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December goings on

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. Brilliantly produced. I wish I could take some old improvisation where everyone goes mad and the music gets really crazy and apply that level of production to it. So anyway this same producer is also the base player and I really need to find a tight base player to trade rhythms off with, and I've got my band.


Apart from that I've been at a very anarcho-activist-pagan friendly Wassail choir where I played guitar for my friend Melski who was leading a workshop teaching the carols - very nice songs, bits with time signature changes but in a very folky way, and lots of vocal parts making each an anthem in it's own right, and then went out to a mad St Pauls jazz/classical instrument players party where the improvising was so great although purely musical, and we went from balkan to arabic to indian to jazz, folk and romanian - 7 beat stuff. Beautiful.


I also wrote a score - not written one for a long time. This was for the wild bunch re-score on the 22nd, live at the cube. Very fun to play, loads of ideas based on the score I wrote, like directing myself during an impro with random data off the internet, like reading out the tube gossip feed or some large IRC chatroom about something very heavy and particular...


What I've been spending a long time with is playing around with some free web space on the Cube Cinema's server. I also want to host a bristol/south west improvisation website - somewhere to bring together all the talent we have in this area, and list gigs/show off people and discuss etc. But I want to build it in an improvisory style, so up to now it's like a labyrinthine wiki - so if you come in you can add whatever you want off the sides of the page. I want to name it Nin - the world of humanity in buddhism. But the Bristol and Southwest Experimental Improvisation Website or even Impro-Crime will be just as good.


I also want to host all my songs on free servers, make as much of it creative commons as possible, and try and have a web presence on opsound again - I had a nice page which had lots of people downloading lots of sadly older and worse quality recordings - now both it and it's gnomoradio counterparts have been moved to the Internet Archive - also starting to use ccMixter for example for a nice dark hours improvisation of which I'm currently recording more... festive themed experimental madness.


So the other use for the sparror web space will be to put together a personal website as a more permanent bringer together for this stuff. In my Xmas stocking a behringer mixer thing for recording, which I'm buying now... And a studio to use! My first very own arts studio... Soon to be a place for sessions of any kind...

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