I have a new release, alkaline, over on Bandcamp. These are fairly raw sounds from experimental processes carried out using small electric motors and other generators, resonating and containing vessels and different microphones. These materials will form the core of live electroacoustic performances. But above and beyond these small sounds which are more a documentation of processes than fully fledged compositions I'm more interested in the performance side of this, how to move around inside a space, relate to the sound, objects and people in it.

For the artwork I tried something new and made some prints at Georgie Fay's excellent Print Club in the Hub. Georgie guided the group through the different stages of mono printing and collagraph then left us to it. There are several beautiful aspects to printing that I'd never appreciated apart from the lush sensation of holding a print in your hands. You don't need to be an illustrator, you can keep overprinting and making small adjustments ie. you can be as experimental as you like, and best of all you never know how things are going to turn out. I'm delighted to now have a small bundle of prints that I can scan and transform in the digital domain to make artwork for albums and posters. 

Some day soon I'll perform alongside these objects which are inanimate and animate simultaneously.

When I get to rehearsing my first steps will be to find initial boundaries, main ingredients and remember the continual interchange between making, listening and observing. 

This is my orchestra just now
a small collection of
battery powered motors
phone vibrators
small speakers
dictaphones
contact microphones
a hand-made bowed psaltery (under the desk)

Analogue synth-maker and tape machine hacker James Pearson will join me soon for sonic experiments in speciation and heterosis.

​His synths..

This one is a lap steel slide, a Gretsch G9220 Bobtail Round-Neck Resonator to be precise. It's a good guitar, well made, sweet tone, as metallic as you'd expect but there's enough wood in the sound as well. It projects well, is  comfortable and responsive to play. It records well. I haven't used the internal pickup much but it seems adequate. I don't know how it compares to the very expensive models but I can't imagine they's be much better than this Gretsch. You can hear it on my acoustic albums Honeyfield Road and Broken Landscapes over on Bandcamp. 

​One day I'll buy a Weissenborn because there's no imitating the sound of that wonderful instrument.

This is the Gretsch 9221 Bobtail, a straight up resonator, all metal. It plays as well as the 9220, reliable and a clean sound. I bought this used and had to take off the front to make some adjustments to the resonator. To get the steel sound you need to play a little more towards the bridge. Internal pickup - seems fine. It's a good one for trying out different tunings, free improvisation or straight up Appalachian tune-making. I play some tunes on my acoustic albums as well as on Outside, my album of free improvisations for acoustic guitars, again on Bandcamp.

I can't play saxophone but I am fascinated by the music of John Coltrane. I was watching some footage of his 'Last Performance at Newport 1966' and apart from being mesmerised by the wall of sound he produced, which Hendrix managed to do as well, I was struck by how physical the whole performance was. He was a big strong man and he laid into that microphone like it was his last sacrifice to the Gods of Music. Sonny Rollins was the same. They're not pretending to be something else. That';s the way you have to play those instruments. It must be in the nature of saxophones, the way you hold them and point them away from you towards heaven or wherever. I've never managed to warm to playing guitar like that. You either end up gyrating around with an electric like a dodgy rock star or if it's an acoustic you end up rocking about with that orgasm face they put on to squeeze some kind of emotion out of the moment. Nah!

There's something I wanted to mention briefly and it concerns the performer's awareness of musical time which is obviously different from that of the listener. I know - the performer is a listener too but the listener isn't a performer, at least not in the same way as I might be if I'm playing a concert to people.

It's this. When I'm playing a pre-composed piece that I've committed to memory or am reading from a score, say a classical study, or a piece I know by heart, my attention is on the present and the future, broadly speaking. I don't think much about what's just happened, unless I've made a complete horse's arse of a section but that requires the application of experience and diligence to ignore. If I'm improvising with little more than a few abstract ideas or even less, my attention will roam between past, present and future. I need to have in mind what I've just done to make some kind of musical sense (yes, I still believe in that) as I go forward through time. I also need to be aware of what I'm actually playing and I have to attention on what's to come. How this works is complex. Maybe it's something like what computers do when they're multithreading.

But how do you know what to play?

​Depends what day of the week it is

What I'm doing now
and forever more if I can't find any musicians to play with.

sit down

pick a guitar

make up a tuning

select preparations

play guitar

record 
​

I went to Asilah to learn about African musics from African musicians. The Miracle Group from Tanger, with whom I associated frequently during the first week of the tour, played in the hotel, in the street, in the park, on stage and anywhere else where people gathered. I only know about African drumming from listening to recorded music and from books on rhythmic patterns when I've tried to piece some djembe rhythms together. This is different, being able to listen and later talk to the musicians about their amazing individual and ensemble drumming. 

I could go on at length but the most important thing I learned was that this is highly sophisticated and technical music, obviously organised but also partly improvised, played at all times with high levels of physical and musical energy and executed with ease and grace. Nothing is straightforward. There's a lot of 3 against 2 going on with 'bars' of 8 and 12 split into 2/3 and 5/7. The young player at bottom left told me about his Raquette or (I think)  keta drums, two small hourglass drums played with sticks. Everything he does is in groups of six. The complexity within that on two drums is baffling so I simply listened and learned, vowing that one day I'd acquire a couple of these drums and learn something from an accomplished snare drummer, maybe from the local pipe band. I reckon if you can hold down a few basic patterns along with some of the lop-sided djembe rhythms that you could join in, as did many of the Moroccans, and at least contribute without doing the usual white boy thumping in 4/4. At least that's the plan.

​The dancing of those beautiful girls, as you can imagine, was a joy to behold.

What I have succeeded in doing is to incorporate some of these complex patterns into my double thumbing Appalachian guitar technique but it's tricky to do spontaneously without having to count as I play. Time will tell.

These two videos are of a Moroccan Gnaoua ensemble. I spent loads of time with them socially and musically. They played constantly, morning noon and night so I can talk a little about Gnaoua as an insider of sorts. The first video shows part of the core group, plus Shingo the Japanese Qhanun player joining in. Said Kouyou is playing the guimbre, a Moroccan three-stringed plucked instrument in the bass register. He also sings solo and with the others in various call and response arrangements.

The metal percussion instruments are called 'clackers' (they are actually called that in Moroccan though I don't know how it's spelled). Apparently the music honours or expresses the pain of slaves who were forcibly moved around the Saharan region in times past. Their only instrument was the shackles that bound them. The music is elaborate, complex, sophisticated and spectacular. There's a well established Gnaoua festival every year in Essaouira down the coast add I think that some of the structural problems with this festival arose because of their straying into another town's established territory.

​The second video shows the full ensemble in traditional costume playing at an evening event. The older man on the red drum is the boss. There was an all night event (in a tiled room!!) at which he seemed to be in charge. Apparently there's an element of trance inducing in this music which makes sense if you play and sing all night at loud volumes.