de-composing

Nonclassical Goes Large and William Morris Goes Lovely

2012-01-22T11:29:00.000-08:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0

Listening/Reading: Radio 3's The Choir and cursing why I'm not in the Choirbook For The Queen; will have to start picking off choral composers in a Kind Hearts and Coronets-type fashion / Back on 'The Women's History Of The World' by Rosalind Miles.

Hair Day: a flatcap day, eg Head Day: super-stylish, but Hair Day: flattened to a pulp

What I can see from my window no. 22: Sirius, or Venus, I'm not sure. It's shaped like an igloo and has a big black spot on it (Andy bought me a telescope for Christmas). It is WELL spooky.

Nonclassical is putting its glad rags on and getting itself out and about these days, whether in America (Gabriel Prokofiev is premiering his Concerto For Bass Drum out there), Europe, or just at home: the club broke out of its monthly residency in Hoxton's lowdown Troy Bar to host a much larger, slicker night at XOYO down the road, and strike me if a whole world of East Londonites didn't show up. The Troy Bar gigs are always decently attended, but it's a pretty titchy space; around 300 rolled up for Nonclassical's biggest club night yet on Thursday. Where the hell did they all come from?! There were probably quite a few normals who stumbled in looking for something nasty and bangin' to flail to, and a lot of them looked quite pleased to find instead a bubble-haired violinist or scratch student orchestra doing their thing on the stage instead.

The night was ostensibly focused on Minimalist rep, alternating live pieces with DJs. First up as we drank our pocket-burning fruit beers was the lovely Aisha Orazbayeva, something of a star in the ascendent (she excitedly informed me she was playing a solo recital at Carnegie Hall soon), who played Steve Reich's Violin Phase with a Zen-like steeliness. Inbetween, I felt cheerily like a scenester on hearing bits of juice's album (on Nonclassical records, and if you haven't bought it, you SHOULD, HERE!) mixed up nicely by DJ Nwando Ebizie, a new name I shall check out again.

The scratch orchestra tore up John Adams' marvellous (and totally un-minimalist) Chamber Symphony, which couldn't sound more like New York's blaring streets and American Dream-chasing if it tried, followed by perky clarinettist Mark Simpson playing Reich's New York Counterpoint with verve. It was lovely to see people sitting at the front of the stage head-noddingly mesmerised by this piece as if they were listening to some old-school ambient house. 'Cellist Peter Gregson performed some lovely multi-tracked Prokofiev, clearly a 2011 take on Reich's solo/electronic pieces but referencing grime and rave, and one part of which is being released as a single. The least successful performance of the evening was a rather ragged and muddy Worker's Union (the classic rhythmical workout by Louis Andreissen), in a badly-chosen small ensemble line-up. The last piece we caught was played by the Nonclassical juniors, aka Sam from the office and crew, looking - as Sarah said - like an adorably earnest emo boy band, playing Reich's Music For Pieces of Wood, very nicely bookended with some simple thudding beats from the decks either side; the boys should have sat on stools and risen off them two-thirds of the way through when the new counter-rhythm came in, arf. We left before the end, but what we heard made for a top night, fusing excellent, intelligent dance music largely from the Nonclassical canon with brain-titillating live sounds that pleased the crowd no matter where they were from. Onwards and upwards (hopefully with the juicettes riding, shrieking, on their tail feathers)!

A quite different state of affairs was found over at Two Temple Place today, where Andy and I went to check out the William Morris exhibition. A stunningly-designed (though feeling like something of a folly) late 19th-century building on Victoria Embankment, it is now open to the public for the first time. With money no object, the architect JL Pearson went to town on the late Victorian gothic-cute of the exterior and the opulent, wood-festooned interior, borrowing from the Renaissance, Tudor, Gothic, and suggestions of Arts and Crafts: all mahogany carvings of plump Musketeers on the stairs, friezes of scenes from Shakespeare above our heads, ebony pillars, geometric-patterned floors of marble, jasper, onyx and porphyry, and a delight of stained glass in the Great Hall. The Morris exhibition, on a sojourn from its home in Walthamstow, was a perfect complement. What a dude Morris was! An artist, printmaker, textile designer, writer and socialist, I love how he gathered to his bosom myths and tales from all over the world - from the very familiar courtly love of medieval England, all long-haired, fey nymphettes and fantastical, pre-Tolkein imagery to the less-known, such as Bre'r Rabbit from Afro-America and Icelandic sagas - and celebrated them all in his glorious designs, with peacocks and monsters, bulging fruits and writhing roses wallowing around in the lush fabrics. Unashamedly uber-romantic, drunk on nature, and surely a humanist, he wanted to celebrate our collective folk memory, something I think on't a lot. My favourite piece was a soaring tapestry, based on the Roman goddess of apples and featuring a text that so often accompanied his work (something else I can't help feeling an affinity with):

I am the ancient apple-queen / As once I was so am I now /

For evermore a hope unseen / Betwixt the blossom and the bough

Firsts! Party, Gig, Film - And Skydiving (Sort Of)

2012-01-18T02:38:00.000-08:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0

Listening/Reading: The Filter Queue, who DOLLYman will play with soon...

Hair Day: Temporary hot pink streak after being inspired by cheapo girl-mag

What I can see from my window no. 21: Piccadilly Circus, just, blinking its little tawdry captions

My first party of the year saw me finally donning my black jumpsuit and heels (verdict: NOT tragic! Result!) to go to the PRS Foundation's New Year party at Cargo, meeting and greeting many a musical acquaintance (Tansy Davies, Luke Styles, Sarah Nicholls and Claudia Molitor, and Mira Calix, telling us about her exciting Olympics project involving an installation in a load of igloo-like stone slabs) and meeting some new ones (such as Trish Clowes, cool sax-player/composer). The PRSF were using the opportunity to showcase a few of their funded projects, but there were rather a few raised eyebrows and quivers of mild embarrassment for the first piece: we gathered outside for hot toddies to listen to Howard Skempton's church bell piece, rung over in Shoreditch Church. Sadly, the bells were mingled, nay obliterated by the sounds of traffic, and were so quiet they just sounded, well, like church bells, perhaps in a neighbouring village, and had no impact as a piece of new music. We all huddled there very politely for 12 minutes, and I at least enjoyed the Cage-ish framing of the city's sounds, but that wasn't really the point. Anna Meredith's piece for the National Youth Orchestra, another 20x12 piece, was showcased by a small troupe of NYOers; while nothing new to me and the juicettes, who invite people to yell and whack themselves at every opportunity, it's a great idea to liberate the players of their instruments and show off their musicality in an exuberant, bodily way. It was slight shame we couldn't really SEE the performers to appreciate the choreography as they were crammed in amongst the revellers. I love the PRSF to bits and they are phenomenally supportive of new music including mine, but it strikes me that a bit more planning/forethought might not go amiss at times like these...

First gig of the year was at the Lexington, to see Yorkshire surreal troubadour David Thomas Broughton. He was supported by Elysian Quartet alumni Geese, doing their noisy post-rocking violin/viola/drums/electronics shizz. DTB himself, who juice had first seen at South By South West last year, inspiring at least in me starbursting epiphanies at his off-kilter craziness, was just as charming and silly this time around. His yawning baritone, simple guitar and desolate lyrics would be unremarkable on their own, but he mixes it with something nearing performance art, creating a theatre of mic stands and leads, accentuating his mistakes, freestyling with fruit and shakers and dictaphones, letting his loops spool over until they're fugged in feedback... there's no-one quite like him.

Shame, Steve McQueen's follow-up to his stunning (as in you feel like you've been stunned by a Stonehenge-sized slab and left dribbling and half-dead) Hunger, was my first film of the year. Not quite as extreme as his debut, it still leaves a mark, and I don't mean the memory of Michael Fassbender strolling around with his cock out. An distinctly unerotic but beautiful-looking movie, what stayed with me was the amazing single tracking shot of MF running through New York, and Carey Mulligan's desperately delicate, super-slow version of New York, New York. Another favourite British artfilm director to add to Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay!

Finally my first adventuring of the year: going with Sarah to the Ballardian, mall-like weirdness that is Milton Keynes, to go indoor skydiving. YES! The whole experience was utterly hilarious, with a range of very cute yet very solemn instructors leading us through our moves (cue us trying to keep straight faces whilst the Spanish instructor earnestly demonstrated the importance of leading with 'your 'ips' as he gyrated unsubtly in front of us). The skydiving is done in a specially-made air tunnel fired from below with 150mph winds (the British skydiving team practise there!): you fall in and hang over the pummelling, screaming chute, being occasionally corrected by your instructor and trying not to let the spit that is uncontrollably flung from your mouth go straight into his eye. I spent the whole, short time laughing my head off, even when I got to do the 'high-fly', which means shooting straight up and down 10 metres several times with your instructor in a spiral, skydiving-formation-style, like riding a rollercoaster made solely out of air. I think I left a small part of my stomach flailing around up there. Hysterical!

2012!

2012-01-10T12:36:00.000-08:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0

Listening/Reading: King Creosote and Jon Hopkin's Diamond Mine/ The Story of Swimming by Susie Parr

Hair Day: It needed some blondifying, so made an attempt at a home remedy this week. Result: dirty orange/blonde streak. Yeah!

What I can see from my window no. 20: A great big dirty slash of butter-coloured sky at twilight

Merry New Year!

I'm not having all that gloomy 'winter is here, and there's no tinsel and over-consumption to make us cheerful anymore' malarkey. January is, like the overripe satsumas leftover from Crimble, fit to bursting with parties and possibilities. Having earnestly made long lists of my bests arty things of 2011, I'm now already into my Best Art Exhibition of 2012, having been to Tate Modern to see Gerhard Richter's show before it closed. It was all my favourite things: big splashy abstract canvases, near-dribbling off the canvas and with sort of 'apocalyptic disco' colour choices. Coming out of there into the South Bank's darkness made everything look a bit Richterish: the Thames looked like one of his trademark squeegees, the oily molasses water dragged through with the hot orange of the bridge's lights, and we all looked shimmery and only half-real, like his paintings of photos. Here's a lovely video of Gerhard painting.

Tacita Dean's Turbine piece, Film, was also marvellous, and maybe my favourite of all of the works installed there. Fresh from watching Mark Cousins' wonderful The Story of Film (an odyssey through the history of film on More4, narrated in his very idiosyncratic Scottish lilt), seeing the hands-on beauty of celluloid, chopped and layered, in an age of the digital, was beautiful and funny.

I've also notched up my first gig of 2012, and a marvellous one it was too, with Metamorphic supporting Troyka in a sold-out gig at the Vortex in Dalston, packed to the gills with enthusiastic people out at their first jolly of the year. It was great to be able to play to a knowledgeable jazz audience, and I hope we can do a few more in 2012!!

Other creative resolutions for 2012:

To practise my flute for the first time in 6 years (ok, pick it up at least once in the whole year)
To read for 30 minutes a day (ok, read for 10 minutes a day, mostly Time Out magazine)
To record 2nd juice album (and get even better reviews than for the first one)
To do a killer You Are Wolf tour, having written whole new set of songs
To have a DOLLYman gig somewhere other than the Spice of Life.
To be on the radio even more than last year
To do something NEW, whether it be a possible Richard Long-style walking composition, making visual art, make some visuals for gigs, write a piece for juice and electronics...
To get on THE TELLY and BECOME THE NEW GARETH MALONE...

Kerry Becomes A Regular Feature On Radio 3, Goes A Bit 'The Shining' In Aldeburgh And Glams Up For The British Composer Awards

2011-12-04T12:19:00.000-08:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2

Listening: Kate Bush's very silly but quite enjoyable '50 words for snow'
Hair Day: disappointing. Needs work from my man in Herne Hill! (Apparently I go to the same hairdresser as Florence Welch, you know)

What I can see from my window no. 19: Chelmsford. By night (I am on a train).

Broadcasting House became as regular a workplace as Handel House or Wigmore Hall for me in November, with two more appearances following my big choral premiere on The Choir. First I went in to record a brand new You Are Wolf song, specially-commissioned by wordsy show The Verb, on the word 'darkling'. I mashed up bits of Keats, Hardy, Milton and Shakespeare in my customary looping stylee for a spooky number. In 10/4! Nice to have a chat, down the phone as I couldn't make the proper recording date, with the lovely poet/presenter Ian McMillan, who, in his voice as molten and rich as the middle of my Mum's homemade Yorkshire pudding, later described me as 'unfeasibly wonderful' and apparently enjoys this blog and my football one!

I later went in to record a piece about last year's British Composer Awards for Hear and Now's preview of this year's awards. Juice went along this year as nominators of Dai Fujikura's piece for us, 'away we play', a pithy bit of virtuosic vocal sparkliness, which had been shortlisted in the Vocal Category. Never one to miss an opportunity to glam up to the max, we sashayed around in all our sequin-jumpsuited/hot-pink-skirted/cleavage-flashing finest, gleefully composer-spotting whilst gulping champagne and scoffing our mini paper cones of scampi and chips. Alas, Dai didn't win in his category, but we reckon we were pretty close in the running and it's really good to get our name out there as flag-bearers of experimental stuff. We at least had one person to whoop for, Firefly's John Barber, winning in the Community and Education category. Here are the other winners. Nice to see the likes of Anna Meredith, Emily Hall, Mira Calix, Michael Zev Gordon and other fab new musickers; Anna managed to get a wink off stadium-drawing comedian/musician Tim Minchin, nominated for 'Mathilda' and something of an uber-star amidst our lickle contemporary world. Result! The Awards sadly piffle out at an exceptionally early hour, so Sarah and I allowed ourselves to be happily dragged off to an old man pub with the tipsy and excitable Oxford University Press crew, brilliant soprano Lore Lixenberg and the arch, super-cool Gabriel Jackson, the only choral composer to look like an East End hipster/greyhound-racer.

The Awards were a glitzy, shoulder-rubbing relief in the middle of a rather intense week at Aldeburgh, where I've been one of five composers writing for pianist pair duoDorT on their Quantalum project. Obviously, staying by the sea and working amongst idyllic marshland had some very special moments, but the intensity and isolation, what with mostly working on our own for days on end, did leave me with something of a thousand-yard stare. I'm relatively happy with my piece, a three-movement exploration of pianos, looping and spoken word, with my ubiquitous birdy theme. Favourite moments were a) coming out onto a night beach to look up at a sky like a split fig, near-dripping with stars, some shooting, one plunging down into the sea and b) my afternoon walk at Snape, with the moon already out, spotting birds in the wetlands, surrounded by peeping, burbling calls like dial-up modems, and getting slightly lost in the Warrens as the dusk fell. Here are some pictures!

Kerry Chats To Aled Jones, Gets Spat On By Michael Sheen, And Falls In Love With Camille All Over Again

2011-11-15T05:31:00.000-08:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0

Reading: Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie
Hair Day: quiffy

What I can see from my window no. 19: Westminster, in the hazy sunshine

Am having an excellent autumn, full of projects coming to a close or promising new ones shimmering into view. I finished up my first Handel House commission, a mix of spoken word, squeaky harpsichord and jangly spinet; I'm calling it 'a portrait of the House by the House'. Hey, here it is!

Graininess and Sheen by Kerry Andrew Composer

A choral piece I wrote in the summer for Making Music choirs, Rhymes and Charms for Fly-Away Things, was premiered on BBC Radio 3's The Choir at the weekend. It's very much at the most accessible end of my choral week (some may say twee....) but I'm still very pleased; the aim, after all, is to attract many amateur choirs to sing it all year round with gusto, not three Ferneyhough-lovers to salivate over it. I went to the studio to chat with the ever-cheery, super-pro Aled Jones, who presents the show, and like to think I came over well, though Andy tittered at my slightly posh radio voice. Next time I'll call Aled 'A-Money' and come over all 1Extra on their asses, then... Listen to it here while you can!

In performance news, juice had a lovely time up at North-East Scotland's most excellent Sound Festival, verily a cornucopia of all things exciting and new in music, and where we crammed in three gigs and a school workshop in two days. Here's an ace review. We didn't feel like we saw much of Aberrrrdeen - during the day we peered through grey mizzle at granite buildings (with a stop for brief colour explosion at the Art Gallery), and the night, which seemed to arrive at about 3pm, hid what were probably the sights of glorious Aberdeenshire. Most eccentric was our visit to the depths of the countryside for our gig at Haddo House, a wondrous estate with signed scores from Benjamin Britten and Van Dyke portraits of Charles 1st; it was bluishly cold except in the library, steeped in ancient history books, where we performed. We drove back through exotic-sounding villages - Drums, Tarty, Quolquox and Cultercullen... elsewhere, I had a lovely You Are Wolf gig behind another grand painting of angrily-pointing politicians in the House of Commons, in the National Portrait Gallery. Here's a video!

Ever-keen for inspiration, I'm trying to keep up the cultcha. Yesterday I saw one of Kit Downes' bands, The Golden Age of Steam, in St. James' rather 'live' acoustic as part of the London Jazz Festival, and chased that up with seeing Michael Sheen's Hamlet, at the very intimate Young Vic, meaning Andy and me, both huge fans, were merely feet away from the sweating, curl-tumbled legend as he spat his way masterfully his soliloquies. The production as a whole didn't feel entirely convincing (set in the wing of a psychiatric unit, with Sheen's supposed madness slipping, I thought, confusingly OUT of view when it should have been appearing), but it was ridiculously exciting nonetheless. Even if you could see flashes of Tony Blair's devil-grin and Brian Clough's assurity here and there...

Gig of the year no. 2 (alongside Peckham's Rite of Spring in the summer) was Camille at Hackney Empire. I had just been starting to get into her new album, so different from her two multi-layered, loop-heavy previous albums, but the whole thing sprang utterly alive in the theatre. Camille, frankly, is an utter goddess of the vocal world, exploring this time, through a beautifully effective bit of theatre (largely the shadowplay created by a long lightbulb on a rope), pared-down songs - often totally unaccompanied - exploring such a range of sounds, from squeaky child-like ones to technically-difficult inbreaths and operatic stuff. She just made us melt. Ilo Veyou, Camille!

Mists and Mellow Artfulness

2011-10-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2

Listening/Reading: New Bjork, James Blake and Camille stuff / Roger Deakin's very lovely 'Waterlog', to fuel my new love of cold-water swimming
Hair Day: sliced and diced; I now look like a 1950s greaser. YES!

What I can see from my window no. 18: the Shard, becoming humungous

'Tis an autumn season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, or in my case, wurlitzers, pop-up theatres and feminist arttalks, ah ha ha ha...

Sarah-juicette and I went to our Nonclassical labelmates The Elysian Quartet's 10th birthday celebrations, which took the form of an all-day experimental music festival in a new fringe theatre, The Yard, up in Hackney Wick. The 'Wick's rather unsalubrious vibe may have sent a few shivers down the spines of some South Londoners, but brought happy tears of joy form me, ensconced back in a land of pub-turned-squats, industrial wastelands and canals. The Yard is a most fabulous new space run by young director Jay Miller, tucked in a square amongst a range of businesses so eclectic I can't believe that Channel 4 hasn't filmed a documentary here yet: vegetable peelers, an evangelical church, mechanics, female mud-wrestlers and a swingers' club (we saw an unhealthy-looking couple - he sweaty and overweight, she haggard and wearing a mere notion of a dress - going furtively into a door marked only with a homemade sign saying 'FUNTIME'. Erk!).

The Elysians had programmed a whole world of leftfield wondrousness: we just caught the end of multi-media percussionist Joby Burgess' set with a Max De Wardener piece, and then enjoyed the lilting, off-kilter loveliness of Seamus Fogarty's folkish electronica. Quartet members performed some of their splinter projects, with Laura doing her 'cello/voice art-pop thing, and Vince and Emma soaring through their strings/loops/noisy drums shizzle as Geese. The guys move in excellently arty circles, and some of their more high-profile musician-mates also made it along, with folktronica dude Adem delivering a gorgeous solo set just with him and this wonderful contraption that was a bit like a musical etch-a-sketch. I want one! Simon Fisher Turner, renegade grizzled chap whom I know best for writing an a cappella soundtrack to Derek Jarman's film 'Blue' (the most high-art film I have ever seen!), showcased some new electronica and then improvised with the Elysians in a beautiful film made up of stills taken around Hackney.

The quartet has been around 10 years for a reason: notwithstanding their propensity for throwing themselves into mad cool cross-arts projects, their ensemble is just fabulously instinctive and their sound soooo together. They played some Meredith Monk pieces, semi-improvised in my favourite piece of the day to a film of Swedish cranes (the birds! not the construction vehicles!) from Kathy Hinde, whizzed through a brilliant jerky soundtrack from chiptune chap Gameshow Outpatient which he had arranged for them (do you know any other quartets who perform acoustic versions of chiptune?) to a hilarious short animation of a houseproud vole, and finished it off with a live soundtrack to Tony Comley's cute film about a world-saving panda. It was all brilliant, made more marvellous by its setting and the wedges of rosewater and raspberry cake... juice should start planning their 10th anniversary party, scheduled for 2013!

I've been enjoying curating my Composer in Residence season at Handel House, where Claudia Molitor and Sarah Nicholls installed all sorts of interactive, thought-provoking pieces for a mostly arty crowd (barring the American couple who thought they had booked tickets for a Baroque concert and instead found Sarah slowly attemnpting to play the harpsichord with bundles of pound coins for half an hour, ah ha ha! They had faces like THUNDER!); last night Leon Michener tinkered with harpischord, wurlitzer and e-bows on a clavichord, improvising with bassist olie Brice and quite wonderful singer Seaming To, who I really hope to see again soon. She was clad in a stunning high-fashion take on gothic Victoriana, and manipulated Leon's homemade magic lantern music box to project creepy cut-out's onto Handel's shutters. Excellent! Elsewhere this week, I've also crammed in part of a feminist art talk (disappointing, mostly about being a mother, yawn) up in my old hood and gone to the Amersham Arms' newish jazz night, run by the SE Jazz Collective. Check it out if you're in the South, as the Camberwell Crypt has now died a death...

Very happy to see the final part of my Art on the Underground project snaking down the escalators at Bethnal Green, completely free of adverts. Here's a snap!

Broadstairs vs. Boulez (And Poems)

2011-10-04T08:52:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2

Listening/Reading: Very cool new jazz group Thought-Fox; Just finished the superlative and immersive 'Wolf Hall'.
Hair Day: in need of pep and vim

What I can see from my window no. 18: see last poem below

In the last few weeks I have become a South London water-baby, with just an eyelash-flutter of sun being enough to send me down the hill to Brockwell Lido for a cold swim. It's a highly addictive, heart-thrumping pastime, wonderfully communal (eg wiggling into my dry things in full view of all other swimmers, all manner of bodies out on show, kids running around), and the water, less chlorinated than indoor pools, is a milky thing of wonder. So the hot autumn spell was a perfect excuse to avoid work and douse myself, and even better was the trip to sunny Broadstairs, where we visited Louise and Stone Bays and got some hearty sea-swimming in. So much did we gulp up the last summer rays that we missed the train to take us back to the South Bank's Boulez concert, and by the time we got there, they wouldn't admit us. Curses! So I forsook possibly my only chance to see the man in person conducting his own music, but, hell, I think I like outdoor swimming more than just about anything else, the master of Modernism included. We consoled ourselves briefly with watching a bit of 'Pli Selon Pli' on a screen, with none other than vocalist legend Linda Hirst, who'd also been waylaid; the music was given an - at times remarkably germane - extra layer of percussion by the barman on our floor crashing around sporadically with ice buckets and stacked glasses. Hur hur.

