Death of a friend

I feel compelled to write a little eulogy for my friend who committed suicide - he was found dead on some train tracks in Bangalore a few days ago.

I could hardly believe the mail when I read it but in truth I wasn’t surprised as over the past few years he had went from not being contactable to sending distressing mails to his whole address book. These mails talked of accounting for sins and the mistakes he had made in this life. After some digging I found out that he was on psychosis medication and he had moved back from the UK to India where he was living with his parents.

I first met him in the UK when we were working together on tech projects. He was from Kerala and we soon became friends as a result of our common love of South Indian Carnatic classical music. He was a Brahmin and had clearly been well educated. I remember him telling me how he used to enter quizzes in order to get money for university. He said he was a ‘professional quiz competitor’ and he did well due to his photographic memory. He was erudite on tonnes of topics, unafraid of controversial statements and awkward situations and to top it off he was really funny with it. His grasp of English was better than most English native speakers. He used to tell me I was prone to hyperbole ;)

He hooked me up with a number of musicians in the UK and I recorded a light classical/folk album for him with some leading lights in the UK scene. We did it in his friends living room and it was a great experience. I really must release it.

When I mentioned that I was looking to go out to India to do some music for a few years it was him who advised me to “go to Kerala as it will be safer for you – you won’t be ripped off or hassled as much” He was right. He even helped me with connections in customs in order to be able to take a tonne of music equipment into the country. He opened up his friends in Kerala to me and was very generous indeed.

The last time I physically saw him was when he visited my place in Manchester. He was clutching a book on Symbols and we hung out in the garden under the night sky talking about the stars and life. He told me about how he was sad that the arranged marriage he was due to be involved in fell through. He discussed how difficult it had been living in the UK and that would return to India. He forgot his book of Symbols the next morning and it’s on my bookshelf today.

Near the end he had became obsessed with a variety of cults and suspect philosophies. He was lost to nearly all. I miss him.

RIP

Michael Jackson Is Dead

I thought he was great and wondrous and it's a shame to see him go but it's for the best.

He was mawkish in extremis at the end.

All the newspapers announcing his death are running the reanimated mummy look he had over these past 10 or so years. It was a cardiac arrest that killed him.

The period I feel in love with Michael Jackson and his music was Off The Wall. I found it on a copied cassette tape in the street and played it over and over. I even bought the songbook to practise the songs on keyboard.

He was utterly funky, wild and sensual then.

His voice was as raw as James Brown when he was 10 or 11. He could wail like no one and his falsetto stretched into the heavens. Girls loved Off The Wall in the way they love Stevie Wonder records.

Poor Mikey - he was a sauvant of a gospel-like spirit. He was as innocent as he seemed.

As the White Crane Flies

12000 miles’ debut album As the White Crane Flies is out now. You can buy it from the Flying Mountain shop for now - it will be on iTunes and other places soon.

12000 miles is the silicone egg brainchild of Boofa and myself. After meeting online in 2005 we decided to work on a project together and 12000 miles was born.

12000 miles is the distance between drongomala (Manchester, UK) and Boofa (Wellington, Aotearoa).

AS THE WHITE CRANE FLIES is three years of bouncing files through cyberspace, winters and summers.

12000 Miles have played ‘in analogue’ once in Manchester in 2007. Also guesting is the stellar flutist Iain Dixon of Manchester.

The Story...
Drongomala and Boofa met by chance on myspace in 2005 - they stumbled on each other’s music and dug what they heard. Drongomala was already 4 albums and six bands into his experimental musical path and Boofa was just finding his footing making simple yet provocative down beat electro. There was a natural alchemical connection that both D and B felt, they decided to work on a track together which soon turned into an idea for an album.

Keeping the demo files ‘low weight’ in the beginning allowed the pair to bounce whole suites of changes back and forth across the net. As the tracks developed then so did the size of the audio and midi files and eventually the pair moved from using Reason and a common-soundbank to Ableton Live and audio.

“We really challenged each other sonically and ended up with something that we could never have made alone. The overall sound is something that we came to by experimenting and doing things that we weren’t doing on our solo stuff. By exchanging files over the net, each session was open to the other completely ripping the material apart, so in a Buddhist styley we couldn’t become to attached to any material or ideas, just two takes each of sonic experimentation” Boofa.

The file exchange cycle became longer and the pair survived a band splitting up, 2 breakins, released three other records between them, started a t-shirt company and a degree in music, moved house 4 times and much else but they still managed to ‘tag’ one another over the two years with the developing demos. Boofa flew to his home town of London to see friends and family and made the trip up to Manchester where Drongomala and Boofa spent 6 short days working their 20 or so demos into a manageable live set for the 5th day in Manchester at the alternative Glastonbury event put on in Manchester’s Green room.

