My advice remains the same to unsigned artists: form your own label. This doesn't have to be sophisticated, doesn't need large amounts of money, but does require effort: press up your own work and sell it at shows. (If you don't perform as such, DGM in any case wouldn't be able to help. Our current artists are working players). Please check the Discipline Diary for last Saturday, 22nd. August, for a longer entry on this.
This afternoon David and I are mastering the first Club Selection: KC - Live At The Marquee 1969. Obscure rites of necromancy are being uttered over the original bootleg, with the aid of sophisticated modern technology.
Chris Murphy, returning un-feebed from a day off, has found the perspective for ProjeKt Two's "Live Groove"; and I have been listening this morning to several of Chris' mixes from our mid-West shows.
The audience is a featured performer on many live recordings and Cleveland's audience stars for some seven minutes of eruptility following the band's withdrawal from a predatory photographer. Even from the beginning of the show the audience contributes several helpful suggestions, such as repertoire which the players might care to feature - "Schizoid Man" and "Fracture" for example - as well as urging the players to reach fresh heights of creativity, this by shouts such as "Belew Rules!" and other enthusiastic ululations.
Chris Murphy has just popped in before going to a riding lesson. He has read my Webpost commentary on his mixing approach and says: "My priority is not in sound quality but assessing the needs of DGM. That's where I think I have the greatest contribution to make". Website visitors now have it from both the horses's mouth and its rider.
Chris suggests that P2 in Nashville might be a Club release, but it's not for "Live Groove".
Meanwhile, "Drop In" has a guitar solo (missing from Fillmore West's "Drop In". where the solo provided a good opportunity to change the tape); "I Talk To The Wind" has the guitarist finger-picking and Greg adopting soul phrasing for the chorus. This "ITTTW" is closer to the Giles, Giles & Fripp "ITTTW" (which featured Judy Dyble, of the first Fairport Convention, singing).
21:13
The Late Shift is underway. "Drop In", featuring some dopey, feebley lyrics (fortunately the lyricist kept up their day job) is grooving through our PMC speakers of audial veracity. David and I have been considering the difficulties of running the Collectors' Club in Japan. Japan has no pattern of mail order trading, operates very differently from Europe and America, and is so remote geographically and culturally, that we weren't able to figure out how we might distribute non-shop records to audients who couldn't get them any other way.
Pony Canyon have been interested in releasing Club Selections along with the regular DGM releases. This brings a host of issues which the Club was designed to bypass, like expectations of quality in sonics and packaging. Our solution was to suggest a Japanese Edition of DGM releases twice a year: a Box Set of three bi-monthly Club Selections, modified to take into account release through shops (like the editing of "historic" out-of-tune performances, dismal and inaudible announcements, pathetic and ill-founded attempts to tune a mellotron). This will, we hope, make Club releases accessible to a more general public without undermining the cachet of Club selectivity and historicity.
"I Talk To The Wind", with a mellotron hovering as close to being in tune as is mechanically possible, is now quavering gently. David hits a button on the TC M5000 and Greg's bass presents itself clearly enough to detect Chris Squire's influence on the bass sound. "Hi fi" comments David gently, turning to me with a dry smile puckering the muscles around his lips; a comment impregnated with a sense of ironic distance.
The subject of "hearing / listening" involuntarily presented itself to my reflectivity this morning as I was reading the chapter on representation from Roger Scruton's "Aesthetics of Music". This while quaffing a demon brew of Fripp's Monster Cappucino, served in an antique English breakfast cup of alarming proportions.
The concept behind the breakfast cup is simple: fire up the savage labouring hordes of the English proletariat by having them pour a pint of tea into themselves. Thus invigorated, they step enthusiastically into the dreadful and exploitive work environments well recorded by Blake and a generation or two of socialist and Marxist historians. Myself, a relatively classless lower middle class product of working class parents (who crossed the class divide) and grammar school upbringing, I have modified the concept. Now, a relatively classless guitarist and product of the broad liberal education available to young players which has exposed me to (inter alia) Italian and Gallic practices, I quaff a Monster Cappacino in my morning's breakfast cup.