Two gigs of late: Metamorphic had a really lovely one at the Forge, reviewed ecstatically here. Juice introduced the newest group baby to Elisabeth Lutyens in rehearsal (much crying ensued) and gigged in Hexham Abbey, giving our 'Laid Bare: 10 Love Songs' songbook another welcome airing.

Here are some recent poems!

Thames Moon Swimming

With gasps that are more delight than shock,

we rush into a clamour of reeds.

As light crumbles towards the moon,

we swim between the patches that are left

- the boathouses, the single streetlamp -

our heads polished like brassrubbings.

Walking back down the path

in light that is now more like a scent,

we are halflings among the hedges;

our sealsouls bobbing in the river.

Daylight Fox, Waterloo

Crossing in front of the cars and my bike,

he shocks like a burn on the skin.

A mulch of winter leaves, a dank sinew

reeking of urine and musk, and

capable of screams that brand the heart,

he is a brazen wildness amongst metalshine

and tarmac.

How long have they been here, waiting

by our feet at crossings, slipping past

on sidestreets, weaving through us

as if we were birch and elm?

Rosemary and Peter, Picking Blackberries

At separate points along the path,

they collect only the ripest, the ones

with the innocence of children

when you hold out your hand for them.

Her plastic rainhat upturned, she moves

with a dancer’s grace; she is first-snow and rubies,

sugar paper and bone, hands flitting

through the brambles like goldcrests.

He is a hero and charmer, idling in the bushes

with inkwell mouth and fingers.

In their second marriage, one that has lasted 40 years,

their eyes shine like the berries they can’t quite reach.

Brambles, bones, blackberries.

5^th Floor (for Nicholas Hilliard)

over to the west

into light that is silvering

the edges of my ivy, mint and sage

starlings flock

rising from the far buildings

as if on the street below

a manuscript detailing

the colours of precious stones

their heaviness and their glitter

has been dropped

in the evening wind

Hay Bales and Knitwear

2011-09-21T04:50:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2

Listening: Ewan MaColl and Peggy Seeger's 'Radio Ballads' project
Hair Day: 50s pin-up

What I can see from my window no. 17: the Olympic stadium

I made an autumnal resolution to see more (hopefully cheap) culture and generally hobnob a bit more, and it's kicking off in style! Last week we made our last trip of the dying summer to visit Bold Tendencies, who run the artsy events at Peckham's brooding 7-storey car park, to catch a showing of Andrea Arnold's three short films in the hay bale-walled pop-up cinema - the most well-known being 'Wasp', a grimly British bit of filmic gristle which nabbed an Oscar. I find her work, alongside her later features 'Red Road' and 'Fish Tank', totally inspiring, and am currently planning my own foray into short film-making, hopefully with a slightly more dreamy quality: bringing myth and folktale elements into an urban environment. All I need are actors, cameras, directorial nous and money... ahem.

Last night I was invited to the swanky Hospital Club to see a London Fashion Week event, where my friend Elspeth Brooke had created the music, a sort of Kraftwerk-meets-Corelli soundtrack, to a choreographed show of a new collection by Brooke Roberts. I hung around in the bar with Elspeth and her fashion writer friend Sharon, drinking the best-titled cocktail ever: The Second Coming of the Earl, which was frankly just as surprising as it sounds, hur hur. Brooke has the surely totally individualistic twin career of innovative knitwear designer and radiographer, and uses medical imaging in her work. It was refreshing to see dancers modelling, thus displaying heartily muscular calves rather than twig-like pins... Along with Brooke, Elspeth is a Creator in Residence at the Club, and I'm looking forward to choosing something from her collection to wear when I play with Elspeth in her burgeoning Creeping Jenny electronica/pop project!

Rather than dreaming of magical realist shorts and x-ray-inspired sheer tops, I should ACTUALLY be writing some music: current projects are a sporty-themed choir piece for Youth Music Voices, who will be performing as part of the Cultural Olympiad next year (am channeling the Honda ad as we speak, but with less windscreen wiperage and more canoe paddles), and planning my downloadable mp3 track for Handel House, which will mix spoken word interviews and music...

White Peak Poems

2011-09-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

Here are the five poems I wrote whilst in the Southern Peak District last week:

September 6^th, 2011

badger/angel

for DOLLYman

he thuds into the earth,

great white beast,

shedding ashen feathers all over the road

something savage

has sought out his heart

(sensing its extraordinary sweetness)

death has already spread her cape

over his back and begun to work him,

licking his ears with a coal-wet tongue

hours later, he’s nothing

but ink and oil, and dank night pool;

nothing but the road

September 6^th, 2011

September Heron (First Day Back At School)

A heron smartly rises from the brook:

one sheet of 100mg A3 ivory paper, cut

with a craft knife and crisply folded

at acute angles, given a deft stroke

of charcoal and hung over a yellow compass;

it rises, and it soars.

September 7^th, 2011

Under hawthorn and hazels

which hand the rain down

leaf to leaf, drop by drop,

we wait by the weir, daughter

and mother, easily talking;

the sound of the rain

and the sound of the weir.

September 8^th, 2011

The Roaches

The peregrine falcon hangs on the wind

above rocks the colour of ravens.

She turns, and the weather turns

with her wing-tip flash: the tarn flares

and walkers become bright as gorse flowers;

the fawn and violet of early heather

find their way into the pine trunks

and mushrooms like golden eggs are found in the grass.

Then back they come, the clouds as dark as bogs,

seeping into the grass; pine-barks gloss over

and the truths of heather’s bruises surface;

walkers run for cover, the tarn turns

its shutters, and the falcon soaks up the dark

of the raven-rocks in her far-spread wings.

II

A laugh on the wind

is snatched by a crow;

the crow’s throat-rattle

shivers through the pines;

the pines’ needle-shimmy

is rallied by chiff-chaffs,

hidden in the scrub

by the trail that we wind up,

talking, and laughing.

Walking With Mothers

2011-09-10T03:09:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 1

Listening: Ella Fitzgerald, PJ Harvey, Roshi
Hair Day: greasy

What I can see from my window no. 16: the death of summer. Sob.

I went to the South Peak District for a Walking With Mothers holiday this week, the sort of break where you are ONLY cool if clad in cagoule, walking trousers and the best boots Mountain Warehouse has to offer, ohhh yes. We had some top walks in the very untouristy White Peak area and enjoyed some brilliant natural wonders:

1) Thor’s Cave was a gaping maw high on a hill in the Manifold Valley, as if blasted straight out of the rock. With its scalp-smooth limestone and pitch-black hollows, it was all my ‘The Descent’ fears come to life: Mum had to force me to use my camera flash to shine into dark tunnels, where I assumed a rubbery mutant would be half-heartedly growling back at me.

2) Chee Valley saw Mum and I venture, Indiana Jones-style, into the mud-and-nettle trails next to the Chee River, glowered on by canyon walls, clambering over stepping stones and trees before the monsoon rains hit and battered us into a taxi rescue.

3) Hen Cloud and The Roaches were marvellous crag-topped hills and ridges with amazing views of the Tittesworth Reservoir.

4) Lud’s Church was a brilliant, forest-hidden chasm 100 yards long, drenched in luminous green ferns with water dripping irregularly like the sound of a clock dying. The Lollards apparently hid here in the 14th century; I just about resisted the urge to run about pretending to be Sir Gawain fighting the Green Knight in the epic poem also thought to be set here, though did clamber up as many sopping rockfaces as as I could and squeezed through some tiny gullies, as is my wont.

Birds of note: grey heron, nuthatch, youngish dipper, yellow wagtail, peregrine falcon, buzzard and kestrel.

Animals of note: hare, stoat, 4 dead badgers.

Kerry Goes Underground

2011-08-30T02:03:00.000-07:00

I had the launch for my Art on the Underground project, working with artist Ruth Ewan and a load of pesky youngsters at Hackney's Laburnam Boat Club, at the Museum of Childhood last week, meaning I could cast a dewily nostalgic eye at my old manor just behind it. (I still love you, Mulberry House!) The mini-concept album that I created from the spoken word/songs/field recordings of the LBC-ers, or as it was rather nicely called by Culture24, 'an a cappella scrapbook', is available online and I guess the pillarbox red posters will be around soon, meaning my name will be all over the tube network, hurrah! Do bend your ear to these marvellous kids here and share it around if you like it!

Next up at the weekend was the Association of British Choral Directors' Convention in Birmingham, where the National Youth Choir of Great Britain premiered my ABCD 25th anniversary commission, The Earth Hath Voice, in Birmingham Town Hall. It was a fairly meaty concert, with Ars Nova and the spookily good (like a load of super-poised high priestesses. With uncanny intonation.) Cantamus packing out the first half - the latter's Judith Bingham piece, Lace-making, being a big highlight. The NYC did a fine job on my piece in the second half, and it seemed to go down pretty well with the audience. Mike Brewer, I think, put everyone else's pieces to shame with their wonderfully funky, boisterous joyfulness. Though of course nothing is more exciting than having Eric Whitacre gracing the Convention with his blonde-maned presence, and ripples went through the choral delegate audience, turning everyone into a bunch of tittering maiden aunts as he swept on, looking like some sort of glamorous, sharp-suited Hollywood star compared to all of us pasty, snaggle-toothed Brits, hur hur. I'm utterly fascinated by his success: what other choral composer is also a) signed to the Storm Model Agency and b) gives keynote speeches to the UN Leaders' Programme, for goodness' sakes!! I was very sad not to get a chance to meet him and if nothing else, have some sort of Fabulous Choral Composers' Hair-Off Smackdown, in which obviously I would win the 'Edgy Quiff Award' but he would wipe me out with the 'Mr Glossy Locks' and the 'Hair-Tosser of 2011' gongs. Ah ha ha.

Still, I DID get spend time with an actual friend who is, some might say, MORE famous than Eric: Paul Mealor, erstwhile Composer To The Royals, who was there to give a talk about rewriting his music into Ubi Caritas for the Royal Wedding. Paul used to hold court in the postgrad room at York, bestowing all sorts of useful compositional advice and plenty of giggles back in the day, and it was a real pleasure to see him again, and have a few buckets of white wine in the hotel bar with the ABCD-ers. He fed me drops of juicy gossip about all his composer friends, hanging out at the Classical BRITS, popping over to America, and all the other things he does now that he is MAD famous, and was as entertaining as ever. What a star!

Two cultural things of late: Twombly and Poussin at the Dulwich Picture Gallery - I much preferred Cy's solo show at the Tate, though it was lovely to spend time sitting in the company of the big splodgy beasts in his Quattro Stagioni; and Ralph Fiennes in The Tempest, a treat from Andy, who somehow managed to suppress his fear that I would throw myself onto the stage in wilting ardour. Actually, Ralph is a bit old and terrifying now, but it was still great to see him live (I saw him do Richard II many moons ago), even if he looked a little uncomfortable in Prospero's cape, especially when he had to groove to his sprites' fairly awful crooning. Ha ha.

Swimming Pool Poems 2

2011-08-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

Here's the second instalment of poems written in France:

August 15^th 2011

holding your breath in the water

fish fold through the light

dark fingers and pale hands

in falling hair

and there’s a sound

bird-rattle and tongue-click

a crackle of some unfathomable energy

forming

the sea is trying to speak

a pearled stuttering so close

it is just for you, inching into your skull

an ancient almost-song

you hear of seaquakes, millennia ago

of rifts, wide as half the earth

and changing everything

of the moon, undancing tyrant

of the long ice-darkness

of whales which throb like hearts

of love-letters in phospherence to the sky

of battles with rain

of ships, cradled like trinkets

and of you, caught in its throat

the one it sings to and the one

who stops it singing

August 15^th 2011

the sun slips into a moon-skin

the sun slips into a moon-skin

feigning a frown

and assuming a mottled brow

he loudly mopes ‘I despair of sin’

and steals away

(he does this many times

throughout the day)

August 17^th 2011

on my back, nightswimming no. 1

it is impossible to tell

which are night-moths

and which are stars

August 18^th 2011

on my back, nightswimming no. 2

Pinned to the water

at precise points along the bone,

and strung with threads (whisper-thin

but trembling with the night’s strength)

that disappear into the impossible above,

my fingers are uncurled one by one,

my arms drawn out and up in a slow

gymnast’s bow, my spine tautened

with a tension at the crown, my feet

tugged by the toes, one by one,

and my legs pulled apart by the heels,

and I am pinioned into their

perfect puppet-star.

Swimming Pool Poems 1

2011-08-22T03:20:00.000-07:00

I wrote a little collection of poems whilst in France, with a diet of one a day, written whilst sitting on a sun lounger and occasionally hurling myself into the pool. Here's the first instalment:

August 8^th 2011

inkblot

after the pen-lift

it is still

veining out

into its Antarctica

August 9^th 2011

les orangers

for Rob and Theresa

stilled

in a heart-light blue gaze

under trees

bunched with bees and berries

in a garden

of throat-pink songbursts

August 10^th 2011

Portrait of Andy Reading ‘Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power’ by Robert Dallek (On A Lilo)

you drift on words

which form in wind and water

spooling phrases slip off

and over each other, lithe as eels

lit for a second

they flit in parallel

darning themselves

into their new wet world

with each new page

the word-eels congregate

their liquid tussle making

a dark door beneath you

August 12^th 2011

Early Evening Swim, Antibes

on your back, you’re a sweet self-crucifixion in salt

the church sucks its bells like boiled sweets

shadows long for their beginnings

the horizon wells up, more water than mountain

you leave a shape as if you have lain there all night

August 13^th 2011

Love Song To A Sun-Umbrella By A Mistaken Bee

oh Bright ZigZag GianteSS

GoddeSS of bloodberry and polkadot

I lovelorn fumble in your SkirtS

you taste –

unuSual

August 13^th 2011

Dream No. 1:

A barn owl asks for milk

with his pebble-clack beak:

I steal it from a newsagents

and let him drink, my fingers

in his ruff, airy as whisked egg-whites

Sexy Beast(s) en France

2011-08-19T09:20:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 1

Listening: TSF Jazz, France's bonzer jazz radio station - jingle: 'cent percent jazz' (said in soothing lady's voice)
Hair Day: I am wearing NO HAIR PRODUCT AT ALL SO DON'T LOOK AT ME
What I can see from my window no. 15: Brixton Town Hall

I have returned, daisy-fresh, from a recuperative holiday in the sun-deluged sud de France, just up from Antibes. The days were beautifully reduced to the simplest of things as we fattened on sleep, swimming, food, books and writing, centred around our pool, which had views of the Alpes and glittered in a sort of turquoise leopardskin vibe. It was like playing out scenes from 'Sexy Beast' (without Ben Kingsley barking 'NO! NO! NO! at us), French artfilm 'Swimming Pool' (without the murder, waspishness and swimming-trunked erections) and English artfilm 'Archipelago' (without the insufferable middle-classness. No, wait...). Art-tasks included learning Chopin preludes on the electric piano whilst drinking gin and tonics, writing most of a new DOLLYman song (about badger-death, naturally), and penning a poem a day - the full collection to follow in some other blogs I think!

Swim-activities became creative and competitive, lilo-surfing being the most hilarious (and brief: 2 seconds before hurtling in was the record), and keepy-uppy reaching new levels of masterful complexity. Chess pieces wound their way to death or victory on the sun-baked poolside, making long shadows on the grass; ping-pong and the sport of aged Frenchmen, petanque, was won resoundingly by the boys (Andy and Matt) whilst I sulked into my rose. We got stuck into David Simon's latest masterwork: 'Treme', simply a televisual dream, being basically a more relaxed 'The Wire' but with sousaphone. Best quotes: 'You got a gig? LIFE is a gig' and 'Why did my marriage fail? I married

a musician, thats why'. See it!

We did make it out a few times - to Biot's cutesome village, teetering on top of a steep hill (including watching a hokey blues-rock lot in in outdoor amphitheatre on a warm night - would have preferred avant-garde skronk-step, obviously); along the coast to Monte Carlo (ghastly, wreathed in a murky humid fog that was probably the rich hoi polloi's every waking thought), Eze (Neitzsche's old hood, bakingly hot) and Villefranche-Sur-Mer (sea-swimming!); and to Antibes' old town, where I overcame my fear of being nibbled on by shoals of peckish fish by swimming goggles-down in the sea to watch the equivalent of 'Finding Nemo' rainbowing around me. The best extra-villa experience was given to us by our wondrous host, Matt, who took us to a fabulous restaurant where the owners, friends of Picasso, have a private gallery that you they will unlock the doors to, just for you; so we had a post-prandial, exclusive saunter through the cellar displaying a cornucopia of cubist paintings, op-art, 80s sculpture, and much more. It was like they'd been slumbering in the basement and had roused themselves awake, to be on display, just for us.

Whilst we were doing 'Sexy Beast' et al, I was sightly expecting to come back to a dystopian city that was part 'Attack the Block' and part '28 Days Later', with London's hooded yout' pitted against teams of multi-ethnic shopkeepers and super-hipsters. It was horrible to watch on the news (especially when you're trying to translate - badly - from French) and I hated being away for those few days. Glad to come back to a civilised and sedate-ish neighbourhood for my big bro's wedding; London IS the best, no matter what.

She Must Have Something Heavy Inside...*

2011-08-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3
Listening/Watching: Many, many compositions by young whippersnappers / High & low art combination of Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra on the BBC Proms. And 'Con Air'. Ahem.
Hair Day: flopsy, mopsy
What I can see from my window no. 14: dark sunsetty rain

Phew, what a monster week! I went a did a You Are Wolf set at the Cambridge Folk Festival, having a lovely time on the Den Stage for emerging folkies. I was a bit baffled by the relative lack of traditional music in favour of boys and girls with guitars blathering mundanities, and the whole festival was so massively uncool that Andy and I felt like the most avant-garde of super-hipsters in the company of a load of middle-class fortysomethings bearing nothing more dangerous than a canvas chair and a ruddy complexion. Now I have just returned, zombie-like and bleeding from the ears from the third Sound and Music Summer School, meaning another high-energy, all-powerful turn from me as Key Tutor for the Composing For Voice group. It was a stellar year for my crew, a charming bunch of composers aged 15-18 who were keen to learn, creative and happy-go-lucky to an almost embarrassing level (when they started doing body percussion and harmony versions of 'When the Saints Go Marching In' in the canteen on the last night, like a particularly surreal and horrific episode of 'Glee'). We had a range of pieces getting teenage angst out in the form of Britten-esque Wilfred Owen settings, Faure-esque Bukowski settings, snippets of Martin Luther King and T.S. Eliot and Norse epic poetry; some body-slappin' looping gubbins (as is my wont); and two very fun pieces of vocal theatre, one by a highly talented BBC Young Composer of the Year. These were all performed with extreme brio and gumption by an A-Team of Sarah-juicette, Laura Moody and Matt 'DOLLYman' Dibble. The other tutor groups came and wrote some one-word miniatures, our favourites choices of words being 'pumpkin', 'regicide' and 'futrit' (a stoat in the Aberdeenshire dialect of Doric!).

The week was marked up a notch by being put up in the local Hilton, complete with kidney-shaped (and practically sized) pool and mini-spa, meaning I could squeeze in power-dips and plan my next teaching moves whilst hyperventilating in the steam room. In an effort to avoid the Official World's Worst Catering Ever (raw jacket potatoes and stricken jelly being the most disturbing examples), I spent time with ace staff musicians in Watford's greatest curry house, Bushey's cutest pub, Aldenham Road's least glamorous Carvery and on the Purcell School's most calming staff room sofas, recovering from recording sessions with gallons of Rooibos tea before going in for another bout. Laura, Matt and I also danced like nutters in the final tragic-yet-brilliant disco, in hysterics that teenagers were going crazy over the Prodigy and Nirvana (music made way before they were born) and showing them our skillz moves in the dubstep finale. A totally great week; I am looking forward to nurturing my stomach back to health (having recoiled in horror from the canteen scenes, it is currently the size of a small mammal's) in the South of France for the next ten days. Expect me back freckled up to the MAX!

* A quote from one of our more silly pieces...

TROSP!

2011-07-24T04:13:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0
Listening: See below.
Hair Day: frizzy
What I can see from my window no. 13: a thousand cranes

A seismic cultural event happened last night, possibly shifting the weight from one old-timered hip to one fashionable skinny-jeaned hipster, um, hip. And it took place in a multi-storey car park in Peckham. YES!

Nonclassical, juice's label, and Bold Tendencies, who run the sculpture exhibitions in the summer in the car park, clubbed together to put on a live performance of The Rite of Spring on the penultimate floor with a full orchestra. And, though the same piece was being played across town by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France for the flask-bearing Prommers, here it was played by a motley crew of Oxbridge and College students to 400 ultra-hipsters drinking smuggled tinnies or camparis from Frank's Cafe on the roof. Packed into the dark, low-roofed space, the audience sat on canvas chairs, or, like us, crammed themselves knee-to-elbow on the dirty concrete floor at the front: had we been any closer, we would have been sitting on the cellists' laps having our tummies bowed. The storey hummed with anticipation as the crowd swelled; the orchestra doodled; it was announced that the first bassoonist (obviously a rather key player what with having the most famous bassoon line in history to open the piece) was stuck on a fire-stricken train. Being career-hungry volunteers desperate to play Stravinsky's classic (including some of my old Junior Trinity students, making me thus feel as old as the hills and twice as lumpy), the gung-ho orchestra were visibly a-glow getting their teeth into the muscular music in a fantastically stark acoustic. I might say that the intonation could have been a bit better here and there, but that's an irrelevance. It wasn't about which orchestra played, or which conductor, but about the event itself: a twentieth-century behemoth performed in an edgier-than-thou setting to a crowd of eager-to-hear Londoners, whilst the trains grumbled past outside. And of course it is the perfect piece: 30 visceral minutes of those gut-stabbing downbows, grandiose homophonies, and fluttery-shriek woodwind solos, enough to keep restless ears busy. It was an amazing, visceral performance, and being there felt like a significant moment in time.The piece ended to massive whoops and cheers, and we all piled up to Frank's on the roof for a stonking gobstobber-coloured sunset plastered onto the panoramic city skyline.

This weekend, juice also played the Truck Festival, getting lost in bucolic Oxfordshire lanes before finding this wee weekender on a farm. Much smaller than I imagined, and strangely quiet for a festival - you could swan up to any bar and pick up your pint of Stowford Press just like that! - it was a slightly underwhelming affair, though perfect for running across the site from sleeping tent to performing tent in our glad rags. I did a little You Are Wolf set to open the Nonclassical stage (having to pretend to be a melodica as I cleverly left it at home), and juice did two sets throughout the evening. It was soooo nice for us three to be on stage again; having not sung as a group for three months, it was like the simplest Fisher Price jigsaw puzzle being slotted back together. Also playing were the fabulous Consortium 5 ladies, whose playing of contemporary rep amongst hay bales and fading light was dreamily atmospheric. Elsewhere, highlights were Graham Coxon rocking his skinny guts out, a wood-burning stove, half pints of perry and hot just-made doughnuts, served in most unlikely festival fashion by the cheerful septuagenarians of Didcot Rotary Club...