The set was raw and well received and the real life collaboration cemented the original connection that the pair made. After Boofa left the UK back to Wellington NZ the guys got to honing the material for an album, but what started off as an idea of 6 months max for a finished album turned into two years.

Drongomala got the auteur wind player Iain Dixon to come in and play flute over the material to cement the feeling of air and wings in the album. This was the second record that Drongomala has done with him and he says of Iain:

“I can’t rate him highly enough - he’s a master wind player. He is Macbeth and Puck in the same breath and regularly only needs to gentlest of nods to click into constant motion. I say ‘Cranes attacking Pygmies on the beach’ and that’s what comes out of the horn/flute/clarinet. A proper conjurer like a musician should be. Iain also turned down a Van Morrison tour just before he recorded with us which is a fun detail” Drongomala.

D & B then reworked the original material remotely - the music melted together and produced an expansive sonic landscape. The crane mojo was at work.

The album is quite different to anything that’s out there at the moment. It’s dynamics are almost operatic with some tracks sounding like a dropped pylon cable in a timpani section while others are gentle and conciliatory. As an album it is more than the sum of it’s parts - the spell doesn’t seem to break.

Don't take our word for it - listen now !

As The White Crane Flies by 12000 Miles

Bill Drummond and The17 - Northampton Fish Market

On Saturday I took part in a performance in Northampton, England of the17 organised by Bill Drummond. It began in the Northampton Fish Market Gallery.



Bill Drummond is an art agitator in the UK that has been involved in a number of psychologically challenging projects (burning a million quid, taking an effigy of Elvis to the north Pole) and has a musical history that began with his management of Echo and the Bunnymen which he then left to form his own band - The KLF. Check out more about Bill here. His main output appears to be writing now but one of his ongoing music projects is a 'post nuclear' choir where Bill imagines that all music has dissapeared and we begin again from year zero.

What is The 17?

Bill has some simple manifesto posters that he uses to explain it - I don't need to paraphrase



Having read Bills book about this project it prompted me to check out this event which was only an hours drive from where we were. As ever, leaving the house with my girlfriend can sometimes take longer than preferred and we left ourselves with 20 mins to get to Northampton fish market to register. Only the 1st one hundred people were to be allowed to register and take part. We broke the speed limit and got there to discover that the Northampton Fishmarket Gallery wasn't so busy and we were numbers 7+8 on the registration form. My agitation at missing out dissipated but my girlfriends agitation at my agitation took a little longer to leave.

The gallery was big and open. We had some nibbles, a cider and waited. I bought a nice artwork made by cutting out paper. It showed a sad man with his feet dangling over a hole and at the bottom of this hole in the forest there was a red heart. All cut out of paper on yellow, black and one splash of red. We watched the mechanical pigeon on the rafters drop out it's fake poo periodically and people slowly assembled.

Awards for top three outfits
1. The lady with a Vivienne Westwood stylings replete with bright red '17 t-shirt' and red hair.
2. The denim jacket with "Bring me noise!" in primal white daubs from a big brush
3. The chique Nouvelle Vague t-shirt. I bought their record recently after trying on a tweed suit in Scotland and in some ways this was the most punk thing to wear to such an event. Nouvelle Vague are a band that 'do' classic songs from dark 80's rock bands like Echo and the Bunneymen and further, do it in a latin lounge style with a succession of singers that never jump out but merely smoulder in the background. It's a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. It's the ultimate anti-the17 statement here.



The Surround Score
My girlfriend and me were taking part in a score called 'Surround'. The full version of SURROUND will be performed in Beijing, China in August 2009 - we were at the English trial-run.

Rather than use notation for scores Bill uses the everyman approach of plain text to describe how the choir should perform each score.

The idea in Northampton was to position 100 people around the streets of Northampton at intervals of 40-50m around a 5 kilometre circumference of a circle. Each spot was marked by a spray painted 17 logo on the pavement/wall/pole.

The score was to pass on a throaty shout descending to the note A from note C around the circle 5 times among the 100 people. The complication of having each 10th person begin the shout simultaneously and then pass it on clockwise was jettisoned when the logistical difficulty of having them notified at the same time became tricky. I guess that would need either a firework or 10 mobile phones calling another 10 mobiles of every 10th participant.

Quickly it was opted to have it begin with one person who would get a phone call to start.

