Gordon's Progress

It appears I have acquired a self-appointed promoter, and a most effective one at that. She arranged two gigs in one day!

So, the pitch that got the gigs?

"[i]My dad plays the theremin and he's really good. It goes woo-woo.[/i]"

:-)

Beat Frequency - appearing at a Primary School and a Rainbow Guides (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girlguiding_UK#Rainbow_Guides) near me soon.

Hang on, that post was unintentionally tasteless!

Sorry everyone. I made the mistake of googling "terrified children" and picking an image before checking the source...

did someone mention Dorit's panties???

Alex - It amused me. Does that make me tasteless too?

No, Buddy. You were dreaming again.

No - Dorit mentioned them at her gigs. She sells theremin lingerie for. . . . electromagnetic activities. Talk about product placement.

A quotation that seems to fit what I am doing...

From The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances."

It's 8:30 am on the first full day of the Sonic Weekender. As far as I know I am the first to wake, having been the first to sleep last night. Yesterday the house throbbed with musicians, camera wielding observers, conversation and music.

Three pieces were recorded, two of which I was involved in. The first was a wholly improvised piece to a percussive backing created by twanging a metal spatula against a door frame, the sound then being looped and put through several effects. There was a moogfoogered bass, guitar, several keyboards - one emulating a mellotron. I added some simple swoops. Everyone played pretty much continuously and afterwards our producer, Pierre Duplan and our musical director, Ann Shenton hacked away all the dead wood giving breathing space to the instruments and imposing a structure on the piece. It worked very well.

The second piece was Matt's idea. (Matt = Wire Mother (http://myspace.com/wiremother)) Matt laid down a sequenced backing on his Novation, and switched between that and a CD of transmissions downloaded from the NASA website. I improvised a plaintive melody over the top. Mostly I kept in tune, but there were a heck of a lot of distractions, not least from Ann and Pierre orchestrating us frantically from about three feet away and gesticulating to go wild, calm it down, use the frothatrill so there were plenty of opportunities for me to lose the plot completely, which I of course did. Later, our songstress, Lee, added a "HAL 9000" style voice-over - just an amazing, sexy voice!) and I made my way to bed while Pierre and Ann mixed it down.

My plan to find a room away from the sounds emanating from downstairs was largely successful - only one instrument managing to find its way into my bedroom - will someone please shoot that ruddy thereminist! - so I fell asleep to the sound of my own worst playing, over and over.

Mostly I slept well, apart from a period where my roommate was either tuning his motor-bike or constructing a by-pass, and I passed the time contemplating the benefits of smothering him.

This morning I woke with the idea of finally doing the Medusa Chain - we have three theremins and numerous delays - adding in some percussion - I noticed a tambourine, jingle bells and a double wooden agogo (http://www.djmmusic.com/mmDJM/Images/PP3010-AI.GIF) - and renaming it Phoenix Asteroids - to tie in with the Dark Star theme of the event. When she wakes I shall pitch it to Ann and see how it goes.

Sunday morning. Again, here's the Gordon perspective - i.e. from the kitchen, next to this morning's extensive collection of empty bottles and cans.

Yesterday I pitched Phoenix Asteroids and it went well. Garry took the bass line on my etherwave, I had the Kees Enkelaar theremin and Ann sat on the floor in the hallway with her Z Z Top red (a friend had been painting his guitars and had some left over - she also told a story about using someone famous's guitar strings - Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page or someone - as a flail with which to play her theremin and slashing the back of her hand as it whipped round, twice) etherwave perched on a chair - she had an interesting take on staying very still which I am told involved the use of a pickled-egg-picker-upper (the device used by Arnie in Total Recall to extract a homing device from his sinuses.) Random percussion was provided by someone who's name escapes me. Sorry, guy.

Later there was a frantic search for paper to write some lyrics down. When Ann asked me I had no paper, but offered some more lyrics instead. Something I wrote for my children.

[i]Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
You're a fusing plasma ball
Your great distance makes you small
Travelling through our atmosphere
Makes your starlight twinkle here
Twinkle, twinkle little star
Now I know just what you are[/i]

(It's great hanging out with artists - people found emotional content in my words I had no idea was there!)

