Drongomala

Drongomala vs Tom Waits - StepRiteUp v2 (Manchester)

2011-12-17T14:19:00.000Z

Drongomala vs Tom Waits - StepRiteUp v2 (Manchester)

Drongomala - BreakFromThisPrison (Featuring the Manchester Four).mp3

2011-12-17T14:17:00.000Z

Drongomala - BreakFromThisPrison (Featuring the Manchester Four).mp3

Malkauns For Veena Blue (TeenTal)

2011-12-17T14:16:00.000Z

Malkauns For Veena Blue (TeenTal)

Run Paint Run Run (feat. the Capn himself) circa Kerala 200?

2011-12-17T14:08:00.000Z

Run Paint Run Run (feat. the Capn himself) circa Kerala 200?

Glass hammers

2011-09-02T19:03:00.002+01:00

It's a fragile thing this life.

Irony is that you must live it as if you are unbreakable.

New Videos for Cierro los Ojos (Close My Eyes)

2011-07-13T13:04:00.003+01:00

These are the English and Spanish language versions of the song Cierro los Ojos (Close my Eyes) from the album Almas Buenas recorded in Argentina. The English vocal was done in WGC, dig.

English

Gear malarky
I used the Cinemek app for mobile storyboarding which is unbeatable and for the actual shoot I used two different stop motion apps (iTimeLapse and StopMotionRecorder). There is a related tech and software post here.

Assistant and extra stage design for the video was Lou Robertson - thanks Lou!

Spanish

Esta es la versión en español de la canción "Cierro los Ojos” del álbum Almas Buenas.

La versión en inglés se puede encontrar en: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q39glP7Ld04

He utilizado dos diferentes aplicaciones de stop motion para hacer este video, y la segunda era de mejor calidad. La primera aplicación fue la más confiable y por eso empecé con esa hasta que la segunda aplicación actualizada lo logró. Y aquí lo tienen.

Si les gusta este video tal vez les interese el álbum Almas Buenas que se encuentra disponible en http://www.drongomala.com

Asistente y diseñador Lou Robertson – ¡Muchas gracias!

Suerte

Drongomala - Voz
Carlos Corrales (bandoneón)
Juan Pablo Navarro (Bajo)
Jorge Savelon (Percusión)
Matías Chapiro (Piano acústico)
Víctor Alejandro Piseta (Guitarra española)
Guillermo Barbera (Trompeta)
Oscar Margariño (Ingeniero de grabación)

Tags
Etiquetas:

tango universo comedia drongomala muñecos animación títere modelo móvil corto agorafobia gimnasia sueños juguetes sistema solar lapso en el tiempo espacio teletranportación

- Show quoted text -

Flying Mountain Productions

www.drongomala.com

Demi-gods of the Cloud don't need the hardware to weigh them down

2011-04-27T13:53:00.015+01:00

It's worth mentioning the synchronicity of the other day - 25th April 2011

First thing - get mix back online from Glen of my track This Is The Way for my new album. Upload it to Soundcloud to keep as a master.
Morning - I'm moving closer to London so I do huge clearout of my own physical CD stock along with other CD's I've bought. Most of my stuff sells online these days. Bin bags are filled with shiny things and plastic.
Early afternoon - I submit a new mix of a track, Big Empty Houses, to Abbey Road Online Mastering for finishing touches. I notice that the Soundcloud integration with Abbey Road doesn't work. It's a business challenge for them both as they both want to be the master holding party of your audio masters.
Afternoon - I switch on the television and see that Norio Ohga, the inventor of the CD, has died aged 81.

Timely.

The CD is disappearing and the death of the inventor puts the full stop on the CD eulogy. This isn't big news of course as we increasingly see CD's disappearing from shops and peoples shopping bags. Folks can iGet what they iWant from online. 500 Cd's on iPod is way preferable to lugging them around in your a) family home b) bedsit c) caravan

Our prized DVD, Blue Ray, TripleDepthDataMagnets will all be ushered from the physical stores and our bookcases into black bin bags. Video and film will not escape the cloud either. The invisible data pipes are getting faster and wider and we are pulling our dreams and lifestyle trinkets down from the computer hum in the skies. It's all in 'the cloud'.

Only the cloud is quick enough - to audition, buy, listen and share among machines and people. Everything else is yesterday.

The CD was a bit of a p*ss take really and for a good 10 years the major labels re-released all their existing material and made a tonne of cash. The need to develop artists was lost somewhere as an imperative and this was one of the two deathblows that was rendered to record companies by CD. The second was when everyone with a computer learned the words 'rip', 'upload', 'ftp' and Napster. Independent fiddles played while they burned.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing either. Music technology and expression is living up to the philosophy of

'it's not about the destination - it's the journey you take along the way'

It's not about the plastic and silver discs. It's how you let music affect you - how you wear your hair, walk, talk, debate and gyrate - it's everything but the plastic disc.

Demi-gods of the Cloud don't need the hardware to weigh them down.

The format is dead - long live the new format!

Drongomala

白鶴飛翔時 / 12000英里 - 繁體中文譯文 T

2010-12-10T16:20:00.004Z

從字母謎案（自A）專輯中免費下載曲目

白鶴飛翔時 / 12000英里

“非同凡響的自由創作作品集” Radio Indy
“如同‘Thermal Riders’一樣，Dixon的長笛配上零落的電子斷音、吉他，音調婉轉清冽，堪比范吉利斯（Vangelis）大師傑作，現在——神奇的銀翼殺手管弦樂曲” MuzikReviews.com

《12000英里》是drongomala和Boofa異想天開的產物。 2005年網上接觸之後，兩人立即決定一起完成一個項目，就這樣《12000英里》誕生了。
12000英里是Drongomala（英國曼徹斯特）到Boofa（新西蘭惠靈頓）的距離。此外，發行時特約了國際知名的英國曼徹斯特笛手Iain Dixon。

《白鶴飛翔時》是三年間歷經寒暑幾易其稿之作。

Drongomala和Boofa於2005年在Myspace上偶然相遇。其時，Drongomala已出４張專輯並組建了六個樂隊，已初步開拓出試驗音樂之路，而Boofa正披荊斬棘製作純樸但卻能激發感情的下拍電子音樂。連鎖反應是自然的，他們決定共同趕制曲目，不久開花結果出了一張專輯。

為了讓示範檔的開頭“低重量”，兩人在網路上來來回回無數次交換看法，最後確定了全部修改內容。曲目形成以後，接著就是音訊和MIDI檔的大小，最終兩人利用《Reason》和通用聲庫直至Ableton Live音序器和音訊。

“我們確實互相挑戰聲學極限，最終到達個人無法期冀的高點。通過實驗和做單獨無法奢望之事，總的聲音效果已趨極致。每次對話都是通過網路交換檔且是開放式的，材料完全揉碎從而使我們無法仰賴任何材料或者固執任何觀點”Boofa。

隨著檔交換週期漸長，兩人歷經分裂和兩次中斷合作，最終樂隊倖存下來。期間，兩人又發行了三張唱片，草創了一家T恤公司，拿下了一個音樂學位，搬家４次，但是他們在這兩年裡彼此勉力“如影隨行”創制樣本唱片。 Boofa飛抵倫敦原籍探望朋友和家人，然後折往曼徹斯特，在此地Drongomala和Boofa僅用短短六天就將大約20多張樣本唱片搬上舞臺，屆時於格拉斯頓伯裡音樂節第五天在曼徹斯特演員休息室裡由Drongomala演奏。

此次演出雖未經訓練但卻獲得好評，實際生活中的合作密切了原有關係。 Boofa離開英國之後，兩人開始錘煉材料製作專輯，但是最初計畫最多六個月完成的專輯最終卻拖延了兩年。

Drongomala特邀性格管樂演員Iain Dixon加入演奏長笛，進一步融合專輯去除支離破碎之感。這是Drongomala與他灌制的第二張唱片，他曾對Iain說過：

“我如何評價都不為過——他是管樂大師。他既是馬克白又是一個頑童，經常只需優雅地點點頭就行雲流水般地彈奏起來。我說‘鶴在海灘上進攻小矮人’，喇叭／長笛／單簧管就應聲而起。真正的音樂家就像魔術師一樣。此外還有一件有趣的事，臨到他與我們灌錄唱片之時，Iain縮短了Van Morrison行程” Drongomala.

此後，D&B重新遠端加工原始材料——音樂融為一體，聲音得到淋漓盡致地發揮。仙鶴正在起舞。

此專輯完全獨樹一幟。某些曲目的衝擊力可比歌劇，定音鼓區域的聲音如同電纜鐵塔傾頹而下，而其它音域卻波瀾不驚。此專輯已超過一加一等於二的簡單相加——魔力無法破除。

曲目
1. 字母謎案（自A）
2. 暖流騎士
3. 瀕危物種
4. 二賢慧心
5. V字隊形
6. 鶴與小矮人
7. 巨石滾落之前
8. 潛特
9. 鶴
10. 字母謎案（至Z）

誠心推薦

（艾福克斯）/ Aphex Twin
加拿大滑板 / Boards of Canada
邁爾斯·大衛斯（Miles Davis）

流派
電子
智能舞曲（IDM）
鼓與貝斯
配樂

對鶴的瞭解會影響理解這些歌曲。

鶴群遷徙時常排成人字形一起飛行，因此領頭鳥之後的鳥群可無需拍打氣流節省體能。
據說，阿波羅曾數次變作野鶴巡訪塵世。
荷馬曾講過小人國的故事，每年春季在海神俄刻阿諾斯的岸邊，小矮人都要騎鶴征戰。
據說赫爾墨斯在觀察鶴及其身體形態之後，受到啟發創造了羅馬字母。
一群鶴睡覺時會指定一隻鶴爪握石塊站崗，因此如若睡著石塊會掉下來，這樣鶴群知道他們無法再受到保護了。

白鹤飞翔时 /12000英里 - 简体中文译文 S

2010-12-10T16:17:00.005Z

从字母谜案（自A）专辑中免费下载曲目

白鹤飞翔时 /12000英里

“非同凡响的自由创作作品集” Radio Indy
“如同‘Thermal Riders’一样，Dixon的长笛配上零落的电子断音、吉他，音调婉转清冽，堪比范吉利斯（Vangelis）大师杰作，现在——神奇的银翼杀手管弦乐曲” MuzikReviews.com

《12000英里》是drongomala和Boofa异想天开的产物。 2005年网上接触之后，两人立即决定一起完成一个项目，就这样《12000英里》诞生了。
12000英里是Drongomala（英国曼彻斯特）到Boofa（新西兰惠灵顿）的距离。此外，发行时特约了国际知名的英国曼彻斯特笛手Iain Dixon。

《白鹤飞翔时》是三年间历经寒暑几易其稿之作。

Drongomala和Boofa于2005年在Myspace上偶然相遇。其时，Drongomala已出４张专辑并组建了六个乐队，已初步开拓出试验音乐之路，而Boofa正披荆斩棘制作纯朴但却能激发感情的下拍电子音乐。连锁反应是自然的，他们决定共同赶制曲目，不久开花结果出了一张专辑。

为了让示范文件的开头“低重量”，两人在网络上来来回回无数次交换看法，最后确定了全部修改内容。曲目形成以后，接着就是音频和MIDI文件的大小，最终两人利用《Reason》和通用声库直至Ableton Live音序器和音频。

“我们确实互相挑战声学极限，最终到达个人无法期冀的高点。通过实验和做单独无法奢望之事，总的声音效果已趋极致。每次对话都是通过网络交换文件且是开放式的，材料完全揉碎从而使我们无法仰赖任何材料或者固执任何观点”Boofa。

随着文件交换周期渐长，两人历经分裂和两次中断合作，最终乐队幸存下来。期间，两人又发行了三张唱片，草创了一家T恤公司，拿下了一个音乐学位，搬家４次，但是他们在这两年里彼此勉力“如影随行”创制样本唱片。 Boofa飞抵伦敦原籍探望朋友和家人，然后折往曼彻斯特，在此地Drongomala和Boofa仅用短短六天就将大约20多张样本唱片搬上舞台，届时于格拉斯顿伯里音乐节第五天在曼彻斯特演员休息室里由Drongomala演奏。

此次演出虽未经训练但却获得好评，实际生活中的合作密切了原有关系。 Boofa离开英国之后，两人开始锤炼材料制作专辑，但是最初计划最多六个月完成的专辑最终却拖延了两年。

Drongomala特邀性格管乐演员Iain Dixon加入演奏长笛，进一步融合专辑去除支离破碎之感。这是Drongomala与他灌制的第二张唱片，他曾对Iain说过：

“我如何评价都不为过——他是管乐大师。他既是麦克白又是一个顽童，经常只需优雅地点点头就行云流水般地弹奏起来。我说‘鹤在海滩上进攻小矮人’，喇叭／长笛／单簧管就应声而起。真正的音乐家就像魔术师一样。此外还有一件有趣的事，临到他与我们灌录唱片之时，Iain缩短了Van Morrison行程” Drongomala.

此后，D&B重新远程加工原始材料——音乐融为一体，声音得到淋漓尽致地发挥。仙鹤正在起舞。

此专辑完全独树一帜。某些曲目的冲击力可比歌剧，定音鼓区域的声音如同电缆铁塔倾颓而下，而其它音域却波澜不惊。此专辑已超过一加一等于二的简单相加——魔力无法破除。

曲目
1. 字母谜案（自A）
2. 暖流骑士
3. 濒危物种
4. 二贤慧心
5. V字队形
6. 鹤与小矮人
7. 巨石滚落之前
8. 潜特
9. 鹤

10. 字母谜案（至Z）

诚心推荐

Aphex Twin（艾福克斯）
Boards of Canada
迈尔斯·戴维斯（Miles Davis）

1. 电子
2. 智能舞曲（IDM）
3. 鼓与贝斯
4. 配乐

对鹤的了解会影响理解这些歌曲。

鹤群迁徙时常排成人字形一起飞行，因此领头鸟之后的鸟群可无需拍打气流节省体能。
据说，阿波罗曾数次变作野鹤巡访尘世。
荷马曾讲过小人国的故事，每年春季在海神俄刻阿诺斯的岸边，小矮人都要骑鹤征战。
据说赫尔墨斯在观察鹤及其身体形态之后，受到启发创造了罗马字母。
一群鹤睡觉时会指定一只鹤爪握石块站岗，因此如若睡着石块会掉下来，这样鹤群知道他们无法再受到保护了。

Close My Eyes and Let it Go (free track)

2010-11-17T10:31:00.005Z

ey up...

Here is a free English language version of 'Cierro los Ojos y Despierto' from my recent Spanish language record 'Almas Buenas'. Click on arrow pointing downwards to download it.

Close My Eyes and Let it Go by drongomala

I'm shooting a stop-motion video for it now :)

Almas Buenas Launch Night - Oct 27th 2010 - London

2010-10-15T16:41:00.006+01:00

Almas Buenas Launch Night @ Barrio North, Islington, London.

I'll be playing some of the songs from my latest album (in Spanish) at the delightful Barrio North which provides the right chic Latin ambience for such a thing.

I'll be doing a solo acoustic set and flexing the songs in a different way than the recording from Buenos Aires.

All those that attend get a free When You Go You Take The Garden With You CD single.

Barrio North (45 Essex Road, Islington, N1 2SF)
LondonUnited Kingdom

7pm

Wednesday, October 27th 2010

Show on Map

Directions: Nearest tube stop is Angel. Come out of Angel and turn right, walk down ‘Upper Street’ until you get to ‘Islington Green’, then bear right. You will pass a Tesco Metro on your Right and Barrio North is a few hundred yards further up, on your left. It should take a 10 minute walk from the station.

Almas Buenas by Drongomala (Release Date 20th Oct 2010) English Blog

2010-09-19T15:15:00.007+01:00

Blog en Español

Almas Buenas (Good Souls) is the fruit of a months work in Buenos Aires by Drongomala working with some of the cities finest tango, folklore and jazz artists. The project sees the group playing new latin arrangements of Drongomala songs from his back catalogue which spans work in India, Greece, UK and the US.

Pre-Production: The project was ambitious from the start. Prior to a 2 month trip around Latin America Drongomala had 11 candidate songs translated by reknowed translator Paula Tizzano. After travelling through Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile tuning his ears, heart and mind to Latin America and a Spanish speaking culture Drongomala settled in theAlmagro district in Buenos Aires. The choice for Almagro was two-fold, that it was the spiritual home (Barrio) of tango and that it contained a legendary boxing club. Drongomala started a routine of boxing training for 2 hours every morning and began the search for musicians to collaborate with. Quite soon into the stay he was introduced to Jorge Soldera who after a few meetings became the holistic mentaur of the project. Jorge committed to finding the musicians and working on the songs in pre-production to give the arrangements a latin slant. Drongomala and Jorge worked intensely for the month leading up to recording.

Rehearsals: Drongomala had the luck to get legendary international tango players such as Carlos Corrales and Juan Pablo Navarro as well as Argentinian luminaries and rising stars like Matias Chapiro (acoustic piano), Victor Piseta (spanish guitar) and Jorge Savelon (percusion/drums). A special arrangement for Exploto Trato Day Ser Alguien was written by Carlos Corrales for Bandoneon.

Recording + Mixing : Recording was undertaken in the famous live room of Moevius Studios. Moevius is well known in Latin America for its specialisation in Tango and acoustic recordings. The recordings were all played and sung live over a period of 3 days. Most songs were captured within 2 takes to retain an edge of excitement. Once recorded the mixes were undertaken by Oscar Magariños who engineered the project.

ABOUT Moebio: Moebio is one of the best and finest studio rooms in Argentina specially designed by Carlos Piriz, acoustic engineer recognized throughout Latin America as an ideal for recording acoustic projects.

In this room have recorded the greatest artists of recent times, including Mercedes Sosa, the guitarist and composer Juan Falu, the guitarist Luis Salinas, the violinist, composer and conductor Antonio Agri, Soda Stereo, Fito Paez, Luis Alberto Spinetta, La Camerata Bariloche, there was recorded the historic album "200 Years of Argentina Music" by the Salta Symphony Orchestra, and many other orchestras, because the audio quality obtained in this room is discussed by many to be insurmountable.

Artwork: Juxtaposing the classic nature of the instrumentation Drongomala chose a rising Graphic Novel/Comic artist, Sergio Carrera, to undertake the artwork for the record. He became aware of Sergio through an iPhone graphic novel entitled ´The Eternal City´ which is a story of a reluctant agent of Death who escorts expired Porteños (Buenos Aires folks) to the afterlife. Drongomala "For me Eternal City is a love story to Buenos Aires by Sergio and throws light on not only the characters of this grand city but provides the city itself with a face too showing the different districts, landmarks and buildings."

Musicos

Drongomala - voice

Carlos Corrales (bandoneón)

Juan Pablo Navarro (Double Bass)

Jorge Savelon (Percussion and Drums)

Matías Chapiro (Acoustic Piano)

Victor Alejandro Piseta (Spanish Guitar)

Guillermo Barbera (Trumpet)

Jorge Soldera (chorus)

Oscar Margariño (Recording Engineer)

Producer - Drongomala

All songs written by Drongomala except "Exploto Mientras Trato De Ser Alguien" (Blowin´Up Tryin´To Be Someboday) - by Drongomala & Jorge Soldera, with arrangement by Carlos Corrales.

Arrangements - Jorge Soldera & Drongomala

Translations - Paula Tizzano (with additional translations by Jorge Soldera and Patricia Zaina)

Recorded In Estudio Moebius , Buenos Aires, Argentina May 2010

Artwork by Sergio Carrera

Almas Buenas - Drongomala -Lanzamiento 20th Oct 2010 (Español)

2010-08-24T09:45:00.025+01:00

Blog in English

Almas Buenas (Good Souls) - Lanzamiento- 20th Oct 2010 - es el fruto de un mes de trabajo en Buenos Aires de Drongomala junto con algunos de los más exquisitos artistas del tango, el folclore y el jazz. El proyecto muestra al grupo tocando con nuevos arreglos latinos algunas canciones del catalogo de Drongomalaque abarca el material en la India, Grecia, Reino Unido y EE.UU..