We got Bills inspiring intro to the concept and the piece Surround and he got us all to practise the 'Hey Ho' shout so we were confident. It had to be loud as not everyone had line of sight with one another. My girlfriend was relieved she didn't have to sing 'professionally' or know what the note of C was but I was a bit disappointed that the only post-music expression I could input would be the volume or character of my shout. Other scores have called for chanting, free utterances or meditation on skylarks ascending. No matter.

100+ of us trooped out of the fishmarket following Bill.

Each person was dropped off at their point. I wangled to get us dropped off early as I needed a pee and spotted an early 17 in spray paint outside a working mans club. A photographer took shots of everyones foot next to their spray painted 17 but mine was on a wall and I was full of pee so they had to take one of my face for safety. Being dropped off early meant there was time to kill until the other 85 people had trooped the 5km and been dropped off. We hung about and got to know our new neighbours dotted behind and in front of us. Ten minutes later the bloke near me decided to abandon his post as he needed to get his bus. This was a bit of frustration as the magic line and number had been broken. Bill was obsessive about there being exactly 100 otherwise it 'wouldn't work'. I spoke to our line and said to ask passers by.

This stand-in job is a difficult sell to someone in 2 mins and I got a variety of responses including

• I'll do it if your girlfriend up the road there gives me head (from someone on the way to see their girlfriend)
• I'll do it - I'm just away home to get my Elvis costume
• How much will I get paid?

One of the girls two numbers up the line managed to call a friend and get her down. She would be here in 10 minutes.

Passers by in cars were hooting and noticing the pattern of people on the street. It was fun in the build up.

The replacement member of the 17 choir arrived 4 seconds before we had to do our thing. Destiny called out and we were not found wanting.

We all shouted 'hey ho' five times to one another and passed our energy around the circle. Shout number 3 seemed to be far too quick after shout number 2 and I susepct that a mis-fire happened somewhere along the line.

We trooped back to the Fishmarket Gallery to get our photo taken - drunkards from the pub were shooed out of the shot which would be only of the 100 with the photo being displayed on the wall of the gallery. I'm the one with the coffee cup and glasses.

Thoughts on my 'the17'

• I love the concept but not the one I was in. The realisation of the score didn't touch on the new concepts of music I was hoping it would. I wanted a less mechanised shout and something that could evolve further and go deeper.
  
• The 'piece' was too short. Short burst versions of the17 (i.e. less than 3-4 minutes) don't prompt the participants to reveal more of themselves to one another. This score didn't require anything other than good natured but ultimately distant participation.
  
• The group camaraderie was fun - there are definitely not enough reasons for small dynamic groups to bond and have a connection - this project has this shared experience at its core
• For most of the other Scores Bill did an audio recording of the event and then played it back at the end. Importantly, for Bill, the recordings were always deleted when the participants had heard it only once - the only remnant being in memories or Bills book notes. For events that didn't take place in the same temporal timeframe (i.e. recording 4 different schools on four different days) he collated and layered them on top of one another for playback and subsequent deletion. I would have liked to have seen an attempt to record our piece - it could have been done on a) our mobile phones b) an omni directional from a silent helicopter or kite;) or c) from 5 or 6 strategically positioned mics. I miss the ceremony of playback and deletion that the book pimped.
  

At the end of the piece I said a quick Hello to Bill and told him I'd mail him about Electroraga.

Check out the17.org, take part, challenge your thoughts about music.

"Bill Drummonds fundamentalism is the roar of the universe - lang may his lum reek."

Drongomala

Online Music Collaborations (Part 2)

I'm coming to the end of a musical collaboration with my initially online and now real-life friend Boofa (from Wellington, New Zealand).

We began our collaboration '12000 Miles as the White Crane Flys' in 2005 and met via MySpace and it's only now that this record is finally at the stage where the last mix is being done - three years later!

In between I've finished three other records and it's now time to write the Part 2 of the blog on online music collaborations (see part 1 here)

Boofa and I have learned alot during the collaboration and I thought I'd share a little bit of it with you.

It seems that the collaboration we did had a few distinct phases to it :

1. Flurry of ideas : this was the beginning phase where we threw lots of files back and forth. This is easily the most 'fun' section and it's exciting to get regular musical deliveries in your inbox. We were careful not to use any proprietary software so that what we heard was the same. We used the out of the box Ableton Live software with no 3rd party plugins...just what came with the software.

2. Flesh on lots of bones : We had around 15 tracks in a very basic state and this phase was to put some more work into them. The way we approached it was to take half the tracks each and spend more time trying to develop the ideas.

3. Switch: We swapped the tracks with each other and did a little more each.

4. Agree on the tracks to jettison: we both produced a top 10 list. We only had one or two disagreements but were easily solved.