Which was leapt upon by another group working on a piece inspired by snoring (everything is a potential source of inspiration) about the universe going to sleep. There was talk of my providing the voice, or of Lee. It might have been recorded yesterday afternoon while I slept. It might not. We shall see.

My whirlees (lasso d'amore) provided a drone interlude for another piece - I was on takes one and two but not the final take - arms too knackered by then.

In the afternoon I slept and missed the choir of everyone singing for an a cappella piece which sounded astonishingly good - what bits I heard of it.

Also decided by drawing names from a hat while I slept was the groups for six one minute pieces. My group have yet to record, but I kibitzed a couple of the sessions. One minute takes as long to record and mix as six - possibly longer, people feeling they have more freedom to do retakes and add extra tracks. Pierre Duplan is a producing machine - people bring him coffee and omelettes while he sits at the mixing desk and the music keeps rolling out. Ann's genius lies in telling people their ideas are great and disrupting proceedings at just the right moment.

Plans get ditched and reformulated at the speed of light round here. One piece involved recording vox pop interviews with random people on the subject of home. My contribution was to be vocal-esque responses to the voices on the theremin. Then we went into the recording room and the voices were played back below audible levels during the session. So I just made twiddly noises instead. Then in the final mix the voices were brought back up to the top. Aaaargh! But on the plus side, Ann did her favourite - OK all go crazy for this bit - bit, so I punched on the pitch shifter. Fun, fun, fun!

I can't wait to see what today brings. Already I have been filmed ironing my chinos and posing with the iron as a hero of the domestic revolution. For the one-minute piece if it fits I have in mind to do some theremin plus delay arpeggios. But who knows. What I want is to bring something different to each piece I play on, and I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve.

Sunday evening. The whole day has had a winding-down feel to it. People have drifted away. About half remain. This morning we laid down a beautiful piece about blowing planets up. Pretty, with an unsettling nervy edge to it. Listening to the rough mix I felt my contribution could be further into the background.

This afternoon has been slow. Pierre and Ann have been in the studio for hours finalising tracks. And we have enough to be able to pick and choose!

To pass the time I rustled up something on GarageBand, using the system text to speech to read the nursery rhyme in the previous post, with a touch of low pass, a bit of ring mod, a hint of reverb and the last word echoing away. Then a pad of some presets voices, kind of ambient Eno-y and gentle. A very simple, naive piece, which I think is important to it. I'm calling it Nursery Droid.

Whether there will be time or room to add it to the album I don't know. It's not important. I thought it would be nice to offer Pierre something that didn't need a lot of work from him. After half term I'll probably dig something out of archive.org and stick it on youTube.

Been listening to the final mixes. Damn good! Project successful. Wait till you hear it. :-)

Also got to give props to Marc. He has done all the dirty work - picked up cigarette butts, washed and cleaned, made tea and provided inspirational speeches. Main man!

After my posting yesterday afternoon the mood picked up. People stopped leaving and the remaining people found stuff to do. There was an optimistic mood in the air. While I was messing around with nursery rhymes Etienne played with the vocoder on the Novation, and came up with a M style ("everybody talk about Mmm, pop music") pop song - "everybody's talking 'bout sex in space, sex in space, sex in space" and people started offering suggestions - add a female voice - needs some moaning - I offered a lewd mime with sound effects that had amused Ann earlier - she dubbed it "Theremin W--k" - I prefer to call it "Solo Performance" - but Etienne was able to pant excitedly into the vocoder like someone who had a lot of experience in that field. I also suggested a voice-over of Newton's Laws of Motion.

[i]An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force. An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force.

The rate of change of momentum of a body is proportional to the resultant force acting on the body and is in the same direction.

All forces occur in pairs, and these two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.[/i]

All good stuff - people came with ideas and went away with ideas. Fair play.

I fell asleep as the virtually final mix was played back for everyone. As before the only sounds I heard were the theremin. Sounded a lot better than last night.

This morning there is a calmness in the house that is belied by the gale force winds outside.