a song about horse racing) and the bar room raconteur of Ridin' The High Stool, and even the venerable Glasgow venue of Barrowlands, are all celebrated and savoured with evident relish.

Sharing the album with long-term musical partner, Declan Sinnott (who takes lead vocals on I Will), sugary sentimentality gets the better of Moore only once lamenting the passing of Irish blues legend, Rory Gallagher on the live track Rory Is Gone. Still, its easy to forgive Moore such crowd-pleasing indulgences on this otherwise faultless outing.

This review first appeared here

Street Life CLXVI

The Confessions Of The Sputnik Kid XV

Part 2

Upon Entering Arblus
In which Chime's arrival does not go unnoticed...

XXIX
At last movement slows as she nudges the welcome skein
of atmospheres. She begins her descent harangued by words
distorted by her plunging past their calling, through a funnel of shrieks.
Off course, she tumbles out of control, struggling with consciousness,
cocooned in flame, she sweeps through clouds burning bright red.





XXX
Pin-prick lights scatter through the bulky darkness as her metal pulse
reverberates, puncturing the drum of the physical world
to follow a silver vein of speeding river, an electric zig-zag leading
into clusters of slumbering humanity. Her fiery arrival goes unnoticed,
save for a single pair of eyes.




Images by Martin Hoogeboom
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid I can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid II can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid III can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid IV can here seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid V can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VI can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VII can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VIII can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid IX can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid X can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid XI can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid XII can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid XIII can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid XIV can be seen here

The Artist Formerly Known As Crap

I was listening to some of the different albums that have recently arrived. One in particular caught my ear above the others. The artist is a young man who has clearly been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen and Morrissey.

I took an instant and visceral dislike to him (all surly and meaningful on the album cover) and his second-hand brand of confessional pop.

I started to write about him. I started to rip him to pieces. It was so simple. He was such an easy target.

Pulling things apart is so easy. And so much fun.

After a while I grew bored with shooting fish in a barrel and pulling the wings off flies. Stepping back, I realise I didn’t like the me who enjoyed doing that kind of thing.

As an exercise I turned my attention around to the positives in the platter.

Hey, that’s a nice ascending bass line. Good interplay between the horn section. An uplifting guitar motif. Clever use of reverb. Punchy without the swagger. An attractive economy in the overall sound, and now I hear it, that was actually quite a neat lyric on that particular song.

Clearly the young man has been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen and Morrissey. Let’s face it, he could be doing a lot worse.

Clearly this is an artist who has plenty of room to grow.

Me too.

Jackie McAuley

Finesse & Frisson
Jackie McAuley
Esoteric Recordings

Whilst he’s always going to be remembered best for Trader Horne’s Morning Way (the 1970 psych-folk classic he created with Judy Dyble). Jackie McAuley’s self titled solo album a year later is also something of a lost gem.

Not surprisingly, the album hovers somewhere between intimate blues-tinged folkiness, singalong pop, and mopping up with the remnants of a psychedelic hangover.

Consequently, there are some quirky and inventive strategies to song writing. Cameramen, Wilson And Holmes, - beginning as a baroque ballad, slides into a jazzy flute-driven thing before fading back to its ornate origins - is typical of the free and easy approach to form and content.

Like many albums from the period it’s peppered in places with fluffy nonsense but when McAuley hits the nail on the head he transcends generic limitations. The delicate finesse exhibited on a track like Away (with finely honed support from Henry Lowther’s plaintive trumpet) shows the kind of calibre he was capable of achieving.

Indeed the backing crew on this record are superb throughout: ex-Delivery and future Soft Machine bassist, Roy Babbington adds gravitas whilst drummer Mike Travis (later in Gilgamesh) provides the push when required.

Reminiscent at times of Steve Winwood’s strained soul-filled voice, the album perhaps lacks the kind of consistency that might have helped it stick in the public’s consciousness.

However, all these years later, square pegs ambitiously attempting to fit into round holes but failing to do so, is after all, what gives albums such as this their left-field frisson and maintains their eclectic appeal.

