7th March is world book day, the opportunity for all those with young children to spend hours scrabbling around to try and match up to their neighbours attempts, whilst the kids hope they wont be too embarrassed by it all. What fun. Like National Women’s Day or Record Store Day or Black History Month, these are all worthy concepts, supporting better lives for all. Really, though, everyday should be World Book Day. Everyday should be equality of opportunity for all day. One Day should be watched every day.
In supporting the adult focus to WBD then please have a look at my first book, Blank Canvas, soon to be followed by Creative Spheres, deep, playful, anarchic, experimental and entertaining explorations of popular culture, with creativity centrally placed.
Now time to dress up as my favourite cultural icon …..
A fresh looking Brian Eno at Watford Art College (Mid 1970s)
With the collective there are checks and balances, the combined rhythmic and melodic impulses connect through the tissues of humans, vibrating naturally. Maybe this will fool the Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot, which can replicate individuals, but the collective human wave has the combination of randomness, continuity and subtlety that will defeat the programmer. We are the robots, do do do do. According to musicologist Michael Spitzer ‘music is something bred in our bones’. Can AI ever be expected to replicate the randomness of humans when placed together with ironic meta modern sentiments? The beauty of Kraftwerk was their humanity, they introduced the machine but with naivety (and great songs) at a point where the machine was not feared but excitement abounded due to the possibilities becoming available. Cybernetics pre-empting the internet. Mass communication through wires. There is something in AI which seems almost old fashioned, like watching sci-fi show Blake’s Seven on a wet and windy November Sunday afternoon. Kraftwerk still feel ultra-modern, the future whilst being embedded in the past. AI seems comically uncultured, taking Kanye West’s vocals for example you can create your own representation of one of his tracks. Is this innovation or legitimising the cover artist, providing creative potential for the masses based on what has happened before. Kraftwerk were innovative, generally ignoring the past, tomorrow’s world. AI has been around for years in music, a secret alien takeover kept quiet from the general populace since the sequencer became embedded in the Roland SH101 mono synth or as a standalone sequencer in the battleship grey Alesis MMT8. Automation in ProTools or Logic software programmes then arrived. Preset sounds built into music making modules are programmers deciding what sounds you would like to use in their machines, providing an AI style link. The Roland TB303 bassline was designed as a bass emulator, a robotic bass player, rather than the squelching acid machine it became. The machine was out of control, a Frankenstein monster let loose by its inventor.
In 1983 I left school for college and embarked on an adventure to the South of France, with my band mates Hoedown at Hanks in legendary Transit van The Cow, hub caps designed like Newcastle Brown bottle tops. In music worlds other things were also occurring…
Pop critic Paul Morley talks about 1973 as an iconic year within both classical and popular Western music worlds, with releases from Roxy Music to Steve Reich to Bach (?). Our Covid19 neighbour and friend downstairs Matt Davies, alternatively sees 1983 as the most vital year for music. Billy Jean has got your number walking down the pathway, ligting up dancefloors across the globe up. The three members of the Thompson Twins have love on your side whilst in rural Bath, UK the Roman Baths echo to the pain of Tears for Fears. Sweet Dreams and Let’s Dance are two iconic tracks that are played as much today, with the Eurythmics track the theme to the Women’s football world cup in Australia. We come from the land down under, where women glow and men plunder. Still true indeed Louis Rubiales. If you ever get a song stuck in your head, known as an earworm, then listening to a few bars of Karma Chameleon will sort you out. Looking forward, Prince was yet to be symbol but he could predict the millennium bug. Rip it up by Orange Juice. Everything Counts for Depeche Mode, introducing a new synthesised aesthetic to pop worlds, taking the sound of underground electronica into the hit parade. A youthful madame Ciccone was having a Holiday in Club Tropicana with George and friends. This Charming Man, True, Let the Music Play on New Years Day. I was young, Too Shy Shy, hush hush to be much of a Love Cat, Oblivious that Love is a Battlefield. Wow what a year, where the scenius was popular music in general, an epoch where a combination of scenii interact, snowballing Over and Over, a year where popular culture turned to Gold.
