DGM HQ.
A reassuring shaking of the room is currently underway as a large carcass is being reduced to consumer-sized chunks by the adept hacking of Mr. Fry, butcher & village shop proprietor. His chopping block is directly beneath where I lay my head, during those few remaining hours of night-time not given over to filling the distance between the necessary & the available, in the company of David Singleton, my 50-50 business partner in DGM and fellow Tone Prober. The modest, well-worn mattress that supports my slumber is a survivor of the Red Lion House, where it was well-pressed by visiting Crafties for three years.
Bax tunes the air. Sir Arnold is reported as commenting that a person should try everything once except incest & Morris dancing. I was once a Morris dancer. But then, I was also once an estate agent. And I should have listened to my Mother.
10.41 David is assembling Elektrik and shortly The Morning Shift will be underway. The DGM Art Department has arrived and all of them is making a cappuccino. Laura is manning the office part of DGM. This is close to feverish activity at DGM HQ.
20.30 DGM SoundWorld.
The Late Shift is underway. We are working on Amphamagoria, the first of the double CD set from Eurotour 2000, the volume of improvs. The auto-correct in MS Word keeps changing improvs to improves. And practising to practicing, for that matter. What would Ben Jonson make of this? Actually, he would probably approve. Ben is quoted as saying that he didn't trust a man who didn't spell a word two ways. But that was before the codification of the English language during (mainly) Victorian England. Yet still the language promiscuously develops, careless of linguistic propriety.
This afternoon Hugh managed to figure out a way of getting me online by dial-up, although this is not as straightforward as BE80G. That is, before an 80 gig HD did a job not-quite-as-well as a pitiful 20 gig that made everything work much better.
After this breakthrough in achieving low-speed access, Hugh & I accompanied Mr. Fry the butcher, he of the office-shaking chopping block below my head, to visit Les in his cottage opposite the watercress beds. Les, now 95 and gardener to the stars, returned home from Salisbury Hospital yesterday. He is in remarkably good shape & full of stories, past & present. Most of these involve pithy epithets, or "cussing" to use Les' own term, and how a (mainly younger) Les either hit someone who gave him aggravation, or just missed them as they ducked. This included a nurse at the hospital who was trying to take his blood at 10 pm. Les felt enough blood has been taken from him already.
But before all this, a listen-through to Into The Frying Pan: KC Live In London 2000 at 14.13. The decision was taken: this will be a Collectors' Club Double CD for release in early 2004. The sonics are not quite good enough for a full-frontal in public and, rather than exclude several tracks and present a more-correct single volume, we have gone with a documentary presentation of a complete one night's Crim performance at the end of a tour in 2000.
And then to shopping in Salisbury. This was an energy-suck of major proportions. Exactly why is hard to pinpoint. Salisbury is pedestrian friendly; alternatively, car unfriendly. If you drive into Salisbury, what do you do? Usually, sit in traffic at many & various intersections. And once walking around, the city feeds.
21.30 Techno Crim is now werning its way through some part of Europe. Techno Crim is really a triumph of The Beastly Mastelotto. Saddled with an electronic kit that, for repertoire, made life hard for Pat. But for the improvs -- yow! Oh to have this in surround sound.
Remember mono? For most of anyone, no. Well, that was before stereo. Audiophile purists might point out the benefits of mono:
1. It's egalitarian - everything is equally in the middle, left, right, centre left, centre right & points in between.
2. Mono is very much louder than stereo.
3. In a post-modern world, there is no one privileged position (is that an advantage?).
But it won't catch on if your listening is based on stereo. Well, stereo>mono is much better than surround>stereo. Six stereo perspectives collapse into one. The listener is thrown from a sonic womb onto an aural pavement.
The exhausting two months of DVD of death, pain, horror, suffering, misery & joy was accompanied by the salve that much of the time was spent inside the embrace of surrounding music. David suffered most of the joy, albeit with some input from The Vicar and Punk (a mixed blessing, in my view) and my own dribbling self.
We took a break at 21.00. David's capacity to absorb Crim, in any form, has suffered from a surfeit of overload. Does the music not speak? Perhaps. The music speaks but David's ears are already too full. Returning upstairs, my verdict is - Improvising Techno Crim lives!
David comments that mixing & editing improvisations, as distinct from repertoire, is an intellectual challenge: one has to discover the architecture within the improvised music. With composition, the architecture is presented as a given. I note that, in formal composition, form is primary. In improvisation, a concern with form is suspended. In response to a question asked in Boston during the Frippertronics tour of 1983, this - Malleability is introduced to form that the spirit may more freely enter.
When extemporization gives way to improvisation proper, when the impoov "happens", there will usually be an underlying form waiting to be discovered by anyone of analytic bent. Perhaps, this is comparable to deep-surface structures of Chomskian linguistics. If the "spontaneous composition" doesn't ignite, then perhaps there isn't any underlying form. And the extemporized performance may be fun, energetic and a journey worth taking, but its present moment is limited to the immediate present.
23.44 Done for this evening.
NB for today: David's wife, Indeg, has applied for the job vacancy created by Laura leaving. Indeg, prior to motherhood, ran a hotel in Lampeter & was chief receptionist at the Harbour Heights in Poole.
"A principle is an instruction in qualitative endeavour."
