Wookey and his Shields.

My friend Michael Wookey is finishing his third album. I've known Michael for a while now and my love for him just about balances the fierce jealousy I harbour of his musical gifts.

A few years back a friend gave me a copy of Michael's second album, beautifully titled "You Shield Me from Darkness". It must have been winter at the time, because everytime I hear these songs I have frost on my memory and woolen jumpers embracing my frame. In my technological retardation, the album I have starts with the marauding slur of Keep a Promise rather than the correct lead of I Can Show You Things, and its a song that I find so nourishing. Its typical of its brothers and sisters in the gorgeous chaos of instrumentation, but this patient tells a story not only in words and chord progressions, but also in tone and intent. The spoken count in at the songs alpha and the sombre drone that follows is a theatrical leveling. It widens the eyes, this lacuna of murmur which lasts only seconds until the falling xylophone provides the true genesis, but its this little segue; marking the transition from loaded silence to majestic procession which tickles me. 

Michael is guilty of creating little shanty towns in his songs. Little one act plays with beginnings middles and ends and all the intrigue and event of a rich local history. If sounds were transferrable to the written word these songs would be Dylan Thomas. And there is something very Under Milkwood-y about this album. The characters in Michael's sonic legion are thick with folklore and triumphs and failures. Each song boasts a congregation of sonics, parishioners with dark secrets beneath the floorboards and live skeletons in various closets.

Just as you come to grips with the haunting theremin, grizzled vocal and maudlin sense that something here is really paralyzing, the townsfolk collect and gather round a campfire for the chorus. The depersonalization and seclusion of the verse is replaced by a swinging romance of hope. He choirs his voice as omega draws near and the effect is prayer like. Sanguine is sought after and received as we fade out. There's more than music here, note that I didn't say JUST music, its evident from You Shield Me From Darkness that Michael Wookey is a novelist. And a good one.

I was talking to Mike about my green at the way he works tonight. The difference between us is that Michael truly creates the sounds you hear, through a family of seasoned and mutated instruments he has adopted and birthed over his career. HIs paternity over every ping and crash is in no doubt and is proven by the intimate performance only a father could achieve. 

Michael lives in Paris with his wonderful lady Laura-Jeanne, speaking french and performing his arias for the people of France. I'm so envious of Michael I could literally die. The otherworldliness of is creations is quantified by his fearless residency in a foreign country. I'm eager to experience the beautiful solitude of being surrounded by people but hearing nothing. Well, not HEARING nothing, but perhaps not comprehending anything. Its difficult enough to concentrate on absence of thought, the haven for creatives, in this country with everyone blithering and intruding on my cipher. And I love to hear people talking. Listening to conversations can be exhilarating and informative, and also as pleasurable as symphonies. The lilting dissonances and impulsive changes of pitch and timbre. But at times you need a white noise to find the pebble in the cave. 

Michael speaks far better french than I could imagine, but it must be wonderful to hear people talking and not have to hear what they are saying. 

As well as covetousness; I am suffused with an immense pride and sense of privilege to know Michael personally. After disconnecting from skype tonight, following a conversation with Mike, I took myself outside to indulge my need to fog my lungs and listened to Keep A Promise again. 

Someday I am going to sit down with him, perhaps; if I am lucky, in Paris, and talk about this song and the stories it tells me. 

You should talk to Michael too. 

www.michaelwookey.com

The importance of reading a book

I'm writing again, which is a huge relief. 

After finishing what is probably my seventh Angela Carter book, I am suffused with a level of creativity I had thought impossible. One of my Dad's friends, a lyricist, said once that words were like cats: they come when they want to. Which is exactly the same with music. I have tried for the best part of a year to write something leading enough to turn into an album. Something with enough of a comet tail to steer my spaceship into the next quadrant.

Wise Children got the ball rolling. When I read this I remembered how liberating fiction could be. A notion that is strange for me to forget seeing as I am surrounded by fiction everyday. Nora and Dora Chance were the two slutty old ladies who got my pen hand wriggling again, but it was Fevvers who sent it shooting out of the cannon. Fitting, what with her wings and all. 

I've written a garden of lyrics and poems informed by Angela Carter's canon in the past few weeks. And I realize that without novels and stories, music is just noise. 

For Warpsichord, i took a lot of inspiration from classical horror and science fiction. The God Song and Cuckoos were direct reflections of John Wyndham (Chocky and Midwich Cuckoos respectively) and Franks Monster was plainly Shelley. Also present were the tones of Marvel Comics, which I have collected and obsessed over since my childhood, when one Sunday afternoon i travelled back from London on a train with my brother and filled my mind with his What If story featuring Phoenix of the X-Men. 