Pre-Producción: El proyecto fue ambicioso desde el principio. Después de un viaje de 2 meses por América Latina Drongomala contaba con 11 canciones candidatas traducidas por la reconocida traductora argentina Paula Tizzano. Después de viajar por Brasil, Ecuador, Perú,Bolivia y Chile afinando sus oídos, el corazón y la mente a América Latina y a una cultura de habla española, Drongomala se estableció en el porteño barrio de Almagro en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. La elección de Almagro tenía dos razones, el hecho de que esta parte de la ciudad ha sido y es aún la casa espiritual (Barrio) del tango y por otro lado que allì se encuentra un club de boxeo legendario. Drongomala empezó una rutina de entrenamiento en boxeo durante 2 horas cada mañana y comenzó la búsqueda de un equipo de músicos que colaboraran en este trabajo. Rápidamente al principio de su estadía fue presentado a Jorge Soldera quien después de una serie de reuniones se convirtió en el mentor integral del proyecto. Jorge se comprometió a la tarea de elegir los músicos y trabajar en las canciones durante la pre-producción para darle a los arreglos una influencia latina. Drongomala y Jorge trabajaron muy intensamente en el mes previo a la grabación.

Ensayos: Drongomala tuvo la suerte de contar con legendarios mùsicos de prestigio internacional del tango como Carlos Corrales y Juan Pablo Navarro, y luminarias estrellas en ascenso como Matías Chapiro (piano acústico), Víctor Piseta (guitarra española) y Jorge Savelon (percusión / batería) . Un arreglo especial para el tema "Exploto Mientras Trato Ser Alguien", fueescrito por Carlos Corrales e interpretado con Bandoneón.

Grabación + Mezcla: La grabación de este proyecto se realizó en vivo en la sala de uno de los estudios de grabación más prestigiosos de Argentina, el Estudio Moebius.

Moebius es reconocido en América Latina por su especialización en Tango y grabaciones acústicas. Las grabaciones fueron todas realizadas en toma directa durante un período de 3 días. La mayoría de las canciones fueron capturadas en las dos primeras tomas para lograr mantener una energía excitante. Una vez terminada la grabación se llevaron a cabo las mezclas por el experimentado ingeniero Oscar Margariños quien fue el diseñador técnico del proyecto.
Oscar Magariños es un reconocido ingeniero que comenzó su carrera en Argentina en la época de las grabaciones análogas en cinta.Trabajó en los estudios más importantes y es un gran especialistas en tomas acústicas. Entre los artistas más importantes que le confiaron sus grabaciones y mezclas podemos citar a: Rubén Rada ,Osvaldo Fatoruzo ,Estela Rsval, Los Nocheros, Miguel Abuelo, Oscar Kreimer y Mario Parmisano entre otros.

Sobre Moebio: Moebio es una de las mejores salas de estudio de grabación deArgentina especialmente diseñada por el ingeniero acústico Carlos Piriz, reconocida en toda América Latina como un ideal para la grabación de proyectos acústicos.

Por su sala han pasado los más grandes artístas de los últimos tiempos, entre ellos Mercedes Sosa, el guitarrista y compositor Juan Falú, el músico Luis Salinas, el violinista, compositor y director de orquesta Antonio Agri, Soda Stereo, Fito Paez, Luis Alberto Spinetta, La Camerata Bariloche, allí se grabó el histórico álbum “200 años de Música Argentina” de la Orquesta Sinfónica de Salta, y otras muchas orquestas, ya que la calidad de audio que se obtiene en este estudio es comentada por muchos como insuperable.

Arte de tapa: Yuxtaposicionando la naturaleza clásica de lainstrumentación Drongomala eligió un dibujante de cómics y novela gráfica en ascenso, Sergio Carrera, para realizar el trabajo de arte para el disco. Conoció a Sergio a través de una novela gráfica en iPhone titulada "La Ciudad Eterna", la cual cuenta la historia de un agente de la muerte que escolta fallecidos porteños (ciudadanos de Buenos Aires) hacia la otra vida. Drongomala ha dicho "Para mí Ciudad Eterna es una historia de amor a Buenos Aires por Sergio y arroja luz no sólo sobre los personajes de esta gran ciudad, sino que ofrece a la misma ciudad con un rostro propio mostrando los diferentes barrios, monumentos y edificios".

Musicos

Drongomala - voz
Carlos Corrales (bandoneón)
Juan Pablo Navarro (contrabajo)
Jorge Savelon (Percusión y batería)
Matías Chapiro (Piano acústico)
Victor Alejandro Piseta (Guitarra española)
Guillermo Barbera (Trompeta)
Jorge Soldera (coros)
Oscar Margariño (Ingeniero de grabación)

Productor - Drongomala
Todas las canciones escritas y compuestas por Drongomala excepto "Exploto Mientras Trato De Ser Alguien" (Blowin´Up Tryin´To Be Someboday) - por Drongomala & Jorge Soldera, con arreglos de Carlos Corrales.
Arreglos- Jorge Soldera & Drongomala
Traducciones - Paula Tizzano (con traducciones/versiones adicionales de Jorge Soldera y Patricia Zaina)
Grabado en Estudio Moebius , Buenos Aires, Argentina Mayo de 2010
Arte de tapa por Sergio Carrera
Copyright: © Copyright 2010 Flying Mountain Productions

Goodbye Anoop

2010-07-14T10:21:00.014+01:00

This recording is in memory of my good friend Anoop who was lost on 13th May 2009. (listen on Soundcloud)

The Deccan Herald in India reported it like this:

35-year-old man from Kerala was found dead on the railway tracks here on Wednesday. The Railway police are yet unable to ascertain if it was case of an accident or a suicide.

The train ran over Anup Adityan, a native of Thrissur in Kerala between the Elagi and Anekal Railway stations in Byapanahalli division limits.

He had booked two private bus tickets from Sangli to Bangalore, and from Bangalore to Thrissur. “It is not clear what he was doing on

the railway tracks. His family members have arrived in the City to collect the body,” said a top GRP official. The post-mortem was completed at Bowring Hospital on Thursday afternoon. The accident would have taken place around 9.30 am, the sources said.

Adityan had just completed his education in London and was keen on setting up an old age home in Bangalore, police added.

It doesn't tell you anything much about him. He was a bright soul with a good heart but a troubled mind. We mostly talked about art and politics and his indexing of facts and figures was close to photographic memory ability. Up until I met him I hadn't known Carnatic classical music much beyond one or two names. Anoop opened me up to the richness of the South of India and her traditions when most of what I was listening to was from the Northern tradition of Hindustani.

He set me up with the musicians for this recording which took place around 10 years back. It was with a young singer who went by Vamsi Das (Vamshikrishna Vishnudas) and had a wonderful tone and authority in his voice beyond his years. The songs were a mixture of light classical and folk tunes. We recorded on my mobile setup in the living room and hall of a semi in Maidenhead, England, UK and got the whole record done in a day.

Afterwards when I went to Kerala to record Scale is was he who provided me with contacts and information to insulate the impact of trying to run a studio in the middle of the jungle. He put his name on the line for the crazy foreigner.

The last time I saw him we were lying on the grass looking up at the stars during a suprise warm night for Manchester.

He left his book called 'An Encyclopedia of Symbols' that night.

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Edinburgh, Magrite and how the cover of 'Garden With You' came to be

2010-06-24T17:10:00.024+01:00

As a teenager I mostly grew up in Cowdenbeath and Dunfermline and would always be excited when I could somehow get across the Forth Rail Bridge to see Edinburgh the capital of Scotland.

Over the years I developed regular haunts and one of them I indulged regularly was a visit to the Modern Art Gallery in Edinburgh. The collections didn't change a huge amount but I just liked the building, the setting and the mood it put me in when I was there. I

was/am big on the surrealists and they had plenty of good content in that direction.

Time passed since then and in May of this year (2010) I was experimenting with different ideas for imagery for a single I was completing. I was in Argentina recording another album and was completing the artwork and remixes for this other single - '(When You Go You Take The) Garden With You'.

As the single was a dance single I thought that I could try a geometric idea and keep it simple in the way the imagery of electronic dance music often translates the music maths of sine waves and frequencies to their artwork.

I thought of a green triangle simply communicating the pubis of a woman but it was boring when mocked up and the idea had been done before. Then I thought of cutting out grass in the shape of a triangle and slowly the idea developed and crystalli

sed when I remembered a wonderful painting by Magrite (Belgian surrealist with a penchant for bowler hats) that used to hang in the back room of the Edinburgh Modern Art Museum. Using the painting as a launchpad I had the specification below for the artist that was going to work on bringing the idea to life.

Here is the mail I sent to the artist....

Specification for 'Garden With You' Cover Art

The song title is a reference to a womans body as a garden - specifically her vagina/pubis. The idea for the cover is to have a picture frame shaped like a womans hips and the picture frame to contain green grass with one triangle cut out (like a womans pubic hair shape) showing the brown soil underneath.

There is famous painting by a surrealist Magritte called La Représentation (1937) that used a picture frame shaped like a womans hips and it would be good to use this shape (not the actual frame) for the picture frame.

I have done a very rough mockup in photoshop to give you an idea but I do not consider it to be anywhere close to a finished piece because :

The picture frame is not shown squarely i.e. I used the photo which shows the frame at an angle. I have not taken the frame shape and created a new frame. A new frame shape is needed not a photograph using wood or branches for the frame
The grass is not attractive enough (I used quick stock footage photo) and is in much too low a resolution. The grass should be rich, green, natural and shown from an aerial view.
The soil is not rich and warm or complementary to the colour of the grass. The triangle should look like it has been cut out of the grass.- the pubis triangle shape could look more like a womans pubic hair
Proportions are not correct and the elements do not look like they belong in the same composition
It doesn't look sexual or erotic

It should be immediately clear to viewers that the picture is a representation of a womans hips and pubis using grass/soil and natural elements.

And this is what Santiago Carosella managed to come back with exceeding my expectations by some margin.

Single is available now directly from drongomala.com and also available from iTunes and other online shops around July/Aug 2010.

More exciting artwork coming for Almas Buenas, a record recently finished in Buenos Aires due out later in the UK summer.

Sergio Carrera (graphic artist) interview (in Spanish) during Almas Buen...

2010-06-08T21:42:00.000+01:00

Matías Chapiro (piano) Interview (in Spanish) during recording of Almas ...

2010-06-08T17:24:00.000+01:00

Carlos Corrales (Bandoneón) profile during Almas Buenas Recording 2.mov

2010-06-08T11:07:00.000+01:00

Juan Pablo Navarro Interview (in Spanish) during Almas Buenas Recording

2010-06-07T20:26:00.000+01:00

The little things I will and won´t miss about Buenos Aires, Argentina

2010-05-24T19:44:00.018+01:00

Things I´ll miss about Buenos Aires, in no particular order, and without reference to the typical tourist sights..............

Things I´ll miss

Smart taxi drivers who can engage about music, politics or anything else.
Empanadas
Bullshit conversations about Maradonna
Malbec
Meeting up in apartments around 11pm before going out and drinking wine mixed with coke. This is often the most fun part of the night and is revered by Porteños
Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad dubbed in Spanish
Old people sitting outside cafes watching the world go by
T-shirt slogans in English with broken grammar
Cheap beer
Small children walking about in Lab Coats
The Soldera family
Steak - Bife de Lomo
The modern art
Acerbic political satire
Spanish terms of endearment for your girlfriend
The sense of drama that fills the city
Fileteado- the distinctive porteño artwork
Friendly people - it´s such a misconception that Porteños are aloof
The graphic artists
Almagro Boxing Club
Being in a context where I can use Spanish
The lack of obvious class distinction
The horse and cart men (and their family) that collect recycling at 2 in the morning
Second rate jugglers operating in the road at traffic lights.
Views of the city from the 12th floor
The cyan blue of the Argentinian flag
The mashup of architecture styles - like Paris/Italy crossed with a noir Batman movie
Great second hand clothes shops
Mastery of ice-cream
A common dislike of Maggie Thatcher
The blend of South American and European culture - it´s just right.
Kissing on the cheek when you meet
Waking up late and going to bed late
Clapped out American saloon cars from the 70´s
Coffee obsessions
Pharmacies that will give you almost anything without prescription
Choripàn (sausage in bread)
How the streets look in the rain
Hearing tango on the Radio
Dulce de Leche (milky caramel syrup for all kinds of cake, ice cream)
The musicians
Not seeing the 2010 World cup here...I leave just before it starts
Morcilla (black pudding)
The Argentine version of Spanish (Castillian) - I like how it doesn´t have all the ´htth´sounds
Cheap massages and service industry (legit I mean!)
San Telmo bars and markets
Getting a bag of laundry done for 1.50UK
Palermo
Black market stalls
British theme bars that play the Stone Roses all night.

Things I won´t miss

Dog mess on the streets
The never-ending noise of the streets through the whole night and the public service vehicle sirens that sound like Commodore 64 SID chips through a distortion pedal
Lack of really spicy food
Obsession with Grunge music from the 90´s among men aged 25 and over
Natty 2 peso notes and shopkeepers that are unhappy that you don´t have the correct change
Cash machines with a low limit for withdrawals per day
Seat belts in cabs that don´t work

Please do comment and leave your own slant on what you will or won´t miss about this city!

Gracias
A-D

Autumn, Ephedrine and Rolling Tape

2010-05-21T18:14:00.028+01:00

Recording is complete for Almas Buenas. I know I am a lucky man to have had the idea grow over 5 months and for it to flower like this.

The idea for the record was simple: take songs from my back catalogue that lend themselves to different styles of Latin Arrangements, sing them in Spanish and record acoustic musicians live.

I wanted the recording for Almas Buenas to be completely live with a whole group playing in unison as it is a romantic and dangerous thing to do and if done right then this magic translates into what is recorded. Unless you have top quality musicians this approach can end in chaos and the truth is that most records are made using a sucession of overdubs because it is simply easier to do and runs less risk.

The studio, Moebio, is a mythical place not listed on many maps or findable on the internet due to the slightly eccentric nature of the owner but is a hidden home for acoustic recordings for those in the know. It is one of the finest studio rooms in Argentina specially designed by Carlos Piriz - an acoustic engineer recognized throughout Latin America as one of the best.

Some of the greatest artists of recent times have recorded in this room, including Mercedes Sosa, the guitarist and composer Juan Falu, the guitarist Luis Salinas, the violinist, composer and conductor Antonio Agri, Soda Stereo, Fito Paez, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Charly García, La Camerata Bariloche. The historic album "200 Years of Argentina Music" by the Salta Symphony Orchestra, was also undertaken in Moebio.

The change to Autumn in Buenos Aires caught me by surprise and three days before the recording and I foolishly left a window open at night in my bedroom which saw me waking up with a cold and lots of nose gunk. Thankfully Jorge had a special remedy including Ephedrine which instantly cleared my head but it was strong stuff.

Oscar Magariños, came recommeded as a recording sound engineer for the project, by Jorge, and it was Oscar that suggested Moebio Studios to record. Oscar had prepped the room before with layouts and microphones so when we arrived things were smooth and enginnering effort invisible to the performers which is the way it should be.

The musicians arrived and gelled very quickly. The double bass player had been changed at the last minute and was replaced by the legendary Juan Pablo Navarro who, until the sessions, hadn´t worked with any of the other musicians on the songs. Juan´s calibre was such that this didn´t matter and he anchored the rhythm and the music perfectly. Carlos Corrales on bandoneon proved to be a focal point for the group due to his outstanding musicality and charisma.

Jorge Soldera conducted the arrangements in the centre of the room and for separation I sang from the control booth.

Monday
We only had the bandoneon and piano player for one day but we managed to get all six songs they featured on recorded.

As some songs had many mid frequencies to deal with from bandoneon, guitar, piano, voice and percussion it was useful that the piano in the studio had been chosen especially to have a dark tonal quality allowing it so sit alongside some of the brighter instruments. It was a ´tango piano´. Matias Chapiro, a young pianist and composer, played extremely sensitively and framed the songs with an inspired touch.

The day was finished off with an eyeball to eyeball tango performance by Carlos and myself. Jorge and I had reworked the song Blowin´ Up Tryin´ 2B Somebody (Exploto Mientras Trato Ser Alguien) into a completely new tango variant and Carlos had written a new arrangement for it. It was a great honour for me to have Carlos undertake this arrangement as he is one of the most famous bandoneon players working in the world today with performances and credits across the world. The first time I heard the new arrangement was at the session and after a trial run we managed to get synchronicity with an explosive take. One of the tricks of tango is that it is not in strict time and the performers are expected to push and pull the timing to suit the mood. One final thing about Carlos - he used to box in the same club I have been going to in Almagro. Perfecto.

Sergio Carrera the graphic artist also came down to the session to do photo studies of the musicians for his album artwork composition.

Tuesday
Focus was on the guitar led tracks and with only two remaining we manged to get through them fine along with one or two percussion overdubs. The track Don´t Get All Stuck (No Te Dejes Atrapar) was electrifying. There are tonnes of words for this track and during preproduction we had to move the tempo down from 115bpm to 112bpm so I could blurt them all out successfully. However during the recording the flamenco style had the musicians excited and we did a version even higher than 115bpm. Victor Piseta, on spanish guitar, dazzled with his virtuoso playing inspired by Paco de Lucia and Astor Piazzolla. Victor´s current direction is primarily folklorico with Duo Matices although he has also toured with the trio, Guitarras de Fuego, and recorded as a solo guitar artist. There are big things to come for Victor.

Wednesday
Vocals. Ephedrine. Honey. Lemon. Spanish language Gods were looking down on me on this day.

Thursday
Trumpet track for Let the Credits Roll (Que Pasen los Créditos). This track needed a muted trumpet to give it a New Orleans funeral procession inkeeping with the sentiment of the song. I wrote this song a few years ago after my band The Good Hurt broke up.

Patricia Zania, a BsAs fashionista, took photos and video footage leading up to and during the recording. I hope to get some of it edited and translated back in London.

Thursday night was strange. My whole calendar had been focussed around this record and it was only after finishing at the studio that I realised I would be leaving in a week. The mixing will be done over the next few days and before I know it I´ll be back in London.

At least my girl and the sun will be there :)

Round 2 - Buenas Almas

2010-05-10T16:21:00.007+01:00

Round 2 of pre-production for the record Almas Buenas (Good Souls) begins this week. All songs have been demo´d with new arrangements and given to the musicians. Jorge Soldera is the producer and co-arranger for this record and I couldn´t have been luckier in choosing him to mentor me through the project and music scene here. Jorge has extensive experience in most forms of Latin music and has worked with some of the big names in Argentina. Importantly, he has a big heart and great ear not to mention his list of contacts which he used to put together a great bunch of musicians which we will begin rehearsing with today. The record will be recorded live which makes the project more difficult but I hope it will give it the edge of drama I am looking for. We record on the 17th-20th of this month. Jorge is also coaching me on my singing in Spanish and his patience is the kind that people attribute to Saints. His lovely wife and family also look after me and feed me as I am never out of their place.

The artwork for Almas Buenas will be done by the rising comics star Sergio Martín Carrera who is most known for his graphic novel The Eternal City which is set in Buenos Aires. It is available on iTunes/Android and will soon be put out in a compendium print in Spanish. It is a story of a reluctant agent of Death who escorts expired Porteños (Buenos Aires folks) to the afterlife. For me Eternal City is a love story to Buenos Aires by Sergio and throws light on not only the characters of the grand city but provides the city with a face too showing the different districts, landmarks and buildings. I went out for drinks with him and his friends the other night and it was great fun and before I knew it I found myself p*ssed at 6am staggering into a cab in San Telmo. They were a smart bunch and gave me great insights and anecdotes about life in the city. The lead character in The Eternal City was based on one of Sergio´s friends who was also out drinking with us and it was odd to have a sense of accelearted familiarity with him as he talked, stood or sat in positions echoing the scenes in the novel - almost like meeting Peter Parker or Wolverine.

My boxing continues and after some rounds of anti-inflammatories my back has settled down meaning I can get through the sessions without agony in the last hour. I will miss the club when I go. Sparring exercises with people who don´t speak English always have the extra element of danger and I can see the look in their eyes saying ´Does he know what we are meant to do and is there is going to be an accident?´.

My house-disco song (When You Go You Take The) Garden With You will be complete by the end of this week and I am really happy with it. All final mixes for Garden With You have been done. There are two main mixes and two remixes. Track listing is :

Main Mix by UK´s Glen Nicholls who has worked with Prodigy, Bee Gees, Depeche Mode and a host of others.

Alternate Mix by Arimaka aka Manuel Jiminez from Los Angeles who has worked with the likes of Madonna.

Dub Mix by Emiliano Gomez from Argentina at the DubSalon - a rising star of dub.

Sleeping on the Couch Mix by Boofa. A dark electro mix by this NZ multi-media artist who is the other half of the 12000 Miles album.