I have been on a journey writing my second book for what has probably been about a year now. Everyday I get up at 6am and write for an hour, letting my unconscious lead me, a time where the troubled mind has yet to arrive, a pure blank canvas. Today the sign of prosperity and hope arrived:
I try to ignore milestones, just write and then later edit, allowing the flow to take control. These are the words as I passed 88888
Dancing is a way of staying fit without the conscious effort. In fact I sometimes go to a dance fit class at my local gym, where I am the only bloke. It’s a tough class that makes me laugh. Some people have been attending for years, creating their own mini scenius, joy unbound. Dancing with friends to great mixes, DJ’s who are really taking the group on a journey that resonates, reinforcing your connection to your friends, the feeling that you are in the best place in the world, the only space that matters at that time. You rely on the DJ and dancing, remembering those special moments when DJ and audience combined in rapturous harmony. DJ Rod Davies at the New Milton Town Hall in 1981 spinning early Depeche Mode or Heaven 17; the Unity St club in Bristol, 1986, water dripping from the ceiling to the deep dark underworld of the Dug Out; the Whirl-y-Gig at Womad festival, connecting world and electronic music in the open air; the Blue Note, Hoxton of course, a tunnel of love; Planet Shroom or Megadog, adding a large dose of psychedelics; to DJ Woodies mix at tiny, personal GrassRoots festival, a cohesive and reaffirming experience, taking you on a journey through pop, country, soul, hip hop, grime and dubstep with a drum and bass base. Dancing outside has a liberating and fresh feel. It feels right and celebratory of the earth rather than being surrounded by man-made objects. Everyones feet resonating with the ground and the earth coming back with its reflective vibrations. Dancing with stars flying over a Cornish sky, meteorites flashing occasional trails through the milky way. A unique feeling of connection with the world which the warmth of the English summer or paddling on a Thai beach can create. The collaborative flow between people who might have just met, each with their own small groups of mates sharing the love, all coming together, right now, over me. The rave, protest march, tube train on the first day back at work, the football crowd celebrating a last minute winner for the home team, watching a film at the cinema where the audience all gasp at the plot twist, a simultaneous flow., like traffic in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, interconnecting mopeds, each with individual lives and experiences circling around each other. They never seem to touch, let alone crash, in a whirlwind of impossibility millions of bikes head off in their individual directions for a common goal. Everyone going somewhere, existing, milling around.
Music and sex go together like strawberrys and cream, Lennon and McCartney, Foster and Allen. Or more probably Blondie. Cool images on our walls, cut out centrefolds from NME, Smash Hits or Sounds, the new look, new love but it was always Debbie Harry who caught the imagination of a generation. Iconic and cool. Sex and music create some of the same internal feelings, warm and tingly as you filter sweep your Sequential Circuits Pro One. The moving connective rise and fall of an orchestral string section. Ibiza Chill Out classics. Leonard Cohen or Van Morrison in a Parisian flat on a sleepy Saturday early spring morning, the distant sound of vegetable or flower stalls coming to life, the dawn chorus. Sound, comfort, meditation, love. We experience a reason for being in the world, a natural connectivity through bodily integration, listening to the gradually intense breathing, the heartbeat changing from reggae, through hip hop, pop, techno to drum and bass before climaxing in hard core. Music is sex: sex is music. Sex has informed music culture, from the permissive era of the 1960s, sexual exploration and glam rock in the early 70s, to SEX the shop, punk and the pistols to New Romantics, the Aids pandemic spreading through London and New York gay scenes. Raves were about love, group hugs rather than explicitly sexual as energy went out on the dance floor. It was the parties after the events, the chill out rooms, the Sunday afternoons where thoughts of new musical ideas and sex started to reawaken. Love hope and happiness.