Wooden Shjips Dos

Quality Not Quantity
Dos
Wooden Shjips
Holy Mountain

Appropriating primitive rock riffs and then subjecting them to subversive psych-tinged FX-laden ju-ju, Wooden Shjips generate manic, warped pulses of pop-rock that don’t just make your ears bleed but get your toes tapping at the same time.

Emanating out of the dissonant fringes of the San Francisco noise scene, their second full length album continues to plough the visceral furrows first heard on 2007‘s self-titled debut and last year’s triumphant collection of singles and rarities, Vol.1

Of course “full length” in the context of Wooden Shjips generally runs to about 35 minutes give or take a few seconds of ear-splitting din. Yet that small but perfectly malformed number means there’s not much of the kind of chaff encountered on CD’s lasting twice as long. Quality not quantity is the deciding factor here.

Down By The Sea occupies 10 of those precious minutes. The spatter-pattern from Erik “Ripley” Johnson’s twisted guitar and wrecked harmonics spray mad smears across monolithic slabs of rhythm like some turbo-charged Jackson Pollock.

Drawing upon obvious influences such as the Velvet Underground and Loop, their instrumental frenzy is topped by largely indecipherable vocals. Impressionistic and resistant to any concrete meaning, they’re like a collision between The Doors’ Jim Morrison’s portentous sneer and the haunted whispering of Can’s Damo Suzuki.

Faced with the obscure poetry resulting from such an encounter, the brain merely composites such sombre murmurings into a vestigial sense that’s not so much understood as simply felt.

An album of experimental music you can cut the rug to: every dream home (with or without heartaches) should have one!


This review first appeared here

Street Life CLXV

Soft Heap Al Dente

Plenty of bite...
Al Dente
Soft Heap
Reel Recordings

Some groups are a such a fleeting affair that we are lucky to have anything at all to remember them by. This is especially true in jazz, where economics and serial wanderlust means that sometimes being in the right place at the right time is elevated to an art form.

Such groupings can be so mercurial a studio album won’t capture the full range of possibilities. This was certainly the case with Soft Heap - Elton Dean, Alan Gowen, Pip Pyle and Hugh Hopper.

Their 1979 self-titled studio album (just reissued) was good but missed out the more savage aspects of the band’s collective personality. Thankfully, this wonderful archive release from Reel Recordings, captures the special alchemy that occurs between a band and a supportive audience.

Recorded just a few weeks after their studio debut Elton Dean dominates throughout, covering a staggering amount of emotional ground in his playing. On Fara he’s all smoochy and playful, whilst Sleeping House has him like a belligerent bull in a china shop, with Gowen’s spiky chords darting in and out of view like some wry matador.

The somewhat basic nature of this live recording leaves the glimmering Fender Rhodes piano a little under-exposed at times but Gowen’s lyrical playing serenely navigates its way past Pip Pyle’s tumultuous drumming and the undertow of Hopper’s serpentine bass work.

A full-blooded, stirring account of a short-lived group with brilliant musicians at the top of their game. More please!


You can buy this album here

Nominations For God LXXVII

Kenneth Williams

Desk Duties V

Whenever I'm involved in transcription work, other things start to slide and get all backed up...

It can't be too long before I reach critical mass and have to sparge the entire lot.

Base 3 DarkMatter

Going Off The Map...
Dark Matter
Base 3
1K Recordings

Although Philadelphia’s Base 3 have much in common with both jazz and rock, their knotty mix of full-blooded sparring and terse introspection avoids the kind of muscular excesses often associated with fusion and its fellow travellers.

Eschewing vulgar displays of technique in favour of something altogether more unified, guitarist Tim Motzer, bassist Barry Meehan and drummer Doug Hirlinger clearly demonstrate that the quality of the listening is every bit as important as the quality of the output.

On the aptly named No Time For Silence, there’s a never-ending supply of discursive moods and ideas being swapped back and forth. Against Meehan’s rumbling rock-steady bass (reminiscent of Michael Henderson’s anchoring riff work with Miles Davis), Motzer and Hirlinger respond with energetic clusters of that are alternately rousing and inquisitive.

With a palpable sense momentum across the entire album, Base 3 are more interested in delivering a collective result rather than any individual standing up in the spotlight. Across four tracks, the constantly mutating forms recall some of Can’s lengthy trance-like expositions, yet sustain the kind of tension and attention required to avoid empty noodling.