The artwork is also underway which promises to be something special and hopefully a little risqué .

One singer that Jorge has inroduced me to is the legendary Argentinian singer Mercedes Sosa. Unfortunately she died last year but left a massive legacy behind. Some say that if the soil of Latin America could sing that it would have her voice and I tend to believe it. Her last album was a series of duets with some of the most famous musicians in Latin America and the record was called Cantora (a double album also featuring a documentary). The position she holds in Argentina is a little like the position that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan holds in Pakistan which is of a statesman that helped give the country a musical, philosophical and cultural cornerstone. She was much feared by the repressive government in Argentina and many times had to flee for her life. I reccomend you check her out.

The fixit guy

2010-04-26T22:56:00.006+01:00

Today was a full day.

Boxing as usual. The weekends excesses became evident an hour into the session. A few new faces. My back a bit sore after the session as I used mitts and not full gloves when on the bag.

Next up off to a Spanish lesson - I'm 5 mins late and blame Google instead of correctly blaming myself for not leaving enough time for the walk. I meet the teacher who has got the script that I want to do an hour of song pronunciation and an hour of conversation. We kiss and I notice that as she pulls away she has a spodge of the the coldsore cream I have been using on her cheek. Oops. The lesson is good and we spend 1 hour and 40 mins on the songs and 20 minutes on cartoons. I get homework on the differences between men and women and thankfully her hair has rubbed off most of the cream by the end of the lesson.

Next stop is a fixit guy recommended by my translator. Every record I have done abroad (India, Greece, USA, Egypt) needs a fixit guy to sort out musicians, schedules, studios and make sure I don't get ripped off too much as a foreigner. They are a crucial Rosetta Stone when you are airdropped into a music scene. We talk for a whole two hours with his wife helping translate. He is connected and has worked on a tonne of stuff from classic bossa nova, ambient Michael Jackson Tributes right through to electronic gay tango. They are both good people and he loans me an old nylon guitar. He will get back to me once he sounds out the musicians. Hooray for some movement on personnel.

I get back to the apartment and notice that the billboard across the road, visible from my balcony, with naked calendar ladies around the piano has been replaced by a Harlem Globetrotters poster for their showbiz jaunt at Luna Park.

Some Skyping, practise songs, dinner and then do most of homework late taking a little evil pleasure in giving some controversial answers.

The condor has landed...

2010-04-23T17:09:00.009+01:00

After a two month tour of Latin America I have now settled in an apartment in Buenos Aires in the Almagro area. I will be here for 5-6 weeks rehearsing and building up to a Spanish language recording of some of my songs from the past 8 albums as well as some new ones.

There is a lot to do not least of which is finding the musicians that can play on the recording and help me bend some of the arrangements to have a more latin feel and punctuation. I am looking for three key players to work with me : a piano player, a flamenco guitarist and a bandoneón player. The bandoneón is the accordian variant favoured by tango players.

My girlfriend leaves tomorrow and the project rehearsal will begin in earnest. In order to keep my ying and yang balanced I've already joined the oldest boxing club in Buenos Aires and have been going for the past 4 days or so. The place is wonderful and full of atmosphere, history and sweat and I am the only gringo there which suits me fine. I chose to live in Almagro because of the Almagro boxing club , which my lyric translator and B.A guru advised me of, and as it is only 3 minutes away it allows me to start the morning with gusto. Almagro isn't one of the tourist barrios (barrio is the term used for a district) but it is perfectly located to get anywhere in the city. Tango's home is said to be in Almagro and the Carlos Gardel (poster boy for tango) museum is in the Abasto section of Almagro.

Lots of work needed from me....singing in Spanish, morphing songs into Flamenco rhythms will be a head bender, getting the tango-like punctuations and pushing beats on thirds of beats is all new to me. Wish me 'suerte'.

I'll try and keep this diary regular.

Other music news : multiple mixes of my house track 'Garden With You' should be ready in a few weeks!

Drongomala, Sinik and Tree by The Good Hurt

2010-01-08T16:00:00.001Z

Drongomala, Sinik & Tree by The Good Hurt by drongomala

Going Ape at the Natural History Museum

2009-12-10T14:20:00.005Z

We had fun going around the Natural History Museum in London recently. There was only one really bad adverse reaction during the day when a chav spat on me in Brick Lane.

This isn't fancy dress it's context jamming y'all.

See the whole set on Flickr

Image by drongomala via Flickr

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Death of a friend

2009-07-03T13:58:00.004+01:00

I feel compelled to write a little eulogy for my friend who committed suicide - he was found dead on some train tracks in Bangalore a few days ago.

I could hardly believe the mail when I read it but in truth I wasn’t surprised as over the past few years he had went from not being contactable to sending distressing mails to his whole address book. These mails talked of accounting for sins and the mistakes he had made in this life. After some digging I found out that he was on psychosis medication and he had moved back from the UK to India where he was living with his parents.

I first met him in the UK when we were working together on tech projects. He was from Kerala and we soon became friends as a result of our common love of South Indian Carnatic classical music. He was a Brahmin and had clearly been well educated. I remember him telling me how he used to enter quizzes in order to get money for university. He said he was a ‘professional quiz competitor’ and he did well due to his photographic memory. He was erudite on tonnes of topics, unafraid of controversial statements and awkward situations and to top it off he was really funny with it. His grasp of English was better than most English native speakers. He used to tell me I was prone to hyperbole ;)

He hooked me up with a number of musicians in the UK and I recorded a light classical/folk album for him with some leading lights in the UK scene. We did it in his friends living room and it was a great experience. I really must release it.

When I mentioned that I was looking to go out to India to do some music for a few years it was him who advised me to “go to Kerala as it will be safer for you – you won’t be ripped off or hassled as much” He was right. He even helped me with connections in customs in order to be able to take a tonne of music equipment into the country. He opened up his friends in Kerala to me and was very generous indeed.

The last time I physically saw him was when he visited my place in Manchester. He was clutching a book on Symbols and we hung out in the garden under the night sky talking about the stars and life. He told me about how he was sad that the arranged marriage he was due to be involved in fell through. He discussed how difficult it had been living in the UK and that would return to India. He forgot his book of Symbols the next morning and it’s on my bookshelf today.

Near the end he had became obsessed with a variety of cults and suspect philosophies. He was lost to nearly all. I miss him.

RIP

Michael Jackson Is Dead

2009-06-26T00:13:00.009+01:00

I thought he was great and wondrous and it's a shame to see him go but it's for the best.

He was mawkish in extremis at the end.

All the newspapers announcing his death are running the reanimated mummy look he had over these past 10 or so years. It was a cardiac arrest that killed him.

The period I feel in love with Michael Jackson and his music was Off The Wall. I found it on a copied cassette tape in the street and played it over and over. I even bought the songbook to practise the songs on keyboard.

He was utterly funky, wild and sensual then.

His voice was as raw as James Brown when he was 10 or 11. He could wail like no one and his falsetto stretched into the heavens. Girls loved Off The Wall in the way they love Stevie Wonder records.

Poor Mikey - he was a sauvant of a gospel-like spirit. He was as innocent as he seemed.

As the White Crane Flies

2009-05-26T09:03:00.014+01:00

12000 miles’ debut album As the White Crane Flies is out now. You can buy it from the Flying Mountain shop for now - it will be on iTunes and other places soon.

12000 miles is the silicone egg brainchild of Boofa and myself. After meeting online in 2005 we decided to work on a project together and 12000 miles was born.

12000 miles is the distance between drongomala (Manchester, UK) and Boofa (Wellington, Aotearoa).

AS THE WHITE CRANE FLIES is three years of bouncing ﬁles through cyberspace, winters and summers.

12000 Miles have played ‘in analogue’ once in Manchester in 2007. Also guesting is the stellar flutist Iain Dixon of Manchester.

The Story...
Drongomala and Boofa met by chance on myspace in 2005 - they stumbled on each other’s music and dug what they heard. Drongomala was already 4 albums and six bands into his experimental musical path and Boofa was just finding his footing making simple yet provocative down beat electro. There was a natural alchemical connection that both D and B felt, they decided to work on a track together which soon turned into an idea for an album.

Keeping the demo files ‘low weight’ in the beginning allowed the pair to bounce whole suites of changes back and forth across the net. As the tracks developed then so did the size of the audio and midi files and eventually the pair moved from using Reason and a common-soundbank to Ableton Live and audio.

“We really challenged each other sonically and ended up with something that we could never have made alone. The overall sound is something that we came to by experimenting and doing things that we weren’t doing on our solo stuff. By exchanging files over the net, each session was open to the other completely ripping the material apart, so in a Buddhist styley we couldn’t become to attached to any material or ideas, just two takes each of sonic experimentation” Boofa.

The file exchange cycle became longer and the pair survived a band splitting up, 2 breakins, released three other records between them, started a t-shirt company and a degree in music, moved house 4 times and much else but they still managed to ‘tag’ one another over the two years with the developing demos. Boofa flew to his home town of London to see friends and family and made the trip up to Manchester where Drongomala and Boofa spent 6 short days working their 20 or so demos into a manageable live set for the 5th day in Manchester at the alternative Glastonbury event put on in Manchester’s Green room.

The set was raw and well received and the real life collaboration cemented the original connection that the pair made. After Boofa left the UK back to Wellington NZ the guys got to honing the material for an album, but what started off as an idea of 6 months max for a finished album turned into two years.

Drongomala got the auteur wind player Iain Dixon to come in and play flute over the material to cement the feeling of air and wings in the album. This was the second record that Drongomala has done with him and he says of Iain:

“I can’t rate him highly enough - he’s a master wind player. He is Macbeth and Puck in the same breath and regularly only needs to gentlest of nods to click into constant motion. I say ‘Cranes attacking Pygmies on the beach’ and that’s what comes out of the horn/flute/clarinet. A proper conjurer like a musician should be. Iain also turned down a Van Morrison tour just before he recorded with us which is a fun detail” Drongomala.

D & B then reworked the original material remotely - the music melted together and produced an expansive sonic landscape. The crane mojo was at work.

The album is quite different to anything that’s out there at the moment. It’s dynamics are almost operatic with some tracks sounding like a dropped pylon cable in a timpani section while others are gentle and conciliatory. As an album it is more than the sum of it’s parts - the spell doesn’t seem to break.

Don't take our word for it - listen now !

As The White Crane Flies by 12000 Miles

Bill Drummond and The17 - Northampton Fish Market

2009-03-16T10:49:00.061Z

On Saturday I took part in a performance in Northampton, England of the17 organised by Bill Drummond. It began in the Northampton Fish Market Gallery.

Bill Drummond is an art agitator in the UK that has been involved in a number of psychologically challenging projects (burning a million quid, taking an effigy of Elvis to the north Pole) and has a musical history that began with his management of Echo and the Bunnymen which he then left to form his own band - The KLF. Check out more about Bill here. His main output appears to be writing now but one of his ongoing music projects is a 'post nuclear' choir where Bill imagines that all music has dissapeared and we begin again from year zero.

What is The 17?

Bill has some simple manifesto posters that he uses to explain it - I don't need to paraphrase

Having read Bills book about this project it prompted me to check out this event which was only an hours drive from where we were. As ever, leaving the house with my girlfriend can sometimes take longer than preferred and we left ourselves with 20 mins to get to Northampton fish market to register. Only the 1st one hundred people were to be allowed to register and take part. We broke the speed limit and got there to discover that the Northampton Fishmarket Gallery wasn't so busy and we were numbers 7+8 on the registration form. My agitation at missing out dissipated but my girlfriends agitation at my agitation took a little longer to leave.

The gallery was big and open. We had some nibbles, a cider and waited. I bought a nice artwork made by cutting out paper. It showed a sad man with his feet dangling over a hole and at the bottom of this hole in the forest there was a red heart. All cut out of paper on yellow, black and one splash of red. We watched the mechanical pigeon on the rafters drop out it's fake poo periodically and people slowly assembled.

Awards for top three outfits
1. The lady with a Vivienne Westwood stylings replete with bright red '17 t-shirt' and red hair.
2. The denim jacket with "Bring me noise!" in primal white daubs from a big brush
3. The chique Nouvelle Vague t-shirt. I bought their record recently after trying on a tweed suit in Scotland and in some ways this was the most punk thing to wear to such an event. Nouvelle Vague are a band that 'do' classic songs from dark 80's rock bands like Echo and the Bunneymen and further, do it in a latin lounge style with a succession of singers that never jump out but merely smoulder in the background. It's a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. It's the ultimate anti-the17 statement here.

The Surround Score
My girlfriend and me were taking part in a score called 'Surround'. The full version of SURROUND will be performed in Beijing, China in August 2009 - we were at the English trial-run.

Rather than use notation for scores Bill uses the everyman approach of plain text to describe how the choir should perform each score.

The idea in Northampton was to position 100 people around the streets of Northampton at intervals of 40-50m around a 5 kilometre circumference of a circle. Each spot was marked by a spray painted 17 logo on the pavement/wall/pole.

The score was to pass on a throaty shout descending to the note A from note C around the circle 5 times among the 100 people. The complication of having each 10th person begin the shout simultaneously and then pass it on clockwise was jettisoned when the logistical difficulty of having them notified at the same time became tricky. I guess that would need either a firework or 10 mobile phones calling another 10 mobiles of every 10th participant.

Quickly it was opted to have it begin with one person who would get a phone call to start.

We got Bills inspiring intro to the concept and the piece Surround and he got us all to practise the 'Hey Ho' shout so we were confident. It had to be loud as not everyone had line of sight with one another. My girlfriend was relieved she didn't have to sing 'professionally' or know what the note of C was but I was a bit disappointed that the only post-music expression I could input would be the volume or character of my shout. Other scores have called for chanting, free utterances or meditation on skylarks ascending. No matter.

100+ of us trooped out of the fishmarket following Bill.

Each person was dropped off at their point. I wangled to get us dropped off early as I needed a pee and spotted an early 17 in spray paint outside a working mans club. A photographer took shots of everyones foot next to their spray painted 17 but mine was on a wall and I was full of pee so they had to take one of my face for safety. Being dropped off early meant there was time to kill until the other 85 people had trooped the 5km and been dropped off. We hung about and got to know our new neighbours dotted behind and in front of us. Ten minutes later the bloke near me decided to abandon his post as he needed to get his bus. This was a bit of frustration as the magic line and number had been broken. Bill was obsessive about there being exactly 100 otherwise it 'wouldn't work'. I spoke to our line and said to ask passers by.

This stand-in job is a difficult sell to someone in 2 mins and I got a variety of responses including

I'll do it if your girlfriend up the road there gives me head (from someone on the way to see their girlfriend)
I'll do it - I'm just away home to get my Elvis costume
How much will I get paid?

One of the girls two numbers up the line managed to call a friend and get her down. She would be here in 10 minutes.

Passers by in cars were hooting and noticing the pattern of people on the street. It was fun in the build up.

The replacement member of the 17 choir arrived 4 seconds before we had to do our thing. Destiny called out and we were not found wanting.

We all shouted 'hey ho' five times to one another and passed our energy around the circle. Shout number 3 seemed to be far too quick after shout number 2 and I susepct that a mis-fire happened somewhere along the line.

We trooped back to the Fishmarket Gallery to get our photo taken - drunkards from the pub were shooed out of the shot which would be only of the 100 with the photo being displayed on the wall of the gallery. I'm the one with the coffee cup and glasses.

Thoughts on my 'the17'

I love the concept but not the one I was in. The realisation of the score didn't touch on the new concepts of music I was hoping it would. I wanted a less mechanised shout and something that could evolve further and go deeper.
The 'piece' was too short. Short burst versions of the17 (i.e. less than 3-4 minutes) don't prompt the participants to reveal more of themselves to one another. This score didn't require anything other than good natured but ultimately distant participation.
The group camaraderie was fun - there are definitely not enough reasons for small dynamic groups to bond and have a connection - this project has this shared experience at its core
For most of the other Scores Bill did an audio recording of the event and then played it back at the end. Importantly, for Bill, the recordings were always deleted when the participants had heard it only once - the only remnant being in memories or Bills book notes. For events that didn't take place in the same temporal timeframe (i.e. recording 4 different schools on four different days) he collated and layered them on top of one another for playback and subsequent deletion. I would have liked to have seen an attempt to record our piece - it could have been done on a) our mobile phones b) an omni directional from a silent helicopter or kite;) or c) from 5 or 6 strategically positioned mics. I miss the ceremony of playback and deletion that the book pimped.

At the end of the piece I said a quick Hello to Bill and told him I'd mail him about Electroraga.

Check out the17.org, take part, challenge your thoughts about music.

"Bill Drummonds fundamentalism is the roar of the universe - lang may his lum reek."

Drongomala

Online Music Collaborations (Part 2)

2009-02-28T18:46:00.019Z

I'm coming to the end of a musical collaboration with my initially online and now real-life friend Boofa (from Wellington, New Zealand).

We began our collaboration '12000 Miles as the White Crane Flys' in 2005 and met via MySpace and it's only now that this record is finally at the stage where the last mix is being done - three years later!

In between I've finished three other records and it's now time to write the Part 2 of the blog on online music collaborations (see part 1 here)

Boofa and I have learned alot during the collaboration and I thought I'd share a little bit of it with you.

It seems that the collaboration we did had a few distinct phases to it :

1. Flurry of ideas : this was the beginning phase where we threw lots of files back and forth. This is easily the most 'fun' section and it's exciting to get regular musical deliveries in your inbox. We were careful not to use any proprietary software so that what we heard was the same. We used the out of the box Ableton Live software with no 3rd party plugins...just what came with the software.

2. Flesh on lots of bones : We had around 15 tracks in a very basic state and this phase was to put some more work into them. The way we approached it was to take half the tracks each and spend more time trying to develop the ideas.

3. Switch: We swapped the tracks with each other and did a little more each.

4. Agree on the tracks to jettison: we both produced a top 10 list. We only had one or two disagreements but were easily solved.

5. Hook up : Boofa came over to the UK and he stayed at my place. He arrived with a big beard and a massive neon suitcase. It was great to meet up. My band was playing and we used it as an excuse to test some of the 12000 material on a live audience. We hooked up some midi controllers and practiced performing the tracks as they were. We only had a day to prep and then perform in the night.

6. Taking the candidates to the next level : over the lifetime of the recording we discussed the concept we were looking to hang the album on - it was something to help us understand what we were doing. We came up with the idea of Cranes and both liked the metaphor of our files thrown back and forth being like some sort of migratory birds flocking between Manchester and Wellington. I had been working with Iain Dixon the legendary flute player from Manchester and it struck me that nothing would communicate birds wings on the air better than a flute. I popped round to Ians with a laptop and recorded him playing to what we had. His single takes for each track added a super useful navigational tool to lead us to the final arrangement. I did a bunch of editing and once I was demented with the sound of flute I threw the tracks over to Boofa. At this stage file sizes were beginning to swell so DVD's were used to send data.

7. Some crackhead broke into my place and nicked my laptops. This was a setback and Boofa worked on the tracks adding calm and coherence. I moved house/town a few times in between before settling and getting more recording gear.

8. The final furlong : Mix time. By far this was the most difficult phase of the project and I think this is where Boofa and me had the most disagreements. In retrospect this is understandable as mixing is often a matter of taste and the final 'render' of the tracks is something that we both had a vision on. This is the one part of the process that I think would have been better sitting next to one another - we got there but not without some blood on the tracks.

But all the time and pain dissipated - we both feel it sounds great. It was worth the 100 transfers, the fights and the frustration. It'll be available in April ;)

In Summary..

Don't be too precious - whole tracks, complete mixes, great performances are all subject to your partners opinion. Keep your eye on the prize and let some bits you care about hit the cutting floor.
Credit the collaboration equally - writing and arranging and mixing. Even if one of you did more than the other for a track or the whole thing breaking it down into who did bit 'x' will only lead to bad blood.
Have patience. Life gets in the way when you are working on a big project that is online. If you are trying to make something that is timeless then it doesn't ultimately matter how long it takes....if you are trying to make something that is 'now' then perhaps online isn't the best approach for a big project
Don't use the tracks you are working on for some other reason without consulting your collaborator

Tools Used
Here is a list of tools we used for our online music collaboration. I've listed them in the order that we used them....