5. Hook up : Boofa came over to the UK and he stayed at my place. He arrived with a big beard and a massive neon suitcase. It was great to meet up. My band was playing and we used it as an excuse to test some of the 12000 material on a live audience. We hooked up some midi controllers and practiced performing the tracks as they were. We only had a day to prep and then perform in the night.

6. Taking the candidates to the next level : over the lifetime of the recording we discussed the concept we were looking to hang the album on - it was something to help us understand what we were doing. We came up with the idea of Cranes and both liked the metaphor of our files thrown back and forth being like some sort of migratory birds flocking between Manchester and Wellington. I had been working with Iain Dixon the legendary flute player from Manchester and it struck me that nothing would communicate birds wings on the air better than a flute. I popped round to Ians with a laptop and recorded him playing to what we had. His single takes for each track added a super useful navigational tool to lead us to the final arrangement. I did a bunch of editing and once I was demented with the sound of flute I threw the tracks over to Boofa. At this stage file sizes were beginning to swell so DVD's were used to send data.

7. Some crackhead broke into my place and nicked my laptops. This was a setback and Boofa worked on the tracks adding calm and coherence. I moved house/town a few times in between before settling and getting more recording gear.

8. The final furlong : Mix time. By far this was the most difficult phase of the project and I think this is where Boofa and me had the most disagreements. In retrospect this is understandable as mixing is often a matter of taste and the final 'render' of the tracks is something that we both had a vision on. This is the one part of the process that I think would have been better sitting next to one another - we got there but not without some blood on the tracks.

But all the time and pain dissipated - we both feel it sounds great. It was worth the 100 transfers, the fights and the frustration. It'll be available in April ;)

In Summary..

• Don't be too precious - whole tracks, complete mixes, great performances are all subject to your partners opinion. Keep your eye on the prize and let some bits you care about hit the cutting floor.
  
• Credit the collaboration equally - writing and arranging and mixing. Even if one of you did more than the other for a track or the whole thing breaking it down into who did bit 'x' will only lead to bad blood.
• Have patience. Life gets in the way when you are working on a big project that is online. If you are trying to make something that is timeless then it doesn't ultimately matter how long it takes....if you are trying to make something that is 'now' then perhaps online isn't the best approach for a big project
  
• Don't use the tracks you are working on for some other reason without consulting your collaborator

Tools Used
Here is a list of tools we used for our online music collaboration. I've listed them in the order that we used them....

• Ableton DAW software - this was he workhorse of our tracks. Can't recommend highly enough. I notice that now we are finished Ableton have announced new collaboration features. Three years too late for the benefit of this project though.
• www.yousendit.com - this is a great free service that allows you to exchange large files
• www.skype.com -when it's all getting to be a bit too impersonal it's nice to do a video call and shoot the breeze. Keep it human.
• Google Documents - we used this for track notes and developing the text for the album cover. Google docs is a great service - don't be fooled by the tag 'Beta' as it's been in use for years
• www.soundcloud.com - This is a great tool and worth even a basic subscription. This online service allows you to upload tracks and exchange mixes with one another. The best feature is that you can see the waveform of the track and click anywhere to make a timed comment. This allows for simple exact commenting such as "that cymbal sounds wack"

Don't let them tell you it's all Gloom

All is Calm?

Dear Reader,

Hoping you are having a good December so far!?

I'd like to invite you to download, for free, my version of Silent Night.

Silent Night - mp3 version

This version of Silent Night was recorded when I was living in Kerala for 2 years recording with Carnatic musicians. When I recorded it the backdrop was the unfolding US policy as a result of 9/11 and it seems all these years later there are still problems all over the world.

Recently in Bombay there were terror attacks and there still continues to be demonisation of whole ethnic groups on all sides across the world. This track, from the album 100 Fields, was made with 2 Hindus, 2 Christians, 2 Muslims, 1 agnostic, 1 spiritualist and a Drongomala - it's easy to make music really.

The track Silent Night will be free to download from this blog post or from www.drongomala.com all through Dec 08 until 2009. A notably wonderful Veena part played by Biju is a must listen on this track.

• Drongomala : vocals, acoustic guitar and arrangements.
• Balu - mridangham
• A.R. Biju : veena
• Jon Thorne : double bass
• Ian Holmes-Lewis : percussion
• Sanjay/Merlin/Lenoy/Sandra/Ramesh/Sujith - choir

"NOW AVAILABLE TO BUY!" (iTunes, CDBaby, FM) Album Title : 100 Fields Artist : Drongomala Catalogue : FMCDA003 Label : Flying Mountain For more information Visit us at: www.drongomala.com Email : silentnight@flyingmountain.co.uk