The social dimension of music weaves itself in and out of conversations. Worlds are turned inside out and upside down. Soiled hand-me-downs are offered as new garments. Purposes turn to nostalgia. In another world long extended dialogues are sustained, aspects of science scrutinised. Models of evolutionary biology are pulled apart to reveal analogues of specialised practices of contemporary music. Consider speciation for example. From a particular perspective the complex behaviours of living beings under evolutionary or environmental pressures can help us understand or indeed create certain types of music. Literature, utopian worlds, worlds turned inside out, the weather here and the weather there, rarely politics, analogies drawn from linguistics, the art world, which comes out of most discussions smelling badly, the general stupidity of people, often artists as it happens and yes, ourselves. 

If I must be thrawn let it be about the scientific method, its history and its successful adoption by so many great minds. I choose to respect it, all the more so in a world where the louder you talk nonsense the more people listen to you and eventually believe you. Or a world where commercial pressures demand fast content in regular doses. This includes the world of art and artists, which comprises of course music and the sonic arts.

Ernst Mayr had a spat with some American scientists over their claims about Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence based on unscientific principles. He also acknowledges that 'the scientific method is a powerful tool for understanding the natural world, but it requires adaptation and interpretation when applied to different fields of science, particularly historical sciences like evolution.’ From time to time the study of music also benefits from a change of lens.

And finally in the interest of equipoise let’s not forget how Kafka would be rolling about the floor laughing so hard while reading The Trial aloud “that at times he was unable to continue reading”.

I can’t properly enumerate or describe all the topics that we’ve covered in our conversations but I can give the reader an idea. These have ranged from deep explorations of music, what it is, what it could or even should be and isn’t, theories of music personal and historical, to our own compositional practices and the work of other composers, anthropology and paleoanthropology including human origins to social pressures on music and the practices resulting from trends, fashions and commercial or industrial forces. Cacology, dendrology, ethnoichthyology, gelotology, glottology, heterology, ktenology, ludology, mastology, morology, ideological morphology, pantology. Fears localised and general burrowed into our composerly conference, both Italian and Scottish. Who wants to smell bad or spend money? Including:-

Anemophobia
Anthrophobia
Anthropophobia
Arachibutyrophobia
Astrophobia
Ataxophobia
Atychiphobia
Automatonophobia
Bromidrophobia
Cacophobia
Chrometophobia
Chronomentrophobia
Decidophobia
Dendrophobia
Dentophobia
Genuphobia
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia
Lockiophobia
Papyrophobia
Phobophobia
Pyrophobia
Scoptophobia
Zuigerphobia

Lesser known topics fell upon us in the depths of hard winters when the birds fell out of the sky: historical vexillology, the study of knocker-uppers, codicology, the multidisciplinary analysis of medieval flamethrowers, all the timer avoiding and critically banishing the idolatry of cats, lizards and beetles. We have touched frequently on technological matters, though never setting out a stall under the banner of fetishists of the new, or the old, taking a somewhat principled though obvious stance to the effect that what we have will suffice, unless something truly better comes along. I confess to having flights of fancy at times, enthusing about things when I should know better (and spending money needlessly), at times merely to irritate people who fetishise technology, at times because of the 84,000 neurotic states of mind the totality of which is unpractised by me as of this date, with 84,000 solutions but of more relevance the 21,000 rooted in attachment or having the character of attachment.

 In case you’re wondering this is leading up to personal theories of music.
​
Someone asked me recently how or why I work with two seemingly unrelated kinds of music-making, electroacoustic composition and playing guitars. The simple answer is that I don’t want to waste all those hours I spent as a child and youth learning and practising classical guitar music in my bedroom. But that’s by the way. 

​Another way round this is to consider that different kinds of music require different kinds of research. Some of course require none, in the sense of academic research. You just play, though there will undoubtedly have been a wider social dimension to that playing which implies some sort of  knowledge base or layered background. On an instrument that I’ve played for most of my life I can play from memory, from a score, improvise from a few ideas or improvise freely. Many musicians can do this quite easily, it’s no big deal. There’s not too much in the way of different sounds to be drawn out of an acoustic guitar, unless we get into amplification, effects and preparations which aren’t typical of the instrument. Any research tends to focus playing and listening or on the histories and traditions of the instrument and its players, a rewarding field of study in its own right. 

It's evident to me that many musicians, especially composers, require a working theory or even a simple hypothesis of what music is in order to proceed with some measure of artistic or even personal integrity. I’m one of those musicians. More specifically however it depends on what musical activity I’m involved with. If the main concern is to explore sound, generally speaking, meaning the extraction or coaxing of sounds and their sonic particularities from various generators in order to investigate these and compose or perform using them, then I’ve found it essential to think and act in a certain manner, one that requires support. Over time therefore I’ve benefited from adopting a theoretical perspective, meaning an evolving process rather than a fixed standpoint. 

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