something good (world's bliss)

last night horsemouth returned from administrative duties at chateau bremen - thinking about a bandcamp site and a blog etc. - which had in fact turned into a productive afternoon's music with good work being done on freight train (elizabeth cotton), blue crystal fire (robbie basho), your child self (howard mostly), and 12th century monk's plaint the world's bliss (trad. arr. horsemouth, found in edward lee's music of the people) but also work on playing keyboard on all my dreams, second skin and you're not god so that when they can face carting the keyboard to gigs they can have a set with keyboards.

musicians of bremen have already recorded blue crystal fire the trick is to now find a way of doing it live or to make it sound like the recording by farming off all the additional parts that horsemouth played on guitar when recording it (other than the main chord strum) to the ukulele - perhaps it will change in the process. horsemouth thinks it is perhaps a verse too long

 'worldes blis ne last no throwe 
hit wit ant wend away anon 
the lengur that hich hit I knowe 
the lasse ic find-e pristher on 
for al hit is i meynd wyd kare, 
mid sorewe ant wid uvel farce 
and at the laste poure ant barre 
hit let mon wen hit 
ginnet a gon' 

world's bliss is of a similar age to summer iz y-cummen in or edi beo thu hevene quene and is (as you may have noticed) a cheerful little ditty. horsemouth recorded it before and you can hear that version on his myspace page, he modernised the lyrics and the tune a bit he's sorry to say, but it seems to work. it will be interesting to see what howard makes of it. at the moment he is grappling with the medieval turnarounds. it's main virtue (other than being totally not what either of them would write) is that it's traditional and can thus be covered without having to pay anybody anything. it needs a better pitched voice than horsemouth's.

( ah interesting - the tune (which with the words is all that has come down to us, and that at least as re-imagined by horsemouth) harmonises much better against Dminor and Gminor (beginning with a nice D suspended 4th) than against the deliberately dischordant G major, Bb major (A7, G7, C passing chords) that horsemouth used on his version. perhaps a nice tuneful introduction before the horror.)  

there, horsemouth thought he was going to write about how he had no memory and has to write everything down.