Thus fired this Wednesday morning, and having crossed the chapter-divide between Ontology and Representation, "listening / hearing" impinges upon Scruton's critique of Kivy and synapses fire in my cerebellum. What of hearing and listening?
From an audient's viewpoint, the issue, interest and concern in listening / hearing is how to move from the outside of music to its inside, where the listener is (really, truly) part of the music: mother to the music: co-creator in the creative impulse's movement into form and limitation.
Briefly, this involves moving between four qualitative degrees (or "worlds") of hearing. These are:
1. Passive receptivity, or automatic hearing (actually, "deafness") where we only hear what we think we are hearing. We have no authentic connection with the music.
2. Where we connect with the music: our attention is engaged and directed towards the sound source. This is the beginning of listening, or more properly, active listening. As a result of directing our attention, we connect with / to the music. Our listening / hearing is governed by our attention span, so what we hear is also necessarily limited. As our attention sags, we fall out of an active connection with / to the music and back into "deafness".
3. Where we understand what we hear. This involves:
i) A practice of active listening. This implies a volitional attention span of 90 minutes, which is itself the outcome of a well established personal practice (this takes some 21 years).
ii) Knowledge, information, study; i.e. we know the structural elements of the music; the time - place - person background: the music's origination in its cultural and historical settings, and the individual/s involved.
iii) A "feel" of / for the music.
iv) Probably, some functional "hands on" experience (e.g. amateur music making).
v) The sense is of "connection": between our feeling, knowing, doing experiencing of the music, and the music.
4. Where we ARE what we hear. How to describe this one? It's where the audient becomes mother to the music. This is something more than "only" active listening. This is where we experience music as coming to us, as we approach music. We are not apart from music: this is communion. The experience is of "instantaneous" listening / hearing, and is nothing like anything we would (could) ordinarily conceive of as "listening".
Perception in depth is governed by our "being", or the degree to which we are who and what we are. Fortunately for us music so needs, and wishes, to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it ears (and voice). So, for this guitarist and aspirant musician, music is an instrument of grace and as close to us as we are to ourselves. So the question is: how close are we to ourselves?
I am aware (even without reading Roger Scruton's demolition of commonplace descriptions of the musical experience) of the limitations and difficulties of this brief outline, and do not pretend to expert capacity in listening / hearing. But perhaps anyone reading this, who has found their life to be changed by music, might sense a resonance.
"Mantra" is now playing into "Travel Weary Capricorn", and Michael Giles discovers some interesting notes on the final word "reborn". David asks me if listening to this brings back happy memories.
What to say? The time was aweful, magical, horrible, a group riven with personal animosities and talent. But what do you say when the muse leans over and takes you into its confidence, a presence as tangible as if someone is standing by your right side? Does this confer on the player an obligation, a duty, or a response of some kind? How to explain this experience to someone else when one's own talents is so limited? What to make of the conflicting, contradictory, confusing impressions of joy, bickerings physical and emotional exhaustion, public acclaim and nastinesses, and stunning music? Happy memories?
I venture the view that to set yourself the aim of happiness in life is a folly, and stupid. This is a technical matter: happiness and unhappiness come in equal measure. To have the aim of being happy is equally to have the aim of being unhappy. This is dumb. A more useful aim is surely rightness: to be true. From rightness follows satisfaction, a life with value. If our lives have satisfaction, we might be happy or unhappy but neither undermine the satisfaction.
The band has just moved through "Nola" to a guitar solo, a Carcassi etude for classical guitar played with a pick, flying flute, loud bass and guitar riffing, and now a drum solo. I have never met a better drummer than Michael Giles in 1969. His thinking and musical attitude was a deep and lasting influence on me.
23.31
David is unable to face the appalling sonics of "Mars". He has left and I have cleared the office washing up.
Little Horse Willcox has just called to tell me she is safely home after an excellent show. I didn't tell her that I have been making some Super Tasty Soup this evening, and consuming such nutritious brew for two days. I shall have to abstain by Friday lunch time so the soup doesn't come between us this weekend.
