recording musicians of bremen volume four

howard had posted over demo tracks (vocals and ukuleles) for  blue crystal fire and confiding in the evening star, both of which are sounding good and fried in reverb and delay.  there’s also a song called blind spot (for the moment) and some kind of drone thing called experiment. and there are loads of covers that could be done painbirds, turn your heater on, katie cruel, on the road again, even rain and snow could get a re-lick.

ok day one (sunday 26th may) of the horsemouth's guitar and vocal recordings

the tracks so far;

• katie cruel (taken a little fast truth be told). two guitars (tuned standard and daddad), a vocal each howard and horsemouth. (perhaps a little lap steel next). 
• confiding in the evening star. howard vocals and ukulele, horsemouth slide guitar, vocals on the chorus. not there yet (but coming along nicely). as an original song it will take a while longer to get it together. 
• blue crystal fire. ukulele and vocals howard. horsemouth, some tracks of e-bow guitar (a bit meh to be honest), acoustic guitar following the chords about (sightly discordant) sounding most elegant but a little darker than the original. once horsemouth had got a take down howard could hear the sense in it. 

day two (monday 27th may) horsemouth was round howard’s recording again. 

on sunday horsemouth had brought down the lap steel - he played two parts call and response on katie cruel with this and then they added a track of clapping to attempt to firm up the rhythm. (violin would be nice).

for confiding in the evening star horsemouth faked up an intro (based on the chorus) and this led him up and into the verse, he then got howard to extend out the song by another verse (they had not taken the precaution of recording it to click and so could not just copy and paste verses round the place) and essentially reprised the introduction through it. hence (for once) a more complicated structure than usual. again violin would be nice.

 the one they began fresh was painbirds

this they recorded to click - horsemouth did the guitar part on the paesold nylon strung guitar, then some vocals, howard did some vocals and then a double-tracked melodica part for the instrumental last verse. it’s a bit slow (but it might be better slow). horsemouth then doubled up some of the guitar with some from the resonator. it was sounding pretty decent by the time they had it done. (erm. violin maybe).

probably back to work saturday

books, films, gigs, events may 2019 (a little early as usual)

 books

• a voyage to lisbon - henry fielding 
• the signal and the noise (part) - nate silver 
• chronicle of the guayaki indians - pierre clastres (translated by paul auster)
•  the ancien regime and revolution - alexis de tocqueville (introduction and start) 
• road to wigan pier - george orwell (about half way) 
• cocteau - francis steegmuller 
•  masquerade and other stories - robert walser (intro and a few stories) 
• chav solidarity - d. hunter (first few chapters) 
•  bringing it all back home - ian clayton 

 films - berth 24 (1950- j.b.holmes) - songwriter (kris kristofferson, willie nelson) - cowboys and aliens - army of darkness (the medieval dead) - crazies (remake) - godzilla (2014) - alistair campbell on depression - first two episodes of 'the rivals of sherlock holmes' - plenty of other rubbish

 gigs

•  lankum and brighde chaimbeul - cafe oto 
•  me and my friends - qeh foyer 

 events recording with howard, john visits, european elections, jam with minty, cat sitting in london bridge, darsavini birthday

gnarly drone through giant orange stacks

so the lankum gig was good (if not quite as earth shattering as the first time he saw them) - jesus, we’ll have to seriously up our game.



lankum have radie peat’s voice and her harmonium drone - giant gnarly drone through two giant orange amplifier stacks (exactly the kind of amplifiers beloved by stoner doom bands and hated by roadies because of how heavy they are), but they also have a fantastic ability to harmonise and crucially they have the tunes (cold old fire in particular).

horsemouth likes the lankum version of katie cruel - but for his money you can’t beat the karen dalton version. horsemouth is a little unsure why he’s recording it himself. 

he also liked lankum’s political analysis ‘(I’m no economist but) we’re fucked. you’re fucked. we’re all fucked.’




brighde chaimbeul was on first - bagpipes, scottish tunes and bulgarian ones. that was pretty great also (would go well with laura cannell). horsemouth is not up on bagpipe terminology - is it the chanter that’s the pipe that the tune is played on then there are various drone pipes tuned by twisting them.

cheers to lou for getting the tickets (and for getting everyone there early so we could get seats). good to see everyone.

horsemouth dun voted (living with john fahey)

it is the anniversary not just of the deaths of clyde barrow and bonnie parker but also of the defenstration of prague that kicked off the 30 years war in europe.

meanwhile horsemouth voted for possibly the last time in a european election. it’s PR and it’s over ‘the seaside towns’, and how long the MEPs will actually sit in office (so how much of an effect they will have good or bad) is moot. we won’t know the results until sunday

it is off course getting messy in the uk, but it is getting messy in europe also - a generational shift is taking place between the europhiles and the eurosceptics. macron has arrived too late to play batman to angela merkel's robin. there’s a shift right-ward. there will be flag waving by the eurosceptic right who will do well in these elections - but actually, like the UK, it is not clear that the real levers of power in europe are in the european parliament anyway.

it is a vote with real consequences but horsemouth is happy to have it as a proxy second referendum - he just wants to get a sense of the actual distribution of forces. the brexit party will win big he thinks - even getting seats down into london and the south east.

the collapse of the nostalgically rebranded ‘british steel’ is a case in point - bought from tata (who’d milked the subsidies and bailouts and worker’s pension plans) by the venture capitalists of greybull for one pound, possibly unsaveable under european competition rules, possibly unsaveable under WTO competition rules, hoist on brexit uncertainties and carbon credits and in any event dirty old industry with 60 year old blast furnaces, its raw materials coming from abroad.

the real issue (for horsemouth)  is the vampire squid subsidy farming capitalism of greybull and the like, the chronic short-termism of government. whatever is worth money of it will be saved out of the wreck, whatever subsidies that can be given will be farmed and then eventually it will go tits up yet again (to be rescued yet again and relaunched at yet a lower level). who will emerge as ‘the saviour of british steel’? - probably farage. go on - it’s just perfect.