A more economic but no less eloquent mode of discourse is found on the album’s closer, Ninth Ward - whose ruminative, often harrowing atmospheres offer a gloomy mediation on the fate of post-Katrina New Orleans. Dark matter indeed.

The Confessions Of The Sputnik Kid XIV

Part 2

Upon Entering Arblus
In which worlds and words start to part...

XXVII
A straight line never existed between this world and the next.
That path curls and curves, with each step a chorus of possibilities
that demand attention, that seduce with their prospects. Only
the most dedicated make it through the ticker-tape of visions
that skew compass point and mission alike.


XXVIII
She longs for proximity, the security of those trees,
to be enclosed. Instead she’s left with nothing but an ocean
of wrong turns in which to get swamped and lost.
The word-clamour begins to rise accompanied by nausea
“It’s not meant to be like this” as she peers ahead.

Images by Martin Hoogeboom
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid I can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid II can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid III can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid IV can here seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid V can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VI can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VII can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VIII can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid IX can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid X can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid XI can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid XII can be seen here
The Confession of the Sputnik Kid XIII can be seen here

Anatomy Roger Eno

Less Is More
Anatomy
Flood
Roger Eno
Burning Shed

Whilst his more famous brother hobnobs around with the great and good or, depending on your view of his more recent production jobs, the frankly bland and bloody awful, Roger Eno has been quietly getting on with plenty of unassuming but nevertheless captivating music on his own terms.

Probably best known for his early ambient albums of the 80s, Eno has turned in some show stealing turns on albums by No-Man and can be seen more recently playing keyboards behind Marianne Faithful.

Two new albums on Burning Shed have him working on series of small soundtrack-style vignettes on Anatomy and the long-form ambient piece Flood. Bristling with summery environmental field samples and recurring lullaby voices, the resulting torpor calms but never quite engages to the extent of the other Eno’s Thursday Afternoon.

Anatomy is far more successful at sparking and, just as importantly, retaining interest. His use of spongy clumps of electric piano, accordions, and the earthy ruminations of bass clarinet create short but spellbinding stopovers, evoking pretty portraits of long summers stretchy out, romantic airs, and the sense of slowly drifting.

Interior and Shrine do a courtly dance around Purcell-inspired themes - especially the latter piece whose descending ground bass reassembles When I Am Laid In Earth - all the right notes although not necessarily in the right order.

Whilst Flood provides a continuous though minimal habitat, Anatomy is the one with the pulling power to ensure many happy returns.

You can find both albums here

Podcasts From The Yellow Room VII

Episode 7 of Podcasts From The Yellow Room.
Duration 60 minutes

Tracklist

I Cannot Cure My Pure Evil
You Dig The Tunnel, I'll Hide The Soil
Hatcham Social
Read my review

Walnut Tree Walk
Green and Blue
Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin
Read my review

Kokkolan polska
Tulipunapalsami
Sytyke

Circles
Circles
Gavin Harrison & 05Ric
Read my review

Stealing Tomorrow
Lost Channels
Great Lake Swimmers
Read my review

My Friend
Sara Watkins
Sara Watkins
Read my review

Kataklasm
Quiver
KTU
Read my review

As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still
&
The Things We Throw Away
The Bruised Romantic Glee Club
Jakko Jakszyk
Read my review

Heartbeat
King Crimson Songbook Vol.2
Crimson Jazz Trio
Read my review

Thanks to Barry Stock for hosting the podcast

Sitting Out Sunday

Having stupidly burnt the fingertips of my right hand the previous evening...

(yep that's me spending the evening with my hand in bowl of iced-water), I was able to take full advantage of the children's kind offer to do the cooking on Sunday. It had been Tom's idea - partly inspired (as he told me) by happy memories of summer days in the garden and the back yard.

Needing no further encouragement , Debra and I sat back whilst Sam, Tom and Joe, not only did the shopping but the cooking as well.







And bless them - they did all the tidying up as well. Bliss!

Crimson Jazz Trio King Crimson Songbook Volume Two

Make A Jazz Noise Here...
Crimson Jazz Trio
The King Crimson Songbook Volume 2
Inner Knot

They say the simplest ideas are often the best. Ian Wallace’s inspired matchmaking between his love of jazz and his old band, King Crimson, was just that, bringing him together with pianist Jody Nardone and bassist, Tim Landers.