Musicologist Sophie Zehetmayer explores elements of music that resonate with the world. The social rhythm which we all undertake in our own unique ways, like the moped riders of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, out on their own journeys without ever intersecting with each other, kept apart by constantly blaring horns. Social rhythm connects to our working hours, economic laws, and daily scheduling. Affect and political power, representation, the body. Hate, fear, shame, disgust or happiness perhaps, aligning to affect and rhythm as theorised by Sarah Ahmed. From the Body to being embodied. SENSATION. The name of a life changing exhibition of Young British Artist’s work at the Royal Academy in London. A shark cut in half and preserved in formaldehyde. An artist can be a sensation, coming through the ranks to be a star, but also it is about how the work resonates, its sensory connections to our thoughts and feelings. Bodies replicate, take the shape of the movement, of the collective over time, morphing, changing due to feedback, resolution, and through repetition. I see this as connecting to the knobs and sliders of an electronic synthesiser, a machine which originally was trying to replicate traditional sounds but became its own instrument, with variances between makes and models due to the filters and routing of sound, the materials and the way they have been used. ADSR – attack, sustain, delay and release. Something which sounds like an operational delivery for a war machine but also to cybernetic concepts of organism. The five steps of operation in cybernetic systems: goal activation, action selection, action, outcome interpretation, goal comparison. A manmade instrument and social system in perfect harmony. Standing over a synthesiser, patching cables between the various sections so you can create your own unique sonic: oscillators vibrating, generating the raw triangular or square sound waves, which can be mixed and then filtered through cut off and resonance before being shaped by the ADSR. Synthesisers, like samplers and AI, were meant to ruin music, take away the role of the true musician but have become essential tools that vibrate with the intensity of society. The use of synths in modern dance music highlights the deep emotions they generate, where filter sweeps can take resonant sounds into the bodies of masses, vibrating core frequencies of ecstasy. In these moments we are connected, at one with the world and those around us, the tribe dancing to the same beat. Simplicity, repetition and movement. Forgetting the troubles of the world around us but just connecting on the same level. The social sonic.
I am very excited to announce this years festival lineup, which features an amazing array of talented musicians across jazz, latin, funk, soul and blues. There will be 5 headline nights from Thursday 23rd May to Monday 27th May, with the community music stages being across the weekend. Previous festival goers will understand the extremely high quality of all acts that we programme for this event. We have had an increasingly large number of artists applying to play which has made the decision making process increasingly competitive.
The end of May is the perfect time to visit East Devon, UK. The flowers are out and the weather is usually (crossed fingers) perfect. A beautiful way to welcome in an English summer. A perfect long weekend break.
As a very part time musician composer producer kind of person it is difficult to find the time to produce music and the th frustration comes of actually trying to find anyone to play it/ listen to it/ feedback; hate it love it buy it. Over the last few years I have been involved with a Twitter/ X based music scene, where generally unsigned artists making slightly avantgarde or non totally commercial electronic music inhabit. BBC Introducing was one space, but that is an increasingly singer songwriter gateway into radio airplay. In my genre of melodic not quite dance electronica a really supportive network of likeminded artists exists, supporting each others mainly part time hobbies. Names like Kiffie, Signal Committee, Trevas, Mothloop, and myself Inochi seem to constantly appear, as if by magic, on the same internet radio shows. I have no idea of listening figures for some of the shows we are played on but it definitely warms the cockles of your creative heart. I mean what is musicking all about anyway? Making your fortune, heading off into the sunset with a banana daiquiri on a Caribbean beach. Possibly. But really, for me its about having an existence which includes music at the forefront, not making a living, but providing some feedback and support, acknowledgement that you have a place on same airwaves.
Big up to Radio Wigwam, Big Satsuma Radio and Trust the Doc internet radio shows who are all playing Inochi tracks this weekend. We are all listening and playing music this weekend in recognition of the epoch changing British poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who so sadly passed yesterday, 7th December 2023.
I am really excited to have a chapter in this beautiful book that celebrates the work of renowned UK minimalist composer Gavin Bryars. The book really explores the impact Gavin had on the music industry, initially with Brian Eno and other artists who formed the ambient and experimental early popular/ classical music crossovers. As a celebration of his 80th year, this is an exploration of the creative life of an iconic and great bloke.
My chapter looks at his connection between art and music, exploring the innovative teaching methods he used at Portsmouth and Leicester art schools in addition to the formation of the incredible Portsmouth Sinphonia.
A perfect christmas present for your cultured family member and/or friend
BLANK CANVAS 