melting in the heat

Hello from an unseasonably hot and sunny swansea.

It's been a few weeks since i last wrote anything here so as I'm avoiding the heat i thought i would.

'She Loves to See The Sky' is out and available from a variety of outlets - Quiet World, Aquarius Records, Art Into Life - and seems to be being quite well received which is always appreciated. Thanks to everyone who has picked up a copy. There are two new cds in the pipeline. Sometime soon will be the album i made using some of Banks Bailey's beautiful Arizona field recordings alongside some I made under the pier here in Swansea mixed with layers of keyboard and processed drones. It's an album i'm ridiculously proud of.
Next week will see me start work on the new album with Darren Tate. It's always a joy to collaborate with DT as our working methods are so compatable - he likes making wacky sounds and i like playing around with and editing wacky sounds. I've got him to agree to a 'no electrically generated sounds' rule for this album so I've no idea what to expect from him but i have a battery of bells, whistles, flutes, melody horns, kazoos, harmonicas and ukuleles waiting to be added to the mix. It should be a laugh.
This is the 4th album I've made with DT - The Moon As A Hole, Summerland (also with Banks) & Wet Rat Year are the others - and they've all been quite different from each other and from the music each of us normally make. It's great fun to do and luckily they've all been well received.

Went out for a drink on thursday with my friends Rod and Steve. For those who don't know, these two are responsible for the two videos that you can see on my myspace and at Rod's website. Over a couple of pints or really nice ale at the Joiners Arms in Bishopston (their Three Cliffs ale is stunning) we discussed how we were going to finish the Aurarua audio / video collaboration we've been working on for the last couple of years. An early (and very short) edit was entered in a couple of gallery shows in Swansea last summer and seemed to be quite well received.

My part is a set of three long and dark drones that i recorded about three years ago to which Rod and Steve have been adding images captured around the locale. I think it's stunning and when it's finally finished it can only be more so. Hopefully it'll be done by the end of the summer but I think i said that last year (and the year before).

We're not short of countryside around here but yesterday we found a bit we'd not visited before, the grounds of an old estate in Neath called Gnoll Country Park. Walking around the woods was a very nice way of spending a hot summers day and i managed to make a couple of recordings once we'd got away from the more populated areas. My favourite is a recording I made near the derelict Ice House. You can find it in the rar file below along with another recording made a couple of weeks ago at a place called Craig Y Dinas. I hope you are enjoying these field recordings, they're fun to make as it means i get to mooch out into the wilds and sit under a tree reading a book while my recorder does all the work.

Field recordings

Finally, as I've been asked about it and i mentioned it in an earlier posting. Here's the story of being up a mountain in a cloud.
I've told you before about my partners FairieTrails project where she traces the locations of old welsh fairie tales and then visits the sites. These sites seem to be almost invariably at the tops of mountains or as far off the beaten tracks as it's possible to get in South Wales. Well May Day this year saw us slowly trudging to the top of Pen Y Fan mountain in the Brecon Beacons looking for a lake called Llyn Cwm Llwch. It was nice but slightly windy day when we set off and several minor heartattacks later we reached the top and photographed this view...



it's quite something isn't it.

As you've probably gathered the lake we were looking for is the one in the photo (yes it is as small as it looks) and typically it was down the other side. Not really being that interested in the lake i decided to find a sheltered nook about halfway down and settled down to read while Sioux went exploring. As i got my book out i felt the first drops of rain. Light showers had been forecast so i put my book away did my little jacket up and watched the view and Sioux clambering down the path to the lake.
Some 20 minutes later with the rain still fairly light i glanced back over my shoulder to the summit where we were going to have to head in order to get back to the car. It was gone. In the time i'd been sitting the clouds had snuck up on us from behind the ridge and the entire top of the mountain and our route down was enveloped in thick, cold and very wet clouds.
The walk back to the car gave me a new definition of the phrase 'This sucks!'. The path we were walking was 2 foot away from the edge of the cliffs and the visibility was so bad we couldn't see the edge. All the way down the mountain, without any shelter whatsoever walking into freezing driving rain. Drenched to the skin.
Finally got back to the car about an hour later, shucked off the outer layers and did a 45 minute drive home in a car with no heating (it died the week before), shivering and turning slowly blue.

Anyway, that's probably the longest blog i'll ever write. Hope it wasn't too boring.
peace
ian

bank holiday reviewing

Just back from a weekend away in Cheltenham which is Sue's hometown. It was a bit of a flying visit. say hello to the family and have a mooch around the town sort of deal. Didn't really have the time to do much but did manage to spend far too much money on books that i probably won't have time to read until the summer. My best purchase by far is a couple of volumes of the American Splendor anthologies. If you've never read them (or even seen the film) then i heartily recommend you do so. more info here.

