Category: Music News

So, as you may know by now, I’m in the middle (at the beginning? near the end? There’s no way of knowing!) of recording a new solo album at the moment. Hours and hours of playing, recording, experimenting, listening happening every day. Which is all sorts of wonderous fun. It’s not an exercise I’ve indulged in to this degree since I recorded 11 Reasons Why 3 Is Greater Than Everything back in 2011.

So what’s new? The biggest new thing is the addition of the Keith McMillen Quneo to my set-up. What on earth is that? you ask… Well, the Quneo is a MIDI controller, that can be used for pretty much anything that can be controlled via MIDI. In my case, that’s drums and synth sounds. I’m not – at all – interested in triggering loops, in having pre-recorded stuff that I bring in, but I am having a great time experimenting with playing parts in on it, and looping them in the Looperlative along with all the layers of bass.

Naturally, with there now being a straight up percussive element to what I’m doing, rhythm is occupying a very different part of the music that it usually does in my solo work. But I’m also digging really deep into some really broken, screwed up rhythmic ideas, so am fascinated – and a little trepidacious – how people will react… We’ll see I guess.

What’s REALLY exciting is that in the process of getting ideas together, I inadvertently finished a solo album. Closing In was started as a way to feed new tracks to my Subscribers as the project went along, but ended up being a complete solo album. It’s not THE solo album that’s going to be launched/released/whatever in September, but it IS one that I’m really proud of. I’ve been listening to it a lot, and have had really positive feedback from the subscribers about it. If you want it, you’ll need to subscribe (and get the other 14 releases that you get for your £20) – more subscription details here.

The rhythmic side of things does feel really natural, given the nature of so many of my recent collaborations – starting with Daniel Berkman and progressing through the duos and trios with Andy Edwards, through the nascent projects with Beardyman (including the quartet with Andy Gangadeen on drums) on up to the duo with Divinity, I’ve been blessed by the deep grooves and rhythmic wisdom of so many of my collaborators of late. Daniel was the first person I heard play music on the Quneo – though his main percussive instrument is the Roland Handsonic. Andy and I have spent the last 2 or so years exploring how both his electronic and acoustic kits interface with my looping set up, and have built quite an amazing musical language between us. And Divinity was the one that tipped me over the edge – in the week we spent working on duo ideas, she was playing electronic drums on an M-Audio keyboard, AND beatboxing into her Roland RC300, and it worked so well. She’s such a fearless experimenter, and has an approach to throwing ideas together and letting them find their own space that really fits well with my own experimental, exploratory approach. Three musical soul mates all bringing a new rhythmic focus and – crucially – new *processes* into my musical world.

So the experiments continue, hopefully some of the drummy-stuff will be up on Soundcloud soon for y’all to hear (and maybe another little preliminary EP for subscribers – I need to watch out that I don’t become SO prolific it just gets confusing 😉 ) and I’m really hoping to get a day in the studio with Andy Edwards soon – that could easily end up just being THE album, such is the consistency of the ideas we seem to be generating together of late.

Til then, the single best thing you can do to make sure you don’t miss any of the new music, is join the subscribers over on Bandcamp – you’ll get every new thing I do immediately available in the Bandcamp app, and downloadable from your Bandcamp collection, plus everything I release in the coming 12 months (which includes the impending release of the first two duo tracks with Divinity!)

Here’s one of the tracks from Closing In, that’s also on Soundcloud. Enjoy!

There’s a lovely new interview with me up at KeithMcMillen.com

[click here to read the interview]

Given that KeithMcMillen are a music tech gear company, it’s deeply refreshing that the interview features such fascinating and deep questions (many of the questions were inspired by this blog post about Smallness ) – all credit to Tom Ferguson for instigating a conversation about something other than just music toys. (KMI make the Softstep controller that I’ve used pretty much every day for the last few years, and the Quneo which is my favourite new music-making toy, and may well feature pretty heavily on the new album. I love what they do 🙂 )

Anyway, have a read, and tweet them to say thanks if you thought it was useful 🙂

So here’s something lovely – The Freakier Zone: Stuart Maconie’s late night sister show to The Freakzone, did a special on improvising duos on Saturday night. Stuart interviewed the oracle of all things interesting in music, Fiona Talkington, and she picked a handful of tracks to play and there are little interview segments with Food (Iain Ballamy and Thomas Stronen) and… me, talking about working with Daniel Berkman! 🙂

The show link is here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061xxhq – have a listen to the whole hour, it’s fascinating.

