Lovely bit of video capturing a gig we did at ReNTReC in Beppu on our AIDF supported trip to Japan in April has surfaced here. Really shows some of the mix close detailed listening, movement/actions based things and listening in space that we dug into working with on that trip! If you ever find yourself in Beppu (and I’d totally recommend the seaside vibes combined with incredible 43 degree hot mineral water Onsen baths that are all over the town) do visit ReNTReC, its a great little shop packed full of stuff hidden away down an arcade under railway arches into the town’s station.
Also a thoughtful review of our ‘A Hair in the Chimney’ record featured in this months jazz column in the Quietus ‘Complete Communion’ written by Stewart Smith. Really nice to be featured among such excellent artists!
http://thequietus.com/articles/22660-william-parker-tomeka-reid-lol-coxhill-jazz-review
“Top-notch weirdo jams from the north of England. Featuring Sloth Racket’s Sam Andreae on saxophone, David Birchall on guitar, and Otto Willberg on double bass, Hair In The Chimney brings an underground sensibility to free improvisation, with the musicians using unconventional techniques to defamiliarise their instruments. On ‘Endless Blue Meander’ (nice Eno reference!) Birchall’s guitar is effectively a percussion instrument, as he taps the amplified body with drumsticks, strikes the strings behind the neck, and rubs objects into the pick-ups. Tap, ping, crackle. Andrae emits a few mouthpiece sputters, but much of his playing is textural or percussive, as he taps the bell with a coin, and removes the neck altogether, treating it as a high-end tin whistle. Willberg occasionally frames these abstractions with free jazz bass runs, but he’s by no means the straight man, as his outré vocabulary of snapped strings and growling arco effects attests. ‘Sockets Filled Up With Eyes’ offers Whammy pedal pitch wobbles and all manner of Cage-ian bass preparations, concluding with an insect ballet set to ghostly drones.”
Record is here::
I’m walking repeatedly around a square of four underpasses, making an air recording with my trusty zoom while pushing my son in his buggy. Overhead you can hear the traffic at the junction of Chester Road and Edge Lane. These tunnels will be filled in soon when the junction is redesigned. The underpasses must date to the widening of Chester Road into a 3 lane highway and the building of Stretford Mall. Currently the underpasses are the only safe way across the road at this junction; after there will be a roadcrossing. They need a little love, some bulbs need replacing in the lights, murals made by local schools and Gorsehill Studios are not in bad shape, some of the paintwork elsewhere could be redone. When we first moved here I realised that the underpasses made me feel at home. This is to do with a specific memory of the underpass between Leicester train station and Granby Street. This is now filled in and replaced by a roadcrossing. This one was pure old school, stank of piss, often had buskers in it, always had a couple of homeless guys seeking shelter. It was the link between the city centre proper and the train station on London Road. As schoolboys we used to walk up from the clocktower where the 61a dropped us, down Gallowtree Gate, up Granby Street through this underpass, past the station then left down Conduit Street. There on the corner was Sheehan’s Music, a few doors down was Ultima Thule (a record shop specialising in prog and krautrock). Inbetween the two and about 5 floors up was our destination; Stayfree Music, where we would rent by the hour rehearsal rooms with huge crackling amps and flabby drums (we didn’t know you could tune drums til much later) to jam out the two chord structures and melodies we used as songs. At very quiet moments just before sleep and when I’m very tired I can hear a D in my left ear and one an octave lower in the other. In fact its quiet at home now in the daytime and as I’m thinking; writing about my tinnitus it comes into focus and I can hear the notes come into focus. Those jams at Stayfree were the beginning of about a decade of exposing myself to very loud music all the time. I’ve worn earplugs the last decade which has helped. I’m back at home now listening to the recording I made in the Stretford underpasses. What I thought I would hear which was the slight ebb and flow in volume of traffic on entering and exiting just isn’t there. What marks the tunnels is Alex doing baby shouts to hear the short reverb. He does it on entering each tunnel and then stops when we are in the brief bit of open air between.