Radio Balladeering and Drum'n'Swing

2011-07-21T03:35:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0
Listening: A mixture of electro-swing on Spotify and OUP's new 'Carols For Choir 5' promo CD which I am on - a winning combination! Ahem.
Hair Day: pinned up '50s style
What I can see from my window no. 12: Westminster, wreathed in mist

I've had my newish producer/sound artist cap on of late, working with lots of raw material - spoken word, a cappella songs, vocal sounds, field recordings - recorded with the pesky kids at Laburnam Boat Club in Hackney for an Art on the Underground project. Chained to my desk and Logic, reinventing/re-arranging lots of little chunks into a mini-concept album about journeys and growing up, then going mad listening to the infinitesimal differences in EQ with my co-producer and DOLLYman bandmate Matt, it's been a great experience, and one that makes me realise I want to travel further down this road. I was massively inspired by artist Ruth introducing me to Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's Radio Ballads, a heart-wrenching mix of social observation and folk song. There are loads of possibilities for spoken word and music marriages in the next year with some promising commissions... I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

Metamorphic were sad to lose out on a nomination for the Mercury Music Prize 2011, but seeing as there's only one token jazz nod each year, it came as no whopping surprise. It IS ludicrous- what say occasionally they pop two in, just to shake things up a bit? And even a risky experimental a cappella/remix album for good measure!?? Mentioning no names of course. My money's on James Blake, who could and should win. Metamorphic had a couple of good gigs recently, rocking out at Luna Lounge's free-ish Thursday session, and going for broke at the Troy Bar in the execrably-named night 'The Funky Factor'. juice are off to Truck Festival tomorrow, and bracing ourselves for the bad weather. Anyone know a retailer of glamorous hail-shields and wellies with kitten heels?

I've seen some interesting giggage of late. Sarah-juicette and I went to the ENO for Nico Muhly's Two Boys, which had received wildly differing reviews all round. I was on the two-star end of opinion... best things were: a) second-row seats thanks to Sarah's stellar connex! b) Nico's excellent chorus writing, convenying the multi-babble of online conversations. Least good things were: a) a plodding plot and lumbering libretto b) dated visual design - always the way when you bring the online world into the arts world c) the sneaking feeling that we were actually watching Prime Suspect: The Opera and d) the detective singing the words 'Bloody Christ!' as a sweary exclamation, when NO-ONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD HAS EVER UTTERED THIS. Urgh. At the other end of the scale was the new single launch for our hip hop/jazzfunk friends Lazy Habits at Shoreditch's vast and unnervingly clean warehouse space, Village Underground last night. The sound was sadly godawful, as if the bands were actually performing to us man fully whilst flailing in the depths of a murky well, but it was well worth it to finally see electro-swing madmen The Correspondents live. Supported by a beardybear DJ, the singer, a whirling dervish who appeared to be a mix of Harry Potter, a vengeful court jester and Death Himself, flung himself marvellously about the stage with some of the best moves I've ever seen in his clingy, uber-art outfit. YES!

Songspin Is Released! Plus Canal and Portugal Fun

2011-07-01T03:17:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3
Listening/Reading: Tune-Yards, my favourite band - African-influenced New York punky funk-pop!
Hair Day: newish dirty blonde streak in the front, slightly crimped fringe, shaved side, like 1986 never stopped
What I can see from my window no. 11: The Royal London Hospital helicopter

juice released their debut album, 'Songspin' (Nonclassical) to a whirlwind - well, at least a gustnado - of national press excitement from The Observer ('astonishing variety, spark and brilliance'), The Independent ('the range of this new vocal trio is immense') and The Irish Times ('sassy, vibrant and enthralling'). Woo hoo! The three of us are mightily pleased and crossing our fingers for a few more, especially from over the water where our friends at Naxos USA have been putting the word out. It has filled the gap nicely for juice during their summer break, what with one-third of us adding a second baby juicette to the fold, though we are looking forward to an appearance at the Truck Festival (which Anna mistook initially and rather hilariously for TRUCKFEST, an altogether more oil-grimed and builder's-bottomed affair...) in a couple of weeks.

I've been keeping myself busy in four places:

1) In front of the piano at home, writing my Making Music/Music Publishers Association commission, a 15-minute choral and piano piece. Having chosen loads of traditional sayings about aerial beasties, I have been thoroughly enjoying bringing these old English texts to life in my possibly overly cutesomely-titled 'Rhymes and Charms For Fly-Away Things'. It's now been handed over so I'm hoping the 1500 choirs who belong to Making Music think the same and pounce on it... fingers crossed!

2) Bishop's Square for the Spitalfields Winter Festival - two gigs in June's utterly inclement weather of finger-numbing wind and rain, humph. I shivered through a You Are Wolf set and sang some songs by Tansy Davies. Brrr!

3) At the Laburnam Boat Club in Hackney, a ramshackle little joint on the canal near Kingsland Road, where I've been involved in an Art on the Underground project with artist Ruth Ewan. A weird haven from the dust of building work, the towering academy school next door, and the grimness of boarded-up '60s flats, LBC welcomes kids of all ages to come all kayak, canoe, hang out and do occasional art projects. It's brilliant seeing East London urchins hurling themselves merrily into the canal water, the total opposite of the sedentary wastrels I hear about on Radio 4. Ruth and I have been working on getting the kids to create songs, sounds and art responding to their surroundings, and now I'm grappling with the recorded results and trying to bash it into an EP format.

4) In fact, I did some editing work this week in the best sort of office possible: a villa in the Algarve, where Andy and I had a few days with DOLLYman's Lucy and friends. Funny, the most inspiring place to work seems to be NOT my study at home but a 7-bedroom quirky old place overlooking sunbaked hills, in 35-degree heat, eating fresh sardines and drinking champagne, with a 15m pool to throw myself into and play the most camp of water games with various Hello Kitty-themed inflatables. Sheer, freckle-exploding bliss...

You Are Wolf Does Radio (and why to visit Kent)

2011-05-05T04:24:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2
Listening: The 6Music Adam and Joe podcast, tee hee hee
Hair Day: flyaway
What I can see from my window no. 11: A murder of crows

I've had some 6Music and Late Junction radio play courtesy of the BBC, but last week I got to visit the Beeb Towers, featuring on Radio 3's Friday evening 'word-cabaret' show, The Verb. I was made to feel right at home by the exceptionally avuncular and adorable presenter Ian McMillan (Poet in Residence at Barnsley FC!), as well as a couple of other guests, Peter Blevgad and Kevin Jackson. The show was recorded live-ish, with us all chuckling into our mics as we listened to Christian Bok, genius poet-physicist, discuss his work with placing a poem inside a genome, which was able to formulate its own coded poem in response (cue sound of my mind blowing into smithereens and splattering around the studio walls), plus Peter and Kevin's irreverent play about the cutting of libraries. I did my spoken-wordy end of the You Are Wolf material and a bit of an interview with Ian. It was all very cheery, we swapped CDs at the end and Ian happily signed a volume of his I'd nerdily brought along, whilst talking lower league footy. Nice!

This is in the much more fun corner of the You Are Wolf. I had two odd gigs this week: one was playing to a packed Green Note, supporting Clive Gregson - a seasoned songwriter, but the sort that makes Radio 2's output seem like the ear-bleeding edges of avant-garde. So a slightly incongruous juxtaposition of his jig-a-jig strumming, banal lyrics ('one and one still makes two, that's the same for me and you'...) and Stalybridge banter alongside my dark, looped shizzle made for a slightly bemused, if very polite crowd for my set, and Andy and I giggled our way down Parkway at what a strange atmosphere it had been. Still, playing to 50 puzzled MOR fans is better than playing to one man and his dog for a supposedly folkish night down at The Workshop in Shoreditch the next evening, following a noisily dreadful three-piece surfer folk-rock boy band (I THINK that's what they were going for; they looked like three cast members from Neighbours circa 1993). I am learning the hard way how not to say yes to everything...

I swung by Nonclassical's Battle of the Bands at the Troy Bar last night, which in typical Nonclassical fashion, was still going strong way past everyone's bedtime. Todd Reynolds, who plays with the Steve Reich Ensemble, Bang on a Can and co, had flown straight in from New York and onto the Troy Bar stage to guest star with his violin and loop/effects set-up, which was gorgeous, if I think overlong. Sarah-juicette had gone along and ended up being roped in as a judge, so filled me in on all the competing acts on the cab journey home. Sounds like the winners, who I saw, were well-deserved: an extremely pro flute trio (YES!) from The North, Tempest, whose ensemble was remarkably tight, and though they had rather a Classical Brits, hair-curlered performance style, played some spitty, spiky, jazz-inflected contemporary tunes and were musically fabulous. Sort of like a younger, bendier juice, if juice's voices were long silver elongated things. They win, exceptionally outlandishly on Nonclassical's part, an album deal of some sort! My favourite bit of the night (though I was hysterical with tiredness, it being a school night and me being an Old Lady, so by the end I found everything utterly hilarious) was Gabriel ill-favouredly deciding to then comment on the other acts, including a duo that he could think of nothing nicer to say than 'well, they're from Kent, so I think they've just got a whole Kent vibe going on there'. I predict a mass-exodus to Ashford by the hordes of alt-classical scenesters any day now...

In a break from the usual musical marathons, we've been a) enjoying some beach time - in Kent!, reading for hours on South Coast pebbles and dashing into the salt-rashing sea and b) taking ourselves to the Miro exhibition at Tate Modern, which was a thing of joy and wonder. With a political seam running through, it fizzed with Miro's fierce, loopy modernism; his motivic symbols of stars, eyes, tendrils, black blotches; the pretty melancholia of his Constellations series; the two chapel-like rooms of vast triptychs, beating the Rothko rooms any day for their eye-socking colour and power; the thrilling last room of his gritty, frenzied final works, unsoftened in his old age; and best of all, the Burnt Canvases, where Miro torched his own explosive graffiti, the gaping holes and exposed frames looking to me like, on Royal Wedding Day, savaged and blood-splattered St George's flags. GO SEE IT!

Gigitude

2011-04-26T03:59:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2
Listening: These New Puritans
Hair Day: ropey
What I can see from my window no. 11: Smog (or 'SMOG OF DEATH', as the Daily Wail calls it)

It's been Gig Central here at Kerry Towers of late. With Anna rather melon-like in her late-stage pregnancy, it was now or never for launching juice's very impending album, 'Songspin', at Nonclassical's new Hoxton venue, the Troy Bar, with its quirks of ill-functioning loos and a worryingly-bowed ceiling mixed in with its downlow charms. The gig was lovely, and we are itching with excitement to see the actual CD come out, now that we have heard all the totally pumping remixes and are just waiting for some last-gasp mastering to take place. Woohoo!

Never one to launch just ONE album in a fortnight, I also rocked with Metamorphic in Leeds, Liverpool, and lastly London with our official album launch in Highgate. It's out on the F-IRE label NOW!

I've also been enjoying some gigs by Proper Musicians. Sarah from juice and I took ourselves down the Cecil Sharp House to see Jim Moray, who wrote a song last year for our Laid Bare: 10 Love Songs set, so it was high time we saw him perform. Super-slick with visuals and some subtle electronics, Jim and his boys played a sort of stadium-rock-meets-folk set, which felt slightly strange in CSH's posh-primary-school-hall stylings, but rock out they did. Songs included his grime/folk version of Lucy Wan though my favourite was a sweet stripped-down ditty, Valentine; more of them, I say! We grabbed him for a chat in the interval and shared SXSW stories (he went in 2010) and hope to see him again soon.

I also popped to the South Bank to a) support Anna Meredith, who was performing some of her latest electronica, but really b) to join the many all-aged hipsters worshipping at the Church of James Blake. This was another of Olly Coates'-curated nights, meaning an eclectic first half, including a rare airing of Seb Rochford's solo material. Those who have ever heard Seb introduce one of his other bands will know that his rowdy jazz drumming belies a voice of dulcet mouse-meekness, so rest assured this acoustic slot did not explore Seb's penchant for extreme death-screamo. The candy-floss-haired one then bashed some skins for Anna's set of laptop-menace, which actually felt restricted in the Purcell Room's hushed and formal ambience; I'm keen to see how it translates to the discerning club-floor (and would pay good money to see dancers become toe-tied by the fluctuating time signatures and accumulate in a pile of tangled, slim-jeaned limbs). Finally, there was a pretty sweet piece for Olly, Seb and four hammer dulcimers. What slightly let it all down was the inept presenting, which left me curled of toe and unable to watch. James Blake doesn't fail here: he just said a firm 'thank you' after every song, each of which was a magnificent thing of dark, deconstructed dubsteppery (Minus most of the dub. And the step), topped by JB's hoarsely soulful voice, with weird spiky beats, dolorous keyboard and samples from the trio. I LOVE HIM.

Cultcha Vultcha! Kerry Becomes Older And Overindulges On Art

2011-04-06T02:16:00.000-07:00

Never one to shirk the responsibility of celebrating my birthday up to max, I gave myself a crammed cultural schedule yesterday to see in my ‘dirty-third’…

In the morning, Andy and I went to London Street Photography at the Museum of London, a pithy exhibition spanning the 1860s to the present day, depicting a city full of life and exuberance, poverty and politics, which made me want to snap everyone in sight upon leaving. We chased that up with a dash around the Barbican’s show on the 1970s downtown New York scene with work from Gordon Matta-Clark, Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson; the best of this was some of Brown’s choreography performed live, in which three jumpsuited dancers moved effortlessly around a vertical white wall full of symmetrical holes, rather like a heavenly Connect 4 board, whilst film of large buildings and moving figures was projected onto them. Elsewhere, there some great graphic scores from Anderson, and a ‘Handphone Table’, in which you placed your elbows in two hollows and conducted electronic sound to your head from the table by placing your hands over your ears.

Then it was onto the highly decadent Bob Bob Ricard’s in Soho for afternoon tea served by waiters in pink blazers and waitresses in deep turquoise waistcoats, latterly to match the colour of the leather booth seating in the ‘20s/’30s interior. Cat and I channelled our inner Bright Young Things whilst quaffing Pol Roger champagne and eating teeny sandwiches and cakes… I then squeezed in a showing of ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’, Werner Herzog’s gasp-inducing 3-D documentary on the Chauve Caves in France, home of the most remarkable rock paintings in the world, preserved for 25,000 years by a cliff-collapse and only recently discovered. In 3-D, we were transported into the swelling, undulating depths, filled with astonishing formations, cave bear skulls cloaked in calcite, and cave art so prescient and immediate that it made your heart stop. Herzog’s delicately philosophical narration drove home that by taking part in art, you are continuing a thread that has been infinitesimally spinning from the beginning of human consciousness. Our need to create memory in physical form, to stamp our place in the world and communicate to our descendants, may have morphed into 3-D movies and junkyard glitch-orchestras (see below), digital photos and installations, but it remains as powerful an instinct as it did to those early homo sapiens who hunted rhino and lions, walked with wolves and laid red handprints on the walls an unimaginable age ago.

To the South Bank! Micachu and The Shapes revisited last year’s collaboration with the London Sinfonietta, ‘Chopped and Screwed’, apparently inspired by the hip hop technique of slowing samples and the mix of ‘purple drank’ and cannabis oft-imbibed alongside it. Preceded by some mostly diverting solo pieces and a lovely trio by Laurence Crane (reminding me that economy of ideas always works best), Mica’s piece was a collection of strung-together songs with plenty of gorgeous textures and off-kilter rhythms; alas though, a lot of its subtlety was lost up in the cheap seats. However, her voice is just ace, a croaky, offhand thing that goes to envy-making low notes, and as a leftfield pop gig it was great. I rounded off my Big Birthday Bonanza with a British Season cocktail (gin, cucumber, lemon, ginger, served in a glass teacup and saucer) in the Skylon Bar looking onto the river, feeling very Mad Men, before tottering home to bed, blown bottles fluting in my ears, hansom cabs and wall-walking figures and cave paintings drifting in front of my eyes…

(In a Texan drawl) Good JOB!

2011-03-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0, hurrah!
Listening: new Battles song, 'Ice Cream'
Hair Day: Quiff, hairsprayed to the max
What I can see from my window no. 11: Battersea Power Station

Off with the furs and on with the bikinis (well, in spirit anyway….)! We had arrived in balmy Austin for the world’s biggest music expo, South By South West. We were put up by Kathy and Ron, who had nervously signed up for the SXSW Housing scheme for the first time, and probably expected four slobbering Yorkshire youths trashing their telly and vomiting in the sink. Ha, they were probably disappointed to get three house-trained classical girls in their early thirties…

We were there to represent our label, Nonclassical, for Gabriel’s showcase at the brilliantly central Velveeta Room, located right in the thick of the noisy action on 6th Street. I was sadly fever-ridden and mucus-addled and was gulping single malt between songs, but we did a ‘good JOB!’ as EVERYONE in Texas says and certainly went down pretty well. The rest of the gig was without a hint of bias (ha), easily the best music I heard at the festival, which was swamped with thrashy MOR rock and jingly-jangly guitar boys. Matt Haimovitz and Uccello were an all-cello quartet performing relicks of classic big band tunes with wood-thumping funkiness. The Calder Quartet can be added to the Kronos, Ethel and the Elysians in leading the charge for contemporary string quartet repertoire; Sissy-Eared Molly Coddles had a touch of the DOLLYman in their off-kilter chamber songs (though some were more successful than others), and Graham Reynolds, an Austin-based composer presented his rampantly driving triple concerto, with his white spinet and nine strings crammed onto the tiny stage. My favourite act was a curio before this, a composer whose name I didn’t catch who performed a sort of phlegmatically-hallucinating-Tom-Waits act; every cough and splutter would erupt onto crazy glisses in the strings, and he ended by caressing the piano and proudly displaying his a half-torn suit. Hilarious.

Bloody hell, there’s so much music at SXSW. You walk down 6th Street or Red River, the two main drags, and slightly distorted yowlings bleed from every bar, shoe shop and café as you munch your jalapeno hot dog with sauerkraut in the 84-degree heat. More fun were many of the buskers on the corners, with Anna’s favourite being a trio of girls with ukeleles, and Memphis’ Star and Micey, whose sunny-strummed loveliness was topped by the guitarist’s mid-song backflip. As fun as watching the buskers was the constant tattoo-watch; it was as if the Great Tattoo God had gathered his most willing converts to one town and liberally splattered them with a cornucopia of inky imagery: Hello Kitty, Where The Wild Things Are, Peter Pan, owls, birds, spiders, flowers, names, poems, hamburgers and milkshakes (hhm), it was all there. It made me want to get indelibly blitzed from head to toe in bluebirds and dolphins and roses right away.

I SHOULD have caught James Blake, Emmylou Harris, Wu-Tang Clan, Sam Amidon and many more. But tearing round after Gabriel and our US record label cohorts Megan from Naxos and the boys from indie classical label Innova, or strolling more sedately the day after our gig, we simply dipped in and out of many a band. I got madly excited by Glasser, filling the rafters of the Central Presbyterian Church with her ice-cool voice in an opening unaccompanied folk song, but quickly got bored as it turned into a droney electro-bore. We hung around the British Music Embassy’s day parties quite a lot, and caught the likes of Jonquil, Dinosaur Pile-Up, thrash-thugs Pulled Apart By Horses (who in classic Brits-abroad style, were still drunk from the night before and apparently vomited copiously into the audience upon finishing, ha ha) and Little Comets, who were jingly-jangly guitar boys in the best sense, a sort of Geordie Vampire Weekend.

Outside of the Nonclassical night, there were two main highlights:

New Musical Crush no 1: Paper Bird
Recommended to us by a Denver-based hipster DJ, our female trio radar was turned on full whack when we heard there were three singing girls in this band for said DJ’s afternoon party. And right scrumptious they were too, harmonies as sweet as mountain air, on top of quirky arrangements with trombone and rhythm section, irregular time signatures and handclaps lending them a touch of the Dirty Projectors-meets-Sufjan Stevens. Super-lovely.

New Musical Crush no. 2: David Thomas Broughton
I had been meaning to catch DTB for a long time, hearing of his prowess with a loop station, but I wasn’t quite prepared for his highly-strung physical and gadget-theatre! On top of some cool experimental looping of his guitar and Antony Hegarty-like vocals, he bashed the mic against his head and the drum kit behind him, posed very strangely with elbows akimbo, used a Dictaphone and played rape alarms which he then attempted to eat. Irresistibly magnetic and bonkers, Sarah and I caught him afterwards to swoon, swap CDs and (hurrah!) agree that juice and he must collaborate sometime.

A lovely last day was ended with a stroll to SXSW’s unofficial fringe up on Congress, a dream-road of indie boutiques and thrift stores. We bumped into my ex-student (erk!) and many a Sound of 2011 star Jamie Woon, who was preparing to play his 5th gig at SXSW; so fab to see him becoming a star with his gorgeous brand of indie soulfulness. We were taken to Magnolia for a gluttonous night of blueberry pancakes drenched in maple syrup by our new Texan Mom And Dad; Kathy and Ron’s arty and supremely liberal vibe, dust-dry humour and ridiculous generosity was an invaluable part of our Texas trip. And now we plan to build on this and go back to unleash the anarchic a cappella Brit-sounds, in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco; anywhere that'll have us...

Juicy Big Apple (US Trip Part 1)

2011-03-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0, hurrah!
Watching: last episode of 'Being Human'
Hair Day: quiffy
What I can see from my window no. 10: fluffy cloudscape and plane wings

Following the PRSF/Bird’s Eye View Film Festival’s Big Feminist Push at their South Bank WOW launch (where I chatted to the likes of Gaggle’s new drummer, Sam Lee of Magpie’s Nest, Claire from CHROMA, the Consortium 5 girls and Claudia Molitor, and was interviewed by a BBC blogger), it was a high-tail to the US for juice’s Big American Adventure!

First stop: New York, where we performed at a lovely wee gallery in Brooklyn, Zora Arts Space. Our perfect partners for this mini-gig were Toby Twining Music, a new sextet led by the NY-based mostly-experimental-vocal composer. Toby has put this crew together as part of his new album project, Eurydice; juice sandwiched them with some a cappella faves, and the group joyfully throat-growled, hocketed, yodelled and harmonic-whistled their way through the five-piece vocal and ‘cello cuts. Well worth checking out here!

With true US-pedigree hospitality, Toby put the three of us up at his house-sit palace in New Jersey, even though he barely knew us. So we resided happily in the ‘burbs, feeling like three trilling Snow Whites as we were surrounded by a plethora of exotic avian Americana: white-crowned and song sparrows, tufted titmouses (titmice?!), common grackles shiny as paua shells, brown-headed cowbirds, and the classic abstract expressionist red cardinals, which Sarah later immortalised in earring form. Plus a chipmunk, groundhog and a vewwy fwendly wabbit.

We had two days to Do New York after the gig. Here are the highlights:

1) The Primeburger diner just off 5th Avenue, built in 1938 and preserved almost entirely in midcentury modern style, and waiters almost as historic. Wooden-swivel desks, bronze lights, pumpkin pie and two old gents who introduced themselves as ‘Noo Yawk born, Noo Yawk bred’ as they chatted us up. Probably the coolest place EVER.

2)MOMA, an even classier (yes!) Tate Modern, which had our dream special exhibition, ‘Music 3.0’, looking at how the New York music scene in the 80’s and early 90’s had influenced art. Cue revisiting the videos and album art from lots of old faves such as Eric B and Rakim, Run DMC, the Beasties etc, but less familiar stuff like John Zorn, a terrifyingly blood-letting Diamanda Galas video which would make the cast of Twilight eat their own faces off in fear, and a hilariously expletive-filled feminist track by Karen Finley, which I can’t repeat here. No, really. It involves orifices. And horses. And waffles.

