tziteras

I've not written for ages. I'm really sorry about that - I had prepared an entry but I think I focus too much on quality and these things need to be just written offhand and published. I guess with writing I'm much more preparatory than with music. Anyway the gig was about a month ago. I have another one planned for the 22nd at bar Oppo on Park St Avenue, Bristol - a no smoking venue to appease people like claudio or my friend Fleur for whom pubs are too smokey, and the millions of others like them, as well as yet more who just don't like to play or hear music where people are drunk and throw glasses at you (Which is incidentally what happened at the gig - I don't think she meant it - far too out of her face to even notice what she'd done I think). So we're moving to nicer venues, with Claudio on percussion and perhaps I wonder someone else on Base or something. I just saw the opening concert for Nathan Daniel PSI - where PSI means personal space invaders....

There's the new flyer for the gig, which I posted around a bit. Since then Tim has pulled out, but I've found and confirmed Claudio Furet on percussions.

Here are my preparations for the gig on the 11th . Lots of guests to keep track of, lots of time to play. Very little money. That's life. It's my birthday. It's an investment for more gigs. Wish I could do a whole gig with a story teller who had a great story though... Would be brilliant. Just did a duet at a Buddhist course. I'm a member of SGI-UK . Playing improvised guitar as a live score to a sketch. Felt really good to get to play experimental improvised guitar and have people actually enjoy it - loads of people said afterwards that the guitar playing fit so well with Aletta's movements and was "timed perfectly"! - Aletta did the animal effects for Dr Doolittle and it was loads of fun to play to her story about an evil nun, eating soap and pretending to be a tree... Anyway, on this gig there's the talented writer and songwriter David Green - I really like his email address name more - should be a stage name - Daid. I want to play tabla to two of ...

I am in a huge and expansive arts centre/cinema/cathedral, in ancient Monfalcone. It's Monfalcone so it must be the Valentinis disco, where all my school friends used to go when I was 16. and although we were in the same school it was unreachable, a world apart. But it's more than that. Other unreachable things are all around. We have come as buddhists or students to do a course and are here for a while in accomodation on the centre's grounds. I can't remember if it's with Soka Gakkai or as students of the UWC that we are here, but the accomodation is simple and functional, but I can tell that we are in a cheaper more day to day part of what houses much more valuable people than us. We are all teenagers and young adults. The course has now come to an end. I remember the rooms and the shared bathrooms, all very clean and well kept. I look out the window down the huge stone block walls worthy of an Inca city or Egyptian pyramid, and far down below I see some limousin...

As I write I'm compressing a file from a tabla practice. I am a student of a student of Pandit Shankar Ghosh . My guruji/master's name is Tapanji . I once told him I was a buddhist, and he told me this story in great detail about the way he would walk past a beautiful buddhist temple in his youth. And now you can't even see the temple for all the other buildings that now fill the land. And his mother used to use flowers, like the ones he pointed out to me in his garden - big bright yellow flowers - when he would hurt himself as a child. Homeopathic remedies. And the tabla classes. Always told with such feeling - his tabla master's strict classes where he wouldn't let you leave when your lesson finished, and you had to assist other student's lessons, or where he would say "put on that record" and they would listen to something - I think quite varied stuff, not just indian music. He told me of not being able to write it down, scolding me almost, for taki...

A huge storm chased me down park row, past the violin shops and the hospital, into the Cube Cinema yesterday Wednesday 31st for our first Cube Orchestra rehearsal after the Here Shop Gig. Present were Belinda, Tomoko, Gareth and myself. We took our time in setting up amplifiers, and finding some old drums for Tomoko to play, while we chatted. After some chat about what went wrong on Saturday, Belinda wrote down a list of points which I hope she'll send to the list - quite openly worded and focusing on the percieved problem rather than the percieved solution. I hope we can use all the problems constructively to refine our guidelines for new people and for participating and in preparation for concerts. Then it was time to play. One of the comments from before was "lack of conductor" or "limited ways of communicating during performance". Belinda suggested a great exercise where you appoint an "invisible conductor", disguised as one of the musicians and th...

Ok so trying to think straight so I can write something usefully. But I'm completely entrenched in lack of brain fibre by this orchestra cube rehearsal that captures my will to write or communicate, my need . We've become kind of a jam band, kind of a crazy orchestra with a rebellious spirit. I don't like it when people feel that that spirit of a bunch of people together doing something is based only on their feel as musicians - that's always there, but it's not everything. What about what was happening in your life, that affected your confidence at different moments, and the memories you'll carry with yourself of those times and those days when you happened to record that music. It's because sometimes what's not said is so beautiful that it tears apart all meaning in a meaningless day. But that doesn't mean it's everything. So I feel we should talk, fight it out, bond or whatever the fuck as long as the music we produce is beautiful and breatht...

ta ti ti ta ta dhin dhin dha dha thin thin na tete ti ti ta