Its probably really cheeky, but when i read a story or identify with a character so completely I am compelled to absorb them and turn them into actors in my own story. Not necessarily rewrite their story, but put it into my own flourished and overtly camp words. When i wrote Hawkeye, I was writing about a couple of things, most plainly; Clint Barton of the Avengers and, perhaps more covertly, about a terrible relationship I just about survived with my skin still on. I whored Barton to my purposes, and I feel a little guilty for it. 

I get a funny feeling in my stomach when i think of all the books and comic books I haven't read yet. Music and literature are the only two things in this world that thicken my blood. And they are essentially two ends of the same piece of string. My ideal eternity would be me and a computer and some instruments and a horde of books. As long as I could dwindle the hours until twilight with singing till i bled and reading till my eyes melted I would be happy. I could cope with nihilism, I could weather apocalypse if i could sing and read. For all my fear of old age and the certainty i harbour that old age is something I will not see, I would relish the opportunity to indulge my interests in my end days.

Generally, in the past I thought the only relevant song was one that conveyed a message of import. I would lace my songs with hidden barbs of 'morality'; in inverted commas because my notions of morality are heavily flawed and immature, feeling that there was no point unless a political perspective was announced. I think in my neotonous mind I was trying to make myself in the image of protestors I had nothing in common with. I never marched for Pride, I never survived a blitzkrieg or held my breath. It's only now in this current equinox (soon to be eclipsed by greater knowledge no doubt) that i come to my senses and see that a song is a story. A political view is served by fable and a moral missive is issued by folklore and myth. 

I don't think I'll ever be able to parody a politic. I'm too uneducated at this lofty age of 27, I'm too muddy in the mind to strike a philosophical question to its core; Sartre makes sense until I forget the terminology and I am too cowardly for atheism. 

In many ways; to survive, I need NOT to know things, because the result is wonder. A quality far too lacking in our society, too lost in its literal slavery. It's not that I believe Fevvers stories or wish upon poor departed Carter an intangible and invisible position as narrator. 

I don't need to believe in God or aliens, but the potential is so inspiring.

The Box

Warpsichord is a love story, but with robots, zombies, monsters and dark rooms at every turn.



....one of the Anterooms was dressed in darkness. If there had been a door it would have closed behind me i suppose, but in its absence the air thickened and my ears popped against the pressure.

I slid on my knees nervous of the darkness and began to crawl forward. Until i hit a barrier.

It was a struggle to pull myself to my feet and as i grasped at the monolith before me a layer became soft and like fabric. It peeled like skin and released leaving me crumpled again on my knees.

The flesh removed i could begin to see the edges on the structure, glimmers from an unknown light source. My eyes were straining to see, burning in the effort so the light may have emitted from them.

To touch, it felt solid. Hard and immovable metal, still as bone. But visually it appeared to be moving. Undulating. It rose and fell slowly like the shallow breath of a recent sleep. I felt a strange comfort in our symmetry.

Now on my feet; the box came navel high and its relief top shifted slightly under my touch.

I opened the lid with a palmful of blood and placed my wet hands inside.

There within were millions of taught strings. I ran my hands across them, harplike, to find that they were irregular and unparallel. Some thick and metallic, others seemingly made of tightly rolled paper. There was a halo trailing after my wandering strumming fingers, a hum, but blunt and sharp simultaneously. Almost silent but piercing in the surrounding vacuum.

The hum grew into a rumble. The rumble to a roar, and as my bones began to shatter and my skin tore back, the blackness morphed to sickening colour.....

Stripping

I am having to force some downtime down my neck at the moment.

I should be collating a bunch of songs for a bonus cd to be sold with the album when bought directly through my label, and i could do that easily from Warpsichord offcuts, but nothing is ever EVER good enough so i'm busy reproducing things, re singing re writing.

Its excellent to visit some things i hadn't heard in a while and it gives me little thrills to hear things i did that i had forgotten, but here's where the problem is. THERE'S TOO BLOODY MUCH OF IT. My hard drive is clogged with nearly 60GB of recorded bits and bobs, which would be amazing if they were all tremendously well executed pieces of musical literature. But a lot of it is recordings of "the time my voice cracked at the top note and i laughed and it sounded cool so i kept it to use later" and the like. I'm gonna have to pack some of it away before i can do new things. Onto a harddrive. Or two.