3) Food, and lots of it. Magnolia Bakery cupcakes (very SJP in Sex and the City); City Bakery hot chocolate and marshmallows as big as bricks (or as Sarah put it dreamily, ‘a cloud in a cup’); borscht and verynykey at East Village Ukrainian fave Vaselkas; a corner-shack pretzel whilst walking the High-Line, a art-lined walkway recently converted from an old cross-rail; and a peanut butter cookie eaten whilst being bitch-slapped by the Atlantic wind on the Staten Island Ferry as we all shamelessly snapped the original Green Goddess.

4) Talking with Toby about politics, beatboxing as meaningful music, arts funding as we took in the steam from the sidewalks, the yellow cabs, the neck-crick, the Art Deco ubiquity, the modernity, the iron-wrought fire escapes, the greyness, the little dogs in designer coats and the stop-start-run pedestrian crossings… The city as romance!

Hair Envy, Alto Flutes and Fuschia Tights

2011-03-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 0.2
Watching: 'Winter's Bone' on Film 4 On Demand
Hair Day: Just shaved the side again in crazed stress-release... ahh, that's better...
Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 9: The London Eye, a blurry deep blue

Had a lovely time at Nonclassical last night, where Gabriel and Rich took over Cargo for a special launch of Tansy Davies' new album, Trobairitz. I missed most of the first duo, Kamama, but caught their last piece, a lovely piece for two players and snare, where one half just hit a drumstick in the air in a constant pulse and the other manipulated snare and his hands to interact with that. Very spare and theatrical.

Playing Tansy's work from the album was an ensemble I haven't come across before, The Azalea Ensemble, all hailing from the Royal Academy or thereabouts. They tackled the jolty, sparsely quirky lines and off-kilter rhythms with fearless panache, and were noticeably committed - it's really nice to see a a group who looked so genuinely into the music. They are potentially a younger, hipper and more Londonish Bang On A Can All Stars. Moving to Cargo and with a slightly higher ticket price meant an attentive crowd, unlike some of the old Macbeth gigs with its distracting clackity pool-playing and brazen glass-bashing. The big-jangle-haired violinist, resplendent in fuschia tights, could even play a sublime set of Sciarrino Caprices to a hypnotised audience. Such gossamer-spun things of loveliness - punctuated by the East London line trains' thunder-bellies, like an duetting pianissimo bass drum part - I never did hear before. Check 'em out:

I had been drafted in to sing one little song, 'Greenhouses', standing in for Anna-juice who has recocrded this and more for the album. It all sailed a little close to the wind - I learnt it that day, rehearsed it briefly with two-thirds of the ensemble, met the alto flute player as we got onto the stage to perform it, that sort of thing... But I enjoyed it, it's the sort of contemporary song that suits me. More exciting than any of this was being introduced by Tansy to her hairdresser. Ha. Tansy's hair was looking so superfly that even being mistaken for her AGAIN somehow didn't ebb my mega hair-envy. I REALLY should have got his number...

Listen to Tansy's podcast for Nonclassical HERE!

Crypt-ish

2011-02-26T13:10:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 9

Listening: James Blake's surprisingly out-there post-pop (or post-'wussy-dubstep' as Andy calls it)

Hair Day: 'Like La Roux's', says my lady in Bullfrogs, Greenwich

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 8: a sunset of ballet-dancing and big blousy marshmallows

You Are Wolf graced two small South London pub venues this week, firstly at The Glad in Borough, a gorgeous wee place with instruments hanging from the ceiling and a mostly hushed and attentive crowd. It was another twinning with Firefly, and certainly the best collaboration yet, with the boys and girl doing an amazingly evocative job on my trad. English tunes. If I could just pack them into my suitcase I wouldn't need my loop station at ALL! Secondly, I attended a rather curious night at Stockwell's The Cavendish Arms, in Will Self's neck of the woods. Quite what the loquaciously deadpan one would have made of the night I can't imagine: there were conflicting musical nights in the bar and in the dedicated music venue out the back. We cringed over our pre-gig bratwursts as some solo boys and geetars acoustically performed their well-meaning but very hapless introspective whinings, becoming bewildered and cowed by the punctuating raucous blarings from the back room. My own set was aided by lovely sound and a cheering crowd, and hampered by the next band's 'cellist who chose to practise his part in the green room next door during my quietest bits. Damn fool. I felt several decades older and frankly a billion times more talented than the sub-Mumford & Sons headline band, who bounded around like puppies on speed in the sound check (I whispered 'are they high?' to Andy; 'No' he shook his head sadly, 'they're just young'. Sob!) and assumed, upon seeing us arrive, that we were vocals (girl) and acoustic guitar (boy), probably about to play the same sort of sub-emo mewlings heard in the bar. Ugh, as IF, losers! A peculiar night. Here's a vid!

Amongst some high-octane workshoppery at the likes of Handel House, Wigmore Hall and Trinity/LABAN, I have found time to get down to Camberwell Crypt for their Friday jazz session to support my Metamorphic compadre John Martin in his new quartet venture, and it was packed to the rafters with as near as you'll get to hipsters in South London. The week later was more of a damp squib, with singer Juliet Kelly's eccentric shtick and ghastly original lyrics more suited to a pub in Driffield on a weeknight (rule one of songwriting: never start your song with 'he wore faded denim/the colour of his eyes'... agh!), and the stoopid audience plebs' jabbering obliterating every instrumental solo. So it's true, we'd be happier if the Crypt blasted out acid-skronk-metal, but it is just about the only live music option in Cambers and the shadowy basement should be used more often. It does need to work on its heating: clearly the chilly old ghosts down there like a spot of straight-ahead dinner jazz with their eternal rest. Brrr....

So used to hanging around in scruffy holes listening to difficult music am I that it seemed rather formal at the ICA last weekend, where I supported some of my muso-aquaintances perform as part of their short Notation and Interpretation series. Some fun-looking graphic scores lined the walls (no surprise to see Claudia Molitor among them), and it was sweet to see scores displayed in a gallery space, especially when they're normally so workaday to me. Will Dutta presented a new piece for piano and electronics by Plaid; both the twinkly piano riffs and trippy visuals leant dangerously near '90s dance for me, and it was overlong, but had some good moments. Larry Goves and Mira Calix shared their acoustic/electronic trade-offs in the second half, with Sarah Nicholls and Olly Coates pitching in on piano and 'cello. The frankly awful presenting let it all down rather; there were some excellent moments, particularly in a big throbbing Calix/Coates piece, but somehow I wasn't feeling it in the ICA's arch atmosphere. Looking forward to Nonclassical's album launch of Tansy Davies' new album at Cargo to redress the balance...

You Are Wolf does the Vortex!

2011-02-11T01:52:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 3

Watching: Being Human, the British attempt at Buffy

Hair Day: leftover temporary red hints

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 7: that nasty tall building at Elephant and Castle which looks like a crap digital watch

My spring term of high-octane freelancery continues, amidst a whirlwind of meetings with tv producers and opera people, PR agencies for You Are Wolf, organising juice's week in America (a gig now sorted in New York before we go to SXSW in Austin!), violently knocking a carol into some sort of shape to be published, recording a track with Metamorphic at Hackney's finest studio The Premises (Madness rehearsing next door) and trying to squeeze in composition of my 20-minute piece for City Chorus. Somewhere in the next week I have to ferret out some time to dash off a quick juice piece too, to be in honour of Anna's daughter Molly and her best friend, the very funky yet eerily inanimate Monkey.

Last week I made my Vortex debut, with You Are Wolf supporting the cream of London's music-workshop-leader world who distil their folk-Reich genius into the band Firefly. The guys were launching their debut album, lightships, which you can download here. We had a lovely rehearsal stitching our two worlds together for two of my folk songs, and two of their originals to add to the mix. The gig itself was an unusually petrifying experience: something about the auspiciousness of the venue, the sell-out crowd, the lack of reverb and the pin-drop hush, and possibly the cup of tea I'd just had made me something of a caffeine-riddled jellyfish, unable to quell my quiveriness throughout my set. Hopefully I got away with it; I think my best moment was my try-out of Miss Otis Regrets, complete with clinking cutlery and ringing wine glass... There's a right nice review of the gig here!

Sexy Thermals

2011-01-31T02:45:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 1

Reading: J.G.Ballard's dystopian novella High-Rise

Hair Day: rock 'n' roll

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 6: masses of clouds and blue sky

Have had a quite bonkers week of workshops and gigs and things, beginning up at Anna-juicette's temporary new home in the coun'ryside east of York. Juice gave a seminar and a composers' workshop at York University, in the latter being as versatile as attempting bars of 26/16, reversing words and growling on inbreaths - yowza. I dashed down to London to whip the Wigmore Hall Young Producers into shape (their curated concert in April is finally starting to take shape) then bounced straight back up to Leeds for a marathon day getting College of Music students to write (at least one of) us a vocal piece in 6 hours. They were nothing if not eclectic, with Berio-ish solos about bananas, me bashing my chest like a gorilla, African chants, loops, belting opera versus croony blues, and much more. Having performed them at the end of the day, I then hot-footed it to Santiago's for Leeds' premier cutting-edge jazz night, The Spin Off, to do a lonnngg late set (flippin' jazzers!) with Metamorphic, after which I was so tired I practically curled up on stage and conked out.

Instead I had 3 hours' sleep and shivered on the train down to London at dawn under Metamorphic's Chris' big coat, and hooked up with juice again in Brighton for the final leg of Mikhail's 'exploded opera' project Xenon: recording a video. So it was back into my least-favourite-looking version of myself (the besuited, hair-slicked-down office worker; for Anna and Sarah, it's a cool androgynous look, for me it's more an ugly NERDBOY) for a few hours in front of a dollying camera. When 'it's a wrap!' was finally called, my hair was spiked up so quick I probably looked like I'd jammed my finger in the nearest socket. Hur hur.

Finally on Saturday, juice and recorder quintet Consortium 5 gave the world premiere of Luke Styles' new piece for us, A Stratagem For Light, a 12-movement beastie with some exhilarating moments, particularly when all five 'corder gals were on the sopraninos, giving it some stratospheric welly along with us shrieking blue murder, and later the sound of five bass and sub-bass recorders bubbling away like a load of brooding bitterns. The downside was that Grosvenor Church was so cold that the bottom half of my body went completely numb and I gained an involuntary tremor that hopefully came across as a slightly spasmodic vibrato. Time to find sexy thermals, I reckon...

In With The Po-Lice

2011-01-31T02:19:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 3

Reading: J.G.Ballard's dystopian novella High-Rise

Hair Day: have been fashioning a super quiff of late

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 6: The spire of St Giles' Church, Camberwell

For all the dissing of my newish hood in the edgy-coolness battle of South vs East, we have discovered a some fun new places recently. House is a community café on Camberwell Church Street selling doorstopper sandwiches and leaf teas, and though the paintings in the gallery downstairs were rather lite (slightly abstracted London skylines in oil are a bit South-Bank-touristsville) it’s a lovely space in which to make things happen! Round the corner on Denmark Hill is a more upmarket commercial gallery, GX, whose besuited, betanned salesman were a bit too try-hard, but hell, it’s always flattering to be treated as if you’re quite easily able to snap up a £3,000 mixed media (coral, oil and spun silver in the next exhibition) piece. Instead, we loped around the amazing basement space looking at the exclusive silkscreen prints and dreaming about buying a John Hoyland, whose noisy, splattery abstracts we both love.

On Saturday night we headed to grubbiest Deptford for the launch of new avant-garde music collective and netlabel squib-box. It was held at the Deptford Old Police Station, whose boys in blue have moved next door, leaving it to flower into an artspace, set of studios, and, er, cells. Having been only recently abandoned, and with cheap fittings and ceiling panels hanging askew, it felt like nothing less than being on the set of Life on Mars.

squib-box, replete with manifestos reclaiming 'radical thought in music' presented nothing less than a supremely eclectic affair: we first happened upon a sort of electro-chamber improv with a frisson of medical torture porn about it (a hooded Neil Luck abusing the guitarist with various tubes up his nose, etc); Fiona Bevan twinkle-voiced her way through a few acoustic numbers, an accordionist did some contemporary numbers, and there was some anguished shouting and loudspeaker stuff down the corridor , sort of Monty Python-meets-Dada-meets a terrifying futuro-dictatorship. In slightly baffling (but cheering!) style, the whole thing finished with the freak-out voodoo blues of Dave Migden and the Dirty Words, a budget Nick Cave with flecks of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. In between acts, Andy and I toured the cells (one with videos of people covering Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues, another covered in Claudia Molitor's discreet 'sticker scores'), imagining we'd just been done for carjacking or abusing the filth. We finished the night by feeling very old chatting to excitable youngsters in the Amersham Arms about spectacles and shaved-side-of-heads haircuts, but at least feeling smug that they'd never heard of the Deptford Old Police Station, thus ranking us as, ooo, at least ten points cooler. In your FACES, kids!

Extreme Assault Course in Creative Insanity

2011-01-20T03:10:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 4.5

Reading: Helen Castor 's non-fiction book on the women who 'ruled' England before Elizabeth I, She-Wolves

Hair Day: newly chopped by motorbike-riding Greek alpha male in Mayfair

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 5: The Shard, a proper beanstalk right there

2011 has begun as an Extreme Assault Course in Creative Insanity! First off I had to clamber over my choral commission for the ABCD 25th anniversary conference, knocking it out in a week. Having called it 'SHOUTsong' for ages, I struggled with trying to get right the balance of shouty/body percussion messiness with the expectations of the commissioners, but once I changed the title to 'The Earth Hath Voice' it all fell into place. Having next trampled a couple of ineffectual carols underfoot, I now look ahead to the spiky edges of a new juice piece (the clever way of making myself write music: put the title in a programme before you've written it!) and a looming choral commission I won for City Chorus (beating 107 others, oh yes!), which will be all about the noise of London, so I expect I'll be wafting flaneur-like about the city, taking in all clamour soon enough.

At the weekend I rugby-tackled (hhm, think I'll leave this theme now) some ABCD-ers over prosecco and gnocchi at their South East dinner, where I met impish 80-year-old composer Betty Roe (who I overheard saying to her daughter drily, 'I just come here to let people know I'm not dead') amongst others. It's the sort of occasion where I forget that I agonise over my emerging wrinkles every morning, as everyone thinks I'm ten years younger. We had to double-take when Andy, after explaining his profession, basically got an 'and is that what you want to do when you grow up?' in return. Ho ho.

I took Sarah-juicette to 'War Horse' for her birthday this week, to see our friend Eammon O'Dwyer do an excellent turn as the Songman, singing lovely folk songs in a strident, slightly giggle-making Devonshire accent. On the way back to South London we bumped into the male three-fifths of the Camberwell Composers' Collective, so joined them for hot ciders in The Hermit's Cave, Camberwell's artily scruffy pub. I'm missing Bethnal Green's edge-of-everything scenester-vibe, but it was at least gratifying to enjoy a villagey end-of-evening in SE5, albeit a quite high-art one including mentions of Berio's 'Folksongs' and unpronounceable Austrian composers I'd never heard of...

Anna has now become the Northern Contingent of juice, having moved to York, but that certainly doesn't mean the fun stops! We're up to our ears in preparation for our visit to Austin, Texas in March, hopefully stopping by New York for a gig first if we can get it together. Our album should come out on Nonclassical in May, so there's lots of mixing/remixing/artwork to be done there. I've also now started at Handel House properly (and have started another blog for it!!!), am preparing to run an experimental folk choir for half a term, am keeping Wigmore Hall's Young Producers going, and am looking forward to seeing both DOLLYman's EP and Metamorphic's album out there. Oh yeah, and listen again here to You Are Wolf, on Late Junction this week, at 1 hour 30 mins!

Phew. Methinks that my fingers are getting a wee bit messy in these here pies...

And the Award Goes To... ME

2010-12-01T02:32:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 0

Reading: John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbour

Hair Day: just like Tansy Davies', apparently...

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 5: a snow-bespeckled wonderland

Last night saw the British Composer Awards in the shadow of St. Paul's; I trudged through the slush in full-on outdoor walking gear, dashed into the loos of the Stationers' Hall to reappear, superhero-like, as Glam Composer Girl nominated in the Making Music category for community-commissioned composition. In illustrious company such as Thomas Ades, Howard Skempton, Rolf Hind, Michael Finnissy, Sally Beamish et al, I was one of the much-trumpeted newish composers with the double whammy of being both a) 33 or under (phew, just) and b) a GIRL. Bonus! What they didn't parp on about so much was the wonderful plethora of composers with different ethnic backgrounds, due to the company being almost exclusively WHITE. Hhm, rather a long and more important way to go there, then. Still, a fairly unknown quantity I was, except to the person in the cloakroom who exclaimed brightly to the back of my head 'hello Tansy!'. Ahem. It probably IS confusing that there are two female composers in their 30s with mad real short haircuts. I spent the next half an hour wondering if anyone who looked my way was thinking 'Ooo, is that Tansy Davies?' before realising it was someone far less important and turning back to their champagne. Hur hur.

As much as I'd just been excited about the free bubbles and general hobnobbery, it was hard not to harbour and mould, as the awards went on, a small nugget of hope that I could actually win my category. Particularly as Peter Broadbent, the conductor of the Joyful Company of Singers who had commissioned my piece Fall had introduced me to a judge as 'Kerry has won- I mean, been nominated for -' etc. We had a heartfelt speech about the value of the arts from Jude Kelly of the South Bank, before the likes of Raymond Yiu, Cheryl Frances-Hoad (getting two awards), Sasha Siem, Ryan Wigglesworth and others won their categories. I was crossing my fingers for James Redwood and Jack Ross, of Firefly fame, to win the Community and Education Award but alas, it wasn't to be. I managed to miss the most memorable speech of the night (James Hamilton - Contemporary Jazz Composition: 'I haven't had a poo for a week') by being in the Ladies' wondering if saying 'wicked and chris' in my speech would be too much.

Finally it was my turn: up with Ian Farrington and John McLeod, there was a brief spiel from the presenters for the night, Radio 3's Sarah Mohr-Pietsch and Andrew McGregor, during which my heart started hammering on my breastplate like a particularly fervent Jehovah's Witness. So extreme was its palpitations, that as my name was called out (YESYESYES!) I managed to get onto the stage before it burst through, John Hurt in Alien-style, and slathered bloodily onto the stage for the handshake and photo opp. Andy and I had joked about me using my spotlit moment to a) give a two-fingered, anarchistic speech about STICKING IT TO THE MAN b) speaking only in aforementioned The Wire quotes ('either you in the game, or you out, you feel? In-deed' etc) or just c) standing there for 5 minutes giving the Black Power salute, but of course in the end I just smiled sweetly, stumbled slightly over a word or two and made my thanks to Peter, Robin Robertson my poet, and 'my spectacularly lovely husband Andy'.

Post-ceremony was a whirlwind of congrats, photos and Radio 3 interview. I met the MPA/Making Music head honchos (who will be commissioning me to write a new choral piece next year off the back of this award) then tackled the assault course of people wanting to shake hands and give me their business cards as I fought my way to the bowl-food and wine. It was brilliant fun and is partway to my aged-14 dream of winning an Oscar for best score... hurrah!

Who You Gonna Call? JUICEBUSTERS!

2010-11-22T05:11:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: a highly-paid 1

Watching: Series 2 of Misfits

Hair Day: nobbut middling

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 4: Scruffy coal tits

Yesterday saw juice turn into the Charlie's Angels of the classical music circuit, with a last-minute call on the juicephone from Anthony Wilkinson of the Wimbledon Festival, desperate for us to replace Alfred Brendel at the eleventh hour. Yes, Alfred Brendel, the colossally-renowned pianist-turned-poet, who was supposed to be reading his surrealist poetry interspersed with his son Adrian on 'cello, until he lost his voice. Getting over the hilarious idea that three rather younger vocal ensemble lasses were to replace the uber-famous KBE-holder, we hot-footed it over to the very gloriously crumbling Southside House, a Georgian mansion fit to burst with costumes, period furniture and paintings, including a prized original of Charles II. Hot damn! Getting ready in the lovely little shabby/chic basement room, with the daughters of the house in waitress uniforms running out from the kitchen with canapes for the select guests milling about upstairs, all felt terribly Downton Abbey...

Following a lovely introduction from Anthony (calling us his 'secret weapon'), we really enjoyed our second half of Love Songs and juice faves, all met with a welcoming reception from the wine-warmed guests, none of whom seemed to want to riot at the fact that we weren't a 79 year-old Faber-published recitalist with several Grand Prixes to his name and honorary degrees from Oxford and Yale. In fact, some were overheard to say that they didn't feel that they were short-changed at all and that Anthony was a 'programming genius!' Hurrah! This is clearly the way to get ahead. Instead of (sometimes) having to scratch around for audiences given our (relatively) low profile, we kidnap Andrea Bocelli or Lang Lang, bundle him into the back of a car, make a crank call to the promoter saying he's caught man-flu and wait for the juice hotline to ring, then breeze in and perform wacky and technically-brilliant a cappella numbers to a gobsmacked audience who then buy up our debut CD in bulk. It's foolproof!

Extremely Wild Cats

2010-11-18T04:09:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 1

Reading: Bruce Cole's The Composer's Handbook

Hair Day: Drying

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 4: Battersea Power Station

juice had an excellent 2 days' final recording at Nonclassical Towers where, fuelled by chocolate, tea and prawn jalfrezi from Bethnal Green's friendliest curry house, we laid down nine more pieces to potentially go on our debut album. Whoopee! Our earlier sessions in the summer had been enacted in face-melting heat; this time, we really hit our stride, aided by Gabriel's subtle direction in the producer's hotseat. Now we just need a pithy title that gets across our genre-hopping, experimental vocal, text-exploring, gasping/hollering/crooning style in about three words. Ummmm....

I made my London Jazz Festival debut this week, singing with Metamorphic at a happily heaving Cafe Oto. Ace promoters The Local, helmed by drawlingly droll Northerner Howard Monk, had thrown three utterly diverse acts into the mix; following our prog-jazz shizzle was the delightful Kyrie Kristmanson, who delivered bravely bare songs with a smattering of trumpet, tambourine or guitar whilst appearing to sport the scalp of a yeti as a hat. After this gorgeous interlude, we were lastly pummelled into submission by the musical equivalent of an extreme BDSM session: hardcorenoiseimprov merchants Puma. An electric guitar/synths/drums trio from Norway, they were a study in crescendos, drawing us in fairly gently at first with brooding drones before we were unwittingly sucked into their snarling, mathy doomrock, with moments variously suggesting a bagpipe player on a murderous rampage, Kevin Bacon (the guitarist Stian was the spitting image) having a nervous breakdown, and some sort of witchy cave-ritual with extra gongs. It was like being dragged to the end of the world, led by the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, accompanied by the synth keyboardist's hell-raisingly joyful whoops. They left us glued to our chairs, our craniums throbbing and soggy, unable to fathom that we were still in Dalston and not in some eternal, slightly blissful underworld. Puma!

Robin Robertson and a Thousand Gigs

2010-11-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 3

Reading: Blake Morrison's South of the River

Hair Day: Snappy

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 3: Fireworks! Splendid death stars over to the north-east, lovely rainbowed cloudbursts way west and a few little plucky flares nearer home, south of the river; plus a lot more popping and crackling going on behind our flats...

It's been Big Gig Week here in Kerry Towers!

