cherry blossoms

i and the great drone artist april larson have collaborated on an album about cherry blossoms.

my pieces consist of a drone and a piano improvisation based around repetitions of the word 'fall.'

the idea was that while i, in the uk, look at the cherry trees blossoming in spring for those engaging in the cherry blossom festivals in japan it is autumn, 'fall.'

a random key on the piano was selected to represent the letter 'a' (in 'fall') and the keys corresponding to  the letters f and l where determined from this. this was repeated three times (one for each month of the new year) and the piece improvised from this point.

here is the complete album.




and my piano piece

'be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good' loving your enemy and the death of fred phelps

this week both my partner's grandmother and fred phelps died on the same day. i see no need to celebrate the death of one while mourning the passing of another.

romans 12: 21 reads 'be not overcome of evil but overcome evil with good' 

it is not our place to hate fed phelps or to know what was in his heart, what he saw in his final years. we do know that he was thrown out of the church he once led; perhaps as he faced his own death he saw the evil he had done and recoiled in horror. we will probably never know but we know one thing, we know that hate will destroy us as surely as it destroyed fred phelps and we must turn from it while we can.

i offer no prayers for fred phelps, or for my partner's grandmother, as i am an agnostic but i offer hope for others, the hope found in 'overcome[ing] evil with good'

this post contains a link to my own track on the death of fred phelps (and i think this week's other death is in there too) and to a friend's track. he says, in the description to his album:

Please don't throw back all of the hate Fred Phelps spewed with his words and actions during this his time of passing with hate in your own words and actions about it. Instead, counter his legacy with LOVE. That is how you defeat it. If it is with hate, he has won in death, and you aren't much better than he was in life. 

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear." --- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good 

the auld wife's lifts

i've featured the local landmark 'the auld wife's lifts' in my music before and decided to share these pages from tom weir's book 'tom weir's scotland' about them and the landscape they are a part of

remixing in the library

since listening to uschi-no-michi's 'ameratsu' i've had an urge to remix it using darwin's 'on the origin of species' as a guide to the length of the cuts.

the idea was to record the length of each chapter in the book and then produce cuts corresponding to these lengths with each page represented but one second of time so that a twenty page chapter would be represented by twenty seconds of time, a thirty page chapter by thirty seconds and so on.

in the end a strict adherence to page lengths proved impossible as the main vocal was cut off half way through a word and other cuts featured periods of silence. in the end a slightly looser version of the original idea was used where the length of a cut could be slightly lengthened or truncated (and where a larger section of the main vocal was taken) to allow for a more organic sounding piece.

the finished piece is available on my bandcamp while the original can be found here

making music you are uncomfortable with (notes on composing 'after without sanctuary'

i recently decided, after thinking about it for a long time, to buy 'without sanctury: lynching photography in america' and, after reading it, to work on an album based on it's contents.

there where several problems associated with this; firstly i wondered if i had any right to work on something connected with the history and struggle of another group - if i, as a white person, was not infringing on the struggle of people of colour. secondly there was a simple issue of taste involved, could i make music based on other people's pain and suffering. lastly there was the question of doing the topic justice and it is this where i feel the piece fails but i could not see how to make it succeed.

though i chose to set the names of individuals who's fate is featured in the book (and a free improvisation based around abel meeropol's song 'strange fruit') this approach left me unable to discuss the historical context of lynching, it's nature not as a manifestation of the darkness that lies within society but as a manifestation of a particular set of political and economic conditions in the southern states of the usa. lynching was not a sociological event but a historical one as leon f. litwack makes plain in his essay 'hellhounds' contained within 'without sanctuary'

i have been accused before of having an 'unclear' political outlook but in reality i do not have an ideological position to promote but rather an obsession with easing the suffering of others, a need to focus on the individual rather than the group or the wider political or historical context. as such my choice makes sense to me but leaves this album open to an accusation of not recognising the reality of lynching as a phenomena.

of this i stand guilty and for this reason i consider the album a failure.

three scores and some lyrics

two american poets (for keyboard)

mercury, messenger to the gods, path of knowlage

an alchemic process for derek jarman (invert the score for the second set)

notes for 'repetition version 1'

lyrics for an unrealised piece called 'three greenwood songs'