Ableton DAW software - this was he workhorse of our tracks. Can't recommend highly enough. I notice that now we are finished Ableton have announced new collaboration features. Three years too late for the benefit of this project though.
www.yousendit.com - this is a great free service that allows you to exchange large files
www.skype.com -when it's all getting to be a bit too impersonal it's nice to do a video call and shoot the breeze. Keep it human.
Google Documents - we used this for track notes and developing the text for the album cover. Google docs is a great service - don't be fooled by the tag 'Beta' as it's been in use for years
www.soundcloud.com - This is a great tool and worth even a basic subscription. This online service allows you to upload tracks and exchange mixes with one another. The best feature is that you can see the waveform of the track and click anywhere to make a timed comment. This allows for simple exact commenting such as "that cymbal sounds wack"

Don't let them tell you it's all Gloom

2009-02-18T20:59:00.003Z

All is Calm?

2008-12-05T15:42:00.005Z

Dear Reader,

Hoping you are having a good December so far!?

I'd like to invite you to download, for free, my version of Silent Night.

Silent Night - mp3 version

This version of Silent Night was recorded when I was living in Kerala for 2 years recording with Carnatic musicians. When I recorded it the backdrop was the unfolding US policy as a result of 9/11 and it seems all these years later there are still problems all over the world.

Recently in Bombay there were terror attacks and there still continues to be demonisation of whole ethnic groups on all sides across the world. This track, from the album 100 Fields, was made with 2 Hindus, 2 Christians, 2 Muslims, 1 agnostic, 1 spiritualist and a Drongomala - it's easy to make music really.

The track Silent Night will be free to download from this blog post or from www.drongomala.com all through Dec 08 until 2009. A notably wonderful Veena part played by Biju is a must listen on this track.

Drongomala : vocals, acoustic guitar and arrangements.
Balu - mridangham
A.R. Biju : veena
Jon Thorne : double bass
Ian Holmes-Lewis : percussion
Sanjay/Merlin/Lenoy/Sandra/Ramesh/Sujith - choir

"NOW AVAILABLE TO BUY!" (iTunes, CDBaby, FM)
Album Title : 100 Fields

Artist : Drongomala

Catalogue : FMCDA003

Label : Flying Mountain

For more information

Visit us at: www.drongomala.com

Email : silentnight@flyingmountain.co.uk

Louis Oak Anderson - Up North in the Coalshed

2008-04-11T13:00:00.010+01:00

Drongomala on Louis: At a stag party up on the Scottish island of Jura a friend of mine played me some demo tracks by Louis 'Oak' Anderson that he wanted me to hear (the island of Jura was where the KLF burned a million pounds).

I liked Louis’ fragile voice and it reminded me of the tightrope romance of Tindersticks. I ended up producing this EP for him and was lucky enough to get Iain Dixon on flute. Iain's Flute runs from Macbeth to Puck and he does things like turn down touring with Van Morrison. Iain has played with artists as diverse as Joni Mitchel and Primal Scream and is a leading light in the UK jazz scene.

I sang harmony to Louis and played ‘gypsy’ percussion on pizza boxes and Oxo canisters. I produced it using old BBC ribbon microphones for that warmth and natural sound.

The first mixes were ready. This was in 2006 and then the master tapes were stolen by a skaghead in Salford, Manchester.

I've finally managed to recover the sessions and mix it a couple of years later. Louis' voice has the sound of loss, anger and tenderness. His insistent metronomic guitar pushes the music forward yet the sound remains relaxed. Louis has a car boot full of songs and these are just the ones I wanted him to record.

The songs on this EP are predominantly about people and the simple lyrics delicately capture moments in his life. Louis’ mobile phone messages to me often says he's moving into a new caravan soon and he’s always heartbroken about a girl. When he came to Manchester to meet me it was the furthest North he’d ever been.

It's was done Up North In the Coalshed
Drongomala, April 2008

Available at Gigs Now - in iTunes in May 2008'ish.

We're doing a gig this w/e in Devon to mini-launch it.

EP: Up North in the Coalshed

Artist: Louis Oak Anderson

Flying Mountain Records FMCDA005
songs written by Louis Oak Anderson
arranged and produed by Drongomala
louis website: http://www.myspce.com/louisoakanderson

louis oak anderson - voice and guitar, Ian Dixon - flute and clarinet, Drongomala - voice and percussion

genre: true folk
sounds a bit like: Incredible String Band, Nick Drake
check it: Ian Dixon has played with Primal Scream and turned down Van Morrison and is featured on another release we have coming up in the summer 2008 - 12000 Miles as the White Crane Flies

Mr Suicide

2007-09-16T01:56:00.001+01:00

In memory of my band The Good Hurt splitting up I searched for some iconic Greek imagery to commemorate it.

This is much better - it's Mr Suicide. Stick him in your bath tub and when you are done pull his lifeless plastic body out and watch the dirty water dissapear.

Allet.

All Together Now

2007-06-26T20:56:00.000+01:00

A blogworthy week of music events in the lead up to the Flying Mountain Extravaganza gig on Friday 22nd June at the Green Room Manchester............with The Good Hurt as the house band.

Monday 18th June
Get a text from rapper Brother Ghazi that's he's pulling out of the show on Friday because he's seeing family in Liverpool. I texted him back the one word "sucky" - he'd known about this gig for over a month and a half - it's even on his myspace gig list. Text is a copout for a cancellation. Mail some more back and forth with Pauline from the Manchester Sing Out choir. One of the members expressed an interest in doing something with me having checked out my other music and I've tentatively suggested that they come down on Friday. The recently performed with Gorillaz when they were in Manchester. Great stuff.

Tuesday 19th June
Get a call from rapper The What Supreme saying he was pulling out of the gig on Friday. At least it was a call rather than a text however cancellations 3 days before a show really leave me icky - posters, mailouts and promo were now all wrong and the time spent by the band rehearsing a few extra pieces of music for rappers could have been spent elsewhere. This leaves no rappers for the rap portion of the Friday night's show - so that's now skratched. I make some phone calls to some of the other musicians playing on the night just to make sure they were good. The idea of the show is that The Good Hurt will invite a load of guests up to play with us. I keep calling it the alternative Glastonbury.

My e-friend Boofa (aka Beaufugg aka Generik) is coming up from London tonight. Boofa lives in NZ and we worked on a project called '12000 miles as the Crane Flies' which was an electronic music project that we had collaborated on over the internet (see my previous post on collaborative workingLINK). Boofa was coming over to the UK and he factored some time into coming and hooking up in Manchester so that we could finish the project in a face to face capacity - Wellington, NZ is 12,000 miles from North Manchester, UK which is how we arrived on the name of the project.

I check out Cranes on the internet for inspiration and the more I read the more I liked the idea of Crane lore being a visual cue for our sonics.....some crane lore and facts below that I dig from the research :

Migrating cranes fly in an echelon, a V-formation, so that birds following the leader save energy by not having to push aside the air as they fly
Apollo is said to have disguised himself as a crane when on visits to the mortal world.
Homer told of the nation of Pygmies who each Spring would wage war on the cranes on the banks of Oceanus.
Mercury is said to have been inspired to create the shapes of the Roman alphabet after watching Cranes and their body shapes.
When a flock of Cranes are sleeping they nominate one Crane to stand watch with a stone in it's talon/claw so that if it falls asleep the stone will fall and make a sound so the flock will know they are no longer protected

Boofa and me will be playing an electro set of the 12000 project on the night - it's a handy bit of pressure to get us cracking this week.

I meet him and his lime green suitcase full of gear at the Tram station in Eccles in the early evening. We quickly get down to work after a delightful home-made curry. As I had been liberated of my laptops by oiks from Salford we weren't sure which versions of the files I had for the project but luckily after a quick check on Boofa's machine things were in order and I seemed to have the latest.

I've been lucky that the people I've met from the net for music have been normal/human/semi-sane and Boofa was no exception which was a good thing. I was glad he was here.

Wednesday 20th June 2007
Boofa and me get down to some jamming during the day and Phil Reed the flute player turns up to do a session for the 12000 Project in the afternoon. For V-Formation Phil does a cool trick of playing 2 flutes at once which looks like a V shape - we dig it. The soundcard is acting like a muppet and keeps putting digital fizz and crackle on the audio so we only manage to get some chunks that aren't wrecked. Phil puts on the jam session in Chorlton known as Extraordinary Rendition. Before we know it we have to go to the soundcheck for the Circus Rock show tonight at the Mint Lounge in Oldham Street. My girlfriend hears us on the Revolution Radio 96.2 station on the way in - hooray. Between you me and t'internet it took a lot of doing to get them to play us. During the soundcheck Pauline from the Sing Out Choir calls - they are in rehearsals and want to know some details - I try and tell her over the sound of drumkits and musicians lugging gear.

Thursday 21st June
Recording and prepping for the gig tomorrow with Boofa. All day from midday to 2am. Synchronised button pressing, knob twiddling and new styles of dancing are the order of the day.

The tracks that we have are : Tsuru, Before The Stone Drops, The Wisdom of Two, Mercury Alphabet, Cranes vs. Pygmies and V-Formation.

Friday 22nd June
Glastonbury is a festival of music and double mud this year it seems - at least our alternative Glasto is sans glow sticks and rain. Tonights gig is for Universal Promotions. I always tend to do a little something special for shows via Universal Promotions because I like the guy that runs it. He called me up a month ago to do something under the banner of Flying Mountain Records to draw together some of the more disparate music I'm involved in.

Pauline told me that maybe 6 or 7 people might turn up from the choir - at around 9:30pm twenty of them turn up. The staff from the Green Room are lovely and we manage to get a little practise room recently vacated by the Flamenco dance classes and get down to working on three of the tracks for 20 minutes.

It sounds wonderful with just the voices and guitar in the sweetly reverberant room. Everyone in the room gets proper tingles and I'm stoked to hear one of my tracks get the gospel treatment. The Manchester Sing Out Choir have a really good group unity feel about them and it's infectuous. As some of the choir are younger we manage to wangle getting the three songs that they are doing shoe-horned earlier into the night. We play Good Souls, Amazing Grace (my arrangement from 100 Fields) and U Got the Love by Candi Staton. The choir do their best to fit onto the stage and it goes down a treat with the audience but the fact is that the sound was better in the rehearsal room. Ce la Vie. The band we jumped in front of to squeeze in our gospel thang are pretty peeved and a few of them stromp about onstage with their little grey clouds and teeth set to 'crunch'. I say goodbye to the choir and buy a few of them a drink....I'm feeling pretty invincible and then around 30 mins later we play a blistering 4 song set with the Good Hurt - featuring Annette Gregory and Phil on Meet U in the Middle and then the core three of us (drongomala, sinik and tree) tear through Blowin Up Tryin 2B Somebody, Leave Ur Mind Where U Want to Pick It Up and Kick This Habit Of U - we pack our normal 40 minutes of energy into 10 minutes and the crowd really dig it. Sarah Evans follows us and does a oratory piece called 'Bisexual Speed Dating' which gives us a chance to set up the 12000 Project and to enjoy her freaking the room out with a blend of character performance, saucy wordage and defiant smoking. Even though the laptop was having a mini flakeout 20 minutes ago the electronic Drum 'n' Bass tinged 12000 Project set goes down perfectly and Boofa and me are stoked that we've pulled it off.

We hang out for the rest of the night - Tree jams along with the act on after the 12000 Project and Sinik b-boys to the turntablists. The Universal crowd are good and we have alot of repeat attendees from the last gig we played at here in the Green Room.

Finish up at around 4am.

Saturday
Boofa and me take a break and we go into town to hang out for a bit - to preempt the 'cabin fever' that is creeping in. We get some food in the café underneath the Buddhist centre in the Northern Quarter and some coffee from Nero where Boofa asks the waitress to "bake me a cake" in Polish. We have a super productive day and the tracks that didn't make the selection for live performance are worked up a little.

Sunday
Final day of tweaking for the 12000 Project - this is much less fun than the writing part but smoothing out the rough edges and the structrure of the music we've been working on lets us finally sit back and enjoy some mixes. We watch a bit of the Who at Glasto as they sing and almost hurry over the line "Hope I die before I get old".

that was the week that was
drongomala

One, two, three, four
Can I have a little more?
five, six, seven eight nine ten I love you.

A, B, C, D
Can I bring my friend to tea?
E, F, G H I J I love you.

Sail the ship, Chop the tree
Skip the rope, Look at me

All together now....

Black, white, green, red
Can I take my friend to bed?
Pink, brown, yellow orange and blue I love you

All together now....

Sail the ship, Jump the tree
Skip the rope, Look at me

All together now....(the beatles)

Timing In Video - lesson 1

2007-05-27T00:41:00.000+01:00

this is an perfectly timed little piece of reality TV....well snipped

Via: Flixya

Planet of the Apes 4Brains

2007-05-27T00:20:00.002+01:00

Recently I undertook a one-off concert with my band The Good Hurt where we themed the visual side of the show on the movie The Planet of the Apes. By that I mean we dressed up in white boiler suits and had a French VJ (Emmanuelle) broadcast and remix the original movie onto our clothes and faces while we performed. We had a few guests that day (Brother Ghazi, The What Supreme, Annette) and luckily they all came along and wore white too. I also played acoustic guitar rather than electric to give it that final postnuclear back to the basics feel;)

The concert was held in a little cafe place called the Koffee Pot in Manchester (just off Oldham Road) with a bring your own booze policy. The event was part of the Futuresonic 2007 festival and as the festival has a big emphasis on context, technology and video it became the excuse I needed to finally 'get down' with my obsession with Planet of the Apes' or more specifically - the thread between ape and man. I only need the slightest of pushes in this direction to get momentum and have often thought about the social truisms that might have sprung up round a shared fire by 'primitives' that went later with recorded records to become species behaviours and societies. Those bonobos bang the bongos too you know.....

In the film three astronauts survive a crash landing on an earth-like planet. Their last chance of contacting home disappearing under the waves. The first and last scenes bookend the film brilliantly and both, in essence, have a very similar theme of the frailty of man and his technology. The opening showing a wonderful piece of technology, a spaceship, sinking into an ocean while the last scene shows something of a similar nature - one of the most iconic statues made by man (Venus de Milo aside) shown half buried in the sand and revealing to the astronauts that they are in fact on planet earth albeit 2000 years into the future. It's a hell of an ending. The movie was adapted by Michael wilson and Rod Seling from the novel La Planete des singes. Rod Serling is better known for his work on the TV shorts The Twilight Zone and it was his genius in adding the last scene which did not exist in the book - eventually envied by the original novelist for the weight it adds to the story. Those two scenes are very powerful and encapsulate the film in a simple arc. The rise and fall of man and the cyclic nature of technology and more primatively....dominance.

MOVIECLIP HORSEBACK MANHUNT

I love this clip of the gorillas hunting down the primitive mute humans and the accidentally stranded astronauts horribly caught up with the hunt. The use of the camera by the gorillas in the scene after the hunt is priceless too as they stand with their feet on the human spoils and laugh. It's proper chilling. The Gorillas clad in leather military outfits on horseback hunt down humans using tools such as nets and guns to a soundtrack of alarmed brass instruments and strings. 2000 years in the future and apes have domesticated the horse and replicated one of man greatest achievements, along with guns and cameras.

The 'mastering' of the horse was so fundamental in getting the really 'big wheels' of our recent globalism started. Historians and archaelogists have suggested the domestication of horses by humans first took place in the Ukraine at approximately 4000BC. The use of horses by this early Indo-European culture shows in the rapid spread of the Kurgan culture and the ease with which it dominated over Pre Indo European cultures. Communications, speed and force were all on the side of cultures who had dominated the horse. Persian Emperors commanded their empire more coherently than their earlier counterparts of Assyrian and earlier still Mesopotamian cultures. Responding to an uprising or a rebellion was much easier with the use of horses to firstly hear about the uprising and secondly to send troops on horseback to quell it.

The humans on this future version of earth are dumb creatures and easily dominated by the apes - used for sport and labour. They are taken back to ape city and they are subjected to experiments. Charlton Heston, who plays the lead man, is subjected to court rulings by the variety of lead monkeys and women. The logic against man and his barbarity, or apparent barbarity as the humans see it, is argued over by the chimps, organutans and gorillas in a complex social discourse not too unsimilar to our own.

In a Science article, Carel van Schaik reports observing geographic variations in orang-utan behaviour that could be considered culture. In her study, van Schaik outlined the characteristics of culture into four sub-sections:

1. labels, "where food preferences or predator recognition are socially induced,"
2. signals, socially transmitted vocalizations or displays,
3. skills, innovations like tool use that are learned by the group, and
4. symbols, "probably derived from signal variants that became membership badges of the social unit or population."

Not all anthropologists agree with this but I do as a punter. Whales haven't been rearranging sea algae in to multiple alphabets and concocting large dialogues between them selves about the existential sense of whale and monkeys are still primitive and habitat focussed in their signage to one another. Today, for the most part, only humans have all four elements of 'culture', but chimpanzees and, now, orangutans have been observed to exhibit the first three.

"The presence in orangutans of humanlike skill (material) culture pushes back its origin in the hominoid lineage to about 14 million years ago, when the orangutan and African ape clades last shared a common ancestor, rather than to the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans," says van Schaik.

In the flip world of planet of the Apes there is a fully developed set of symbols that operate among the chimps, orang-utans and gorillas. Symbols on archtiecture, on clothing and externalisation of self is everywhere. Not only do apes rule and act in a rich manner they have a class system encompassing the main families of ape.

The gorilla police, military, and labourers;
The orang-utan administrators, theologians, and politicians;
The chimpanzee scientists, intellectuals and workers.

Each of the ape groups has a wonderful style of clothing that identifies them and their social place/rank. I've even checked out the possibility of getting clothing as used in the movie but it's limited to ex Hollywood stock at very high prices on E-bay and crap generic monkey masks masquerading as legitimate film related merchandise. It's a blend of leather and cloth and the colours are so deliciously 1960's that any one of the outfits are on my top 10 bits of clothing to get. Chimps are green, Orang-utans are orange and the Gorillas are purple.

Humans, who cannot talk, are considered to be "less than ape" and as such are treated like cattle for sport and experimentation. The arrival of the astronauts who can talk throws ape society into disarray and the majority of the apes, especially the gorilla's, want to eradicate the humans...some chimps however take pity on the humans and seek to know more about the phenomenon and to know more fully where and 'when' they came from.

Many animals have been observed using tools: Dolphins use sponges when fishing, crows use sticks to forage for insects in dead wood, capuchin monkeys use stones to break open nuts.Researchers can learn about chimpanzee "culture" by tracking nut-cracking behavior. Cracking nuts is no easy feat, and it can take a chimpanzee up to seven years to learn how to do it correctly. The technology is passed from generation to generation and diffuses across populations. Knowledge is a virus, language is a virus as real as any forest fire or ocean swelling.

Zaius, the Orang-utan and eminent scientist soon discovers Taylor's ability to talk and puts him on trial when he tries to escape. After the trial, he is taken to see Dr. Zaius, who threatens to emasculate and lobotomize him if he doesn't tell the "truth" about where he came from. But Cornelius and Zira (the leading chimp synpathisers) execute a plan to free Taylor.

They flee to the Forbidden Zone - not a million miles away from the idea of a Twilight Zone - a place where anything could happen and you must expect the unexpected. As a destination - you know that the Forbidden Zone is going to be the shiz - the name makes it such desirable as location. The forbidden zones of our own society can often educate and not always for the good. Apes of today have a sense of the forbidden in social protocol with regards food, shelter, and reproduction rights but they are more really rules - no great lore and story associated with it. In the movie Cornelius, the chimpanzee, aracheologist and historian had a year ago visited the Forbidden Zone and found human artifacts there and they return to find out the series of events that led to man losing earth through nuclear war. The story of mans fall and apes rise is played out to them in the forbidden zone and the final sign shown that he has travelled to the future and witness to a horrible fate. That statue of liberty covered up to her chest in sand.

The concepts in the film aren't exactly that oblique and the apes become surrogates for examining human behaviour - not only the treatment of animals by humans but the dynamic between humans themselves. The backdrop for the movie being made in the 1968 was the cold war as examined by the long haired hippies.

The dramatic climax near the end of the movie when Cornelius reads directly from the Sacred Scrolls at the now-captured Dr. Zaius' request : Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.

MOVIECLIP of DR ZAIUS SPEECH

The advent of tool making has always been a double edged sword as far as 'progress' goes. It is thought that shards or flakes from the use of stones to crack open nuts were the first flints or knives and knives can be used for cutting food or taking out your neighbour. Nuclear power has this duality too - cheap and simple power production intertwined with the horrible bomb.