1) First off: another You Are Wolf trip to the always-supportive Monday Monday folk-ish night up at Camden's Green Note. I was playing with my favourite live band of the hour, the heart-wilting Firefly boys and girl, so managed to rope them in for a couple of trad. folk numbers, re-arranged in ad hoc style for the lot of us. I tried out a new, supremely dark (quel surprise) version of Tam Lyn which you can see here!

2) On Thursday juice ventured to the unknown wastelands of The West to the very glamorous and posh contemporary gallery Louise Blouin Foundation for their contemporary concert series. This was juice's first chance to air their long-gestating collaboration with our buddy Damien Harron. Damien is an amazingly theatrical and vocal percussionist; we've wanted to cosy up for ages, blurring our roles in bringing together the primal forces of singing and banging things. It wasn't a wholly successful concert - a stiff-shirted, largely bemused audience for one - though had some lovely moments (I loved rocking the 'Little Drummer Girl' look, and bowing the vibes) and it's at least a good starting point for future voice-percussion-offs.

3) On Saturday night juice glitzed up to the Frozen North to bring the Love Songs to York for their Late Music Concert Series. Though braindead from a hyper-busy two months, we gave it our gusto'd all, and had a lovely time in front of an audience of friendly Yorkie faces, including my Mum beaming away in the front row, whose proud motherly gaze I had to studiously ignore all concert for fear of corpsing. We brought rats, prayers, naughty childrens' deaths, and Sumerian insults (courtesy of our friend Stef Conner) to the wee chapel just near Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate.

4) Back to Friday: after doing my Dead Poets Society Bit For The Greater Good by kicking off a composition project in a rowdy secondary school near Bellingham, it was off to the Front Room of the QEH for a complicatedly-titled 'Friday Tonic Presents Ladyfest Ten: Girl Fawkes' Night' as part of Poetry International at the South Bank. I had no idea this would turn out to be my most populated You Are Wolf gig ever, singing to 200 or so folks. It would be the night that my throat became an arid dustbowl due to the evil aircon and my nerves kicked in, with my right leg turning into the pale milk jelly Mum used to dish up when she was feeling creative. After me was the totally ace Lulu and the Lampshades, a feisty set of girls and guy with a homemade rock 'n' folk feel; they pounded tin drums and sang harmonies with high-energy gumption, as well as belting through a barnstorming plastic-cup-percussion finale. Brilliant.

As a happy coincidence, my favourite poet Robin Robertson - whose poem/translation 'Fall' I had set for the Joyful Company of Singers (now up for that BASCA award, whoop whoop) was performing up in the gods at the Royal Festival Hall on Bonfire Night, so we went along, hoping to say hello afterwards. It was a much more brow-furrowed affair than the happy-go-lucky feminism of next door (where my favourite phrase of the show was, in promoting next week's Ladyfest anniversary celebrations, 'you could crochet a vagina!' Erk); I wasn't keen on Elisabeth Bletsoe's po-faced impenetrability, much more taken with Kathleen Jamie's prose on visiting the deserted isle of Rona, but most excited to finally see RR in the flesh, since we possess all of his books and I have been in a little correspondence with him. Onstage, he had a quite terrifying presence, all deliberately drawn-out burr and dramatic quiver, and seemed like some sort of Scottish Poetry Godfather who could probably casually slice you into bits with a deftly-enunciated dactyl if you so much as sniffed. His poems were - naturally - great: dark, sensual, wry and mired in the land. Afterwards, I went over, slightly nervously, to say hello, and Robin turned out to be bubbling over with charm and irreverent humour, immediately debunking the stuffy atmosphere and inviting Andy and I into the artists' area. Over free wine, he had us in fits over the demographic of his usual audience ('sitting there in their mobility scooters') and comparison of the approving sounds that poetry audiences to 'whimpering farmyard animals'. Whilst Andy and the terribly earnest intellectual chap who introduced the night gushed over American responses to W.G. Sebald, Robin cheerfully dismissed it all as 'bollocks!' to which Intellectual Chap backtracked slightly, stuttering 'yes, well, indeed there ARE cultural differences...' Tee hee. He told us of a new collaboration with Alasdair Roberts (whilst Andy tried to pimp me as their backing singer), and I rather got the impression that Robin was not keen on my contemporary choral setting of 'Fall'. Eek. It's probably just not his shizzle, but as he suggested that 'the Wolf thing' would be much better suited to his poetry, I think I'd better get onto it pretty sharpish before he whittles those dactyls...

A Million Love Songs (Well, Ten) Plus A Load Of Mooning

2010-10-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 5

Watching: Getting wiltingly-addicted to Downton Abbey

Hair Day: It's a Hair Day Off

Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 2: The BT Tower

juice are in the midst of a hairily-busy period; when we remember how much music we have to learn, we turn white and stuff our face with more cake that we shouldn't be eating to distract ourselves from the rising panic. Still, the Love Songs London premiere is out of the way, hurrah! Our Kings Place gig went pretty darned well I think - we performed them in bite-sized chunks (or as Sarah unwittingly put it, to the hearty guffaws of my friend Jim, a 'love sandwich'. Yummy.), interspersed with piano/film/sampling-stylings of Scratch the Surface featuring the likes of Leon 'Jagger' Michener, Sarah Nicholls and Claudia Molitor, who almost outdid us in the multi-coloured tights stakes. Many of the composers came along, including Errollyn Wallen, looking glamorous in leopardskin, Anna Meredith, Phillip Neil Martin and Mica 'Micachu' Levi. We're so proud of this project - it took a mammoth effort to get funding and was right down to the wire in getting them ready for performance. You'd think we'd want a bit of a rest following that; but no! A day later we returned to the bosom of Kings Place and their fabulously slick tech team to perform in Mikhail's 'Xenon' project. This included fun costumes: for the first half, we were Annie Lennox/Robert Palmer models in suits and red lippy (I had great difficulty in processing Mikhail's request for me to make my hair look 'less lovely and more androgynous' - my hair is the only thing that always looks FABULOUS!), and in the second we transformed into shiny-glam people 'excavated from the earth' - for me this meant looking like a big gold pudding in some hip-exaggerating (believe me, the last things that need exaggerating are my hips) gleaming trousers. But at least I got to spike my hair up, phew.

After that, and not forgetting another performance of 'Xenon' in Canterbury, juice enjoyed two days of trying out material with our friend, the brilliantly dynamic percussionist and composer Damien 'Father Damo' Harron down in the Cronx* for our concert in a weeks' time. I penned a very quick one which treats juice essentially as one voice, has Damien jabbering away and playing gongs, and which revealed a rather stuck-record approach to composing as it is about the moon. AGAIN. We're also performing pieces by John Cage, Tansy Davies, Georges Aperghis and many more. It should be great fun, though means we have about 10 more pieces to learn in a week. Followed by another premiere by Stef Connor two days later in York. We are clearly sado-musico-masochists.

In exciting other Kerry news, I enjoyed not one but TWO iPlayer features this week, first with my choral piece 'Fall' being broadcast on BBC Radio 3's The Choir, and You Are Wolf's 'Lucy Wan' being played by Fiona Talkington on Late Junction. Yay! AND the former piece has been nominated in the 'Making Music' category at the British Composer Awards, thanks to Joyful Company of Singers chief Peter Broadbent. I'm not expecting to win or anything but am SO looking forward to Andy and I rocking up to the Stationer's Hall at the end of November, quaffing lots of free champagne and hobnobbing with composers-a-plenty...

* Croydon. Ahem.

John Lewis is the new Cafe Oto

2010-10-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: If preparing 'Composing in a Baroque Style' worksheets counts, then 5
Watching: Catching up blissfully with Mad Men after 2.5 weeks without the internet.
Hair Day: Super-cool and short and after central London expenso-trim
Things I Can See From My Flat Window No. 1: The London Eye

Things are hotting up for juice's appearance in the gulp-inducingly large Hall One of King's Place on October 22nd. As part of the publicity and to make the most of our PRS for Music Foundation groups award money, we had great fun in a London Fields studio a few weeks ago doing a new juice photoshoot. Little did we expect to be rocking the wildly contrasting looks of a) monochrome balloon-stabbing sexpots in teetering heels and b) Tim Burton-meets-Miss-Havisham playing with a Heath Robinson-esque machine, complete with bustles, corsets, pained expressions through lack of lungspace, and our hair spiked up, electric-shock style and sprayed grey. But rock them, I hope, we did. Hur hur.

Elsewhere, it's been the usual whirlwind of musical fun coupled with the not-so-cool pleasures of furnishing our new Camberwell flat (John Lewis's rugs are a godsend, I tell you! Urgh). I've started doing some workshopping at Handel House Museum, giving workshops to straw-boater-wearing Year 6s and Midlands-based Yr 13s when not getting hopelessly lost in the building's knottily labrynthine staircases and corridors. I kickstarted a Young Producers project at Wigmore Hall with a bunch of marvellously sparky 6th formers, mentoring them through the curation of a gig in April (I'm considering headhunting a couple of them to be my free PAs, they were so full of creativity and energy). I had lunch with the sage and wonderfully gregarious choral composer and conductor Bob Chilcott at the ICA, and popped along to Camille's producer MaJiKer's little album launch in Shoreditch to do a teensy bit of backing vocals.

You Are Wolf has been busy too, performing at a lovely intimate gig with Fuzzy Lights in Cambridge, alongside the effervescently charming Fiona Bevan at Beatnik in Hoxton, and finally at 'nonclassical' in Shoreditch. Here I had a wonderful time doing new arrangements of a couple of YAW folk tunes with Stuart, Ian and Olly (on bass clarinet, accordion and viola) from CHROMA Ensemble, plus trying out the first four of Berio's 'Folk Songs', in my own miked style. Sadly, also having a wonderful time were the attendees of a private party downstairs, whose beats and basslines from all sorts of common denominator party classics bled into nonclassical's upstairs room. Thus recorder quintet Consortium 5, launching their album with some supremely delicate woody flutterings and breath-attacks, were punctuated by driving four-to-the-floors, and CHROMA gave the London premiere of Mark Bowden's trio to the DAISY-age accompaniment of De La Soul's '3 Is The Magic Number'. Nice!

Are You Wolf? Erm...

2010-09-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius (out of 10): 0. Perfect pitch and clever musicianship is little use in the world of mortgage lenders, solicitors and evil estate managers.
Amount of creative activity achieved today: Too busy attempting to buy houses, to little avail
Watching / Reading: Series 4 of 'Mad Men', hallelujah / A proof of 'The Report' by Jessica Francis Kane - a novel around the biggest single WW2 civilian disaster, in my old endz of Bethnal Green
Hair day: wilting

It took me to move out of Bethnal Green's sanctified environs (not by the Pope, you understand; merely beatified by the holy triumvariate of art, parks and undercuts) to discover a cool new hangout: 10 Gales, under the arches near the tube, which in true BG style, is a mix of boutique vintage shop, cafe, haircuttery, gallery and gig venue. The gig arch is very recent, so much so that it's still stinky, dank and a leetle drippy every time a train thunders overhead. But it feels like an underground room in Berlin with its hotchpotch chairs, little tea sets and £1 beers. I played a You Are Wolf gig there, which went very well, apart from my brain turning to plasticine and me introducing myself as 'I Am Wolf - no, You Are Wolf, no, that's who I am, You Are Wolf!'. Agh. It was nice to meet a mum and son there afterwards who were there as part of a local audience scheme, having been given free tickets to the night; they loved it and compared my voice to Alison Goldfrapp's. Nice! I also talked to a painter and did a significant double-take when the folk-singing best mate he kept referring to turned out to be Sheila Chandra. Sheila Chandra, one of my key experimental vocal influences along with Meredith Monk, Berio and Zap Mama, at least in the early days!

Andy and I were invited to the PRS Foundation New Music Award party in the Serpentine Pavilion last night, and had fun new-muso-spotting (and more importantly, beating Andy, in 5 mins flat, of black and red plastic chess, which is as good an achievement as winning to New Music Award in my book): Errollyn Wallen, Stephen Montague, Bishi, and a whole free-wine-quaffing host of journos, composers and players. Errollyn is a new acquaintance, having written one tenth of juice's monumental new commission, 'Laid Bare: 10 Love Songs', which was premiered at Catrin Finch's converted chapel venue in Wales for the Vale of Glamorgan last week. Considering that, as we also performed some little Tormis songs for the first time, we performed SEVENTEEN new pieces we'd never aired before, we did pretty well. The gin afterwards never tasted so good...

UK vs Sweden: Return Leg

2010-09-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 8
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2
Watching: the screen of my beautiful new MacBook Pro for signs of dust which I immediately banish
Hair day: Bit dishevelled, but rockin' a marvellous Brockley-based cut.

Back in April, a motley band of dirty-minded, witty, rowdy British musicians collided head-on with a more sedately super-cool Swedish crew for some crisp-air-and-cutglass-lake-inspired collaborations up in a tucked-away corner of Sweden. This weekend saw the intrepid Swedes take the novel form of FLYING (we were scuppered by the Icelandic volcano and had a valiant 2-day affair featuring a squadron of local trains and one glorious ferry on our way back from Scandinavia). Where their country served up wonderful salmon and dill-based meals, wooden chalets, oceans of stars and a forest floor bouncy with pine needles, we offered student accommodation rife with silverfish, primary school-style packed lunches and windowless cells to devise in courtesy of the Guildhall's basement in the Barbican. Whoops!

So the working environment was a little more difficult to waft around in this time, but this was no-one's fault but the budget's (let's assume it's all down the evil Con-Libs and curse their heads). However, at the other end of the scale, we did at least show them: 1) the Most Cutting-Edge New Music Night in London (Gabriel's nonclassical at the Horse and Groom, with Joby Burgess' Powerplant doing delightful things with Fanta bottles and plastic bags - YES! 2) the Best Music Venue In London, Cafe Oto (catching the London Improviser's Orchestra) 3) Shoho/Spitalfields nightlife with some bevvies at the Ten Bells 4) Dalston's finest Turkish kebab takeaway 5) London's Best Club Bar None, Passing Clouds which some of them made it to, no doubt for some Congolese beats, squishy sofas and heart-warming vibes.

This time we were put in a quartet for two days. I think my group found negotiating the ground between choreography, loops, structured improv and personality differences a struggle at times, but I like to think we got there in the end. We went back to Oto to present our work; it was a wonderful gig, with the process of collaboration between such diverse practices bringing out a far more richly engaging night than most new music gigs. My favourite moments were:

The first piano/theatre/electronics piece - my friend described it as four surgeons carrying out nasty little operations on the piano; I thought they looked like futuristic zoologists working in a weird, robotic insect jungle.
Tappity-tapping canes on the floor, miked up and choregraphed/composed.
Larry and Bill's delicately suspended trio plus soundscape: a proper piece.
Leon wearing my piano necklace and looking like Liberace. Ha ha.
Performing our piece. I loved incorporating movement into our improv, so thank you Marie. And sorry to Matthias for probably giving him a heart attack by doing unexpected things to the loop station in odd places...

Back to work. This week sees an all-new juice challenge: get ten new pieces (some so new they're still toasty from the printer) ready for their premiere on Friday at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival. AGH!

Edinburgh!

2010-08-13T02:02:00.001-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 1
Reading: 'The Buddha of Suburbia' by Hanif Kureishi
Hair Day: Have taken the monumentally dramatic decision to start styling my fringe over the other way

Following some strenuous walking up in them thar hills of North Yorkshire and East Riding (highlights being watching gannets, their wings dipped in ink, at Bempton Cliffs, hiking some of the Cleveland Way from Robin Hood's Bay to Whitby, and overcoming my fear of cows enough to stroke one on the nose. Well, it was behind a highly secure fence), I nipped up to a hair-destroyingly torrential Edinburgh Festival. I was there to catch WOLF, a show for which I'd created some a cappella vocals; it explores the mythology of wolves and has a full run in the Caves at Just the Tonic. It was lots of fun finally seeing the whole shebang, the actors rubbing up against audience members, panting, whimpering, singing, snarling, and being utterly dark and wolfish.

I then had Edinburgh to myself, so in between disaster movie levels of downpourage, I drifted around catching a show or two and daydreaming:

THE MAGNETS!
I decided to check out some a cappella action, to see if there really was a scene in England for all-singing, all-dancing, camp vocal nonsense. Playing to 200 delighted people every afternoon in August seems to suggest that The Magnets are doing it for the UK. Styling themselves self-deprecatingly as a 'man-band', hammed-up back aches and all, they did a few too many pop covers for my liking (would have loved to see some more instrumental mimicking, and some more diverse choices of songs), but they were very slick and their A to Z of film themes was pretty spectacular.

Dayream #1: I loiter around afterwards, impress the boys with my discussions of the delicacies of tuning 5ths and ensemble enunciation, tell them all about juice, and ingratiate myself as their occasional vocal arranger.
Reality #1: I loiter, the skies split open and unleash biblical amounts of flooding upon the land, I skuttle off to the relative safety of a leaky pub umbrella, as the Magnets dissolve into the deluge.

Forest Cafe!
I stumbled upon Edinburgh's coolest hangout, a perfect mix of E2's half-haircutted art-sillines, but shabbier and with less pretension. During the Festival, you can apparently borrow a 'human library book' - ie a person with specialist knowledge who can chat to you about their subject over a cuppa. Before I left for Scotchland, Andy had joked about me running off with a Scottish man such as my creative Calendonian heroes Alasdair Roberts and Robin Robertson. Lo and behold, as soon as I walked in I spotted in the corner a brooding and beardy Alasdair sitting on the corner of the stage.
Daydream #2: I immediately go up and say hello, buy him a drink, get chatting and through our happily shared musical/lyrical loves become his BACKING SINGER FOREVER. Hurrah!
Reality #2: Pretend not to see him, plot my approach whilst skulking over a chai tea in an antique china cup, watch him leave with his guitar and lady friend. Curses!

Josie Long!

I DID manage to say hello briefly to Josie, who is a friend of friends. Having never seen a live stand-up show, it was a marvellous surprise to thoroughly enjoy myself in the company of a wonderful girl who is basically like me but much more ballsy and famous: she spoke of living in Hackney surounded by politically-ineffectual hipsters (check. Well, until 2 weeks ago), being a feminist which is of course NORMAL (check, ohhh yes), and wanting to be adopted by Billy Bragg or Nye Bevan (I always wanted Bill Nighy or David Attenborough as an uncle) with the aid of a projector and some very nice illustrations. She has a disarming, honest, and proudly female approach which is ACE.

Daydream #3: We hang out after the show, Josie is in awe of my extreme coolnes, we become best buddies and start having tea and politics mornings in Dalston delis along with Ruth Barnes, Fiona Bevan and other East London-dwelling creative feminist-types.

Reality #3: I follow my stomach to excellent diner Mum's for delicious haggis and neeps concoction followed by more tea and book-reading at the Forest cafe, plus a night in a hostel with three extremely polite Tawianese folk, trying to ignore the Ozzie/Scots fighting and police vans outside, which I can only assume was a early hours cross-nation street theatre performance (16+, some violence and much bad language). Though it's funny, I can't seem to find any info about it in my brochure...

The Fitzrovia Radio Hour!

Though they've played at the Last Days of Decadence in Shoreditch many times, it took a trip to Edinburgh to finally catch this marvellous troupe, tapping into the zeitgeisty trends of cabaret and Blitz-era style but with a more sophisticated, Radio 4-ish sheen. They perform radio plays of the '40s and '50s, with you, as the radio audience, able to see their resourceful sound effects and join in with appropriate cheering and groaning. The ripping yarns and quickfire dialogue is all delivered with spunk and gusto, and made me (in best cut-glass accent) terribly, terribly heppy. Much recommended!

Having a Field Day

2010-08-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 6

Hours of creative activity achieved today: 2.5

Watching: 'Rev'

Hair day: Greasemonkey

Have had a recent frenzy of gigitude, travelling the length and breadth of our green, pleasant, dirty, rude etc land in the continued quest to rule over the nation with a mix of experimental jazz/folk/acappella nonsense. This has included performing to an audience aged 3-75 (mostly rather nearer the upper end...) with juice at the Harrogate Festival, where we had to get to grips with delivering a full-length concert starting at the very un-voice-friendly time of 11am, when all we really wanted to do was lounge in our jim-jams drinking tea in front of House Antique Makeover Dine With Me Challenge. Then I hared off to Liverpool to sing with Metamorphic at a lovely gallery on the same road as the Cavern Club, thus competing with various Lennon-busking charlatans. The day after that I took my loop station to the Victoria and Albert museum for their inaugural Summer Camp, which brought together an incongruous mix of European tourists learning to clog dance and West London fashionista snortheads drinking martinis out of special cardboard glasses. I sang to this eclectic bunch from the EFDSS stage in my first You Are Wolf outdoor gig, which included the twin rites-of-passage of singing to people stuffing their faces with barbecued pork and shielding my loop station from the rain.

Merrily, unlike last year's diluvian daymare, Field Day at the weekend enjoyed a spark or two of sunshine. We said our sad farewells to our dearly beloved East Endz by strolling to Victoria Park to enjoy some ear-pummelling from These New Puritans, some jangly quite-niceness from Beth Jeans Houghton, the perfect festival parpsters Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, who mixed bare chests, hip hop dancing and really big horns, the sunny clever-house lad Caribou and Parisian headliners Phoenix, whose lightshow made Cat and I super moth-happy. Sad farewells as Andy and I have moved out of The Coolest Place To Live On Earth TM*, to forge new cultural avenues on t'other side of the river, home of Florence Welch, art schools, composer's collectives, and, hopefully, retro flats with mega-views...

You Are Wolf has gone one step further now down the road to stardom with some play on BBC 6Music's Gideon Coe show and 6Music's equivalent in New York, the very ace WFUV. AND with the appearance of my debut video! Which is here, as made by KASH Creative!

*TM by ME

Devon, I'm in Devon, And My Hearts Beats So (From Walking) That I Can Hardly Speak*

2010-07-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24: 2

Reading: Hari Kunzru's 'My Revolutions' & a week's worth of emails

Hair day: unsure of motivation

Have had a lovely, get-away-from-valiant-flat-buying-attempts time in North Devon, in Tarka the Otter Land (we stayed in Henry Williamson's house, with his secret writing hut ensconced amongst the trees; everything was called Tarka Trail, Tarka Beer, Tarka Surfing, Tarka Roadworks, that sort of thing; amusingly the local pub's chalkboard out said: 'Probably the pub Henry Williamson drank in' and a Carlsberg sign).

Highlights were:

The wondrous Putsborough-Woolacombe Sands, so smooth and vast that at low tide you felt like John Cleese's knight forever running at the castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail upon taking courage and dashing seawards to swim in the wonderfully sudsy sea. Putsborough is the more sedate end, with the usual chintzy charms taking hold at Woolacombe, an impressive cornucopia of pop-up tents, sandcastles, chip vans, rounders matches, metal detector-wielders, parasailors and watersporters, all going strong even when the burly clouds lumbered over and did their worst. Best sights were the elderly surfers, all wobbly-pastry torsos and craggy faces, and parents ingeniously drawing spirally lines on the beach and then racing their offspring around them like kiddie-scaletrix.
Body-boarding! We did this at both ends of the above beach, looking probably double-takingly like Keanu Reeves and Lori Petty in Point Break and not at all like two waddling seals on My First Gnarly Wave. Most fun though sometimes a little terrifying trying to judge the crest and break of some looming waves, and often getting totally bitch-slapped.
In Ilfracombe, the Victorians were not ones to let a great hulking cliff stand in the way of their constitutional improvements, so drilled right through it to create some tunnels and a bathing pool from a naturally-formed lagoon. On a coldish, drizzly day, the little beach was a spookily lunar oasis of charcoal-dark shingle and massive rock-shards thunked into the surf, with a wonderfully icy empty pool, later swallowed back up by the tide. So in we went! The bravado was well worth it, a brain-bracingly chilly experience in which I tried to remember that the unknown things brushing my legs were seaweed fronds and not the tongues of terrifying seapool critters. Ha.
Getting enough freckles to make it look like the sun had just sneezed violently all over me.
The Best Cream Tea Ever at a National Trust cafe on Baggy Point, following a rain-lacquered walk, with warm scones as pleasurable as putting your face into a kitten: clotted cream good enough to lay bricks with, peppy jam and strawberries, little red explosions of joy.