Drove home through the Forest of Dean on Sunday afternoon stopping to visit a Faerie site that Sue wanted to find. A well called 'Virtuous Well'. It turned out to be one of those strange sites that have been adopted by both the god and the crystal bothering brigades equally. It's an old stone well built over a meeting of 4 springs. The trees around it are festooned with ribbons and assorted bits of tat that have been tied on as, i suppose, offerings of some sort. Looked kinda cool whatever the reason.


I was going to make some recordings but three other groups of people turned up whilst we were there and also a tractor was ploughing the next field over. The microphone can be quite imposing and i had no wish to spoil other peoples visit (and the tractor made a horrid noise) so i didn't bother.

Monday and Tuesday of last week was spent in the college studio with a couple of friends. It's been a long time since i strapped on my bass guitar (about 5 years) and i must say i've not missed it. We completed two tracks of krautrocky post-rock. think ganger, tortoise or appliance and you're along the right lines. it's all still in desperate need of mixing which we'll be doing sometime this week i think.

In the meantime I'm trying to get as many reviews written and rewritten as i can before i put the new issue of Wonderful Wooden Reasons online. As i type I'm listening to an excellent album by a Spanish musician called Pilar Baizan who records as Baseline (the albums called 'Estado Liquido'). It's so nice to be reviewing something made by a woman. I don't believe gender (or race for that matter) has any bearing on the music a person makes other than those imposed at a societal level (whether consciously or not) but the music I get sent is pretty much entirely 'man' made so it is good to know there's someone out there working in a non testosterone fuelled way.

peace,
ian

audio caving

the weather has been kind to us here in swansea so we spent this past weekend behaving like tourists. Took the opportunity to jump in my increasingly poorly sounding car and hit some spots that we hadn't been to in a while or hadn't been to at all.

Saturday was spent roaming small seaside towns doing some shopping and i finally managed to get myself a new black shirt. I'm fairly colourful normally but there's nothing quite like walking out on a beautiful spring morning dressed head to toe in black.

Sunday I got dragged on one of Sue's (Sue is my partner) excursions into the myths and legends of this soggy little country we call home. She's currently researching and visiting the faerie-lore attached to the South Wales area (www.faerietrails.co.uk) which seems to mean me dragging my fat lazy ass up and down a variety of mountains. Today though found us in a cave in the brecon beacons called - Porth Yr Ogof (the Gate Cave) - where I managed to set up the microphone and do some recording.



I was happy to let the machine run for the first 5 minutes but my inner fidget got the better of me and i started playing around with the stones and puddles around me. It's not the best thing I've ever done and unfortunately the batteries cut out so it all ends rather abruptly but it was fun to do so i thought i'd stick it up here in case anyone fancies a listen.

download here

Hopefully the rescued portion of the new WWR will be online this weekend. I lost most of the issue when my 'puter died and all I have left are the reviews i'd handwritten into a notebook. I'll revisit all the other albums along with some new stuff for the next issue but this next one will still feature around 10 new (and corking) albums for your delectation.

peace
ian

Traveller returned

I've just got back from a weekend spent with friends in Glastonbury. That's Glastonbury the town as opposed to Glastonbury the festival.

For those who've never experienced Glastonbury (the town) then let me set the scene. One street (hill actually) that bends at a right angle at the bottom (like a capital L) featuring about 20 shops selling all manner of New Age paraphenalia, a couple of book shops and some good vegetarian cafes. The whole place is themed around some spurious notion that it's the mythical Isle of Avalon (I think 'mythical' is the key word there) and as such has built it's entire identity around New Age tourism.

I have a strange - or maybe that should read strained - relationship with the place. It's just too fucking nice! The people are nice, the shops are nice, the buildings are nice, the litter is nice - aaaaargh! Within half an hour of arriving I'm looking to buy the foulest pornography available - 'anal puppy sluts' or somesuch - so i can sit and read it in the town square just to sully the place a little - does this make me a bad person? - I think not.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not a complete curmudgeon (just mostly) - I like the fact that it's got a free and easy vibe to the place. It's all just lacking that edge that I need to keep me interested (or even conscious). Sue, my partner, on the other hand loves it there as she can let her inner hippy run riot and so i get dragged from crystal shop to crystal shop looking at shiny rocks and assorted tat.

It was good to meet up with some old friends again though and I had plenty of time to write some more reviews (the new orchestramaxfieldparish album is a corker) and also managed to do some reading - Concrete vol.2, (which was good fun although the russian agents in the everest story were a little cheesy), John Wagner's History of Vilence which was way better than the film, The Push Man by Yoshihiro Tatsumi which was an interesting change from the usual manga dreck and i managed to finish reading The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes an interesting, but flawed, stab of alternative victoriana - not quite steampunk but with the addition of, i suppose, magic (it's never really clear) that leads for some quirky and unexpected twists and turns.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

peace
ian