The movie was recently 're imagined' by Tim Burton however it just doesn't' seem to hold the same gravitas with me. The original with it's stark sets and simplistic approach is much more Shakespearian (helped by Roddy McDowall - arguably the lead chimp). The production in it's limited budget and techniques is almosyt theatre-like and emphasises the drama and the philosophical questions at stake much better than the overblown remake.

The original reminds me of a great book I read by James Morrow called 'This Is the Way The World Ends' where the dead hold a trial in the Antarctic of the six remaining living and those directly and indirectly responsible for the nuclear war that ravaged the earth.

You have been warmed....

Drongomala

The Good Hurt

2007-03-23T10:22:00.000Z

Kick This Habit of You

My new band The Good Hurt was formed in Manchester late in 2006. We're now playing live in the NW England and it is about time that I dropped a little blog about how the band got together and who is in it and all o' that.

I was wanting to get a live band on the go again - I had been a digi-producer doing mostly hiphop and electronica with a variety of poeple in the UK and I wanted the live feedback of a band setup. The first addition to the group was Sinik. Sinik is a b-boy and DJ who also does photography and film and we first met when he filmed my improvisational Fusion project ElectroRaga He began filming at 6am, took punches for me and worked his way through the 4 concerts in one day right up until the Midnight concert in the Red Light Area in Manchester. The ElectroRaga day was an outrageous event and because we hung so tough on that day we had an immediate bond - they call him The Sinik but I call him by the less snappy title of Romantic Realist.

Sinik is proper quirky and rotates having pink, purple and red streaks in his hair along with some sort of bi-polar happy/sad mania. He adores Devo and The Pixies a scary amount and has some seriously enviable knowledge of funk and hip-hop.

Before forming The Good Hurt with me Sinik played a little bit of guitar but owing to our reduced numbers (2) he had to play bass guitar and a few months later and his natural groove is unencumbered as he runs over the frets like his knuckles and knees used to do on lino. It's a beautiful thing.

We quickly began to demo stuff as a two piece and began working on a set - a mix of my songs and songs that we co-wrote the music for. I don't tend to sing other peoples lyrics as I get psychological problems with it;)

Here are some links/downloads of our little two piece demos that we did at the time. This blog/podcast is the only place that these demo's are available so feel free to download/share.

We really wanted a drummer and after some searching on various bulletin boards and myspace we were lucky enough to find Tree. He's 17 but he plays like he's been living out of a transit and rocking it for years beyond his age. The first rehearsal was great and we knew he was 'the one'. Tree got stuck right into the mix and our dynamics opened up deliciously - the set grew and we managed to turn from roar to whisper in a heartbeat. Tree plays all the time and does some pretty avante garde projects on the side including Carcophony which he'll be putting on at Glastonbury. It's a large military jeep customised with loads of drums and a PA that Tree and another drummer rock out in and on top of. It's something else alright.

After our first gig Caroline from All FM asked us if we could do a live spot for her show Funky Drive which we were happy to as it gave birth to our acoustic set. You can hear the audio of it here or by clicking on her pic - we play four tracks and chat a bit about current events aswell as some avante either or pop quiz questioning..

When we got enough jams together and after we had played another couple of gigs we decided to record a demo. We do it at Sankeys Soap. We did it live and in a day because it was cheap and we wanted to get the energy of some first takes on tape to match the excitement we were having in rehearsals. Dave Thomas engineereed and mixed it.

We recorded 4 tracks and called the EP Prescription No 1.

Kick This Habit Of You
Spinning Plates
Do It Every Night
Good Souls

A friend did the NHS style graphics for the artwork from a spec by Sinik and me.

Kick This Habit Of You is deliciously punk rock and Spinning Plates, which sounds a bit like early U2 aka Red Rocks period, saw us use the synths a bit more which were slowly creeping into the set and every song. In among the bluster Good Souls, a song I first wrote when I arrived in Manchester early 2006, showcases the band playing in a classic sensitive mould. The demo began to get us gigs no problem.

The Good Hurt don't contrive any sort of identity and instead we dig the challenge of breeding an eclectic yet coherent output. We're not a rock band, we're not a new-wave band, we're not a pop band - we're simply The Good Hurt.

Each live show gets better than the last and the set is slowly being honed into a missile that we are aiming at the UK music biz.

Please consider yourself introduced.

Drongomala

Get Prescription No 1 on iTunes (will open iTunes on yer comp)

Buy a Physical Copy from CDBaby (our Stateside distributor)

Pre Sleeping Beauty

2007-03-14T12:30:00.000Z

A sleeping beauty is always brought to life first in the eye of the beholder.

Gazing on a lover as they slumber.

Watching the seemingly endless calm

wash upon their brow

like waves on an empty moonlit beach.

The only coloured kid at school has had the

eyes of many stare onto her waking face.

Transporting their world on hers and

And now an attempted Romeo looks on solo

The spirit of this girl when she is awake could make mountains quake

and when asleep the tempers of a thousand giants keep.

She isn’t an example of Mother Nature she wears her very skirt

She moves between the Kings and the Madness and the Dirt

This power drawn by inverse engine of chaos and calm

her windmill grinds the gears and commands.

She is strident when she walks this world.

She entertains mosquitoes like she entertains fears

Those with the lucky eyes and ears

Can feel the magic and marvel at those who don’t understand it.

The stakes for a waking girl in this world are high

The challenges for men are many

Talk of morality in bars is easy.

She bears the fruit she is the harvest

Not one thing is wrong with her

Freckled nose twitching in repose

Hair lying delicately across a cheek

The hairspray can no longer keep

the sharp day up

and the warmth of her spreads out like a sunrise.

Kissing her on the lips is like particle generator

Placing your body and mind in paradise

Where you have no eyes to see it only your soul

She is always in and out of control

Her jaw is strong and soft

She always walks with her head aloft

Stars at her shoulder welcome her good morning and doff their heavy photon caps.

She is the horse the cart and the trap

She is Michael Angelo and the ceiling

She is every good feeling

Dawn together from different sides of the planet

She drags my heart to hers like a flesh magnet

Amazon woman captures my mind with her grace,

Gardens and dreams and planetary travel appear as a smile on her face.

Infinity refers to her eyes as an example

She is Adam and Eve and the apple

A Ragini Goddess cannot betray her roots

Her life astutely avoids the trivial pursuits.

The nature of man and woman is her work

Chemistry, bravery unexpected bliss,

Never ending belief in this.

There is no fork in the road only the meat

Your heart is only as big as you’ll allow it to be

Gazing with Imagery on sleeping Beauty

for Priyanka 8th Sept 2006

music enclosure : Good Souls by The Good Hurt

100 Fields - Each One Was a Jewel

2006-09-27T18:53:00.000+01:00

100 Fields

If ever I did a Zeitgeist Orchestra recording without knowing it fully at the time then it was definitely ‘100 Fields’. This record is now available (hear some) but here’s my story of where, who, what and why…

Somehow, somewhere I was drawn to black gospel music as manifest in America during a time where the tension was pulled tightest. I was drawn to the female gospel singers in particular – Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin.

It seemed to me that the solo singing was best done by the women and the harmony singing by the men and I’ve often wondered why that dynamic prevailed. My end thinking was that the women felt the blues double because they had two oppressors (albeit of a different nature) – whites and the chauvinisms of their own black men. When the women screamed about pain I’m guessing the men shut up. It's how I feel about what I hear. If you listen to some of those recordings by the great women in gospel they carry an authority that is very difficult for the men to match. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, for example, played electric guitar in a wild syncopated style long before Hendrix plugged in and she was Little Richards childhood idol. Not to mention her singing which had the chime of the dawn of time written all over it.

Check out her version of Down By The Riverside

I think I’m in awe of how the souls of black women were stretched during their horrible struggle in America – they sung like broken and beautiful birds and it’s just by luck that recording techniques were around to grasp one aspect of it.

The music in Scottish and Irish churches can be a real dirge…the reasons for this are complicated and possibly something to do with the weather and fields long since being settled but the singing in the Northern churches of the globe doesn’t feel like it’s made from cosmic stuff at all.

I was brought up in one of these kind of churches but because I loved music so much it became more difficult to connect the church with the magical and wonderous when the arts going inside were so leaden. I liked the long quiet bits with no singing where you could just lose yourself in your own thoughts. Church became boring for me and when I could I escaped it. I didn’t give up on it and music though and I looked to gospel music.

I worked back from Arethea Frankin and luckily I could see past the sound quality of some of the earliest works of Mahalia around the 1930’s. I was in a rock band at the time and it felt like no-one was screaming it out like these female gospel singers did way back. I sang along to their songs a lot. I didn't believe in the church that I'd been to but I believed in Mahalia's singing 100% and that felt like religion to me.

Since then I have a few other veins of devotional music that really do seem to touch on the sacred or the timeless for me. Mozart’s Requiem Masses, the Bulgarian folk laments, Indian devotional recordings. I often thought that these musics contained more of God than those somber Sunday masses.

Fast forward to my last days in India 2002 and I somehow decide to do some of my favourite gospel songs with a south Indian folk band - as a way to clear my head after the orchestrally demanding Scale. I don't consider myself to be a Christian or of any religion at this point in my life. In sync with me leaving India more than a year on since the 9/11 tragedies the landscape of the world was teetering with a divisive east west mentality. I still gave a shit about right and wrong however. I had an hours rehearsal with the singers beforehand and then we did the record live in no more than 2 takes for each song.

The recording was a wonderful magical thing and we all felt it in the room. Nearly all the denominations (athiests and 'music'ists included) were present by accident rather than design and the message is in the act of doing it in the first place. My frantic arrangements the night before worked and the musicians played with such soul that were were blessed no matter which lexicon you use.

I felt lucky that the thing even happened at all.

Now I'm putting it out and want to tour it. So naturally I've just had a quick look at the 'market'. Here's an example of one market (US Gospel) that this record will be thrust into and in truth it is in all and none of them. Anyways...

Gospel stations in america fall into three categrories...

southern only i.e. black only,
mixed meaning the country white style and the south style
those that are a little more loose with a definition of Christianity

I read some of the submission guidelines for all of these and it seems the religious sites have went to town on 'what's acceptable' for their gospel music playlist. As a safeguard and not to be swallowed by the madness I intentionally changed some of the songs to include Hindu detities and Buddhist and Muslim rivers - I was feeling more pluralist than simply Chritstian and such statements like my "This is a record that shouldn't be classified as Christian" will mean that a load of my Cd's will hit the bin straight away when they reach the US.

I want the debate and I'll be having it soon. Get on board. John Lennon isn't around so we need you.

I hope you enjoy it.

We hope to do a live concert in Wales using a Welsh Choir and Indian musicians conducted by Drongomala aka me during Nov 2006 - keep an eye on the website.

MORE INFORMATION AND BUY LINKS
100 Fields WebSite on Flying Mountain Records
100 Fields CD Baby Buy Link
100 Fields MySpace Site

Drongomala
www.drongomala.com

p.s. any animators want to have a pop at a video for one of the songs?

VIDEO : Bismillah Khan the great Shennai player dies

2006-08-22T09:34:00.001+01:00

I got a phone call yesterday from Greece to tell me that the great Shennai player from India, Ustad Bismillah Khan, had died of a heart attack. His health had been bad for a while and his playing had naturally reached it's peak a few years ago.

The gentle genius of Bismillah Khan is perhaps single handedly responsible for making Shehnai a famous classical instrument. Traditionally used to play music during marriages, Shehnai is the counterpart of south indian nadaswaram. It is also used to play music in temples.

Born in a small Bihar village in 1917, Ustad Bismillah learned shehnai from his uncle who used to play in the famous Vishwanath temple of Varanasi. He brought Shehnai to the center stage of indian music with his concert in the calcutta All India Music Conference in 1937. There was no looking back.

Ustad Bismillah Khan is the third classical musician after Pt Ravi Shankar and Smt M S Subbulakshmi to be awarded Bharath Rathna, the highest civilian honour in India. However even though he was well respected and used by the government as part of the Indian culture promo list he wasn't really kept in the manner he should have been and he even threatened to hand the award back if he didn't get a cheque....he got one eventually. Bismillah had the onus of feeding a hundred persons, ten sons included. He travelled across the world but didn’t like flying. In India he would mostly travel by train.

Bismillah had a retinue of 8-10 accompanists - quite a large number. He would travel to the railway station by cycle rickshaw, heading a caravan of 4 or 5, waving to familiar passersby, no less happy than a prince in a Rolls Royce! He was very well loved by the people and his healthy perspective and example on the overlap of being both Muslim and Hindu was well noted by the people.

I myself was touched by his playing and his rendition of Multani at the banks of the Ganges was what inspired the ElectroRaga Version of Multani recently in Manchester. You can hear me triggering and chopping his Shennai playing.

And here is the original performance that I took it from as hosted on Patrick Moutal's excellent website on Indian music.

This news of his death didn't make it to the UK newspapers or websites as far as I could see. Let us not forget this link with the old world of magic as handed to us in the form of Bismillah Khan. His kind are less every year.

Rest ye well.

Links
http://www.chembur.com/anecdotes/bismillah.htm
http://www.musicalnirvana.com/hindustani/bismillah_khan.html
http://blogpur.blogspot.com/2006/04/bismillah-khan-and-his-shehnai.html

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

VIDEO : HLI+Drongomala Sat12thAug - Birmingham

2006-08-16T15:49:00.000+01:00

Footage links below to the recent gig by HLI and Drongomala at the Rainbow, Digbeth in Birmingham. Footage has a blend of daytime messing around aswell. This was a fundraiser for earthquake victims. Camcorder quality sound.....H(B)ollywood please call.

Filmed by MiMi and edited by AntKnee

Part 1 - hanging out and rehearsing

Part 2 - ElectroRaga

Part 3 - Hi Diving

Part 4 - Homeward

Part 5 - Everything Is Gonna Be OK

Part 6 - Outro with Guest Juice Aleem, Sensei C doing street poetry and WuTheF*@! doing a ditty.

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

Newspaper Article: When Hoodies Attack (ElectroRaga)

2006-08-14T09:54:00.000+01:00

southmancreporter-electroraga attack
Originally uploaded by drongomala.

One of the local newspapers caught on to our little drama at the ElectroRaga dawn gig in Chorlton, Manchester.

Feel free to leave comments on their site....already the rights and wrongs of what we did is being debated....

The article is replete with misquotes and made up bits - I'm not complaining though as the hit count for the clip has went from 200 to 2000...I love the press - has Indian classical music ever been so rock and roll?!

FRESH NEWS : watch out for a video report of the hiphop gig with HLI in Birmingham this weekend - coming soon - yes it rocked hard.

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

ElectroRaga VIDEO : Malkauns (midnight) 23/7/06 Red Light Area, Manchester

2006-08-02T12:58:00.001+01:00

Malkauns is a dark brooding raga. PLayed late night. (see my article 'Robert Johnson, The Cross Roads and Malkauns)

This gig like the rest wasn't agreed.....thing is it wasn't the authorities we were worried about it was the lawless.....this one was in the red light district of Manchester. Watch out for a cameo by Mick Jagger.

ElectroRaga VIDEO : Yaman-Kalyan (evening) 22/07/06 St Anns Square

2006-08-02T12:50:00.000+01:00

Yaman Kalyan is an evening raga. We conspired to slip into St Ann's square and quickly setup as we didn't have permission to play. We hadn't counted on the security guards for the stalls nearby - our generator was freaking them out as a fire hazard and me out becuase it wasn't in the right shruti. Luckily we kept them at bay and managed to get going. Olly Farshi joins in on e-bow guitar.

Part 1

Part 2

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

ElectroRaga VIDEO : Multani (afternoon) 22/07/06 Castlefield

2006-08-02T12:25:00.000+01:00

The afternoon concert on the banks of a river....well Castlefield canal in this case...

Bismillah Khan and Ravi Shankar were the dons that I took inspiration from in this raga. Make sure you check out the extra cam footage which has better quality sound and some close up views..

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 - extra cam footage with better sound

or in hyperlinks
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 (extra-cam better sound)

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

ElectroRaga VIDEO : Bhairavi (dawn) 22/7/06 Chorlton Water Park

2006-07-31T16:14:00.000+01:00

The dawn concert...in a water park outside manchester....a blend of clubbers, the curious and some psychopaths are all drawn to the lake at 5 on a Saturday morning.....

Part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Part 3 of 3 Malkauns encore and fight

Bhairavi Part 1
Bhairavi Part 2
Malkauns Encore (and fight)

drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

ElectroRaga - from dawn till dusk and then some..

2006-07-23T10:34:00.000+01:00

Phew.....just woken up from Saturday's all dayer - 4 outdoor concerts in Manchester during the Futuresonic festival. The plan was to improv with people we'd never played with before - in locations and times to suit the ragas we'd be jamming on. It was to be :

Dawn (5am) Chorlton Water Park - Bhairavi raga
Afternoon (3pm) Castlefield - Multani raga
sunset (8:50pm) St Anns Square - Yaman-Kalyan raga
Midnight Portugal Street East (the red light district) - Malkauns raga

My reasons for doing this event were both simple and complex....

it's less hassle to have everyone just turn up and go for it rather than rehearse
it fits with my punk ethic of taking 'fusion' away from pious jos stick crowd and putting it in a context that people don't expect
using non trained musicians to mix it up with easterners
applying the raga time and location concepts used in Indian music to our new context of Manchester
to be a little irreverant with Indian classical music and musicians
cos it's romantic

Not one of the locations (except Castlefield) had been agreed with the council authorities or location owners because I didn't have the time and they would never agree leaving me stuck in treacle with the 'authorities' then knowing about my plans. That aint the Art of War script at all.

I did try negotiating the top of an NCP carpark for the sunset concert but after initial positive talks it was rejected - the guys wanted to measure out the number of car parking spaces we would take up (and work out a charge) in a car park that was permenantly half full.....I wasn't feeling it...even fallback positions of £200 to cover admin costs meant that I wasn't so bothered when they said - "no go cos of internal schmernals"

I wasn't too deterred and after a quick scope of the city we chose St Ann's square as the sunset spot. In the days leading up to the event I flyered Rusholme (the 'curry mile' as it's known) to much bemusement by local residents and shopkeepers. The HSS hire shop magically had lost my booking of a generator so Friday was a crazier run around than it needed to be.

On the Friday late afternoon I picked up the main melodic lead player from central bus station. He is a Carnatic (south indian classical) saxophone and mandolin player called E.R. Janardhan or otherwise known by the snappy title of 'Saxjana'. Trained in Chennai India by Kadri Gopalnath the musician who brought the saxophone into the lexicon of Indian music. He was coming from London and was arranged through my Keralan contacts in the UK.

We rehearsed in my living room on the Friday night and after some changes to the key/tonic/shruti to suit the saxophone (which was in Bb) we had some great fun playing around. SaxJana also plays a mean mandolin and other than U Srinivas there aren't many playing this instrument in Indian music.

Sinik (Tom Rochester) the guy that had been agreed to manage the filming of it turned up at 4am on the Saturday morning and we loaded the van and headed off. We met up with one of his friends, Abigail Merrick, from art college whom he had just graduated with. Tom had gotten the nickname Sinik from mates for his strong opinions but any man getting up at 3am to do a days worth of madness like ours could only be a romantic realist at worst.

The Sunrise Concert - Bhairavi
Bhairavi is one of the key ragas in Indian music. The ancient rules state that it must be played at dawn but because of it's popularity it is often played at the end of concerts to fit in with modern Indian lifestyles. The mini-paintings, called ragamala's, that are often associated with ragas tend to show Bhairavi as a woman worshipping a lingham/phallus/penis. It could well be representative of life-forces and rebirth but I guess it could also be quite literally have roots in 'morning glory'.

The main worries with pulling this concert off were :

- running a generator in a public park at 5 in the morning without permission
- being harassed by fishermen that we were disturbing
- not finding the back entrance to the park to avoid the security cameras
- nobody being there
- the park attendants or police being called

We didn't find the back entrance but the front seemed to be open so we decided to risk it and hurriedly unloaded the van near to the lake. The generator weighed a ton but we got it into the back of the tree's so that the trunks and leaves could deaden the sound a bit. It had been a dry couple of days so I tried not to entertain the thought of the generator going on fire and setting the wooded are of the park alight.

Daniel Weaver , from Manchester, the contemporary composer and performer turned up to play banjo. Daniel is a kindred spirit in the game of putting on 'event's or happenings that are a little bit outside the 'Night and Day' 30 minute indie set. Those that believe in magic have got to stick together these days.