* Sung to tune of Cheek to Cheek, obviously...

Summertime, And The Livin' Is Busy

2010-07-02T03:37:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7.5
Hours of creative activity achieved today: 2
Reading/Watching: The Crimson Petal and The White by Michel Faber; Andy Murray bow out
Hair Day: Post-swimming haystack

Cor, another whirlwind couple of months has corkscrewed frantically, taking in lots of gigs and educational work. I caused some politely middle-class frissons of controversy at the (deep breath) South Bank's Chorus Festival London Contemporary Church Musical Festival preview (phew) by saying I wasn't religious whilst talking about my sacred choral writing, followed by a disappointing lack of outrage on the Radio 3 message boards after my Choral Evensong-broadcast magnificat premiere.

juice have been continuing to take their 'squeal!-pop!-grunt!' mantra to the masses, first taking the sedately-swaying marshes of Aldeburgh by storm with their week of teaching Aldeburgh Young Musicians; these are the cleverest young musicians in Britain, the sort of kids who think nothing of creating a Beckett-esque avant-garde recorder/voice/theatre work setting their own haiku in five minutes flat, or combining contemporary dance, chair-scattering, monologues and tuba-deconstruction in a hommage to Pina Bausch. Ha ha. We also toured special needs schools in South Yorkshire for Live Music Now, finding the time to zoom around various country parks sampling regional cakes (my first Bakewell pudding! Mmm...) or walking around our sublimely remote farm accommodation, surrounded by hundreds of sheep, fields of madly bleating vuvuzelas. We've also gigged at the Whitstable Biennale (getting down there early to dip in the blissfully tepid sea, yelping at the single large fish that kept belly-flopping near Andy's head), at King's Place to a great audience for our silent film soundtrack, and a few others besides. THIS week, juice have finally started work recording their debut album on nonclassical, our resolve and ability to only glow like ladies should being severely tested by the obscene heat of the studio once the air con is turned off.

In jazz news, the DOLLYman massive had a day of recording their rockiest numbers in an extremely non-rock 'n' roll private school in leafy Surrey, so look out for an EP soon... Elsewhere, Metamorphic had a nice gig at Leytonstone's Luna Lounge (a retro venue below an all-you-can-eat curry joint, with a lunar landscape badly painted on the walls). I sadly missed the High Art Drama when the last band played: the drummer apparently abruptly stopped mid-stick to accuse remaining members of the Metamorphic crew of talking through his set, culminating in near fisticuffs between the jazzers! Brilliant! Had I been there, I would have, of course, kung-fu'ed wildly in defence of my homies. Hiii-YAH!

I've managed to see a gig or two, including a stimulating OperaShots night which you'll find on my other blog given the high football content. It's nice to meet some like-minded musos in the field: You Are Wolf played a sweet gig at Green Note in Camden this week, and got chatting to a lovely American experimental guitarist who'd dropped by to watch before flying off to Berlin. Here's his shizzle! And at last night's nonclassical gig at newish venue the Horse and Groom in Shoreditch (probably the only place that evening showing a Brooklyn-based banjo player doing electroglitch remixes of Madonna's Like A Prayer), I met the very charming Tansy Davies - I have always imagined steeling myself for a girl-composer-hair-battle upon our first encounter, but thankfully, though she does have a right good barnet, we look sufficiently different at the moment not to have to enter that ring. Hee hee.

Arty Parties

2010-05-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Hours of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 1

Listening: Joanna Newsom's new album 'Have One On Me'

Hair day: under a cloud

Two arty parties recently, at either end of the spectrum:

Whitechapel Art Gallery

I jumped at the guest list tickets from my new muso buddy Stuart, whose contemporary classical combo Chroma were appearing briefly. What I didn't realise was the high profile society Art-eratti vibe of the night, so Andy and I were slightly surprised to rock up just behind Tracy Emin in a big white coat posing for the paps. Hysterical! Inside was a legion of champagne flutes lined up to do a battle with the gulping gullets of the rich and posh and arty, an oyster bar, a DJ playing crappy Big House, many many small canapes, and lots of people dressed up to nines hiding behind their bling bags gossiping about everyone else. We spotted Jay Jopling, Gavin Turk, Peter York, Peter Blake, Jefferson Hack, Johnny Borrell, plus Bat for Lashes, Bishi and Jack Penate who were all performing with little attention from the yabbering, free cocktail-glugging hordes. Kate Moss was apparently there but had her own enclosure - what is she, the most famous goat in London? It was all a bit silly, but apart from Chroma's moment in the sun (messing around with a Beethoven loop), the most enjoyable moment was the Sotheby's-run auction for charity: minor offerings (most notably a Bridget Riley and some limited edition Gavin Turk/Sid Vicious prints) were snapped up double-quick for all sorts of silly money in an exhilaratingly rattled-out style. It was well we assumed a deadpan expression throughout: one unconscious facial tic later and we would have been going home £7,000 lighter with a crappy cat-cardboard-collage under one arm...

Mulberry House

Rather the same, except without the famous people, canapes and paparazzi, this was a rather more intimate affair chez Club Mulberry, ie our fabulous flat, for Andy and my April birthdays. Our wheeze this year was for people to contribute a piece of A4-sized art which we would then auction off. The concept took off brilliantly, with most people bringing offerings that encompassed the likes of photo montage, mixed media, graphic scores, glitter, beads and paint, some silly, some proper. Andy then auctioned them off, Sotheby's-fashion, and there was some unexpectedly heated, beer-fuelled bidding which resulted in about 20 pieces raising £137 for The National Autistic Society, which our mate Ed was running for in the next day's London Marathon (and which he did, having slept for only 2 hours, in 3 hours and 34 minutes. Hot dang!). Hurrah! The tabloids missed a treat!

Swede Dreams Are Made Of This

2010-04-19T03:50:00.001-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 168 hours: 84
Level of conviction in own genius out of 10: 7.9
Reading / Watching: About volcanoes / a lovely archive film about a round-the-world Zeppelin trip in 1929 on BBC4
Hair day: shockingly unreconstructed

Part 1

Spent 5 days away in a tucked-away corner of Sweden, on an island and nature reserve called Saltogarden, courtesy of the PRS New Music Incubator: a music camp where, rather than teenagers getting caught in brace-wearing clinches with spotty fellow flautists, 10 UK and 10 Swedish boundary-pushing artists descended to make noises together of the mostly brain-expanding variety. Each day we would emerge sleepily from our log cabins to be put in groups of four, given a rather broad focus, and sent off into the ether to thrash out our differences and come up with something to perform at the end of the day. Each day was utterly different, but what noticeably happened over the week was a shedding of the extraneous: gradually the technical trickery melted away leaving mostly bodies and found sounds. I, for example, having lugged over my loop station and melodica, ended up mostly playing a wooden skewer on paper, stamping on shells, getting a group of Norwegian girls in the woods to sing and presenting a 9-minute silent film of a bush. YES!

The week was a rich palate of pared-down sounds: pianos played with feathers, primal screams, mini-paper-live-theatre shows, music played in locked houses, 11-string guitars, Chinese flutes, bird calls on clarinet mouthpieces, wine glasses, plates and maps. I had a total epiphany on the third day after an hour-long sound walk which became so detailed I could hear dried thistles rubbing against each other; this was chased with 15 minutes of jumping with my committed groupmates Bill, Sareidha and Lisa and then the most minimal improv ever. My calves are still suffering for my art, ha ha.

It's hard to explain how great it was without sounding like a total artwankeroon, so here are some edited highlights of our High Art Big Brother Experience:

Seeing Gabriel, chief alt-classical London honcho, performing a sort of homoerotic-body-playing-contemporary-dance thing on Pascal
Hearing Sofia's incredible experimental vocal work in her presentation
Any of the times Leon got near the piano
Snickering with Pascal, Anna and Claudia behind a load of gaffer-taped boxes with unsuspecting audience on the other side
Underground harpsichord soundz
Being called loving pet names by the Hardest Man With The Softest Centre and the Biggest Biceps in Contemporary Music
Being told that a long and baffling music-theatre piece was actually all about me - WHAAA?
My two morning walks: one making sculptures on the beach, one clambering up to a granite rock, sitting very still amongst the loftier parts of pine trees and watching two Scandi-punk crested tits land very near me. I think I actually became a Disney classic at this point
Skimming stones with the boys

Part 2

Having heard rumblings of rumours involving volcanoes and planes, we were thrown in the deep end on Friday morning at a teensy station near our camp. The UK crew then embarked on an extreme European assault course of suburban trains, rail replacement buses, platform stairs, and finally a wondrous hulking Ferry of Paradise all over 48 hours, including 5 countries, 4 currencies, no sleep and a diet of Friski mints and Danish liquorice. I think we win gold. All I can remember from the fog of delirium and tannoy bleeps are:

The falafel in the Lebanese restaurant in Copenhagen which hosted us for about 4 hours during our wait before the Long Night of the Trains
Leon looking like Mick Jagger only MORE ravagedly cool, his shades masking the fact that he'd left his specs back at the camp and had to be led round like a little lamb from train to train half the time
Outrageously brilliant South Park episodes watched from Larry's shoulder. In fact just Larry's shoulder generally
Meeting folks on their way home -Dan the Anthropologist from Oxford, Barry the Architect from Dublin, William the Lost One, etc
Playing an 80s British pop band-name game and being triumphant at remembering T'Pau
36 hours into our trip still managing to have intelligent conversations about Percy Grainger's electronic experiments

I wonder what I will learn from this. Am desperately hoping my summer term will consist not of the usual slipping back into London noisiness and hectic life but instead finding a way to channel the meditative practices of the last week into my creative life. And a regime of Extreme Jumping, obviously...

Seal with a Kiss

2010-03-15T06:38:00.001-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 6.5
Amount of creative activity acheived in last 24 hours: 1
Watching: Match of the Day
Hair day: windswept, in the walker’s style

Man, what a term. Three educational projects over, a hilarious audition for Shlomo at the South Bank (where I aced the vocal side but possibly came a leetle unstuck in the high intensity street-dance-off, ha ha ha!), and a curation of Gobsmack at the Forge in Camden (sadly skeletal in audience size but rich and nourishing in its line-up of Ben Crawley, Woodpecker Wooliams and Kay Grant). I also had my official EP launch at my nearest and dearest artcafe, The Gallery, lent out to me for an evening of You Are Wolfishness and CD-selling, which was super-lovely. This fortnight I have to cram in a recording with Metamorphic, my birthday, a gig in Leeds, a week in Sweden on the PRSF music exchange course, teaching at Aldeburgh, and this week attempting to finish a commissioned magnificant, currently called my magnifiCAN’T…

Yorkshire Tripper
A swift Easter trip to Yorkshire aimed to flush out London’s toxins. We went to Spurn Point to walk its flaccidly remote length; one wind-emaciated side was scattered with erroneous flotsam such as blue rubber gloves, a freezer, and old war defences tumbling in great blocks off the dunes. The south side, marshy, wide and calm, had a rock that looked like a bloated, beached seal. We thought we’d investigate; Andy, kneeling over it, shouted to us that it was a dead seal; said corpse promptly rolled over, opened it eyes and gave us the fright of our lives. We stood over it for a while, wondering whether it was in trouble, whilst it huffed and snorted at us in an uncanny impression of my dad. As we turned to leave, it belly-flopped over the beach, in the wrong direction from the sea, but I’m sure he knew what he was doing. Here is a picture of Simon.

Flamborough Head dished up sheer limestone cliff-faces choked with pretty kittiwakes - whiny baby monitors on wings - and hundreds of guillemots, plump sheeny monochrome types, lined up on vertigo-inducing ledges, beaks to the cliff and shuffling into each other, bored stiff of the sea-view.

A wayward countryside walk from the pub at Wetwang (which means, in too-good-to-be-true style, ‘a slap in the face with a wet fish’. In Norse.) took in yellowhammers, three hares, one of which came, well, haring down the track and stopping dead 10 metres away when it spotted me, before doing its ‘Bewitched’ thang, transporting itself in seconds far, far away over the horizon. We also caught sight of a buzzard skating the air, a pair of aloof sparrowhawks, a large tawny something-or-other on hedgerow and a keen-eyed kestrel. We managed to skirt the rainclouds all day as they gently pulled their jellyfish trails of rain, or sneezed themselves like charcoal powder across the sharp-focus view.

You Are Wolf hits town and esteemed folkmen (and East London adventures)

2010-03-07T11:23:00.000-08:00

Hours of creative activity achieved today: 3
Level of conviction in own genius: 8.5
Reading/ Watching: 'Alias Grace' by Margaret Atwood / just finished cramming The Wire: Season 5 - epic genius!
Hair day: getting chopped tomorrow

There are a thousand black wolves in my study: my lupine solo debut EP is steaming hot off the press and I've tons of them, watchful and panting, waiting to be told which necks of their unsuspecting, music-promoting prey to go and chew on. Happily I've already got a stonking review from alt-folk ezine The Ear Horn, and airplay from Head Female Music Pimper Ruth Barnes on her great Resonance FM show, The Other Woman and on BBC 6 Music's Introducing with Tom Robinson, (on in the ungodly hours of tomorrow morning); this means I am now the proud owner of a famous 'I've been introduced by...' online badge on my myspace sites. Well, proud to any of the 800,000 (of which I am one) who listen to BBC 6Music; if Auntie Low-culture Vulture has her way, I'll have a very short-lived moment in the sun before I'm pecked to death by 'Strictly Come Dine With My Overweight Supernanny' or whatever it is they show these days between 'Mad Men' and 'University Challenge'.

One of the great figureheads of new folk music is Alasdair Roberts, who Andy and I caught for free at Song East's mini-tour of venues out our way. Huge fans of his unashamed musical sparseness and stonkingly erudite lyrics which make him a sort of Gerald Manley Hopkins/Will Self mutant (words like 'simulacra' and 'saturnine' are as common as muck - I mean, fertile sod of low luminance - to him in his excellent album Spoils) , it was a joy to catch him close-up, rammed into the downstairs bar of the Vortex. He was more at home in this intimate space than with his bands in Bush Hall and the Luminaire, laconically spinning the history of the barefaced traditional songs to us and threatening any Campbells, should there have been any, in the audience. His voice keens like a mournful baby banshee playing in the reeds, and he tossed out his venturesomely-tuned guitar licks like sweets. Tall and skinnier than Peter Crouch, he's a cross between fiercely-nationalistic ambassador for Scots culture, and a folk-singing crane.

I knew that practically being face-to-face already, I had no excuse not to say hello and give him a You Are Wolf album. But I do hate the impudent networking game sometimes, and felt so nervous at approaching a musical hero I had to be made to walk the plank by Andy. But I did it, spluttering goofily about what a fan I was, and managing to prove I was at last a legit musician by mentioning a loose Robin Robertson connection (he and the Scottish poet are friends, and I've set one of RR's poems for a big choral premiere), before basically beating him over the head with an EP and running away in terror. For shame!

We popped into the Dalston Jazz Bar for a quick one, but man, that place is OLD NEWS. It's now very much all about Passing Clouds, a possibly only semi-legal 2-floor venue in off Kingsland Road, which is now my new favourite place EVER. Cafe Oto, you're fired! A chilled and smiley place of hip-but-not-twats East Londoners, there to bounce to affable reggae and later, our best hipjazzhop buddies Lazy Habits. Elsewhere, there was a peachy upstairs room of ragged sofas and fantastically erractic swing/Jungle Book/Tom Waits soundtrack, and a corner where gossamery French girls were doing face paints. Obviously I resisted this fey girly pasttime and did not insist on looking like a woodland fairy. Ahem.

With Passing Clouds ticked off my London to-do list, I vowed that the New Empowering Church, a recently-opened venue a mere hoppity-skipety jump away from where I type, would be next. Happily, 18 hours later, I was offered a last-minute You Are Wolf support slot there for FOLKLAHOMA, a Magpie's Nest night, so will be playing there this Thursday, before headliners from the Waterson clan take over. That's the way to do it.

Beat There, Dung That

2010-02-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0
Reading: Just finished Sarah Waters' 'The Little Stranger', a slow-brewing ghostly postwar novel, not her best, but pretty good
Hair Day: Pleasing

2010 has been a whirlwind of musical activity so far, and May's downtime currently seems a long way off. It's all my own doing of course, heartily saying 'YES!' to three educational projects in one term and a couple of choral commissions, applying for exciting courses and jobs, juice-ing in York, Manchester, London and Crewe whilst also trying to get a large-scale commissioning project off the ground, DOLLYman-ing with the gorgeous artfolksters Firefly, and seeing the arrival of my ONE THOUSAND (well, it was cheaper) You Are Wolf EPs. Coming up is much, much more, but I still find time to have a creative breather and catch someone else's work occasionally...

Concerto for Beatboxer
Anyone who was any(late twenty/thirty-something arty so and so)one was at the QEH last night for the classical/hip hop mash-up that was Anna Meredith's 'Concerto for Beatboxer and Orchestra'. The first half presented all the disparate elements of Anna's piece: Shlomo doing his usual Tigger-in-a-sweetshop solo routine; 'cellist Olly Coates playing a new piece with electronics that fizzed over with too many ideas; the Vocal Orchestra doing a cute, crowd-pleasing set; and Anna herself presenting a very hilarious mix of pipe-and-drum-inspired messy electronica complete with live bagpipe player, including a 'Flower of Scotland' bagpipe break - a sort of musical 'Fuck you, I'm SCOTTISH!'. That had given us plenty to chew on, and we didn't really need the chamber orchestra's slightly polite version of Terry Riley's 'In C' to take us into the break.

Anna's piece itself, created very much in collaboration Shlomo and the performers via plenty of workshops (I'd seen the kernels of the collaboration at Cafe Oto in September), was generally a great success. Set up a little like a Berio piece, with the Vocal Orchestra amongst the players, it was packed with lovely ideas, from the interplay between two drum kits and the beatboxers to the instrumentalists doing a spot of sweetly earnest acoustic beatboxing, and from the dramatic punctuating gestures at the beginning to the tasty 'Stimmung'-like chords. Possibly due to the sound engineering, it didn't seem much like a concerto; instead, to me, it seemed a marvellously deft integration of beatboxing and chamber orchestra, and was the most interesting form of beatboxing I'd ever heard: Shlo was challenged into exploring the textural potential of his sounds, rather than boxing himself into bombastic 4/4 beats as usual. It was rather short and sweet, and everyone was surprised to find themselves suddenly in a Q&A with a slightly flustered Tom Service so soon, which felt a bit pre-emptively self-congratulatory. Still, it was great to see a spot of the notation, whilst it was hardly revolutionary to the experimental-vocal-expert eyes of the juicettes. In a bizarre bit of programming, the sell-out crowd, all wound down after the Q&A, were then utterly baffled to find themselves listening to the piece ALL OVER AGAIN. I'm reliably informed by my estimable composer buddy Rob that this was de rigeur in the early 20th century, and it was worthwhile picking out more detail second time around, but I have never been so flummoxed. My pals and I mulled it over in the fabulous Skylon bar drinking pricey apple and vanilla bellinis and feeling right cultural and stylish, innit.

Chris Ofili
Also enjoyed punchy Brit Art at it finest at Tate Britain's super-middleweight exhibition. Raising issues and eyebrows (I most enjoyed the little old lady who doddered slowly up to a large painting of the Virgin Mary, her nose practically to the countless collaged images of ladies' proffered anuses - it just took her a minute for everything to jostle into focus before she was off quicker than her little legs could carry her), the large paintings, squatting on hardened balls of Ofili's tradmark elephant dung, smacked of race, women, religion, earth, and seemed staunchly British. My favourites were the less typical Ofilis - the pencil drawings using tiny multiple Afro heads to look like beads, the nude watercolours which represented REAL women, and the recent witching-hour-dark blue paintings, where the images brooded amongst bruised colours of blue, black and purple. Marvellous stuff.

London rule!

2010-01-10T13:51:00.000-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Amount of creative activity achieved today: Tis the day of rest
Watching: Series 2 of Being Human on BBC3 - the grown-up British Buffy!
Hair Day: Have fashioned cool twisty fringe hair today

Ah, London. Celebrated as the disarmingly cosmopolitan capital of Europe, if not the world, in BBC2's smashing History of Now: The Story of the Noughties last week, a haven for all nationalities where no-one gets done in because of their race, it was good to be back in the metropolis. As brain-bracing as the Highlands (see next blog down) were, their redemptive power of snow, whistle-clean air, panoply of outdoor wildlife theatre and steaming great big mountains can only last so long. You can't pick up the first fabulous dresses of the year (one so damn cool Andy declared me a style icon of considerable dimensions, and he wasn't talking about my thighs) there, or try out the latest funky Thai restaurant for diaphanous prawns, noisily fresh asparagus and pallid oyster sauce, or see the World's Most Depressing Movie(TM). You also can't go swimming next door to your house (lochs don't count), trying out your latest super-cool gadget, before catching the last day of an American conceptualist and photo-composer retrospective and still getting home in 20 minutes. No offence, golden eagles, seals and other hardy locals, but we'll see you in a couple of years; there's too much goddamn fun to be had down here...

Scotchland!

2010-01-06T09:04:00.000-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0.5
Reading: Susanna Clarke's 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell', marvellous winter hol reading.
Hair Day: Snowy.

I managed to pull out the stops to finish my latest choral commission, which I'm most pleased with, just before Christmas (premiere: Cadogan Hall, March!) so as to fully enjoy our annual winter break away from all worries of work, email, hell even phone as I left it at me ma's. Andy and I enjoyed a week away in the barren wastes of the West Highlands, and most splendid it was too. Highlights were:

1) The drive through, both there and back, the imposing Black Mount, Rannoch Moor and Glen Coe, an A-road through a world dreamt white. It was utterly surreal speeding in a warm car through this gorgeously forbidding landscape, mountains peeled straight from Ed Rushca's paintings, or an Ansel Adams wet dream. These hulking natural monoliths were like giant snowy owl gods for whom an inbreath lasts a century, opening one slash-black eye as we, tinny little nano-horsefly, zipped by meekly, and closing them again.

2) Loch Sunart's oak forests, under which we enjoyed satisfyingly crunchy walks through snow and leaves, whilst these thin, leperous old trees wrung their hands above us at the broad winter sky.

3) Wildlife Watch! We clocked THREE golden eagles, some snipe, 4 grey seals, a great spotted woodpecker, loads of big grey shaggy herons, some wild deer, and a couple of other birds of prey. We didn't see a single one of these in our icy-toed wait at the Garbh Eilean hide, snuck into the rock for the sole purpose of catching a few otters or the famed sea eagle, but the chill, silent view of the unfettered loch was so hypnotic it didn't really matter. Better than a meditation class full of 'ommm'-ing East Londoners, I can tell you.