To be honest its been a long time coming. I have gradually become so freakishly patient that if a pitch bend takes five minutes to load i shall wait. But thats not really good enough. I don't have a great short term memory and things fall out of my head almost instantaneously so i have to be able to work quickly.

I wonder if my short term memory is actually an inability to pay attention. Some sort of attention defecit. I once told someone i had Attention Defecit Disorder, and then completely forgot to tell them it was a joke. But they were convinced for a few years that this was indeed true.

Its not that i can't pay attention really, but just that i try to pay attention to lots of things at once. I have the TV on when i read. I listen to music while i watch a movie. I draw while i make music. and i beatbox when trying to sleep.

Thats the worst one really the drumming at sleepytime. I'm terrible for drumming my fingers and hands. I walk in drum rhythms and have to keep them constant. I can't keep my fingers still and this all comes most violently at bedtime. I suddenly realise i have an amazing beat clattering around my head and i tap it out on my head/on the bed head. And its not just any old beat, but TRULY THE MOST INCREDIBLE FUSION OF DISRYHTMIA EVER BEFORE WITNESSED. This can keep me up for a long time. I'm kind of used to it, so i can still drift close to the edge of slumber paddle in the wake even and keep doing my beats without much hassle. But then a kind of anxiety starts to form and i wish i had a dictaphone to transcribe this magical clunking. But NO! Not a dictaphone. That, by morning would sound like a spittled fart from my tired lips pressed rudely into an insufficient mic or a mindless contextless clatter of nonsense beat on a dirty bed.

I need you to be able to hear all the villagers pounding these beats on the floors of my medicine mans hut, to hear the subtle cracklings of electricity flying between the poles of my fingers. And whats this?! over these thumps and splutters comes a growing sine wave. louder and louder, changing key fighting against a angry flute! staccato notes spiralling against the steady advance of the synthline! A harpsichord is sexually plucked with soiled plectrums making a tinny sharp oscillating etch against the lush and airy flutes.

And i can see the notes I'm going to sing, the voice I'm going to use, the look on my face as i spit the words. I can hear the colours flying around me at night. If i could see my own head at that point i bet there would be little glimmers floating around it.

But by morning its gone. I'll remember a word or a note, but mostly, my great concerto, my tribal aria is gone. No room in my head to keep it all in.

So i wonder if anyone can lend me a hard drive for my computer and one for my brain?

Band Practice featuring the X-Men

I'm watching the X-Men Animated Series today. I've had two glasses of red wine today and read four books this week, which is something of a record for me.

Band practices are going really well. What's really cool about it is remaking songs from scratch, some you wouldn't recognize from the album versions. Me and Matt were talking about it last night on the way to see Wolverine, how cool it is that the versions of the tracks that appear on Warpsichord are by no means the definitive versions. The bare bones of the tracks remain the same, but everything else can change and should change. I like the idea that this release will mark a point in history of these songs and this idea. Like a single frame in a roll of film.

When I was finishing off the production of this album I really liked the idea of releasing it as a double sided disc, one side containing the main mixes and the other side the tracks completely reimagined or remixed. The idea being that you wouldn't necessarily know which was which, it would be down to the listener to decide which version was the definitive one for them.

I shied away from this idea eventually, partially because of the difficulties that would arise for a DJ from a double sided disc, but also because I want this album to be as accessible as possible from the jump. No gimmicks if possible. But there is no reason not to investigate things in a live setting. Its also going to be really beneficial for the other musicians playing with me to be able to improvise themselves, and that without the rigidity of a backing track i can begin to experiment vocally.

I can't wait to get going with this now. I think Ireland will be first.

I've been thinking a lot about my next project recently. I think its going to be pretty fun to work on. I'd like to bring in other musicians for this one i think. I'm so used to working alone, but have found these past few weeks enlightening.

I wonder if i might have a little sleep now. That episode of X-Men where the Morlocks first appear is on and its one of my favourites.

Would anyone be interested in reading a blog which is less about music and more about my favourite X-Men?

Well you might get one anyway

love love love love love

The Captain America Video.....Video

The Captain America Video.....Video has been live on youtube for a while now, but i must simply tell you about it.




Its been a wee while since we shot it now so my memories are sort of Hazy.

We did principal shooting on a really hot day in June Maybe? I cant remember specifics. Me and Lin went a driving up to East Acton to Director Lulu's beautiful flat where the video was to be set.

Got there kind of early and so the two of us went for a wander and a nice cup of tea in a nicely weird place whilst Lu and Mags finished setting the equipment. I took loads of clothes up with me, my laptop, an amp for playback and some other bits and pieces.