'Some day they’ll go down together 
 And they’ll bury them side by side 
 To few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief 
 But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.' 
 Bonnie Parker, “The Story of Suicide: The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

birdsong sunlight books (a wood pigeon)

yesterday was the first day horsemouth felt truly free. he sat in the back garden sunning himself (it’s still a little nippy). by the end of the day he was a little torched.

this morning he writes this (types this) with the window open but wearing a jumper with his sleeping bag covering his knees.

horsemouth has been reading paul auster’s translation of pierre clastres chronicle of the guayaki indians. the forests are full of dangerous animals that can kill, the nights full of malicious ghosts of former tribe members, the neighbouring tribes are all shunned and believed to be cannibals. then there is the white man and his dogs and guns. the ghosts are lonely in their wanderings in the land of the dead, they must given someone to keep them company or they will come and take someone, it is difficult to keep everyone fed, there is abortion and infanticide to keep the numbers low at the level the environment can support, disease comes and when it does the sick are simply left behind to die. 

‘although I have been back to paraguay several times, I have never seen the guayaki indians again. i have not had the heart to...’ clastres, a student of claude levi-strauss, died in a car accident in 77 0r 78. of the guayaki indians their numbers are in any event declining - soon, if not already, clastres realizes, they will be gone.

auster’s translation was not published when it was made. the only manuscript was lost (only to be recovered from a second hand bookstore bargain bin years later). now we have it. horsemouth found it in a charity shop - not the manuscript but a fully bound paperback book pulbished by faber and faber, they were presumably emboldened by the subsequent success of auster as a novelist.

 ‘no matter that the world described in it has long since vanished, that the tiny group of people the author lived with in 1963 and 1964 has disappeared from the face of the earth. no matter that the author has vanished as well. the book he wrote is still with us... a small triumph against the crushing odds of fate...’

pastures of plenty

there was a brief discussion last night of how karen dalton can really do it (and this is why she is unlistenable) - how in effect what she actually did was brought the anthology alive to the new york folkers - there she was, an actual hillbilly, doing it, and yet she is not so far from us that we cannot see her, this was no historic recording, and yet so strong is her duende you can hear it even on the recordings. there it is, the grain of the voice against the muzzyness of the guitar. the battle just to keep singing.

horsemouth has finished reading the fielding (a voyage to lisbon) - fielding is off to portugal for the sake of his health, but really he’s dying, he won’t last more than a few months. he spends a month becalmed in english waters before the necessary winds blow to take the boat to lisbon. he thinks about the english class system and calls for a set list of prices to stop the workers (and boatmen in particular) selling their labour for best price they can get (and scalping him mercilessly).

horsemouth has done a little research into the influence of ustad ali akbar khan's influence on robbie basho.

‘possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted the author’

so goes fielding’s description of his a voyage to lisbon (charity shop south london 50p together with his jonathan wild). fielding, horsemouth is pretty sure, makes it into rose macauley’s they went to portugal (but he cannot remember any details).

it’s even worse than he thought, it’s just about the voyage there - from june 26th until august 7th (42 days later).

‘there are many evils in society from which people of the highest rank are so entirely exempt that they have not the least knowledge or idea of them; nor indeed of the characters which are formed by them. such, for instance is the conveyance of goods and passengers from one place to another,’

fielding is about to find out (at length), and will share the horror of it with the reader.

fielding is going there for the sake of his health but he hasn’t even left london yet before he is fulminating against popery.



conversely for horsemouth it all goes well - last night the cats returned home, were fed and snoozed, he let the cats out this morning and they have returned and been fed (they are currently snoozing or pretending to snooze). they have accepted him as provider of food and opener of doors with alacrity.

the night before last  horsemouth watched the news and andrea oliver presented a program on uk jazz. he went to bed early. he dreamed of friends, losing them and meeting them again at the railway station. 

horsemouth arrived here having walked straight from work at camberwick green technical college (only pausing in various charity shops and at the library). this afternoon he’s off to minty’s for a jam (he thinks). tomorrow round to howard’s. it looks like next week will be the last week with a decent amount of work (i.e. enough to pay horsemouth’s rent nearly). thereafter he will be living off his savings from work (or he will have to go and find a summer job), a certain proportion of this is fair use - he can argue to himself that it is the money he (and his employer) are now paying into a pension for him in his dotage, this just leaves an amount that is actually his savings being dipped for real. 

horsemouth’s work is seasonal - he doesn’t want to take on more elsewhere because he likes the fact that he no longer gets so ill and run down over winter (though that may be down to central heating rather than anything else). horsemouth was intrigued by the bus pass at 60 (should he still be in the seaside towns) and by pension credit.