ilovefuzz.com

Well, I went back and forth on whether to do a self-congratulatory/self-promoting post, but what the hey.

I'm playing a duo set that's going to be properly/professionally livestreamed tonight. 8 p.m. EST, if you're looking for something to do with your evening (or if you're up late in Europe!)

Playing with my friend Patrick who's a guitar whiz. I'll be playing some of my lyre pieces and doing some synthin' on the Zoia on his compositions. Full info is here and you should be able to catch it here:



...and for bonus self-promotional content, I had a pre-recorded trio set premiere on youtube earlier this week. I was playing tapes, processed ukulele and wired heart:

Just noticed this and I'm watching the live performance and have realised I now need to add lyre to the list of instruments I don't own, but need to! I liked that first piece, you should make some samples from it for the next Okta release. What sort of reverb were you putting that through? The other chap on guitar made some enjoyable sounds too and I like the complete disregard for a pedal board - far too many pedals, in the best possible sense Considering the compositions were randomly chosen, I assume that means that the selection of notes used had to be possible on both lyre and guitar?
The third piece with both of you playing together had a sort of moody Fripp / Eno No Pussyfooting feel to it, but then it became something else more electronic and then returned to the drones - that was very interesting to listen to; I really liked the drone parts (I'm a sucker for swelling sounds). Both of the lyre and guitar pieces worked really well too, and I think they were my favourites. Some of the backwards stutter guitar around 27 minutes was great; I would never have thought that would work with the lyre. The very rhythmic / discordant piece wasn't my sort of thing until the guitar calmed down and it was you just playing whatever that small synth was? The gospel piece wasn't my thing either, but it was certainly different and wasn't boring!

Overall this was a wonderful performance and reminded me of some of the wondrously odd things that I used to experience in cultural centrum's in lesser known parts of Belgium in happier times!

The other duet performance was very avant garde skronk... I decided I'd had enough at that point I'm old enough to know when I've had too much avant garde skronk (plays havoc with the digestion at my age!)

Aw, glad you dug it some!

moid wrote:Just noticed this and I'm watching the live performance and have realised I now need to add lyre to the list of instruments I don't own, but need to!

Yeah, the lyre is super-fun and easy to approach. And pretty cheap, especially the 7-string ones like I got. The next step up is a 16-string, which probably opens more possibilities (especially some more harp-like harmonics) but I like the constraint of 7 notes. It's tuned DEGABDE, so it's not possible to play something discordant!

Those notes make it pretty easy to play on guitar, too, though it calls for sight-reading at speeds I am nowhere near.

moid wrote:What sort of reverb were you putting that through?

The reverb — and the synths — are all Zoia!

Patrick's one of the people that I can nerd out about pedals with, so I think he brought all those to jokingly show me up — he had quite a few less on hand when we rehearsed.

moid wrote:The third piece with both of you playing together had a sort of moody Fripp / Eno No Pussyfooting feel to it, but then it became something else more electronic and then returned to the drones - that was very interesting to listen to; I really liked the drone parts (I'm a sucker for swelling sounds).

I love this composition — I just love the look of it even! Full disclosure, as I said, I can't sight read at playing speed, so I "translated" it to a format that I could follow... I basically numbered each of those notes, and made little tree diagrams showing which notes can lead to which others... and I numbered the pads on the Zoia correspondingly with bits of tape.

The other one is super-interesting to me, as I don't normally play/think musically in that rhythmic sort of way. It was a cool step out from my usual m.o. to think about trying to play quarter and eighth notes!

moid wrote:Overall this was a wonderful performance and reminded me of some of the wondrously odd things that I used to experience in cultural centrum's in lesser known parts of Belgium in happier times!

The other duet performance was very avant garde skronk... I decided I'd had enough at that point I'm old enough to know when I've had too much avant garde skronk (plays havoc with the digestion at my age!)

I'm super-lucky to live in a place where there's an approachable music community that made it seem easy and natural that I would shift from being an audience member to playing... I wish everyone could find that!

Second set was indeed top-notch skronk, with top skronk peeps.

Thanks for all the extra information! I can't read music beyond tab for guitar (and I'm not quick at that either!) so I can understand that feeling. That composition above is crazy, I had no idea it would look like that! I wish there was a musical community near me... we used to live in London which is easy to find amazing places to see live music, but we moved to a town a long way out because our son was born and suddenly a tiny apartment with a tiny shared garden and nowhere to park was not a great place, and owning a house with a garden and driveway was a good idea, but completely impossible in London for anyone but rich people... and there's no cultural events here at all (probably one of the reasons why it was cheap enough for us to buy a house)... and all the money that used to go on fun things now goes on living expenses... I hope that at some point in the future that will change. Thankfully my son is very keen on music so we play together and make our own weird sounds.

The skronk held my attention for a while because the chap involved was talking about Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty which I read when I was a student 30 or more years ago, and I don't think I've ever heard his name mentioned since! So my ears picked up, but skronk still doesn't do anything for me... I do try to listen to it sometimes because so many people enjoy it, but I can't figure it out. For me to enjoy music there needs to be something harmonic or melodious in it... pure noise / discordant stuff is too much for me!

Definitely thinking about lyres though