People who had specifically come for the concert began to arrive aswell as some random punters that had been clubbing. Once we managed to convince some of the more hyped clubbers that there was no way we were going to play 'Girls' by Studio B and that I didn't want a pill we managed to begin our ElectroRaga version of Bhairavi. (I do like that Studio B track though;)

It went really well and my ideal of the birds and park waking up to the music happened just as I'd liked. The clubbers skinny dipped in the lake and everyone watched the widescreen view of Chorlton Park over the lake as we played. To come up with the idea and then to find myself in the middle of the situation playing the music and improvising was a real will to flower power moment.

After we finsihed the folks asked for one more....so we decided to play Malkauns (a dark midnight raga) as it's quite accessible. The bad supernatural forces were at work for Malkauns (read more about it during the midnight slot below) and during it I looked up to see a little oik with two sticks in his hand telling me to shut the music off now or else....he had a PCP style rage on him and he was desperate to fight somebody. Us and the clubbers were caught off-guard with his forced change of mood and he harssessed a few more people (male and female alike) before he was wrestled to the ground by some of the audience. In retrospect we should have thrown him in the lake.

After he was 'managed' he legged it to get his brother who he said had a gun. Little brothers always shoot off their pistols using the big brothers bullets ....Uh huh....it's Manchester so that could be true....we had done our thing and if we ever needed a sign of when to quit while you are ahead this little mentalist has been it.

The crowd helped us get the stuff into the van before the possible spectre of a cavalry from the schemes in Chorlton arriving and after quickly showing the video footage of the oik to the cops that had turned up we were ready to leave. Only one resident came down to complain about the noise - he explained that the lake was a natural amphitheatre and that it was echoing all around the place. I bit my lip and held back the temptation to mention that the lake basin and area was chosen specifically for that reason.

Verdict - big thumbs up, magic moments and an agrro ending

Castlefield 3pm - Multani - Afternoon Raga
My favourtie versions of Multani are by Ravi Shankar (sitar) and Bismillah Khan (shennai - reed instrument). It's an afternoon raga that is meant to be played on the banks of a river and I took inspiration from Bismillah's version which I have a great video for - he is on a boat in the Ganges with people on the riverbank. His son is also playing backup shennai and eventually began to take over many performances as his father aged. Multani is meant to have a solemn, compassionate mood.

Our Multani was taking place in Manchester and our bank of a River was the Castlefield Canal.

We were meant to have the keys to the old tourist centre meaning that it was our one legit gig but when we turned up it was locked and we couldn't get in contact with the organisers...no matter....we set up at the top of the steps - another perfect little amphitheatre again.

A mate of Sinik (Tom) called Tom Clancy who was filming turned up to help and looked spookily like my little brother....even his disposition aswell....luckily that meant he mucked in with the setup. The heat of the day was pretty intense and there wasn't much wind around....I was proper stewing in my own sweat and remembering the tropical heat of India.

This concert was just SaxJana and me and I really enjoyed this one. The PA was clear and we really managed to move back and forwards more comfortably. Musically I think this one was the most cohesive and it's a shame that the rallies and event in the middle of town had taken some bodies it's way instead of ours.

People on the banks of the hill lay and listened and some came up to the steps to watch and listen. I did a brisk trade in Scale Cd's and we had a little respite before the next raga at 8:50pm.

2 down 2 to go.

St Ann's Square, Manchester City Centre - Raga Yaman-Kalyan (Evening Raga)

Yaman-Kalyan raga or Yaman is one of the first ragas taught to students and is considered to be one of the grandest and most fundamental ragas in Hindustani music. The raga is an evening raga and we are trying to get some of the sunset thing happening here in Manchester. Some ragamala paintings use the image of a poet with vast knowledge of music and a voice that can change character like a cuckoo while other paintings and lore use lords in white garments on lion thrones with pearl necklaces through to simplistic brave noble minded hero figures.

Our security guys were here for this one - Colin and Tom (another Tom now making the count 3 in our stage crew or 5 if you count the SatNav in the van). I went to attempt to park the van in a carpark that didn't have a 6ft height restriction while the rest of the crew tried to find a spot to play. The Manchester Jazz festival had been using the square earlier in the day and there were empty tents and structures all over the place. I tried to get one of the security guards to let us use the stage but the mentality is a jobsworth one these days and there was no go. We got set up - the PA was starting to groan now and one of the speakers wasn't working.

Olly Farshi (in the hat) turned up to play e-bow guitar. It was the first time I'd met him. While he got up to speed on the scale I warded off the female security guard who was freaking out about our generator and whether we had written permission,.

We started the gig anyway. This one had a few hairy moments with the laptop seizing but I don't think it was noticeable. I was pleasantly surprised by Olly's playing having never heard him before we managed to get through a version. SaxJana played Sax.

We all went for a drink at a pub near Sinik's place. I could only drink one because I was driving. It must have lasted 10 seconds tops. We got talking to Colin and Tom - I know Colin through rapping as MC Bantam - he is an up and coming garage/hiphop MC and I'm doing a track with him as a return favour for helping out the nighttime session of Electroraga. They were both great crack and we laughed as we tried to forget the legistics and location of the next set - midnight in the red light area.

Midnight - Portugal Street East (Redlight Area) - Malkauns
Malkauns is a midnight raga said to have supernatural powers. Some musicians are fearful that playing it enourages connections with evil spirits. Ragamala paintings are filled with heroic lords taking pan (natural amphetamine) wearing a garland of skulls. Malkauns is a dark raga and I have written more in my article Robert Johnson, the Crossroads and Malkauns.

After the evening gig I felt like I was on the home straight right up until we got to the midnight gig area. We still had a mini mountain to climb and this gig was always going to be the most dodgy. Brother Ghazi the rapper who was going to spit some lyrics on Malkauns had sent me a text at 11:13 saying:

"Alright man. I'm at the gig location NW sat on concrete. Lots of cars going past, picking up hookers obviously. Gv us a ring wn u turn ur fne on man asap"

...poor Ghazi had been cruised as he waited - some old bloke had said that he looked 'warm'. If we hadn't turned up and got him in the back of the van at 11:50pm he might have legged it. During the day this place was rough but at night it had Sin City overtones that would crush the art-fopp in a hearbeat. Dark, dangerous corners....cars milling about with crazies doing the circuit, prostitutes working the street next to us.

I chose to set up at the loading bay of a disused warehouse - a natural stage of sorts. It was on a part of the polices circuit and low and behold a van came up near the end of us setting up. A policeman driving and a policewoman as passenger. I jumped to make sure I talked to them first. The woman was unhappy and I could see that she wanted to junk the whole thing and make us pack up. The guy seemed better though and I gave him my pitch that it would just take 10minutes and it was the fourth one in the day....I apoligised for giving him such weirdness on his shift and when I said thanks he nodded and drove on. I knew the woman was seething to be over-ruled like that. Thank god the fella must have feared the paperwork or something...

Sinik had sensibly brought some lights for this one and as we switched them on a car of five tough guys pulled up and started getting interested. I could see that our tough guys were getting a little uneasy and that me nervous. There was a load of camera and electronics that would go in the boot of any car or van if the person had the will to take it.

We got started - the PA was still sounding like shit but I decided it diidn't matter and that this gig was more punk than raga. This was Ghazzi's first or second experience of playing live and even though he got airborne a few times with the rap he choked a little. It didn't matter - I jumped up and sang something and then just kept making the music faster and faster until it was indeed the coat tails of the devil himself flapping in the wind. Boom it finished. Jana's mandolin playing was really good - broken riffs and real grit in the playing.

The tough guys in the car must have been freaked out a little becuase they didn' t make any weird comments afterwards or try and rush the mikes. Ghazzi went and kept them busy with some talk so they didn't think to call their mates with hardware and a van and we loaded the stuff into the back of our van.

Another police van came up, we had timed it to miss them when we were playing, and again I jumped to speak to them. I told them we were done and looking to get out of here. They didn't say a word and just looked at me in disbelief with an expression saying "you are insane to do this - get out of here and save yourselves"

The van was loaded and we had done it. My smile was in danger of splitting my face in two and we'd pulled the mad event off. My driving and concentration were a bit erratic but everyone got dropped off safely in the end.

Jana and me stayed up for a bit and talked musical revolution for a bit and then we crashed before he had to go at 7 in the morning back to London.

Did it all happen? Was it just a dream? ?Yes there could have been more people there but as Tony Wilson says - there was only 12 at the last supper and a few of them at the moonlanding.

Watch www.flyingmountainrecords.com or www.myspace.com/electroraga for more happenings, information and music. All photos on this blog by Tom Rochester.

We filmed the whole day and will put clips up on the Doctor Ongo Mala video site.

There may be a special BBC Asian Network show in the offing too.

That's how we do.

Finally - I hereby nominate Sat22nd July with ElectroRaga for the Turner prize.

Drongomala

Flying Mountain Present ELECTRORAGA:22nd Jul Manchester

2006-07-16T23:37:00.000+01:00

Flying Mountain present ElectroRaga in Manchester.

4 outdoors shows in one day - from dawn till dusk.

Saturday 22nd July.

5am (Chorlton Water Park)
3pm (Castlefield Visitors Centre)
8:50 (St Ann's Square)
Midnight (Behind Picadilly Station - Portugal Street)

Full details from the website.

It should be something special.

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

Guitar Amps Dream of Shifting Air Like a Flute

2006-07-14T16:07:00.001+01:00

Madness -this has sat in Drafts for 4 months...oops...

Just had a flute session for Louis Oak Anderson's EP due out this summer with the wonderful wind player Ian Dixon. Ian's played on all kinds of things from the BBC Radio Orchestra to Primal Scream and Joni Mitchell.

Ian was brought up in Lancashire and and after stints all over the UK and his current schedule doesn't look like his biog is slowing down. From the chats we had in the kitchen over my butchered coffee it turned out that he's producing and arranging all kinds of music.

My favourite sessions are always the ones that finish early because it means that all is flowing.

Louis is coming up to play Manchester on the 22nd July 2007 to play the Green Room. Check The Good Hurt Blog/Dates.

Birmingham O Birmingham

2006-06-18T12:10:00.000+01:00

A quick note just to big up the lyrical warriors and poetic messengers that stepped down from Birmingham to be part of the Zeitgesit Orchestra for Friday nights show with Broad Minded.

Wasif (The What Supreme - verbalist) and Tom (Sensei C - verbalist/clarinet) play out as the duo HLI (Headlighter Islanders) but like proper scenesters are involved in all kinds of activities. On Friday and Saturday they took their heat over to Manc for Drongomala and Flying Mountain.

The electroraga piece was a beautiful thing and everyone pushed themselves out into that jazzy primal scream therapy territory that is needed to pull off a 14 minute unrehearsed jam. HLI dropped their live set afterwards and the night couldn't hace been inaugurated better.

....on the Saturday we then dropped two jams in spooky electric (my studio). Ep in the summer sometime.

Big Up Wasif and Sensei C - the real spirit of hip-hop runs through these guys.

Drongomala

Billy Preston RIP

2006-06-07T12:46:00.000+01:00

The great singer-songwriter and performer Billy Preston, the "Fifth Beatle" has died after a long illness as a result of malignant hypertension that resulted in kidney failure and other complications. He dies in Arizona where he'd been in a coma for nearly a year.

Billy was menatuared by Ray Charles early in his life and went on to a play important roles in a number of important records. Billy played on Let It Be, The White Album and Abbey Road, he played a major role in Exile on Main Street by the Stones....AND was the organ player for Sly and the Family Stone. That's not all his credits but those alone are pretty heavyweight...

I've heard alot of Billy's playing but I haven't seen a whole lot of him playing on film. The one bit of footage I do know is the where the beatles are trying to make abbey road and there is alot of bad sniping going on between the fab four arguing like spoilt kids Then Billy comes in - boom the atmosphere changes and all of sudden the beatles get busy making music. Everyone is smiling ..the playing has improved..the Beatles want to impress Billy.....

Well done Billy Preston.
RIP

It's Strimmer Time

2006-05-31T15:11:00.000+01:00

It's a nightmare....if it's not power cuts in south india it's legions of people round about me with strimmers, trimmers and other engine drones...picked up perfectly by my lovely microphones...

It's like social ninjaism but this spring weather is making it doubly hard.....I hear a truck go by and then know my odds are good for the next three minutes....I suppose it gives an energy (or mania) to the performances;)

Oh the eutopia of a quiet environment.

right - that's my moan done...

Louis 'Oak' Anderson Session

2006-05-29T09:01:00.000+01:00

Hi there,

Just thought I'd drop a note about a two day session I had recently with the young singer/songwriter Louis 'Oak' Anderson from Devon.

On a stag weekend up North a few months ago a buddy of mine, Russell, played me some songs by Louis. They had worked in the same surf shop and both been fired from the shop and had remained friends. you know how it is people are always saying "you must hear this" but when I heard Louis I enjoyed it - particularly his strange voice. With the right development I thought...blah blah

So we began corresponding through email and phonecalls on a possible EP/Album for Flying Mountain. I wanted to do something acoustic with Louis rather than with a full band.

I'll let Louis tell you the story and the link below is to his myspace profile and blog on the session.

Louis Oak Anderson on Myspace

He has a quick mix of one of the tracks up there called Princess - played with a lovely £4 guitar. I helped out on harmonies. The final record will have a flute player we think.....still looking for them so if you are a flute player in Manc then get in touch..

Will keep you posted on this one.

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com
www.myspace.com/drongomala

Elemental by Elemental (aka Drongomala +4D) now on iTunes

2006-05-23T09:59:00.001+01:00

You wait for one bus and then they all appear at once....

People of Earth Elemental by Elemental (aka Drongomala+4D) is now on iTunes .

You can buy the whole record or do it track at a time.

Click the album cover below and it will open up your iTunes application (normal) - then you can preview tracks and buy.

Enjoy!

Drongomala

Take 10 mins and go and preview some of the album tracks that haven't been on the net until now including the poetic 'Bow Down Like a Prostitute' and the massive hiphop jam 'Countdown'.

Here's a freebie in the way of "When I Was Young"

Scale by Drongomala now available on iTunes

2006-05-18T15:46:00.000+01:00

Hi there - well it took a while but Scale by Drongomala is now on iTunes .

You can buy the whole record or do it track at a time.

Click the album cover below and it will open up your iTunes application (normal) - then you can preview tracks and buy.

Enjoy!

Drongomala

show your support - which now starts at 79p a track!

Hank Shocklee: Louder than a Bomb - interview by Jim Welte at mp3.com

2006-05-16T19:16:00.000+01:00

Thought I'd reprint this - cos Shocklee is the man...
it's from mp3.com

He has a new website launching soon at www.shocklee.com/

------

With a book and a sci-fi audio-visual project on the way, the creator of the Public Enemy sound is putting in work.

From the moment he sat down with MP3.com for a chat, it was clear that Hank Shocklee was ready to bring the noise.

As cofounder of Public Enemy and creator of the Bomb Squad beats that propelled dozens of sonic bombs, from "Fight the Power" and "Bring the Noise" to "Welcome to the Terrordome," Shocklee invented the sound that defined an era and served as the backdrop for Spike Lee's seminal Do the Right Thing.

Shocklee has been away from the game for a while, having served stints as a soundtrack producer (Juice, He Got Game) and a record exec (Universal)..

But that doesn't mean the 40-year-old Shocklee has retired from the game. He's just on a different vibe right now.

As head of Shocklee Entertainment, he's writing a book on the making of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, PE's second album that almost started a revolution.

He's also working on an audiovisual sci-fi project called Shocktronica, listening to lots of drum and bass and, not surprisingly, eschewing much of today's mainstream hip-hop. He also hasn't yet heard the latest album from Chuck D and company.

Here's MP3.com's lengthy interview with Hank Shocklee.

MP3.com: So, let's start off with talking about what you're up to these days. It sounds like you have a number of things cooking, one of which is the book about the making of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The album that defined PE's sound.

Hank Shocklee: Yeah, that's going very well right now. It'll be out next year. I'm approaching the book from a different angle, looking at the whole philosophy and reason for making the band, what everyone's role was and how the whole thing came together. It was different from any musical group on the planet.

MP3: How so?

HS: With PE, we got together as a DJ group, and when we crossed over into doing records, we adopted a whole new philosophy. I wanted to do a personal experiment to see whether you can create something that inspires, teaches, and connects with people on a multi-dimensional level, not just with sight and sound but with also with also vibrations and feelings and emotions and things of that nature.

I think we succeeded, because even 20 years later, people come up to me to tell me that our music changed their lives in a deep way.

MP3: That's right, we're almost at the 20th anniversary of It Takes a Nation of Millions.

HS: Yeah, isn't that crazy? Time flies, man. And that means that the second generation of hip-hop will be celebrating its 20th soon. I'm not talking about the early years. Those guys were doing something that had never been done before. They were basically like, "We have no clue what the f*** we're doing, but this feels good and we should keep it going."

I'm talking about the second generation, like Run DMC, Rakim, Slick Rick,Salt-N-Pepa, Biz Markie, Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, and PE. That's when hip-hop found its voice and got its personality and started to reach that superstar level. That was like the Marvel Comics of hip-hop, where there were so many characters on the scene.

MP3: I'm curious if you think that a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions could get made today. From a sampling standpoint, a record like that with so many samples in it would cost a fortune today in licensing fees, and politically, major label artists these days seem less willing to take chances.

Bringin' the noise.

HS: Yeah, that second generation of hip-hop came before the sampling crackdown. The laws of sampling need to be brought in check and standardized, because it stems from a lack of understanding and it's leading to greed.

Sampling was so different back then. The sound of that time was a direct reflection of where you took your samples from. Marley Marl gets the almighty respect because he changed the game prior to that by sampling the kick and the snare [drum] from a record. That gave his sound a whole unique tone, because before then, everybody had pretty much the same sound. So then it was like, well if he took the kick and the snare, why can't I take the guitar riffs too?

At that point, I looked at the landscape and said, "Oh, I see where this is going. I have a s*** load of records." From then, I just wanted to take the sampling and OD [overdose] on it. You know, I wanted to use it so much that you didn't know what anything was and where things was coming from.

And there was this sonic resonance that I wanted to hear throughout the record, bringing in noise from everywhere. I felt like I had to make records that superseded everything on the marketplace at that moment. Otherwise nobody was going to even take any kind of notice.

MP3: Because you guys didn't already have an established fan base in one of the boroughs, say with KRS in the Bronx or BIG in Brooklyn?

HS: Yeah, that was the premise of our existence. We just had to break into the game.

MP3: What kind of music are you making these days? We don't see you out there in the mainstream.

HS: The thing is, what got me involved in hip-hop was its alternativeness. Hip-hop was the alternative music life back then. But now, hip-hop is the mainstream. So, now, it incorporates all the mainstream elements. It's more homogenous. There are more harmonies. There's singing. To me, there's nothing insightful about making a Christina Aguilera record or a Ja Rule record.

MP3: So you've stayed away from mainstream music because of how formulaic it is?

HS: Exactly. No matter how you do it, as long as you conform to the melody of the song, it's going to work. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm working on an electronic, sci-fi, audiovisual project right now.

MP3: Really? I'd read a quote from you a while back to the effect of, "I don't want to make music that you listen to. I want to make records that move you." Is that what we're talking about here?

HS: Yeah, definitely. I'm creating a record that you can watch--a record that you can put on that allows you to take the experience to another level. When you listen to a record, you've got to visualize what's going on. That's cool, you know, but I've always been a visual person. So, musically, I want to be able to show you images that give you that extra excitement.

And then there's the music. Since we can now all carry around 8,000 records with us, what's new? What's the next phase? What I'm developing is called Shocktronica. It's designed to make you think. It's designed to make you feel.

I'm dealing with frequencies that are rhythmic and will keep you in the groove but will also have the appeal of a soundtrack or a score.

I'm doing this thing called subsonic frequencies, which is all about fear, allowing you to feel the emotion that's involved in it.

For me, music is moving into another zone, which allows you to participate on a more intellectual and physiological and psychological level. I'm talking about psychedelic, '60s kind of operation but with a 2006-2007 kind of feel to it. It's called Subsonic Frequencies.

MP3: It'll be a DVD?

HS: Yeah, or an enhanced CD with visuals. And I would definitely want to get it out to the video iPods as well. It'll be out late this year.

MP3: You're an iPod guy?