We did a lot of performance shooting initially to capture what was going to be the crux of the video and then moved on to some really fun set pieces. These included Mags and Lindsay hiding in the cupboard and fashioning a method of turning the lamp off from within.

Amazing fun, but i always thought i would be more of a show off when actually tasked to perform, i was really shy instead. i think i started to pick it up though.

We finished off kind of late that night and Lin and i listened to Anat and Jem and the Holograms on the way home.

Work resumed later in the week with an evening shoot to get some darker shots and play with the lighting a bit more.

Lu had a really impressive set up. The lights were amazing and i think have turned out triumphantly in the finished video. This shoot was a lot easier in that i found it much easier to perform. In fact i think this is where we got the best bits of the video.

Marvellous fun during a sequence where i am wrestling with the tape on the bed, i fell back mid wrestle slamming the back of my head on the wall, but carried on as you do. I had to stop when we got to the climbing out the window bit because i was a bit woozy.

Anyway, i have better stories thn this somewhere and i shall write more thoroughly soon, but in the meantime, i think you should go and have a wee look if you havent already.

Get it here : LOOK!

more soon.

best again.

xxx

The God Song

It's been a while. I have been absent.

Life happened and didn't happen in equally devastating measures, but it appears the seas are finally settling.

During this vacation I began to write terrible amounts of words and during this proliferation I reconsidered some of the words I had written previously. Sometimes I don't know what I'm writing about until its done and then I have to apply it to my life like a horoscope to decipher the meaning. Sometimes that's the final stage in the writing. Once a chord progression and beat have been found, i mumble the lines i have come up with over the music and edit out the less lucid parts for more appropriate phrases. I'm kinda equal parts when it comes to composition. At times I write music to a lyric and at times I write lyrics to a music. But the most common scenario is this kind of edited autowittering translated into a story, sung over the bare bones and given flesh afterwards.

The words to The God Song happened more or less in this fashion.

There was a time in my life when i considered myself a viciously silent religious person. Troubled as I was and most everybody is, i could roll my eyes closed and bathe in a blonde light of comfort in times torment or stare at some invisible entity in dark formless clouds and feel connected to it.

I never really spoke about it and never attended a church, for it was a private experience and so greatly enriched by its secrecy. I think back to that time now and realise i was addicted to secrets. The pleasure and trauma of having something unknown to anyone but you. Terrible things really. i try not to have any secrets these days. I am fairly certain this happened because of all the X-Men and Spider-Man comics i consumed. Ha.

A few of my friends had deep seated, sturdy christian beliefs which could not have been more alien to my personal beliefs. They would effervesce communally and loudly over the correct approach to sex in the eyes of god. I would listen and offer a view based only on fact or logic, deadpan and devoid of religious overtones. The straight man. Secretly i would converse with my Cloudman in pictures, not words. I would ride out the detriment of homophobes and bullies with knowing but desperate looks upward and feel protected. It was better on the darker cloudy days cuz it added to the whole drama of the thing. It was more satisfying and dramatic to imagine and Old Testament god looking directly at me atop a huge fucking thundercloud. And on sunny days i didn't really think about it.

And then one day it stopped. I'm not sure what happened, but it was like my access was rejected. The pleasures of comforts I had had during times of torment were now defunct and non renewable. A gloom would well beneath me and I couldn't tilt my head to see beyond it. That's probably enough metaphors about that.

I mean I tried to rejuvenate it. I bumbled with guilt and puzzled over standard thoughts of the forgotten sinner. I looked to more conventional means of contact to try and sidestep the malfunction and for a time began praying nightly. But it would not work.

Perhaps I grew up? I don't know what happened, but something ticked over in my head and I wasn't as easily rewarded. Which is probably a good thing. After a while I stopped even thinking about it. I got over the drama of having lost my imagined connection and got on with life.

And so the words to The God Song are largely about this time. My state as a marionette and the horrible moment an unseen crow snipped the strings to the sky. I actually thought about that image as I composed and tried to represent the crow by the marauding brass in verse two. just so you know to look out for it.

But I'm not REALLY a snipped puppet, and far from lifeless. As it is you find other ways to connect as we bumble along. to each other, and perhaps thats what I was looking for at that point in history and didnt realise.

This was a rather sombre one folks, so i'll stop there. I promise to be more fun next time. I will tell you about all fun things about shooting the Captain America Video Video, Maida Vale Studios, Radio One, Manchester, Gay Festivals, Chicks On Speed and Radio Plays with Blevin. Oh and remixes.

MORE (cheerful) SOON

AMX

xxxx