4) Castle Tioram (Cheer-am), stunning ruin which is blocked off by the tide of Loch Moidart twice a day, and film scout's choice of many of Scottish historical epic. The Silver Walk, which starts there, was a delight of rock and fauna and mad icicles, always with a stonking view of calm loch, burly mountain and occasional seal breaking the silvery surface.

5) The sunset at Resipol over Loch Sunart as the sun bowed out between a lazy 'V' of two mountains, spilling amber, peach and lilac onto the loch, and paintbrush-flicking dusty pink streaks, lengthening by the second, onto the sky. The only sounds were the occasional disgruntled cry and churlish retort from gulls, while a lone seal slinked through the rainbowing water. A visually delicious, transfixing moment.

You ARE Wolf - ACTION!

2009-12-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 9
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 6
Reading: Shiny magazines full of fashion and art like a big GIRL
Hair day: Brilliant - Barry has updated my purple/blonde fringe which I am currently fashioning into a sort of hairsprayed-to-the-max ski-slope. YES!

I had my first taste of music video stardom yesterday in my You Are Wolf guise, at a lovely studio in London Fields, with mate Phil (who runs Kash Creative) directing. We chose 'all things are quite silent' from my very very impending EP, as folk songs don't normally get a high-glam animation makeover. I had great fun being prodded and tweaked and sewed-in by stylist Charlotte and make-up artist Callie, doing my best to get over having my facial blemishes and super-wobbliest bits scrutinised closely by two beautiful girls. Charlotte popped me into a long grey clingy dress that made my cleavage look, well, extremely cleavage-y, , then sewed a load of peacock feathers to one shoulder strap, whilst Callie made my cheeks all autumn-leaf-like and plopped a huge brown feathery fake eyelash on one eye. I, being a fake eyelash virgin, was quite proud of being able to keep my composure what with feeling like a huge house was stapled to my lid. My second look was sort of mad-sea-mermaid-clown, with shiny dress and big neck ruff, which Charlotte added to with LED lights for extra hilarity, plus greeny sequins glued to one side of my face. Ha ha! Oh yes, and as well as being all dressed up for hours, I did actually get filmed singing to camera a lot, all the while hoping I conveyed a sense of glowery, ethereal moodiness and not psychopathic misery, whilst Charlotte was on Tummy Watch, keen-eyed on my silhouette which veered from slimmish (hoisted in, holding my breath for dear life) to 3 months pregnant (my normal look. And I'm not pregnant). It was all shot on a green screen, as most of the vid will be lovely animation/illustration; more news to come!

In other news, juice have done about a thousand gigs encompassing Belfast, Soho, Kingston (the London one) and more, all accompanied by the happy tap-tap of Scrabble letter on travel Scrabble board, which is transpiring to be our new, madly rock 'n' roll addiction. I had a nice wee You Are Wolf slot at Folk and Roots magazine's newish club night, Monday Monday, at the Wilmington Arms in Clerkenwell, on, er, Monday. You can watch two vids (and check out the hair) here and here. Enjoy!

Cultcha Vultcha

2009-11-23T05:01:00.001-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: hhm, 0.

Reading: Graham Swift's rather lightweight novella' Saturday'

Hair day: Am addicted to plaiting the longest bits of my fringe and then releasing for 80's crimped look.

It's been a Superweek in terms of cultural shenanigans: I first took Andy to a Words on Monday event at King's Place, where we were treated to a brain-massage of verbosity from the esteemed panel of Simon Schama, Tony Benn, Polly Toynbee and Geoffrey Robinson QC, discoursing on the topic of 'The Art of Rhetoric'. It didn't really matter what they were saying in the end: the joy was in hearing of each of them launch forth in a probably more impressive manner than many of the politicians they were dissecting. Simon Schama was easily the most showy, his liquidy presenter's voice rolling loquaciously over such figures as FDR, Lincoln and Obama. Polly Toynbee was more measured, Geoffrey Robinson could have quite easily been lounging in an old leather armchair, swilling scotch in a thick-bottomed glass, such was his confidently relaxed, richly posh tones (well, he is used to the pressure of prosecuting war criminals) but Tony Benn knocked spots off them, impressive simply by his accumulated experience. The others weren't able to give anecdotes about what Winston said in 1942, or indeed give their initial 15-minute speech without notes, as he did, all with a voice that sounds like he's permanently sucking on a Werther's Original. A real pleasure.

juice had a trip to see jazz/soul legend Cleveland Watkiss celebrate his 50th birthday at the QEH. It was a shame not to see of his solo loop station work, but we still saw a taste of his more exploratory side, the best being a trio with Talvin Singh and kora player Tunde Jegede. Yesterday I caught another of my 'Beginning with Blobs' shows (which I did the 45-min soundtrack for), which has come a long way since the first performance. Andy and I then made our annual trip to the BBC Wildlife Photography exhibition, always an utter delight, both for marvelling at the natural world and for technical and aesthetic artistry. Highlights included a teenager's shot of a deer caught in a half-lit woodland canopy, and flocks of starlings made as abstract as charcoal flicks in the black and white category. The under-10s category is always unbelieveable, though their precociousness shines through in their blurbs which say things like: 'I took this unusual photo of a silverback gorilla eating an ostrich whilst on holiday in Uganda with my father; I was just trying to capture the beauty of the strangler fig trees when the gorilla just appeared from nowhere. I was in grave danger but the gorilla realised I was an unthreatening posh kid and carried on as normal'. I think I actually agreed with the winner this year: an incredible image of a Spanish wolf jumping over a gate, a startlingly unusual impression of a fairytale animal who looks like he's just gobbled Red Riding Hood.

Finally we caught the end of the London Phil's weekend celebration of Russian composer Alfred Schnittke (the first time I heard his name was when I was a teenager at a composition course; my tutor said my work reminded him of Schnittke. At least I think that's what he said. Arf) at the QEH. He's described in Time Out this week as 'polystylistic' which is as near as dammit: the composer piles in all sorts of musical references (blues, Viennese waltzes, hymns) to a point of near-vulgarity. Still, vulgar or no, it was mostly pretty enjoyable, barring the first piece for solo viola and string orchestra, dull as dishwater. The strings were from the RCM, though all looked about 12; they remained for the rest of the first half, both for the Piano Concerto and Concerto Grosso 1. The concerto featured Boris Petrushansky, surely the Russian Jerry Lee Lewis of the 20th-century classical world, coming right off his stool on a couple of ferocious occasions. The concerto grosso starred a lovely bit of clunky prepared piano, and two violinists who were supposed to fizz with romantic tension; however, the leads lacked the necessary Brangelina vibe, though they did belt out some niftily mental Baroque flourishes. The Yellow Sound was a more convincing affair, fitting nicely alongside music-theatre works by Berio with a muttering cast of vocalists, unusual chamber ensemble and drifting soprano soloist messing about with lights. Though the Schnittke vulgarity couldn't hold be restrained, and the whole thing ended with a scream and rather doom-laden schlocky organ chords, like the finale to a Hammer Horror film. Love it!

Fire Works!

2009-11-09T03:07:00.000-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7.5

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0

Watching: The marvellous, if hilariously over-animated, Andrew Marr's 'The Making of Modern Britain'

Hair Day: fashioning new occasional trademark hairstyle of two little plaits from fringe going over like a hairband. YES!

juice did possibly their most intimate gig ever in Thursday, gracing the extremely bijou preserved drawing room of the Handel House Museum. Trust me, if you've craved the experience of real juice-spit in your eye and the deafening screech of our herding calls actually making your inner ear spin like a top in a hurricane, you missed a treat! But it was a very evocative experience, singing in the ultra-crisp acoustic of the tiny wood-panelled chamber, though hopefully the setting didn't confuse any juice virgins in the audience into thinking we were going to trill pretty Baroque shingalings - our slightly more contemporary fare, guttural gruntings et al, are a leetle more 21st-century than early 18th...

Had a rather lovely weekend of Londonness, first of all at the Kingdom of The Fireworks, the Tower Hamlets Borough Council's annual all-out extravaganza, which they must surely blow most of their budget on ('Recycling? Fresh road markings? Pah, we'll just send a load of mega-rockets into the air!'). But it does draw the hugest and most beautifully mixed crowd of multi-ethnic families and East London Coolios to Victoria Park, and every year the show is sensational. They seem to have forgone the attempts at a pre-fireworks narrative (though their near life-size recreation of a burning Houses of Parliament, the crowd baying for more as it fell apart, lives long in the memory) now, and this year's show, entitled 'Great Balls of Fire' simply combined huge flaming jets which licked the sky with a preposterously over-the-top display, all set to '50s and '60s conflagration-themed tunes. Kudos for the heart-shaped bursts and the perfectly-timed halos to Johnny Cash's 'Ring of Fire'! The whole neck-craning affair is like a VJ-ed mash-up of the end-of-2001: A Space Odyssey and the Death Star explosion, with a load of kids waving triumphant plastic lightsabres for good measure. Fabulous.

On Sunday, Andy and I walked the grey, drizzly North Bank of the Thames before visiting the Ed Rushca exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. This retrospective of a 50-year career merging graphic design, American typography and abstract/not-so-abstract painting was a robust affair, fascinating in its exploration of words as images. I grappled with the ideas of words having no size, of trying (and failing) to extrapolate a word from its meaning, of how the typography is as inherently iconic as the meaning of the word it's wearing. His later work was generally not so engaging, apart from strange, ghostly images of wolves and Midwest churches done only in black with spraycans. Then to the Curzon to see Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, finally, which I've been desperate to see after catching her first feature, Red Road, in all its searingly thrilling glory. Her second film was no less blazing, a tenderly raw story of estate teen life laid bare, with little flares of beauty in the grime, and featuring a quite unsettlingly sexy turn from Michael Fassbender. Arnold is a massively talented writer-director, fiercely real and -I think - inherently female, and I can't wait to see what she does next. We finished off by stuffing our bellies full of heart-palpitatingly salty, oily pasta at our fave Italian, Ciao Bella in Bloomsbury, whilst the pianist played a jazz version of The Godfather theme just in case we thought were at a Japanese joint. Tee hee.

Barn-storming

2009-11-04T04:58:00.001-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3

Watching: The most disturbing tongue in the world, courtesy of the geckos on BBC1's 'Life'

Hair Day: flyweight

Bookending a quite horrific gum infection (pain level from 0-10: THREE THOUSAND, plus added beating of breast and mangled wailing through a jaw that could only open 2 centimetres) was a lovely gig and some great work. Last midweek we went to the Efterklang/Britten Sinfonia-Jaga Jazzist show at the Barbican, for some hardcore Scandi-alt-rock action. Jaga Jazzist are a slightly flexible Norwegian collective who peddle avant-math chamber-rock; they're a dash of Belle Orchestre and a pinch of Bang on a Can, with flashes of zingy electronica. Almost all multi-instrumentalists, (you don't see many girls doubling up on flute, glock, voice and tuba), the 11 musicians went at it rather full-pelt the whole time, with not enough spaciousness and rather too much reverb for me, but it was nice to hear space disco with added bass clarinet. Efterklang, recreating their last album Performing Parades in collaboration with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra here in London with Britten Sinfonia, was an unbounded joy from beginning to end. Their brand of gently euphoric ensemble vocals, unusual chamber ensemble (often including things like clogs pattering percussively on the stage and little organ) and intricate orchestration made for a heart-melting experience. With the added effect of their innocently-bright pendant-adorned costumes, it was like being led into heaven by a load of blissfully happy Danish scout leaders.

With gum still throbbing, the juicettes drove to deepest darkest Kent for a couple of days of workshopping with our bestest artvocal chum, Mikhail, and assorted other lovely vocalists E.Laine, Ben, Conal and Amy. Mikhail is devising his 'exploded opera', Xenon: a fabulously imaginative idea in which the elements of his opera (video, installation, vocal performance, etc) are separated and performed at various East Kent venues and festivals next year. Mikhail had hired the most amazing barn for us to live and work in, a sort of 'James Bond Does Countryside' or, as Ben put it, like being on MTV Cribs. So we feasted well, watched the sheep hanging around like gum-chewing teenagers on street corners, and worked on various vocal/theatrical tasks Mikhail set us, before coming together on the last day with an artist and performer who will be reciting the Declaration of Human Rights. Great to have the time to explore new ways to improvise within juice too: it's rather luxurious to be paid to a) send a note round juice trying to make it sound like one person and b) tickle Anna whilst she's trying to sing 'Ave Maria'...ha.

Awe-tumn in London

2009-10-26T07:30:00.001-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Amount of creative activity achieved today: taking a break

Reading/Watching: Time Out, delivered 4 days late via Royal Mail to my door / 'The Thick of It' - brutal, coruscatingly witty, with unbelievably obscure, only-for-the-literary-highbrow-and-not-many-of-them-neither reference to my fave poet Robin Robertson amongst the multi-swearing.

Hair Day: awight. Self-made fringe bearing up decently.

On Thursday I tagged along to a discussion on Ethics put on by Andy at Foyle's, though mostly for the prospect of free food rather than the debate (though remarkably, I kept up); after all, I don't often accompany clever writers/philosophers (eminent scholar on contemporary Muslim Britain and journalist Zia Sardar and popular philosopher/writer Julian Baggini) to dinner at their members' clubs in Soho. Funny, I thought I would be all up for swanning about, wallowing in the exclusivity of it all, but I hated just that: it seems utterly un-egalitarian to elbow out the hoi polloi just so can eat your steamed venison pudding next to Ken Stott. Though the pudding was rather moreish.

Felt much more on top of things over the weekend, going itinerary-crazy for Mother's Birthday Trip To London. Ma's incredulity at the ways of the Big Smoke never ceased to divert; Mum on the tube: 'they're all plugged into something! No-one talks to each other!'; Mum at Broadway Market: 'everyone is so stylish! It's like being on the continent!'). We managed to take in Turner and the Masters at Tate Britain (so-so; rather too old-school for moi) and then hop on the Tate-a-Tate boat (sightly regretting the ample scone just scoffed) for Miroslaw Balka's big black box, which is good for about two seconds and then is a bit silly; not dark, not scary, and the only thoughts provoked were how to trick people into colliding with the end wall. In the evening we sat amongst a hundred crisp-crunching, texting, guffawing teenagers at the Novello Theatre to see the revival of Stephen Daldry's lauded version of An Inspector Calls. Rather over-shouty, I thought, and very heavy-handed use of music, including a nicked bit from Bernard Herrmann. Over the rest of the weekend we visited markets Broadway and Columbia Road Flower (the former for Ultimate Art Toff-Spotting Championship, the latter for stereotypical East End flaaaar-sellin' comedy vaudeville), went to the British Museum (hotly busy, favourite thing was the 3rd/4th-century BC Burmese monster made of lacquer wood, all antlers and long tongue like a tie), and had a great walk down the Parkland Walk, a disused railway line which has reverted back to nature between Highgate and Finsbury Park. Add to that a smashing meal at our local Cilician restaurant, Solche, MOTD, and a spot of DVD-watching (The Reader, bit lacklustre) and you've got a zinger of a weekend. As my main man down at the DVD store said after chatting to him about Driffield, where Mum lives,:'you wouldn't imagine moving away somewhere quiet, would you?'. Hellll, NO, sir!!!

International Woman Of Mystery (well, Experimental A Cappella Music)

2009-10-22T06:02:00.001-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: NONE, hurrah!

Reading / Watching: 'The Women's History of the World' by Rosalind Miles, to continue my feminist reading. I am transforming into a empowered Female Fighter of Misogynist Crime by the day / Catching up on 'Generation Kill'.

Hair Day: Just re-done. As usual I told Barry it was a wonderful haircut then promptly raced home and made my own extra snips to adjust. Thus I am now sporting a slightly wonky purple fringe. Ahem.

Have just reached the other side, spitting sand and blood, of a Saharan whirlwind of creative activity. Man, it has been quite ludicrously busy. In the last few weeks I have:

a) Completed the soundtrack for Kazzum theatre company's 'Beginning With Blobs', including tackling the Herculean challenge of mixing 45 minutes of music in about FIVE DAYS. When I've never mixed anything before. The show is now tickling small childrens' ribs and brains around the country.

b) Made my French debut with juice, with three different gigs in three days in the Champagne region, where it would have been rude not to break my abstinence from alcohol by quaffing fine, gossamer-light bubbly after every performance with the locals. The concerts were rather marred by me being ill of the cold/throat variety and Anna being ill of the MADFLUPOSSIBLYSWINE variety, so much so she was shivering under blankets with cold flannels on her forehead mere seconds before going onstage. We were also rather too experimental for some in our first gig, but we are sticking fast to our 'anarchic Brits' label given by 'Sir' Bob Chilcott. I threw my first ever diva hissy-fit upon seeing our last venue, a boat, moving backwards whilst we read music. I can't a) travel backwards or b) read whilst travelling without feeling vomitous, so this was not ideal. In the end it turned out possibly to be our nicest gig, at least because I had developed enough confidence to ad-lib en francais.

c) also gigged with juice in Manchester and Brighton, and spent a week doing exhaustive/exhausting workshops with schools for children with disabilities for Live Music Now in Newcastle.The highlight was a very small girl interrupting our song to tell us proudly she had Tinchy Stryder on her iPod. Rock on. We also did a training sesh for Sing Up,which I meant I got to see underneath the shiny fat-rolls of the Sage Gateshead.

d) had a lovely You Are Wolf gig at Lemon Monkey (hhm, images of gnashing canines and ape-carnage abound), probably my best yet, helped largely by the crowd of friendly faces brought along by birthday gal and chief You Are Wolf photographer Dannie.

e) Had meetings for new projects like the Music Orbit team (another Gobsmack experimental night to be curated by moi in March), Music for Youth where I've been invited to be a mentor, plus the prospect of ticking other Music Education boxes like Creative Partnerships looking likely too. One day I WILL be Howard Goodall.

I have found time to squeeze in some nice arty social things too, namely: seeing Conrad Shawcross' installation 'Chord' under Kingsway in the old tram-tunnel (a joy for Londonist nerdlings like Andy and I - we were much more excited by the peeling layers of 1930s posters than the work itself); taking tea with new buddy MaJiKer, who is writing juice a piece, at the very snobby top of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, before being ferociously inspired into further Feminist Acts and Statements by their re-hanging of work solely by females in the collection, 'elles@Pompidou'. Grrrrrrrrr. Oh, and being an international woman of mystery, I intercepted my husband who was returning from Frankfurt for a gevaarlijke liaison in Antwerpen. Well, alright, it was less that than tripping about the mostly cobbled streets, looking at Rubens' buff Jesus' in the cathedral (they all looked like they'd been doing too many press-ups in Gijsbert's Gay Gym), using our in-built Cool Radar to source the three coolest bars in town, avoiding the hoardes of very clean scouts traipsing around, and liberally lathering ourselves with Warme Chocolade. Yum.

And NOW! Well, plenty more things, but at least for a few days, I can do them whilst lounging under the duvet watching 'True Blood' on Channel 4OD and scoffing at how much of a poor, haemophiliac relation it is to the supreme 'Buffy'...

So-So-Shlo-mo

2009-09-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 8

Hours of creative activity achieved today: 4, in the realm of singing

Reading: Juggling 'Corvus' for erudite comfort reading and Will Self's 'Cock and Bull' for hardass tube book-time

Hair Day: Bit pink. With a small 'p', not a large 'P', though have oddly been told more than once that I look like the rage-y rockpop queen. Hhm.

So juice had a Big Night Out yesterday, featuring in Blank Canvas' new series at London's coolest music venue, Cafe Oto, up in E8. Many a Dalston virgin was agape at the true fabulousness of the place, whilst Andy and I of course, old hands at popping in to see off-kilter Japanese free improv on trumpet, live electronics and cutlery, shrugged smugly. BC is one of the core alt-classical family, brothers with nonclassical and Kammer Klang and second cousins with straighter classical models like the Little Proms. We kicked off the night with some a cappella bits and bobs and some choons with electronics, braving three new ones off by heart - hopefully we look like we're engaging thoroughly with our audience when in fact our brains are going into minor meltdown trying to remember whether it's 'mikatamikikaiwa' or 'mikikaiwakataki'. Ha ha. Then all-round beatboxing mastermind Shlomo, he of Bjork's 'Medulla'-album and Vocal Orchestra fame, took to the stage to improvise a megamouthful of big beats and clever vocal trickery. He's more musical than most beatboxers, and uses his loop station, the same model as mine, with rather more deftness than I! My favourite moment was an abstract looped aviary of tweeting birds; the challenge for beatboxers is creating something that takes it past an amazing novelty, and Shlomo's definitely nearer than most, though I won't be happy til there's a beatboxer who creates clever little jazz drum licks in 5/8... Am very excited about Shlo's collaboration with old York mucker Anna Meredith though - they're going to be creating a concerto for beatboxer and orchestra, and last night we heard an exciting initial sketch following their first workshop with some instrumentalists. Anna was at Blank Canvas with the Camberwell Composers' Collective, who presented a few works for 'cello, clarinet and percussion. With their riff-driven, electronica-massaged sound, they're fashioning themselves as a Bang on a Can for this side of the Atlantic. The highlight of the night for us was a wee improv with the man Shlomo himself; with the shortest of rehearsals at something similar in the sound check, it was slightly nerve-racking, but worked pretty well, in a sort of chilled, Bobby McFerrin's 'Circle Songs' kind of way... phew! All in all a fab night, full of shmoozing with the alt-classical scenesters (ha, of which we are a part!) and a few of our newer musical friends, whom it was lovely to see.

Today we popped up the road from my flat to the nonclassical studios (in a rather, um, colourful building which houses, among other things, nostril-burning-weed-smoking grime producers, a snooker club full of burly East End chaps, and the rather suspectly-named 'Holborn College of London' - hmm...) for some mic-testing and initial try-outs of material for our nonclassical juice album, to be released sometime next year. The possibilities of which pieces we use, and what new material we create, are endless: I'm getting rather excited about a kids' voice-changer (complete with LED lights!) I bought from eBay. The image of the three of us using flashing red loudspeakers live is a gleeful one and I must write us something, although mostly so far I have been using it to creep Andy out by talking dirty to him in a weird minor-second-clashing robot voice. Ha ha!

Glam Girls

2009-09-13T14:31:00.001-07:00

Hours of creative activity acheived today: 2

Level of conviction in own genius: 8

Reading: 'Cock and Bull' by Will Self. Witty, super-erudite, challengingly masculine.

Watching: The excellent 'Red Road' finally, directed by Andrea Arnold, whose second feature 'Fish Tank' is out this week. Countering Will Self's brute masculinity with a steely-eyed feminine slant.

Hair day: just-got-out-of-bed look. Not in a good way.

juice have dived headfirst, making bubble-noises and mouth-pops all the way, into our autumn season. Last week we crammed six gigs in two days into the valleys of South Wales, putting the 'glam' in Vale of Glamorgan. We belted our way through four community gigs in the gritty districts of Barry and Abedare, and did our own evening gig, trying desperately to not be distracted by the over-enthusiastic man in the front row who tried to sing all the words to everything we did, despite the fact most was new music he could never have heard before. We were also drafted in the night after, pretending to be a children's choir in Ozzie composer Ross Edwards' 5th Symphony, alongside the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. We flew by the seat of our cute pink pants in the gig, as though our parts were easy, they were framed in bars and bars of 5/8, 3/8, 3/4, 2/8, 3/8, 3/8, conducted at hyper-speed by floppy-haired Zen-ish Andre De Ridder. It'll be on Radio 3 at some point. Blink and you'll miss us!