HS: I tell you, the iPod has to be one of the most incredible inventions of the last 20 years. People don't even understand how revolutionary it is unless they actually were a DJ and tried to carry 300 records around on their back. We used to have to carry seven, eight crates to every gig.

Now you've got situations where you can carry 60-80 [GBs] of music, like 10,000-15,000 records. You could change records up every one minute and you could be doing the gig for 25 hours and never play the same record again twice. It is just so amazing right now.

MP3: What are you feeling out there these days? What are you listening to?

HS: I've been listening to a lot of drum and bass, even though all these "experts" are saying that drum and bass, jungle, two-step, that that music is over. Music comes in waves. It peeks its head up and then it sees what's happening out here and then it finds out, "OK, the people are not ready for it yet." Then it goes back underground and just starts brewing again. It doesn't disappear. It's going to come back up again. Hell, rap was supposed to have been dead in '87.

And I'm also into a lot of eclectic electronic music too. But there's so much music out right now from all over the world, from Brazil and Spain and Cuba, all over the place. I've heard stuff where Nigerian rhythms and juju music are put together with hip-hop.

And to me what's even hotter than anything is music with no genre. It's like, "Don't even f***ing tell me what this sh** is. Just let me put it on and let me vibe to it." I think that the day is gone where everybody is on one vibration.

I'll even put on some classical shit and be like, "I'm vibing to some Rachmaninoff right now. You know what I'm saying?" We're moving away from the style police where everybody's got to sit there and follow one mode. That's dead.

MP3: I'm curious where you think hip-hop will be in 10 to 15 years. Do you think that some of this creative kind of multigenre, you know, stuff that's coming from all over the place will bubble to the surface, or will this formulaic homogenization continue?

HS: No, we're heading in the direction of musical freedom, I believe that. Part of the reason is that the hip-hop generation is growing up, and it's feeling a lot of different kinds of music that might not be what's on the radio. Each artist is going to sell a lot less now, so those superstar ranks will diminish.

MP3: So that means more music will be popular among a critical mass of consumers?

HS: Exactly. There's going to be less for everybody but it's going to be better because now the cream is going to have to rise to the top in order for you to get to that level. And so when you do get to that level it's going to be because you truly earned it.

MP3: Before we let you go, what are your thoughts on the new PE record that was written and produced by Paris?

HS: You know something, it's funny. I've never even heard it.

MP3: Really?

HS: It's like everybody's keeping it from me for some reason. Nobody will give it to me.

MP3: Interesting. Well, a lot of people are saying that he lit a fire under them a little bit.

HS: It doesn't take a genius to do that, to be honest. It's because Chuck finally gave up the reins a bit. That was one of my biggest qualms with that situation. Chuck is a great guy. But from a musical standpoint, he's not like the greatest musical person. But he's been like controlling and doing all the records ever since Apocalypse. And I think ever since then he's been making records that have been substandard.

Chuck D and Hank Shocklee

But the bigger issue is that PE wasn't just a sound, it was also a philosophy and a mission. No disrespect to Paris or anybody who has written or who was on the record. I look out there on the streets, man, and I'm asking, "Is anybody even dealing with these issues?" I think that it's been reduced to the music just being music.

MP3: Are you guys still in touch, you and Chuck and Flav?

HS: I still see Chuck, and I still speak to Flav when I see him. Everybody's older now. I think that people are more interested right now in maintaining their "existence," as to trying to do something new or to change the climate. What I'm not seeing is anybody taking their power and using it for the betterment of changing the environment.

It's like we can all go out here and make millions of dollars but can we do anything of any substance? Can we change anybody's lives? Can we make this world a better place? And I know that sounds idealist, but we don't live in a vacuum. It doesn't matter how much money you've made.

MP3: So too many people are just looking to maintain their existence, like with Flav doing the reality show and all that stuff, but no one looking to "Fight the Power," so to speak?

Flavor Flav's reality show, Flavor of Love

HS: Yeah, but I'm not saying that you shouldn't [make your money]. But we're lucky enough to be able to make a living doing what we do, and we owe it to try and do something more than that. The voice of hip-hop used to have this tremendous strength of change and consciousness.

You know, Kanye is the only one that's saying anything of any relevance, and he speaks out of both sides of his mouth at the same time. I'm not downing this kid, all right? He's the one that's got the most amount of balls out of everybody that's out there. So I've got to give him the torch. But who's mentoring him?

Some of these cats, they're only commodity is that they're known and famous. That's not a commodity. What do you do?

If you're Puffy, what do you do? Don't tell me that you make clothes because you don't make the clothes--you license your name. And he learned that from Russell [Simmons], because that's all Russell's career was, licenses and name. That's why Russell has no real power.

Everybody is good in their own right, but it's those special people who can go above and beyond so that when you listen to their creativity, their creativity is backed by their word, which you know that their word means something because you'd know the things that they stand for.

I'm looking at this world now, and I'm saying, "OK, guys, you've made it now. How much more do you need to make it?"

Look at Mel Gibson. Whether you agree him or whatever, the cat is saying something with his art and his money.

MP3: It gets back to the fact that PE really stood for something that made people stop and think.

HS: Exactly. That's one of the reasons why I'm doing this book, because it's the philosophy that makes it important, not just the music. We're supposed to be living a righteous life, a positive life, and then all the art is going to amplify that.

MP3: Words to live by from Hank Shocklee. Thanks a lot for the time. It's been a pleasure.

HS: Thank you very much.

Medical 2 of X : Doctor Ongo Mala : NHS, Anti Depression and Marvin

2006-05-05T23:58:00.000+01:00

Dr Ongo Mala reveals that even the simplest of 'found' objects can help reduce the cost of the NHS - in this case the use of Marvin Gayes - What's Going On as a method to combat depression.

Watch, listen and learn....it's nearly a science..

Medical 1 of X :Doctor Ongo Mala on PE and Motivation

2006-05-05T23:24:00.000+01:00

I'm allied with this guy and have decided to give him a forum - his medical advice is the cheapest you'll get. Trained in Oxford and India - he's slightly PostPreMeltdown European.

It's video....it's a VLOG - the camera is out.

Why I Love Captain Beefheart

2006-04-30T21:34:00.002+01:00

Here are some reasons why I love Don Van Vliet or Captain Beefheart as he was otherwise known.

His musical work was mainly conducted with a rotating assembly of musicians called the Magic Band, which was active from the mid-1960s through to the early 1980s. Van Vliet was primarily a singer, but played harmonica and very nutty saxophone.

His compositions are characterized by their odd mixtures of shifting time signatures and by their surreal lyrics, while Van Vliet himself is noted for his dictatorial approach to his musicians and for his enigmatic relationship with the public.

Here are my reasons.....

1. He Helped Get Me Into Indian Music
I think most of us under-estimate the influence of rhythms in our lives or rather the lack of variety in them.

Cap'n Beefheart used to say that all the rock and roll music and pop (4/4 rock beat or Waltz mostly) was hankering after being back in the womb and hearing the consistent thud thud of your mothers heart. He said that it was appeasement music …boom cha boom boom cha… predictable and that we were kids for feeling happy and comfortable with these simple first rhythms - we hadn’t moved on. Actually most rock, soul, funk, blues is the same too.

The Captain used to say of Frank Zappa, his alleged mentor, that

"Frank believes in time and we could never get it together. He writes all his music and gets sentimental about good old rock 'n' roll, but that's appeasement music”.

I’ve mentioned this rhythmic philosophy of the Cap'n to a lot of the musicians I’ve met and it’s some hard shit to hear for the first time. The whole appeasement thing and sucking on your mothers tit bit I mean. It’s true though, we are addicted to the head nod and the foot tap like mental patients in the corner next to the radio set. The good musicians get this revelation and others don’t wish to hear it at all. Understanding the approach and taking the approach are two different things however.

That’s not to say the Captain didn’t use simple head nod rhythms occasionally as his roots were in early Blues (2/4 rhythm) and in particluar he took alot from Howlin' Wolf. These beats are of course simple rhythms but still wonderful expressions of those rhythms. However, over time, Beefheart began to develop a new technique althoghther and developed his patterns around the words and odd phrases of piano. He didn’t truncate the sentence to fit the bar, he just pushed the bar out and that was just the length of the phrase.

Most rhythms we hear are quite predictive and we know what’s coming next. I’m sure we all know when the drum fills come in or the last chorus. Our euphoria gland has been pimped this past long while with the same patterns over and over. We all know the templates and the shapes. Often it’s the only the atmosphere of the instrumentation or the vocal that differentiates the music in any fundamental way.

With unpredictable rhythms they often appear like a cacophony to the listener at first but once you become familiar with the approach you can zone right in. This isn’t 4/4 or a rock beat or a waltz – it’s something else.

Indian rhythms and music are often thought of like Captain Beefheart in the West. Initially cacophonous and unmusical. We don’t know where the beat is or what’s going on with the melody and we can’t tap our foot so easy but with practice it comes. It’s like wine or riding a bike – you don’t give up on your first try and I’m glad that I stuck with the Captain and kept listening until I wasn’t listening on the outside of the music I was inside the music and those rhythms seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Grooving on the strangely structured rhythms of the Captain made me accept rhythm as having a melodic route or structure and not just a backbeat in a traditional form. To be able to break away from existing patterns was the Captains genius and our lesson from him.

Ok – that’s reason number 1.

2. Great Songs
Even though Trout Mask Replica is mooted as the Capn’s best or most outlandish work and I do love it it’s not my favourite album. My favourite album is somewhat ironically one of his most mellow and accessible albums - ClearSpot Kid. A lot of Captain Beefheart albums have some tracks that stand out more than others so I prefer to look at the body of his work and luckily he was quite prolific in his time.

(Get full album list here from the Radar Station – easily the best Captain reference on the web and it’s been running for years :)

My favourite Captain Beefheart tracks:

Diddy Wah Diddy (A+M Sessions) – Bo Diddly cover. Raw and from prehistory.
Electricity (Safe As Milk) – I don’t think another song, other than maybe something by the Chemical Brothers, conveys electricity so well. The Captains voice is such a rasp here that it sounds like a dropped pilon cable.
Beatle Bones and Smokin Stones (Strictly Personal). Even though I love the Beatles I also love the fact the Captain was irked into having a pop at them on this song.
Ella Guru + the Blimp (Troutmask Replica) – proper leftfield weridness..the Blimp lead vocal was recorded down a telephone.
Lick My Decals Off, Baby + Space Age Couple (Lick My Decals Off Baby) – Beefheartians tend to say this is their favourite album and with good reason – even though the band using their odd-rhythms to the full this record is accessible and much fun.
I'm Gonna Booglarize You Baby + Blabber’N Smoke (The Spotlight Kid)
Nowadays a Woman's Gotta Hit a Man + Sun Zoom Spark + Big Eyed Beans from Venus (ClearSpot). Great record – Sun Zoom Spark is a great chorus and it’s like a guessing game as to when the Captain is going to drop the beat again.
Run Paint Run Run (Doc at the Radar Station). This is one of my all time favourtie Captain songs – A while back in Kerala India (during the Scale sessions ) I did a version of this track. I used a temple instrument called a Nadaswaram which has a reed like a clarinet. The only part that is really the same is the lyric “Run Paint Run Run” because sometimes it’s just too difficult making out what he’s saying or what the band are playing. Of course, if you cover a Beefheart track you daren’t copy it and luckily the Capn builds that right in – they are unrepeatable by anyone but him.

3. Nutty Composition Process and Great Guitarists
For some reason the Captain used to attract all kinds of hot and avante garde guitarists who would float around the whole Zappa and Bowie kingdom. These names included : Doug Moon, Alex St. Claire, Ry Cooder, Moris Tepper, Richard Redus and Gary Lucas and more.

The guitarist that stuck with the Captain for the longest time was a fella called Bill Harkleroad who joined the band first for the album Strictly Personal. The Captain used to christen every body in his band with a new name and low and behold Bill became Zoot Horn Rollo, which is easily better than Bill. See the liner notes for Trout Mask Replica :

ZOOT HORN ROLLO: glass finger guitar, flute
ANTENNAE JIMMY SEMENS: steel-appendage guitar
CAPTAIN BEEFHEART: bass clarinet, tenor sax, soprano sax, vocal
THE MASCARA SNAKE: bass clarinet & vocal
ROCKETTE MORTON: bass & narration
DRUMBO: drums

The Captain preferred younger guitarists because they could be moulded more easily. Upstream would be Beefheart hammering a piano and the drummer (John French or Drumbo) transcribing parts for the other musicians. The parts weren’t all playable but for the most part the guys kept to this ‘score’. Initially that might seem cruel but it undoubtedly made the music unique.

The sound of twisted, spiky and angular guitar was pioneered very heavily by Harkleroad and as his relationship with Beefheart developed he was given increasingly more freedom. Bill said of those crazy early years with the Captain.

“I was 19, my two favorite artists were Zappa and Beefheart, and I was just glad I didn't have to go to college or join the army and die.”

John Peel said of Beefheart :

"If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of popular music, it's Beefheart…I heard echoes of his music in some of the records I listened to last week and I'll hear more echoes in records that I listen to this week"

During the rise of Punk many of it’s leading lights praised Beefheart and claimed influence including John Lydon, The Sex Pistols and the Clash. Many popular modern groups also draw heavily from his well including Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, dEUS, the Pixies and The White Stripes to name a few.

4. Don’s Philosophy
Here are a few of the great quotes from the Captain

"I think nutrition is very important. If you eat bad, you feel bad. If you feel bad, you do bad things. Most of modern rock and roll is a product of guilt. People cop licks off of dead people, like stealing pennies off a dead man's eyes. The movement needs a bowel movement."
"I don't believe in time, you know, 4/4 and all that stuff," Beefheart says.
"I guess the reason I use lyrics is because I'm a singer and the record companies and everybody would think I was ridiculous if I didn't use the English language."
“Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument. You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.”
"A carrot is as close as a rabbit gets to a diamond."
"Everybody's colored or else you wouldn't be able to see them."
"I'm not really here, I just stick around for my friends."
"Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employerin terms of who you're brining over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub."
If you're guilty of thinking, you're out. If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

5. Recording Lore
The story of recording Trout Mask Replica is fantastic ….

For the rehearsals of Trout Mask Replica, the captains most famous album, the Magic band were holed up in a house in the the Woodland Hills. Only one of them was allowed out once a week to get the basic supplies of lentils and such and then back onto the rehearsals. This lock-in lasted a month.

Bill the guitarist for Troutmask replica recalls his memories of the time:

"the side of the music that most people don't want the hear about is how manipulative this older guy was with these 19-year-old kids. It was only ten yards short of a Manson situation. We would play 12 to 16 hours a day, fall on the floor, and them wake up and do it again. Our hero was a brilliant person with half his energy running on extreme paranoia. He'd talk to us for 36 hours straight, telling use that our hand position in the air wasn't artistic enough."

The band played the whole record until they knew it inside out. They went to the studio, ran by Frank Zappa, set up and got a sound. Frank hit the record button and the band played it to the end. Frank said “great rehearsal” guys let’s do some more takes. The Captain said “that’s the record Frank” and then they packed up and left.

6. He Also Painted
Now Beefheart lives out in the Arizona desert. He retired from music after the album Ice Cream for Crow and lives with his wife and cat. He paints a lot of the time and although there is nothing officially released about his current health he is suffering from a long term illness.

The Captains paitings come at the right time in his life….no running around the music business madness and time to be private in the desert that he loves. The paintings contain the same spirit that the music. Beefheart was a real artist and not a Xerox copy like so many others.

See this link for an index of his paintings

-------
So that’s why I love Captain Beefheart.

Drongomala
http://www.drongomala.com
http://www.myspace.com/drongomala

Hip Hop Part 3 of X : A virus let loose on the English Language

2006-04-28T11:21:00.000+01:00

Ingerlish – The beginnings
I mentioned briefly in the last blog (part 2) that one of the tools subverted by the hip hop phenomenon was the English language itself by the rappers and scene members. Not all musical scenes when they burst forth have a verbal equivalent that is also brought into being at the same time. Rock and roll didn’t really change the way people talked – dressed and acted – ok - but not really the vocabulary. It wasn’t the pantheon of patter that came out of hip-hop.

Hip-Hop was different.

Remember that the English language isn’t first generation stuff – it’s derived from languages that went before. In 1786 William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta, announced to a meeting of the Royal Asiatic society that his studies of the Sanskrit language (ancient core Indian language) led him to believe that it was a a cousin of Latin and Greek. He further stated that he thought there were great similarities between these three languages and Celtic, Gothic and Persian and that must have all came from the same source. This single people had brought and carried their language as far as Ireland and India where it eventually diverged into modern tongues. This single people were called the Indo Europeans and their homeland is what we now know as the modern Ukraine. 8000 years ago they left their homelands and having mastered the horse they managed to get around a bit. Genetics has also backed up this movement by tracing genes and variations.

Now languages can change for a number of reasons. The invading men kill all the other men and take the wives….words get blended together as do genes. The new language is associated with a new technology – in the case of the Europeans it was the horse and farming that peppered the language and as the technology was spread so was the language.

We can skip over the Greeks, Romans and development of English in what is now known as the UK – essentially by around 1500AD the UK was moving over to English in politics, law and as the common tongue. The Irish, Scots and Welsh had to bow to the pressure of both the military and the commercial concerns of the South and eventually English was established in the Isles as the primary tongue. Ireland still has Gaelic today but it’s dwindling, Scotland has hardly any and the small numbers of the Welsh were at least smart enough to ensure that legislation was passed to keep the Welsh language alive. The rest of the empire in India, Africa and Australia was co-erced to follow suit. English has won the war of the tongues or at least made a bloody good stab at it.

USA – the Baby is born
So that’s the British Isles…what about across the pond? The birth of hiphop? America was spawned from mostly European aspirants and a mixture of slaves taken from the southern hemisphere. It was inevitable that the language of the masters would dominate in America – and that was English. btw - can anyone tell me how Columbus discovered America when it was populated already - he was really just a violent tourist...anyways...America, the new baby, had been born and it had it's own fair share of input to English to give.

White folks added a variety of words or alternate words like : trunk, truck, ranch and crap like that aswell as mis-spellings and changing 'ise' to 'ize' however in my mind there is no such thing as American English other than what resided in the vain minds of the American. The volume of differences is nowhere near great enough.

Black folks were adding to English aswell and the vernacular and delivery style of Hip Hop came out of the prisons, army camps and segregation - similar breeding ground for blues and gospel. Black music invariably contained feelings and words about hard times but the difference with HipHop is that it wasn’t couched in the comfortable language of the past. Hip Hop didn’t eulogise past glories or wish for better ones in the future - instead it talked of how to do it now. It wasn’t a way of just thinking – it was a way of being.

It’s all in the Delivery
Now English is classified as a non-tonal language and that means that generally when you speak it in different pitches (higher or lower) it means the same thing. That’s not to say that you can’t use English with tonality for example “you BOUGHT a James Blunt record?” – by stressing the word ‘bought’ by maybe saying it louder or in a higher pitch we convey our incredulity and surprise - the devliery adds new meaning. Most languages in Africa are tonal (except Swahili and Fulani) but as to their full effect on hip hop I’m not sure. There are a number of studies done on the influence of African tongues and tonal languages on rap but I aint really buying much of it. People talk about how rapping can be traced back to roots of poets singing or telling stories over drums - thing is - nearly every culture did this - it's a truism of humans not a genetic group.

I think that the expressiveness of hip was born of a performance style, a political state a mentality and of a time - all done in English or 'phreaked' English.

The words and the delivery of the words were inseparable. It was futuristic, coded, and extremely rhythmic. Sometimes the rappers only made use of a few notes in the musical scale with which to ‘drill’ their rap home. The melodies of the raps were very simple – tweaking up and down at the beginning and ends of sentences and always pushing and playing with the groove. Radio Dj’s, comics, wilful mispronunciations and the bubbling groovy language of disco and funk also got thrown into the mix. The subversion of the language was spawning out of control like a virus. Young people didn’t want the cure and the old folks couldn’t think quick enough to come up with an antidote.

Unlike in the past where a war was needed to give a language a leg up the radio and TV stations did all the conversion very easily.

A generation was being shut out. Hip Hop Culture was codified. It was difficult for outsiders to pick up although it was really just ‘phreaked’ English.

Covert Operators
Black folks had a lot of covert talking to do in America and it’s inevitable that slang would be coded into the language. It allowed you to talk about those controlling you without them taking your head off.