My interview segment was recorded over the phone and as usual I was talking too fast, so here it is transcribed:

“…you have to trust each other, you have to have the belief that what the other person is going to bring to the music is better than what you would do on your own. Otherwise you’re just going to resent them. I mean, that would be terrible, improvising with someone who was messing your music up! So you have to have that feeling – and commit to that feeling – that what they’re going to bring is better than what you would do on your own… and then leave room for that.

“So there’s this sort of transaction that goes on where you leave space, allow someone to fill it and then they do the same, so it’s sort of like a game of consequences, where you’re folding over and each writing a sentence – he said, she said…

“and so one of us might start… I mean, sometimes we’ll just sit there and giggle at each other for a minute before we start because neither of us want to, and both of us want the other to lead us into something new.

“But you’re also trying not to tread the same ground again, you’re trying to take it in new directions, so you don’t end up performing ‘pieces’.  So it’s not that you can’t draw on the same language again, but you don’t want to actually try and copy an earlier piece, because that’s a very different skill set and a very different mental approach.”

It’s an inspired bit of radio programming, given what a massive influence on me both Bill Frisell and Arild Anderson have been, and what an influence Toumani Diabate has been on Daniel… Top work, Fiona!

The track played is an excerpt from Accidentally (On Purpose) – the title track of the 2nd show Daniel and I played together, and the first thing we released:

And given that the track that followed ours was by Ballaké Sissoko and Toumani Diabate, it’d be fitting to link here to Daniel’s amazing acoustic Kora work too.

…and you know you can buy all 10 of the shows for £10, right? 🙂

Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone and Freakier Zone are chock full of amazing and surprising music. Fiona’s regular musical home on the web is Late Junction on Radio 3 – I’ve discovered SO much amazing music through her over the years: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tp52

This is the first of two posts today – the 2nd one will have gig news and some recording news, but first here are two videos that have gone live in the last week.

Yesterday I posted this one, that was recorded as a video test, and turned out rather nice… Was checking whether I could do video and multitrack audio at the same time on my laptop. Turns out I can, as evidenced here.

Lots of lovely pedals are featured - MXR bass preamp (on the floor out of shot), Dunlop Volume Pedal, Markbass MiniDist, Darkglass VMT, MXR Bass Fuzz, MXR Bass Chorus Deluxe, MXR Bass Overdrive, TC Electronic HOF mini, MXR Bass Envelope Filter: Continue reading “Two New Solo Videos!”

2014 has been another fun-packed year of musicking – solo gigs, collaborations, recordings and launching a subscription service to help people keep track of my rather accelerated release schedule 🙂 . In the UK and abroad, so much has been going on. So let’s grab a few highlights, eh?

The year started in traditional fashion, with a trip to California and a run of shows with Daniel Berkman and Artemis. After releasing the 10 album FingerPainting set in 2013, we’ve held off on releasing any of the 14 shows we did this year, but there’s some magic in there, and it’s in the queue for future release (though not all 14 shows of it, I learned my lesson last time 😉 )

I also did a duo show with bassist Steve Uccello while in California, that resulted in a couple of wonderful duets that will see the light of day very soon.

Oh and on the eve of my trip to California, I released What The Mind Thinks The Heart Transmits – my first ‘proper‘ ambient recording, which has proved very popular this year:

Continue reading “2014 – A Year In Music”

So, our new as-yet-unnamed trio had its debut gig last Sunday, as you know. And it went very well. Here’s the proof – this is the entire first set, starting out with me solo, joined by Jem then Andy. This is mixed and mastered but wholly unedited:

More soon!