Right, it's been a fairly full-on week on multiple fronts, and I've definitely got that "just hanging in there" feeling, but anyhow...
Next Saturday I'm off to the West Dean International Classical Guitar Festival for the best part of a week. The festival combines evening concerts by some of the world's finest guitarists (including, this year, Craig Ogden and Xufei Yang), with private one-on-one lessons, masterclasses, ensemble and orchestra classes and lots of opportunities to perform (always a scary task, that, playing in front of a room full of other guitarists, including the luminaries above). This is my first time back there in a couple of years (I took last year off while finishing my Master's) and I have to say I'm not feeling as prepared as I'd like, but I'm sure I'll get there. I'm hoping to roll out some Dyens, Turina, Vincent Lindsay Clark (in a duo with the excellent Hilary May, whom I met many West Deans back!) and Jobim both in either performance or in lessons, and looking forward to playing some of Vincent's pieces with the orchestra. Anyway, stoked about going there, although, as I say, a tad daunted and under-prepared, and I hope to report along the way, should I get a moment to breathe!
I've finally got around to consolidating a lot of my Boom Logistics and Abyssal Labs work on to a DGMFS Bandcamp "label" page (I mean, it's not really a label is it? But anyhow...) The most recent work on there, Boom Logistics' Fifth, dates from 2016 and has been available for most of the time since on Spotify and other nefarious streaming platforms. So why move to Bandcamp, so late in the day? Well, for one thing, it's nice to have everything in one place, and anyway, it's not as though I'm making money from Spotify - so frankly I'd rather not make money from Bandcamp, which is in every way a better experience for musicians, with a straightforward interface, a genuine community and, well, a generally better "vibe". Whether it stays that way we'll have to see.
But what I mostly like is that I can actually include some information on each release, not least about the various fantastic musicians who've contributed along the way. A lot of people have commented on Spotify in particular's appalling album metadata (the brilliant Ted Gioia among them), and it is truly woeful. By way of contrast, funnily enough, only this morning I was listening to Dennis Russell Davies' 1978 recording of Ives and Copland (on the original vinyl release) and noted this on the back cover (the back cover - not exactly tucked away!)
Different times, people, different times! Anyway, there's more work to do, not least to consolidate the album artwork. The design for Fifth was done my old buddy Paul Finn of Fitzroy and Finn, and rather makes my own attempts at "design" on the other covers look like that of an 8-year-old let loose with a sawn-off version of Photoshop. So I hope to recruit Paul to put that right.
I'll still be keeping my Soundcloud page going for all my classical shenanigans, composition sketches and so on, and using it to preview other work in progress. Talking of which... I've got two more Boom Logistics releases to get mastered and put up there, both of which I've collated (again, in pre-mastered form) as Soundcloud releases. Firstly, The Rainbow Faults, talked about endlessly (promised? threatened?) in these pages for several years now. Well, honestly, I swear it's nearly there, and here's the final assembly, at least:
And then, in true London bus style, there's going to be another BL release hot on its heels. A Stag Hill Miscellany is a collection of material mostly done either as part of my Master's at Surrey, or at least inspired by it. I was initially unsure about whether this should be a Boom Logistics release or not, but listening back, it strikes me as inhabiting the same world, which is pretty diverse, after all. The more formalistic side of my studies has definitely taken the music to new places, of course, but... well, see what you think. Here's the first draft of an (unmastered) assembly:
In other news, I mentioned earlier in the week that I'd just had my annual recording session with my long-standing collaborator Nick Reynolds, and indeed, my mangling of one of his excellent clarinet improvisations has made it on to the Stag Hill Miscellany playlist above. Nick has now started posting his own pieces from the session, including this, his own bossa-goes-wrong (and brilliantly titled) piece Floating World, Brutal Powerplay:
Then, sigh, more Bach! I've already mentioned my work arranging Bach's aria "Sheep May Safely Graze" for the Brighton Guitar Quartet, and pointed out how much help I've had from Steve Gordon along the way. Well, here's the finished result, albeit with midi guitars (although I have to say how impressed I am with Native Instruments' Plucked Nylon VST - it even features heavy breathing!)
Amid all this, I've only managed to knock out one Bach chorale harmonisation, I'm afraid. It's his "Aus Meines Herzens Grunde", which was quite a challenge because the melody implies a fairly static harmony, and given that it's a reasonably long, six-phrase-length chorale, it made it quite a challenge to sustain interest. I'll let the reader be the judge of whether I've achieved that.
Finally, I wrote a lengthy post on Wednesday celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of the 2-CD compilation, 152 Minutes, 33 Seconds - A Brief History of Ambient, which kicked off the somewhat cult-status "Virgin Ambient Series". I haven't had much feedback on the post yet, given that there are some contentious issues around the series, but what I've had so far has been complimentary, so maybe I wasn't entirely barking up the wrong tree...
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