Check the words out to swing Low Sweet Chariot – the old gospel tune. (My South Indian Band did a version of this on 100 Fields - due out in the last quarter of 2006). Some say this song was a code too and that the Sweet Chariot was in fact a freight train that would take them north and away from the slavery. Thing is – if you start singing about the 3.15 leaving tomorrow it’s going to work out bad for you. At least the coded versions could be sung out loud and felt inside. The secret language and delivery had been getting honed for years in the black community. As African families had been pulled apart and fragmented by their uprooting and placement in America – old traditions and language were difficult to keep up outside of a home influence. Native tongues of Africa were discouraged with sticks as it all sounded conspiratorial to the rightly paranoid slave owners.

Phreak Techniques
Slowly black America was absorbing the English language and developing it with a rhythmic delivery unseen before – drawing out words to extraordinary lengths and swooping the pitch up and down like long trombones. Code words and fun words were shoehorned in. The idea of ‘proper’ went out the window and rightly so - the African Americans delighted in chopping, shafting and ripping English and putting it back together to suit themselves again. There was a singing in it too – it had started to develop tones and nuances. English the stress language was moving into tonal territory via the performers. The sentences were being played like instruments and drumkits. Words were repeated for a machine like delivery and emphasis – the digital age of chopping and splicing had entered the words. Growls and roars were in the delivery.

There is no single moment when things like gospel became blues became soul became disco and funk then electro and hiphop. It just tends to happen same way rivers meet up. It was the same with the language – it absorbed all that its developers gave it and kept going.

Louder than a Bomb

In Hip Hop specifically African Americans stamped the culture heavily. They showed everyone what could be done with the English language when combined with a metronomic delivery. It was the sound of the inmates taking over the asylum they should never have been in. It was the sound of the human bomb. It was the terrordome and it was the truth of the world. It was as poetic a moment in the English language as when James Joyce wrote the first modernistic novel ‘Ulysses’. Chuck D and James Joyce would have had great crack in the pub together – they both speak the language of fiery romance and for my money Nation of Millions or Fear of A Black Planet are as equal as some of the finest artist statments rendered in the West.

When those hiphop wagons rolled into town they might as well have been the Ukranians riding in on horses – the spoken word was irrevocably changed in the 80s. Like the horse had propelled the roots of English around the world – the new technologies of digital and the burning street poetry of African Americas were changing the lexicon daily.

Ebonics and the Wild West

There seems to be an idea that there is some sort thing called Black English – Ebonics is the proper term. It's academic home is Oakland, California - the same place I recorded Elemental (yes that's a plug).

I have to laugh at the Ebonics debate and all the pious bullshit associated with it from both sides. English is a sponge and it doesn’t yet seem to have stopped absorping influence. I think the whole Ebonics gig does black folks a disservice - let time decide which aspects of English changed in our time will be kept....that's how it's worked for centuries. Linguistic policies of divide and conquer only end up dividing.

The Ebonics gig at root is from a mindset that wants to separate and show distinction – in reality it’s a competition. Who ever delivers ‘meaning’ or ‘achieves’ results the best in the language wins….they become most effective and therefore psychologically dominant. The winning flavour of the language swallows encompasses or bloats the existing one.

The idea of the Queens English or owt like that went long ago – it’s not the state that regulates the language it’s Hollywood and iconism now that rule the verbal roost. With every young person born in Europe, America and India the manner in which English is being spoken is changing. Every country I have been in Europe put a premium on the young talking English – many define a class status in India on being able to speak English.

The black peoples in America have put their colour in the English mix – it’s inseparably mixed now and rightly so. Ebonics is like trying to separate two tins of mixed paint - a waste of time when you could be painting

Burroughs used to say language was a virus and he was right. HipHop was an outbreak. English language was the host.

Yeah – it’s like that.

Summary

Black folks absopred the moment in the 80's and created a lexicon. Hip hop shagged the crap out of English and had a baby called rap.
Vernacular also sprung up because of segregation and the need to be covert,
Wilful overloading of words and incorrect context usage was a ‘fcuk you’ to the originators/keepers of the language.
Repetition and stuttering and non-linear effects were expressing the digital machine age.
Ebonics is a red herring or a black trout or whatever
There is no such thing as American English

We owe a debt to Hip Hop in showing us how we can express and improvise on our feelings. The hip-hop that mattered to me was the hip hop that was the call to justice. The cause worth dying for and not stupidity and moron bravado…..of course, funny and rude is a good release valve for stories crammed with sadness. hip Hop does all of this and more which is why it hit me like a truck or is it a van?

Rap is how the poets must have spoken before great battles in the past - how people were led to freedom. We will get justice today. We will not accept the way things are.

The tempo of hip hop makes you want to get out of your seat and move to action – while the lyrics of hip hop give you a reason.

A powerful combination – birth of a nation.

Drongomala
www.drongomala.com
www.myspace.com/drongomala

Romantic Interlude

2006-04-12T01:27:00.000+01:00

I went into the Manchester Civil Art Gallery the other day and the one painting that transfixed me was this one of the Greek Legend Sappo - an 1877 painting by Charles-August Mengin (1853-1933).

...i bought the postcard and took it home for a quid - stuck it on the side of my peripheral vision on a box of unsold CD's ..

I only just looked it up on the internet and the pictorial life of the character Sappo unfolded before me. I knew all the characters and the situations and the story felt like shoes and lives I had worn. Suddenly this simple postcard was like the wackiest tarot ever read out...

.... a romantic interlude in pictures.....I hate the ending though....but there's no editing her story

drongomala

Hip Hop (Part 2 of X): Subverting the tools is cool

2006-04-05T15:27:00.000+01:00

HipHop (Part 2 of X) : Subverting the Tools is Cool

other people do the person x and y did this or that track...this isn't one of those articles..

Digital Watches Mark The Beginning…
The moon landing set the seed of the expanding future in our parents minds of outer space and endless possibility of technology. It truth though it seemed to have no relevance on earth other than B-movie plots about giant slugs. The science fiction was confined mostly to the public imagination and private government spending and research. A generation or so later we fast forward to the 80’s and the children aren’t looking up at the skies dreaming like their parents did. Instead they are looking at the game Pong on a TV screen – transfixed by it’s simple glow – it was like Stanley Kubricks monolith had landed among the apes once again.

The 80’s was pivotal because young people around the world began to own electrical shit that wasn’t a powertool and things were branching out quite alot since the digital watch creeped into the 70's. We weren’t building outside the mind with engines and cars and architecture – now we began to build concepts and models that weren’t in stone or glass or paint – they were in 1’s and 0’s and we couldn’t even physically touch them. Computers and digital watches with big red led faces and a whole pantheon of consumer goods hit the stores – the future was back with a vengeance. It was now possible to make electrical and computer gear cheaper and that meant mass uptake. Television and media programming helped the birth of a new language and phenomenon containing silicon, storage, memory and other digi-related nouns. The children of the 80’s saw no reason for this surge of technology to stop and they were right. The birth of the digital age? The era of electricity? …..

Like so many sociological changes it must be mass change by definition. The chaos unleashed by letting loose the peoples of the world on this technology was a glorious thing. Only by trying all the permutations of these new tools would we even begin to find out what was possible. Do you think the first person to refine iron imagined the uses it would be put to – it ended up defining an age.

Now although we are all quite happy (my readers at least) with the concept of using an invention for something it’s not meant for that doesn’t mean everybody is happy about that. Those in power always own the current culture and they have built it using the tools and the social realities they understand. They have put money into radio being sent out in a certain way, running big studios with analog desks, charging for sending information back and forth….you get the picture….the music and the film industries seem to be the perfect example of this. Youth being youth don’t give a shit how their parents did things and thankfully this bucking at tradition keeps culture from falling into a big black hole called entropy. It’s important we try all the permutations and as there are billions of us it’s not too hard to do.

Subverting the Tools?
So the revolutionaries, the new breed – how do they come into the mix and change things? What do you mean subverting? What about hip hop man? Okay…I promise I’ll get there ;)

1835, Samuel Morse proved that signals could be transmitted by wire. It gives birth to the morse code industry which is then killed off in 1877 by a rival – the telephone. Same mechanism different concept about encoding signals.
1877 : Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. He thought it was going to be useful for recording contractual agreements as they would be clearer…, of course it kick started the music industry and he only joins in because his competitors threaten to overtake him.
1940’s cassette tape invented and soon after two French mentalists (Pierre Shaeffer and Pierre Henry) experiment with playing it backwards and forwards aswell as chopped up and looped – ‘musique concrete’. Definitely not normal behaviours but such irreverence to the medium gave birth to all sound ‘chopping’ of today.
1946: ENIAC - the first electronic digital computer, is switched on and in 1957 Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson got a computer to compose a piece of music then played by a string quartet.
1951: Sun Studios in Memphis, guitarist Willie Kizart dropped his amp and busted a speaker cone. The result was an "unruly hum" as heard on Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats – it’s the beginning of distortion as a legit sound and not an engineering mistake. Culture decides – fucked up sounding is like my life so leave the noisy bit in please….Hendrix lights up the 70’s using distortion – redefining guitar.
1981: Kraftwerk develop bespoke instruments from random computer gear not intended for music such as mainframes , calculators and retrofitting rhythm devices to research gear.
1989 Internet invented (or ‘running’) Web and hypertext itself. Originally, TBL just wanted to help physicists publish and share their works. Little did they know blah blah..

Good or should I say ‘Functionally Healthy’ subcultures fuck with the existing tools of the mainstream or current culture. They play with it like a child and sometimes they go 'WAh!!" and break it. The inventors can never imageine what the children will really do. People invent things from other things. They have to – it’s what’s around. They take back the power by subverting and bending existing innovations to create their own subculture. They can't invest in new technologies because they don't have the cash - they have to use what is already around.

We should really think of the present and the future as waves that are crashing upon themselves. That’s a lot of noise and froth. Now digital technology was part of the sea. The Ying of our Digital Inventions to the Yang of the Analog World.

In the 1980’s there was a great wave called HipHop which rose to three times the height in the ocean – a culture tsunami - three waves combined to make one seriously big wave and subsequently a sea change.

A BIG WAVE MADE OF 3 WAVES

WAVE 1 : MUSIC : The tempo of revelation

One other element about the beginnings of this electronic music was that it allowed artists to have their compositions run at an exact tempo – over and over again with reliability. This was a very big deal and was a massive break from the analog world of flamenco guitar players, bagpipers and rock groups where the musicians would naturally move around the tempo – if they were excited they might play faster – and of course for compositional effect they may choose to speed up and slow down.

Let’s remember that music is physical – it’s waves (and particles) coming out of those speakers all over your body and into your ear. The ability to make the tempo run at exactly 80 or 90 beats per second for the duration of the piece meant that the audience were ‘hypnotised’ in a new way – an almost scientific way. Our body has tempo’s and clocks built into it (stomach, brain, eye, heart) and when we are subjected to music for a duration of time we will naturally tend to resonate or ‘merge’ with it. Same as you do when you bob around in the sea….it’s hard to avoid.

My contention is that a constant stable tempo is a good tempo to receive ‘programming’ while a varying tempo is a good fun for an ‘exciting ride’ of emotions – yes I do mean the difference between rap and rock ‘n’roll … kinda. James Brown had moved towards the repetitive metronomic funk in the analog world with his band that were fined wages for wrong notes and then it went even further with hip hop - dissecting real and unreal grooves like wizards of stereo sound and pushing and pulling the rhythms and sound collages back and forth by a measure of milliseconds.

One of my favourite images of Lee Perry is some video footage of him in the Studio where he sticks his head up to the control room window and shouts at the drummer “Play it like a Machine Man or I kill you…Do you hear me man!?” Lee Perry knew that the hypnotic effect of dub was better achieved by keeping the tempo or ‘spell’ constant.

The smart hip hoppers get this and I remember hearing KRS-1 say that hip hop is the tempo of revelation. A good tempo for the narrator to get inside your brain. Black youth were rightly twitchy and agitated and when the tech democratisation of two turntables and a microphone allowed anyone to get involved – well a lot of people had a lot of things to say in the black community …this element in the music spoke to me…. the energy – the growls – the chaos – the truth

Check it

adult human heart, at rest, beats at about 70 bpm (males) and 75 bpm (females).
Hip hop tempo 70-110 bpm
House 110-140 bpm
Jungle 140-190 bpm. (But that’s really a half-time gig:)
200 onwards – lunatics with drill samples

So hip hop is generally just above our natural ‘rest’ point and just before our shake out booty point. It’s pitched just right above your natural rest state – an incitement to get up…to be motivated…to kill inaction… to stand up – stop resting….that’s why when it hit in the US first it was the voice of revalation….the English language was being rolled and twisted and stuttered and presented back to it’s semi-owners….they didn’t understand it….the people understood it – never since the Celts and the Indians took a hold of the English language and shook some poetry into it had the medium of English speech been shaken. 1980's baby. Forget shit like Ultravox….couple of good tracks but nothing that blasted a hole as big as this….hip hop was an explosion…..a verbal explosion at the tempo of revalation…..thank the gods the voice had became much stronger and not a moment too soon….

Lots of people were super unhappy about this new powerful voice. They had been in the mind games business long enough to know this was a powerful tool. They didn’t understand the language of the music and the lawyers didn’t really know how to legislate for the chopping up and sampling of the existing copyrighted funk tunes and rare grooves that were ‘liberated’. The content of the lyrics were confrontational – voices that have been quashed always shout when they can first make sound again. …and like a loud sound in a public place everyone turned their head to look.

The scene and ideologies galvanised people – the lexicon and approach spread and before you know it…..the ripples reached the UK and then into even further unchartered territory – the lost lands of Cowdenbeath…..me imploring relatives to bring back books on graffiti from their trips to New York….the ripple went far and it changed the ocean..

Stravinsky succinctly reminds us not to be precious with owt:

"the danger lies not in the borrowing of clichés. The danger lies in fabricating them and in bestowing on them the force of law, a tyranny...."

I remember hearing Public Enemy’s ‘Nation of Millions’ and ‘Fear Of a Black Planet’ for the first time and the human drama was as visceral as Mozarts requiems. What have I heard in the UK that’s done the same for me? Asian Dub foundation and after that on the polticial voice rising there wasn’t much….but now everyone has ‘settled’ in the West we are now discovering that we are still unhappy and can’t quite put the finger on it….oh yeah – we are all born into a world already carved up…;)

WAVE 2 - GRAFFITTI
The new houses are often built using the bricks of the old for reasons of pragmatism – it’s what was lying around. And for hip hop events that meant old records, bits of electronics, street sound samples and big sound systems cobbled together from multiple speakers.

There was also a counterpart to the gig or party that the music had going on which was the graffiti ‘happening’…where one day from nowhere a massive mural/piece would appear from nowhere throwing the whole context of an area into another dimension….it could have been a moving train or the side of a burnt out building. Andy Warhol is his biggest wet dream wishes you could have conspired poetic events such as these…..instead he fannied around safely indoors replicating expensive colours on top of expensive materials and fabrics. Graffitti writers nicked the paint and worked at night by torchlight and spoke with a visual style that the overstudied and frazzled Warhol could never plug into.

These burners could never be sold and after a while the graffitti writers got into business although the mainstream was onto it already. Beat Street and all kinds of movies helped graffiti blow up everywhere.

It’s a fact that you have to burn to want to do graffiti – it’s not easy – the proportions, the paint running, the speed of operation and the fact that it’s against the law and the stopwatch doesn’t last long from the first fence climbed into the yard makes. When you are not allowed to take part in the development of the way the cities and countries look architecturally then the under classes will always just do their thing on top of it….

In fact it tends to be a feature of democratic states with fascist undertones (US…..northern Ireland, Spain…Paris etc….graffiti/burners/murals are common in all of these places …and now in Eastern Europe things are on the rise with excellent graffiti writers doing their thing – the context just as poetic as any…..it’s the resistance trying to lift the spirits of the people ….the democratic bit means that you don’t get executed for the graffiti….although Mayor Kotsch in New York was close to passing the law;)

It’s clear that graffiti (Greek for ‘writing’) as manifest in the Hip Hop culture saw the age old tradition of rebellious defacing of property updated to new heights – these pieces were not just the simple complaints of citizens with a a scrawl on a Colleseum wall – these we moving trains of steel covered on sometimes more than 2 cars – a huge rainbow going through the city…. Or Spitting demons on the side of a liquor store, cartoon characters from the nations youth were twisted and distorted on huge walls. The kids were having ‘their way’ with the mindset of the people.

Wildstyle graffiti was the epitome of this visual subversion and it was the most covert of codes - a complicated construction of interlocking letters often completely undecipherable to non-writers.

My uncle brought that book back from America and it was hot – he must have been connected OR things had went so mainstream that he picked it up at K-Mart or Macies more like. It was 1984 Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper, - Subway Art. It’s even got big gatefold pullout sections!

I’'ve watched these two resources below and they are solid and have been for years…ones for your favourites…tell em this article sent ye…

- http://www.duncancumming.co.uk/photos.cfm
- www.graffiti.org

WAVE 3 - DANCE

The paths to dancing before break dancing took the streets were :

1.Ballet -> jazzdance -> then solo improv’s where you might express your inner whatever. It cost a lot.
2. Life with a gypsy troupe doing flamenco and Indian dances, being hounded by the police and doing dramatic stuff round campfires.
3. ‘Ethnic’ Dance. Don’t get me started.
3. Tap Lessons from your Granddad.
4. HipHopRoute : Straight to a lino shop and then down your mates and expressed your inner whatever.

Those weird moves that came into being….all the shudders, and sine waves through the body and the ‘robot’ and the repeated movements were like the movements of the times….the tech mindset had entered dance….which made sense when you think about how ‘things’ end up in dance…

Waving your arms around your head and making a whooshing sound like a nonce happened because of the branches on trees swaying to our ancestors who mimicked it ……makes sense that the tech’ should enter dance at some point …..it wasn’t the trees now it was moves like ‘helicopter’, ‘colt 45’, ‘jackhammer’ and ‘drill headspin’. The floorwork of breaking, which is most like gymnastics, seemed to concentrate on the urban machine shapes while the dance moves of those popping and locking crew on the west coast were digital, electronic and spage age like : robot(tin), Strobing, Ticking, (energy)Waving, animation popping, gliding

Do you think the inventor of the strobe light thought that dancers would try and make it look like they were under a strobe light that wasn’t there – artificially cutting visual frames to appear stuttered under normal lighting…..no way – chaos was in delicious effect and the dancers were having it….the jazz and ballet dancers shat themselves and quickly aligned to include ‘street’ dance into the syllabus…..they might as well have called it tech dance.

My opinion on breakdancing…I think that breaking now in 2006 concentrates way too much on floorwork gymnastics and not enough on being the funkiest bastard in the universe….and that’s why my allegiance lies with the California poppers and lockers …… plus I’ve hurt myself in the past doing floor stuff way too many times. Check these typical break-dance injuries! My favourite times in hiphop clubs was never around when the best DJ was playing it was when a crew out of nowhere starts to get down in the club……breakdancing can occur anywhere and when it does….it’s unbeatable. …the ballet is nice but breakin is the shit.

The world of dance had changed overnight….finally the techno in our minds and our society melted into dance moves….. the progression of dance moved one step further from jazz -> breaking.

SUMMARY
It is the role of the sub-culture to subvert the mechanisms of the upper culture – it’s homely term is called ‘stirring the pot’ and the military term is storming the castle using the enemies guns against them. It comes out in all different ways in history ….. and in 1980 it happened as Hip Hop on three fronts of music, dance and graphics.

It had a synergy with all three elements happening at the same time and it’s impact is still felt today. It’s a spirit – I often think the punk bands have a bigger connection with the spirit of hip-hop than some of the current hip hoppers do….

Hip hop is almost a methodology rather than a genre.
Hip Hop’s genesis was about reinvention of tech and language for empowerment.
Young Black America spoke with poignancy at the right time and the right tempo of revelation for it to sink in right. Things changed overnight.

....and here it is in 2006 - i recorded a record called Elemental with a buddy 4D in sanfrancisco. We used an ipod as our hard-drive and did it in a kitchen on a laptop. New orleans had revealed just how the government felt about black folks when in a crisis and the rappers that came through the kitchen had no real problem in getting heat....we didn't do rehearsals - it was ... here's the beat and go....that's punk, that's jazz, that's hip hop and the truth of the matter is on the record - yes this is a plug but it's a righteous one. We hope to do some shows in the summer.

people - if you got to the end of this then thankyou.....it's been on my mind you know?

Drongomala
www.drongomala.com
www.myspace.com/drongomala