Afterthoughts on the Equinox Festival

Well, the Equinox Festival has been and gone, and Comus have played their second gig in 35 years!
The audience response was ecstatic and fantastic, and we unveiled the first of the new Comus songs, 'Out Of The Coma', as an encore. Things overran quite a bit though earlier in the evening, and we felt bad about the fact that Kinit Her's set seemed to have been cut short to accommodate us. Sorry guys.

An interesting event overall though! It was very good to catch the other bands, especially as I'm curious about the noise / electronica people, and listen to William Basinski and Heroines Of The USSR quite a bit.

It struck me, watching the musicians hunched over tabletops of electronics, that we had no immediate way of knowing for certain how the sounds were being generated; the tabletops of pedals, Electribes, delays and oscillators unleashed great oceanic waves of distorted and filtered sound that broke across the audience. I also wondered why we were all looking at the stage! Perhaps it's because we're so used to seeing musicians playing identifiable instruments that we can't quite relinquish the need to gawp.

I managed to snatch a brief chat with Pietro Riparbelli, who told me about his use of short-wave radio signals as the source material for processing. But I sensed, from a trawl through the websites, a chthotic sub-text to at least some of the music - hardly surprising, given the festival context - and I wonder how, or if, this influences the generative / compositional process. I don't know much about the esoteric / occult world at all. Perhaps I should have caught a couple of the lectures on offer earlier in the afternoon to get a sense of context.

Maybe because of the use of conventional instruments and the inevitable drone violin link with the Velvet Underground, but Yan-gant-y-tan were more immediately comprehensible compared to the music that preceeded and followed. Again, I'd like to know how their electronics conjurer, Mark Pilkington, works. I'm so used to the music 'running out' when I stop blowing or hitting something that it seems very attractive to generate almost limitless sound constructs from the tap of a finger on a mike!

Where did noise insert itself into Western music? Extending instrumental ranges / new instruments / oscillating valves / 'orientalism' / Debussy privileging moment and colour over structure? Radio waves? Futurism? Varese? All of these.....?

I remember reading somewhere that almost as soon as telephony was developed people began to listen to the static and started to interpret sounds they could hear in the noise. And of course, vinyl crackle has its own curious attraction.

I shall return to Rob Young's excellent 'Undercurrents; The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music', for further insights!

My alt. band, Red Square, were interviewed recently by Frances Morgan of Plan B (who, coincidentally, turned up playing bass with Yan-gant-y-tan at Equinox!). At one stage guitarist Ian Staples said that his earliest musical memory was of listening to the timbre of the piano when a note was played. I was struck by the fact that his earliest musical memory was timbral. It occurred to me that my earliest musical memories are largely melodic, probably vocal, but largely 'a-timbral'.

Perhaps that's why I'm fascinated by the noise / electronica thing, but don't naturally go there myself, and why my first instrument is the saxophone.

Jon

On being forced to play the flute by Roger Wootton....

Until I joined Comus, I had managed to avoid ever having to play a flootie, an instrument I generally characterised - with an appropriate display of fastidious horror - as the preserve of sulky legions of wan, pre-pubescent girls called things like Petronella and Chlamydia.

That said, on the qt, I had previously wielded a tenor recorder on a couple of album tracks with an earlier project, B So glObal, but I had articulated and phrased the recorder parts in a style drawn (very loosely!) from listening to an old vinyl album by the astonishing Japanese hocchiku player, Watazumido-Shuso.

I was given this album as a didactic Christmas present ages ago, and I was greatly taken with the intricate use of articulation, micro-pitching and timbre as structural devices; meaning and virtuosity, it seemed, could be expressed as much by the complexity of one note as by the speed with which it could be chained to others - a cautionary reminder in the then-current era of jazz-rock...........

but, time passed, and.......

....so much that is useful or important is lost in forgetting, in the neglect of observance and silted over by subsequent focus; I lost touch with Watazumido-Shuso.

I learned the changes, and constructed coruscating chord progressions over which, when called upon, I could deliver change-hugging flights of saxophone.

But, thank you, Roger - picking up the flute has renewed the connection with Watazumido-Shuso, and this has dovetailed into a re-ignited interest in 20th century 'art' music, where I have always known the flootie lurked, siren-like, waiting for me.


And the moral of the tale is; never say never; a metaphorical flootie might lie in wait for you too.


Anyway...here's a (non-exhaustive) selection of flootie / shakuhachi / hocchiku stuff that might be of interest:

'Syrinx' (Debussy) and 'Density 21.5' (Varese) - 20th century solo flute icons - Amazon or itunes downloads.

Bruno Maderna's 'Hyperion III' & 20th/21st century solo flute works played by Richard Craig - free FLAC downloads from the Avant Garde Project. Brilliant, brilliant site and repository for a huge number of out of issue 20th century works. If you want to dip your toes in 20th century art music, this is probably a good place to start.

Shakuhachi works played by Kifu Mitsuhashi - you can listen @ Last FM. Both of the albums are on download @ Amazon.com.

My vinyl by Watazumido-Shuso was called 'The Mysterious Sounds Of The Japanese Bamboo Flute'. It doesn't appear to be available anywhere now - beware of similarly named offerings!.....You can get a flavour of his playing here, though: Watazumido-Shuso

'Apparition & Release' a recent work by Michael Oliva for quartertone alto flute and electronics. You can listen (or buy!) here; Michael Oliva.

Any other suggestions? No. Not bloody James Galway, thank you very much.......

pip pip,

Jon

Red Square - noises to make and do........

Hello Comus people...
Just wanted to let you know that Jon Seagroatt, Comus's newest member (woodwind and percussion) and his alt band, Red Square, have a new album out on FMR Records called 'Thirty Three'.
The material on the album was originally recorded over thirty years ago, but was considered so extreme at the time that no label would release it. Jon has re-mixed and re-mastered the recordings for FMR, and the band so enjoyed trawling through the reels of tape to choose album tracks that they decided to re-form.
If an elemental, genre-defying cocktail of abstract noise terror, avant-rock and outer-limit free-jazz rampaging is where you wig out, then you might like to pay a finger-snapping visit to www.myspace.com/redsquarealbum and hear Red Square laying it down!
PS A short montage of newly recorded Red Square material is also now downloadable from the band's site.

Confessions of a Jonny Come Lately

Well. I thought I would put up a word or two to get the ball rolling on the shiny new Comus website, even though I'm the new boy in the band.

I've been perplexed about how I missed Comus first time round, and how I missed the point again when I subsequently heard 'First Utterance' about four years ago.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I picked the album up in 1972, and put it straight back down again, unable to overcome, what struck me at the time as, the rather repellent cover art.

When I subsequently heard the album (some thirty years later!), I entirely failed to get past the shockingly bad production, and took it off after a (very) cursory listen.

So I breathed a bit of a sigh when I stepped in as Rob Young's replacement on flootie and bongolettes last year, realising that I was going to have to subject myself to the album again to learn the parts.

I put 'First Utterance' on the car stereo, gritted my teeth, and prepared to listen.......

It took a few plays, but I began to get past the surface, and I began to hear the songs.

I remembered Chris, the band's manager, telling to me that the album got nowhere near capturing the energy of Comus live, and I wondered about the rehearsals that were scheduled to take place soon.

And it was during the rehearsals that I really, finally 'got' the Comus thing; the depth, strength and originality of the material and the energy, commitment and sheer bloody charisma of the band in full spate.

So, to all of you who got the whole Comus thing long before I did, I offer my humble salutations and hope that you enjoy the new website!

Jon