Skip to main content

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 then everyone follows what they do - so their music becomes the conducting for that time. The best bit was when Tomoko conducted by playing drums and egg shakers - with Guitar and Wind instruments maybe we're accustomed to what to do with certain types of sounds - like to a jazz chord we might tend to solo and vice versa... With Tomoko's abstract noises, disassociated from her musical ability. we were much more free to react in creative ways to her noises.


Then we got out the Brazil DVD that I'd brought, and we discussed how we can organise the rescoring for the end of this month, so that it's not a big boring 2 hours. We put on the first dream sequence, when Sam Lowrie flies through the air and gets attacked by astroturf skyscrapers.
We quickly found out a couple of issues:

  • With 4 people it was really easy to concentrate on the film and at the same time follow everyone else
  • Some dialogue sections were a bit hard to do (not much happens... People might want to concentrate on following the subtitles)
  • We got bored after about 10 minutes or less and lost inspiration.
  • For me and Gareth who knew the film better, it was easier to do incidental music.


So the result could be that for the rescoring we

  • Divide ourselves up into small groups of up to 8 people for each scene or DVD section.
  • Appoint someone who knows the scene to do the incidental music if needed. Maybe someone else can play the general feel of that scene.
  • Get someone to present each section. The cube are fine for us to do bits of different films, rather than just one film from beginning to end.


Also we'll need to have someone in the projection room and give them an exact list of sections we'll do from what film and in what order.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How could Scotland have a more resilient food system?

The question that's led me to write this has been how do we adapt long term, specifically here in Scotland, where I live now, to coronavirus and the idea that pandemics are here to stay if we stay this industrialised and globalised. How does a society look if it's to be resilient long term, sensible and ecologically regenerative? We do know a few things about this novel coronavirus that we seem to be slowly figuring out as it evolves and spreads, and I have almost a picture of how it might look in my head. Here is the closest I can get so far to it, on a regional scale at least: In the picture, each block is a community of several households and work spaces, and each green space is where they grow crops, or graze animals. So why this system? Around the time when it was obvious a lockdown was coming, I read a community organisation manual that mentioned how graph theory applies to limiting the spread of something like Covid-19. It advocates getting together with your clos

Poem for peace, from a pirate recording in a Cairo Museum.

My love With peace I have placed loving flowers at your feet With peace With peace I stopped the seas of blood for you Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come Come and live with me my love Under a blanket of peace I want you to sing, beloved light of my eyes And your song will be for peace let the world hear, my beloved and say: Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come And live in peace These I believe are the words of a widow at the tomb of her beloved. I got the words from this italian website . It was used in a seminal Italian anti-war song " Luglio Agosto Settembre Nero " by the band Area (although I guess they weren't called anti-war songs then) - whose vocalist Demetrio Stratos indirectly gives the name to this blog, and whose music is the inspiration for a lot of my mine. It's adapted in turn from a greek folk song, but no-one knows who wrote the original words, except that Stratos was probably