Their first album, Volume One (2005) showed them able to stretch and re-imagine the Crimson songbook with an authoritative confidence and sparkle.

Sadly, Wallace’s death from cancer in 2007 halted a project beginning to expand beyond its original constraints. The addition of vocals by the ever-impressive Nardone on an elegant reworking of Inner Garden has both passion and range. Though some will prefer Adrian Belew’s original version, Nardone makes a convincing go of it.

His pin-sharp piano playing is strong throughout. Directive when needs be, he’s unafraid to hang back when a more impressionistic treatment is called for. His exquisite work on Heartbeat is an undoubted high-point.

The appearance Wallace’s old Crim-colleague, Mel Collins on soprano and tenor saxes for two tracks, theoretically widens the scope yet further, though the sprightly reading of Frame By Frame, with its soprano curlicues, is oddly one of the album’s few awkward, ill-fitting moments.

Collin’s tenor sax is used to better effect on The Islands Suite in a setting that invokes Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Introduced by a meditative drum solo, and some McCoy Tyner-like scene setting, here they broker a different approach regarding interpretation.

Rather than a straight arrangement where the principal tune is stated and then solos are taken over choruses, The Islands Suite is a more abstract reading that has familiar themes re-cast into darting motifs, scurrying runs and deft games of hide-and-seek phrasing. At the end, Landers’ astonishingly intimate acoustic bass solo almost steals the show.

Like the very best of jazz drummers, Ian Wallace’s final recording has him constantly adding subtle shades via nimble cymbal work, ensuring either melodic or rhythmic emphasis are achieved with precision and an irrepressible joie de vivre.

We never know what we’ll be remembered for but there’s a good chance Ian would’ve been happy with that.

Nominations For God LXXVI

Richard E Grant

Circles Gavin Harrison & 05Ric

The Circle Game
Circles
Gavin Harrison & 05Ric
Squatter Madras

Having almost single-handedly reinvigorated the music of King Crimson on tour in 2008, drummer Gavin Harrison’s extra-curricular adventures outside his Porcupine Tree home-base continue without a break.

This second team-up with bassist and vocalist Ric Bayer (aka as 05Ric) has the duo revisiting their own brand of circular musical interrogation.

As with 2007’s Drop, the record is filled with the kind of uneven metres that would break your toe if you were foolish to try tapping along. Harrison (who also plays bass and guitar) is a powerful and busy player but Bayer has no trouble keeping up with some snaking finger-work.

All the material is constructed from a kaleidoscope of interlocking rhythmic parts across which Ric’s languid vocals decorously drape themselves.

The sheet extent of ferocious displays of technique (and boy do these two have that in spades) can be a touch overwhelming at times. However, they’ve allowed themselves a little more space, enabling the music to breath a bit more.

This approach pays off with Faith, showing a welcome more reflective facet to the duo. A mini-Queen quote on Break also shows that whilst their brows may furrow in an earnest manner not without a sense of humour. The added texture that comes from a freewheeling piano solo from from ace sessioneer Gary Sanctuary suggests potentially fruitful avenues for future exploration.

Street Life CLXIV

The Confessions Of The Sputnik Kid XIII

Part 2
Upon Entering Arblus
In which Chime's begins to go back to the beginning...

XXV
The Distant Ritual complete, the flute player’s attention turns
to the vacuum of silence momentarily sucking at him.
Arblus is quiet again. Rain dampens the fire, hissing embers die.
He peers at the pitch-black pool where Chime swims
across the dead-light threads of stars, seeking out a boy




XXVI
After the noise she can hardly bear the silence
one weight replacing another, making it hard to wade across
space and time. She tastes tendrils of thoughts, prayers and invocations
on her tongue. Soon she will hear each one, pitch perfect,
then tune in to her quarry. An arrow unleashed.

Images by Martin Hoogeboom
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid I can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid II can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid III can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid IV can here seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid V can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VI can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VII can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid VIII can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid IX can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid X can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid XI can be seen here
The Confessions of the Sputnik Kid XII can be seen here