Today we made our Colourscape debut at Clapham Common. Colourscape is a family-friendly vast-chambered inflatable paradise - simply a load of womb-like rubber tents (and many vaginal corridors - hhm, think have been reading too many feminist books) in a field, but all so luminously-coloured that you feel like you're an extra in a never-ending Barbarella remake. We sang some bits and pieces and did a lot of improv, sometimes with a bearded, gold-caped live electronics chap called Lawrence, and sometimes with a crystal ball-toting dancer guy. It was a great experience, particularly when sitting on my own in a green room, singing with Sarah and Anna but only hearing them through a speaker; the many excitable kids clambering all over us whilst attempting to riff on Morton Feldman's 'Three Voices' made it a little tricky.

We recovered afterwards over tea in translucent china cups and macarons, tiny chewy 10p pieces of loveliness, in the patisserie in Clapham Old Town: we hooked up with MaJiKer, our vocal idol Camille's English producer, who's interested in writing us a piece. Hurrah! We also met his mate, singer Indi, and Will from cool night Blank Canvas. This week we also encounter Shlomo at said night. The creative networking fun continues!

Summer is Over (but the Autumn has just begun)

2009-09-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: LOADS
Reading / Watching: Guiltily have taken hiatus on 'Corvus', lovely book on crows, to cram first CJ Sansom Shardlake series book / Sobbing to Gareth's work on 'The Choir'
Hair Day: Bit rubbish

Had another lovely cultural bank holiday weekend, as we always manage to do. We kicked off by going to Free Fridays at Cargo for unoriginal electro-indie shenanigans, where somehow Andy and I were the coolest people in there (well, I was sporting American Apparel socks with a little black number), but it was so loud my jaw almost unhinged itself and clattered around on the floor. Wandering around Shoho with our ears ringing, we stumbled upon a marvellous little bar at the bottom of Hoxton Street called Troy, where we enjoyed hilariously uncool jazz fusion, totally mud-stuck in the '70s, with all the players tossing out ludicrously virtuosic solos whilst chatting nonchalantly to their bandmates. Excellent.

On Saturday we decided to go back to my Sarf London roots, but venturing further than I'd ever been, to Morden Hall Park at the deepest, dustiest end of the Northern Line. We stuffed our bellies with Sainsbury's finest cheeses in the meadowy grounds, then wend our way along the River Wandle, managing to totally miss the feted marshlands and bird reserves and instead ending up as unlikely tourists in the districts of Mitcham Junction and Hackbridge. Still, the river was quite charming, lurching from grassy and sedate to litter-filled - with upended trolleys looking like fat dead geese - and should surely help generate a new verb ('to wandle': to amble along a river, whilst getting a bit lost and waxing lyrical on a variety of subjects from math-rock to Henry VIII). Once we'd arrived in the heroin chic of Hackbridge, we made haste up to my first London hood of Tooting, where I checked out my old house (they seem glassy-eyed and impassive when you don't know who lives in them). We were there as seasoned curry heads, seeking out the Sri Lankan/Keralan delights that the Tooting fave Radha Krishna Bhavan had to offer, before catching up with a few Southies at Brixton's always lovely Mango Landin'.

A bitter-eyed, windy Sunday saw us explore the back streets on a walk from Bethnal Green to Tate Modern. We got down onto the grimy northside beach west of the Tower of London to mudlark and make some impromptu art out of whatever we found. There were loads of old bits of white pipe and chunks of pottery, let's say Roman (hhm... probably. Or from the nearest BHS Homestores), but the highlight was picking up a big brown bone the size of a forearm. It may be my first human bone-holding experience. Gulp. Still, I happily added it to my sculpture and we went on our merry way to the Futurism exhibition, which was more stimulating for its manifestos than most of its paintings; any art movement that caused regular fisticuffs in the street has to be applauded, but only momentarily; I would throw a few punches of my own to Marinetti and co for their wanton disrespect of women, the ignorant misogynistic fuckers.

The sun finally came out on Bank Hol Monday, when we bypassed the Carnival to catch the last day of David Byrne's 'Playing the Building' at the Roundhouse. Quite literally a great wheeze, this installation hooked up an old pipe organ to lots of bits of the building, and then allowed the public to play it. Unfortunately it was full of people who weren't really there to listen to the surround-sound of clattering pillars and heavy-breathing pipes but to just queue for their go and chat, so some of the point for me was lost. We then celebrated the sun's coming out by dipping into Hampstead Mixed Bathing Ponds for the first time, an altogether bracingly gorgeous experience, most unlike the clinical rat-race of York Hall; feeling the cool, green-mud-thickened pondwater on my skin, and not knowing the depths of the pool was fabulous. Though I did momentarily freak out when my foot caught a buoy rope, thinking it was some killer pike seeking its next middle-class victim. Ha. We then lingered on the Heath as the sun drew down, the trees' long shadows like spent balloons, in a last silken sigh of summer.

S'n'M Summer School (w-psshh!)

2009-08-24T02:52:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 1

Hair Day: Bit manic

Phew. Am recovering from bonkers week at the S'n'M - I'm sorry, Sound and Music - Summer School (how did they not think this through? Though I rather like the thought of taking a tutor group through their paces on the Japanese rope bondage course, arf), where I was the Key Tutor on one of five courses. Mine naturally being Composing For Voices as it's the only thing I can actually do these days (I broke out in a sweat when I heard that one of my students played tenor horn). We were ensconced in the Purcell School, where I revisited my Alcuin College/York days by sleeping in a small cell complete with blue-tac stained walls in the 6th Form block. What was most amusing was the (of course always necessary) levels of discipline aimed at the 75 teenagers on the course, and their then impeccable behaviour rather outdoing the debauched partying of the staff every night, leaving the common room and outskirts of the block littered with ciggie butts and beer cans, whilst the hardcore amongst us continued into the hours of the morning with the odd outdoor rave in the football field or had clumsy snogs with fellow staff members. Classy!

The great thing about these summer schools is of course meeting brilliant musicians with whom to teach, play and drink and plan future world takeovers with. I was lucky enough to have a totally disarming and happy-go-lucky bunch of teammates (on oboe, voice, piano and trumpet) who I basically fell in love with over the week, and who made me end up being paid for a week of laughing my head off and talking nonsense. Slightly mad with tiredness most of the time though 12-hour days and very little sleep, we called ourselves the A-Team and gave ourselves silly Captain codenames which we then insisted on being called by our kids, who probably thought we were totally crackers.

The actual teaching was exhausting but always brilliant fun, helped by a super-sweet and adorable bunch of students (the best ones actually absorbing the things we threw at them rather than writing pithy pop songs or moany choral epics which were a study in Bm7). My favourite pieces, written, recorded and performed in 4 days, were: a fantastically quirky 5-part layered riff vocal piece, a perky jazz vocal number about the wonders of the universe; a ludicrously dramatic music-theatre piece in which Sarah, Stef and I unleashed our inner demon goddesses, shouting about Medusa whilst James thrashed the insides of a grand piano; a Britten-esque chamber song with such juicy and well-considered harmonies that I blubbed throughout its rehearsal; and the best power pop piano-led ballad with added cor anglais. YES!

Was brought down to earth rather with a stupid throwaway You Are Wolf gig in a pub in Kentish Town last night. It was a poorly-organised night with four slots too late in the evening for a Sunday, and three of them being crap blues acts. With me opening. Have been lucky enough so far to perform to audiences who actually listened, so was a little demoralising to sing to a bunch of braying fools who were only there to drink frothy lager and shout at each other about the cricket. Sob. Ah well, I have learnt my lesson and shall have a clause in my contract next time insisting I only play if the audience is polite enough to listen. Or are gagged with pistols held to their heads whilst I whisper my delicate looped folk epics at them. Grrrr.

Tall Tales in Yorkshire Dales

2009-08-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved today: 5 hours -check it!

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Reading / Watching: Just finished the very marvellous 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' / 'Classic Goldie', with old Yorkie chum Anna Meredith rockin' it BBC-style

Hair Day: passable

Had a totally enriching and brilliant few days away with my mum Sue in Yorkshire - Andy and I having decided we should follow our separate passions for a small hol. So whilst he went cycling and hostelling intrepidly round the bottom end of Wales, I went a-walking, a-walking I did go on the west side of the Dales. We based ourselves in Ingleton at the foot of the famous Three Peaks walk and strode womanfully some distance every day, enough for my cellulite to just consider a little loosening of its grip on my thighs, and for my knees and ankles to throb dully like a crap club night. Highlights were:

1) The Ribblehead viaduct, 24 lofty stone arches echoing the curves of the hills. Clouds moving over the hills and getting stuck on cows' backs.

2) Going 'off-road' at the base of Whernside and discovering two little caves all for ourselves. Kept inching down into the watery depths and then freaking out, imagining that the monsters from ace caving horror flick 'The Descent' were emerging, and racing back up again. As they are only marked as 'Cave' , we renamed them, happily defacing the ordanance survey map. Clambering up onto a large scar (rocky outcrop to the untrained East Londoner), I disturbed a sparrowhawk and cheerfully watched it, wondering all the while why it was hovering so meaningfully low over me, before I again freaked out about an impending sparrowhawk attack and ran away.

3) Conquering the third (or 'the smallest' in party-pooping terms) peak, Pen-Y-Ghent, in three and a half hours. Celebrating at the windy summit, some sheep advanced and I swiftly, again, ran away.

4) On the way back down encountering the totally excellent Hull Pot, a massive canyony-gorgey-cave-fissure thing in the earth which looke like the entrace to a lost world or something. Studying my new friend, the ordanance survey map, I became so engrossed I left my camera here and didn't realise it was lost to we got to the car. Was depressed all night, dreamt I was falling down caves and being eaten by sparrowhawks, got up the next morning and walked halfway up Pen-Y-Ghent again to rescue it. The jubilation at finding it still sitting in the grass by a 30-ft stony drop was worth the nightmares.

5) Ingleton Waterfalls Trail, a rather trashy nature walk you had to pay to go into, was populated by hideous high street-types. So it seemed Pennick waterfall churned into cherry coke and lager shandy pools; Thornton Force looked like a white wedding complete with plumed ponies; Snow Falls was paint splattering in a whitewash of DIY TV shows on 'Living'; and the spray and sunshine in the air turned clubby colours of small-town Ladies' Nights.

6) The totally marvellous Inglebrough Cave, we going deep into the rocky wet earth to look at all manner of astonishing stalactites/stalagmites and ludicrously grandiose formations called things like 'The Lost City' and 'The Sword of Damacles'. Of course, once Mum and I had a look, we were renaming them 'The Land of The Joyous Penises' and 'Labia Surprise'... Arf. I came over all 'Descent' again and almost attacked Mum when the laconic guide thought it would be a laugh to show us what it would be like down there without any lights on. Hhm. Not sure I'd have made my dad's side of the family, miners all, proud...

Total notable wildlife seen: 1 sparrowhawk, 1 rabbit, many pied wagtails, red admirals, green-veined white butterflies, stonechats

Total miles walked: 25

Photo accompaniment to this blog here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=302762&id=560960297&ref=mf

Anarcho-Death-Bluegrass

2009-08-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 6
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 2
Watching / Reading: 'How to be a Composer' on BBC4 - can't hurt ha ha ha / 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' which is marvellous.
Hair Day: wispy

Am far too busy to have a whole weekend free to do a festival this year, so made do with (sigh!) having to walk 10 minutes up the road to Vicky Park (oh, the fatigue and bother!) for Field Day last Saturday. In its third year, the festi has come under fire in the past for its lack of loos and bars and suchlike, but that all seemed to be under control this year. Sadly what they hadn't managed to do was have a word with 'im upstairs about the weather, so we had half a day of murksome clouds before the rains kicked in mightily. Perhaps because of my proximity to a bath and kettle, it made it easier to squelch off home, shivering and miserable, before the headliners, rather than being a tempter for me to stay. I am a super-wimpoid. And thus missed Mogwai's 'nice quiet soothing guitars NOWVERYLOUDINYOUREARS' set, plus Toumani Diabate's no doubt session of jewel-like kora joy.

I did at least manage to see SOME acts, starting with charming chamber-folkie-popsters Fanfarlo, who were very Beirut-meets-Sufjan-Stevens. Andy prefered the glacial electro artpop of the Sian Alice Group. I caught quirky friend-of-friend-of-friend Micachu and the Shapes in the Adventures in the Beetroot Field tent. They were really fun, all angular scratchy avant-pop, if rather too subtle for the very loud chatty crowd who were far more interested in using the tent as an umbrella rather than a forum for itchy math-skiffle. Then made sure I saw the rather ferociously feisty Juana Molina, who seemed permanently on the edge of fiery Argentinian fury and spent most of the set trying to kill the sound guys with her eyes, as nothing seemed to quite work for her. Still, I enjoyed her looped folk-tropicalia and it works much better live than on her rather droney second album. Then a touch of the Horrors, all doom-laden whine-rock, before the deluge really hit and I scuttled off home, full of bratwurst and pear cider to my bath and some macaroni cheese.

Yesterday I had a small gig of my own, a solo spot at Craig's Moose Factory afternoon at the rather brill George Tavern in Stepney, a scruffy artpub owned by an artist whose car encased in tiny mirrors, which once was installed outside Tate Modern when it first opened, now sits, half-smashed at the back of the garden, glittering jaggedly next to a raggedy cat who stretches out on a hospital chair in the sun. I was on first, and was fine, though have to remember to open my eyes occasionally, no matter how much I'm trying to show off my lurid turquoise eyeshadow. Had some nice comments from hardened locals afterwards, including a charming gothy artist chap who told me he wanted to paint while listening to me and made a few animal noises for good measure, and a sporty East End fellow who racked his brains for who he thoughts I sounded like and came up with... Enya. Hmm. After me were two very good bands, both giving me the ultimate 'coin their sound in three words' challenge: the first, Snorkel, I'll call freaky cerebra-funk; the headliners, Rude Mechanicals, colourful nightmare-vaudeville. And that's all you need to know....

La Bore De Loin

2009-07-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 6.8
Amount of creative activity acheived in last 24 hours: 2
Watching: 'Psychoville' on BBC2
Hair Day: Needs drastic cut-and-paste action before photoshoot tomorrow

Celebrated our second whole wedding anniversary by going to the Coliseum to see the ENO do Kaija Saariaho's 'L'Amour de Loin'. It's very rare I go to the opera, mostly because I don't like people singing all the time when they could be speaking... BUT I have liked Saariaho's delicate, exquisitely orchestrated works in the past and was bang up for it. The opening was a fabulously sensual feast of theatrical headiness, with a huge silky canvas sliding over the audience's heads onto the stage, oversized staging and opulent costumes. Oh yes, and aerial acrobatics from six great performers who writhed and twisted on hanging sheets to represent the three main character's spirits. But from then on, it was mostly downhill: the opera soon transpired to comprise the most dull story ever (high concept is too interesting to describe it): prince falls in love with noble lady he's never seen (that's the first half), he eventually travels to her, but falls ill and dies as they declare their love. Oh, and she, having been nothing more than a vacuous object, decides she's lost the love of her life, curses God for two minutes, and then - of course! -becomes a nun. Over two and a half hours, and with the principles singing the most achingly banal language possible - "'My heart aches for her', 'Oh that is a shame','It is like a burning flame', 'Oh dear, a burning flame'" - it was one big frustrating yawn. I kept hoping there'd be a few explosions or swordfights or something, but no, just interminable recit-like passages going on and on with very little motivic writing or aria-like stuff or anything. The lovely staging was nothing more than desperate padding for such a black hole of an opera; the poor singers often had to stand for twenty minutes looking ponderous. We saw plenty of friends and faces: Mikhail and Uriel, the juicettes, E.Laine, old Yorkie pal James Williams, the newsreader Julia Somerville and Kaija herself, floating gracefully around in red, oblivious to the audience's dark mutterings.

Still, on the plus side, it was actually great going to the opera and it makes me want to see more! Picking and choosing carefully of course. It also makes me realise my own music-theatre bent is freaking genius and should be pursued immediately. It's not about writing operas that just anyone can bellow out with the audience struggling to hear the words thorough the fog of their vibrato, but using idiosyncratic voices and mixing up styles. Mikhail will be doing it soon with his new opera commission and one day he and then I WILL rule the opera world and juice will star!!! Ha.

A month of Sundays

2009-07-06T01:23:00.001-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 1
Reading: 'The Whole Woman' by Germaine Greer. Am getting quite aggressive in the process.
Hair day: ungratifyingly conventional-looking

Have had gigs for three Sundays in a row, to keep me busy. first up was Metamorphic's road trip to SevenArts in Leeds, where we did two mammoth sets and tried out a few new tunes, including Laura's lovely arrangement of 'Hyperballad' which allows me to do my most uber-wispy voice and do some sea-breath loops. Last week the intrepid DOLLYman were at the Spice of Life, bang in the centre of town, for a fantastically-enjoyable set - not least because we unveiled our new secret weapon: a real live DRUMMER in the form of James' lovely Ozzie mate Pat. He'd only come in for two brief rehearsals so it's early days but, WOW. It actually makes us sound like a real band. Ha ha. Well, he did give us a real boost, and we went down a storm, with me just proud I could stand up straight in my new black and green zigzag heels bought on a whim on the way there without my knees buckling. Most fun was Lucy's newish one 'Juliet Archer Nearly Killed Me', about her near-death nut allergy experience where the Dollies basically saved her from a fate worse than death: Homerton Hospital. The number involves a spot of heavy rock and squealy improv which I added to by screaming apopletically and making lots of avant-garde vomiting noises. YES. I signed an autograph at the end, which is a first, but not sure it really counts when given to an extremely drunk and confused German chap...

Last night it was Metamorphic again, with bandleader Laura's husband Craig's Moose Factory night going all out with a mammoth 12-hour all-dayer of experimental and improvised music. I missed alt-female music chums E.LAINE and Roshi, but caught a spot of very funky and adventurous Porpoise Corpus before we were on. After us came terrifying Norwegian noisenik Stian Westerhus, who had a rack of effects so huge and complicated he probably could have manouevered a spaceshuttle with it, and who attacked his electric guitar with such angry ear-ripping venom he sent me scuttling out of the room for cover. We caught a bit of Hot Head Show, a sort of experimental funk trio with no tops on and came back for wonderful punk-jazz lot Fulborn Teversham, headed by Alice Grant, who is one-and-a-half notches more cheekboned and cool than me, featuring scary Pete Wareham who made his alto sax sound like a fluttering trumpet, and of course backed by Seb Rochford, the only man to harbour a whole other ecosystem in the form of his hairdo. I am ridiculously starstruck by Seb, which is daft as I've been in contact with him about doing a DOLLY/Teversham gig and he is as nice as pie. He's just such a big scenester. So I just about managed to go up and say hello and not fall over myself or look like a complete fool in the process. Last up was the quite incredible Bilbao Syndrome, who with their quite brilliant white jeans/white polo-neck/mirrored RayBans-look appear to be a crew of futuristic anarchic surgeons, who probably tear through the universe cruising for alien organs to harvest. Instead of that the main band stand impassively at the back playing very difficult metal while singer Andrew Plummer, with the rubbery physicality of Jim Carrey on acid, made noises like Tom Waits playing John Hurt in the memorable scene from 'Alien'. It was very cool. And gave me nightmares.

This week, and last, and the next and in fact any spare moment I get this summer I will be working on the 45-min soundtrack for 'Beginning With Blobs', Kazzum's production for 4-8 year-olds touring in the autumn. It is a huge job, both exciting and slightly gulp-making. Updates to come...

Vocal Anarchy From The UK!

2009-06-07T10:06:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0

Reading: Sunday papers, including excerable Observer Woman Mag, which is about as pro-independent-power-woman as The Daily Star

Hair Day: sooo getting it cut tomorrow

I recovered just in time from hellish projectile-vomity Norovirus that left my bathroom looking a little like a puce-coloured Pollock in order to make it over to the Tampere International Vocal Festival for juice's triumphant return following our 2nd prize two years ago. This time we were there to do a gig at the self-explanatory Klubi, which wasn't too bad, if not quite as barnstorming as we'd hoped, us being on at about the time everyone wants to go to bed. But it was well worth the trip, firstly to learn from the best vocal ensembles in the competition, jaw-dropping German winners Klangbezirk (means 'district of sound' apparently). The four-piece jazz/popsters were so technically accomplished, charming and brilliant, mostly for, incredibly, being able to improvise pop tunes in four-part harmony on audience's suggestions. Argh! Puts us to shame. Secondly, we networked as much as possible: we're trying to set the wheels in motion for bringing last year's winners, the very daft but totally excellent German group Vocaldente, a sort of comic ageing boy band who wear matching cheap suits and Adidas trainers, over to the UK. We have more ambitious plans to host our own vocalfest in London in order to show off all the incredible European acts that have absolutely no exposure over here because they are too poppy and not from Oxbridge. We breakfasted with choral wundergod and hopefully all-round guru for me at some point, Bob Chilcott. Mostly we had fun earning a reputation as being the slightly 'anarchic' (Bob's words), 'self-ironic' (Jenny from the jury), certainly most experimental and leftfield, probably best-dressed and undoubtedly dirtiest (we had fun explaining to all Europeans why wide-eyed German group 'Spunk''s name was so amusing) set of girls on the scene.

Went to Tate Britain today to see the Richard Long retrospective. Long is an artist I much admire and feel slightly affiliated to, what with his affinity with and use of the outdoors, plus his text work. It was a top exhibition, the crisply matter-of-fact font for his text pieces making his walks come alive. You've got to hand it to a man who can walk for a living. Though he may, with his mammoth expeditions of walking in straight lines for hundreds of miles in three hours or something, put Mum and I to shame when we have our slightly less ambitious walking hol in the Dales this summer. Not sure Mum would appreciate me making her walk in increasingly large circles whilst occasionally making her carry a stone either. So an engaging afternoon, and I was suitably inspired enough to buy a couple of postcards to display back home, which I promptly left at the Sainsbury's self-service checkout. Can't quite be bothered to walk back to look for them. Richard would be most unimpressed.

LoveLea

2009-05-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 0
Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Watching: About to watch 'Changeling' on DVD
Hair Day: Superlong

Spent a day and a half in ridiculously bucolic South Devon over the weekend, for JimmyDOLLYman's wedding to the fabulous Cress. The main party was in a buttercup-sprayed field where we also camped, and others made use of the cute cream-coloured tipis laid out for them, like an arty middle-class native tribe. The village had a stonking pub, gorgeous 15th-centruy church, and not far away was a brilliant all-purpose deli, cafe, newsagent and DVD store, where many guests breakfasted, stealing all their Saturday Guardians and using up all their posh coffee. The weather was mostly blusteringly sunny, birds flittered merrily about and Cath Kidston-inspiring wildflowers peppered every laneside. The wedding was wondrous, rising comedian Josie Long was a guest, I dried my eyes several times on the hem of my dress and kept off the drink so I could sing a few numbers at the end of the night in a sort of ideal karaoke situation ('Groove Is In the Heart', 'It's Oh So Quiet'), and it was all rather gutting to have to come back to London quite early the next day in order to do a spot at Troy's Magic Piano at the Harrison Bar. Even more annoying as the weather in London had been so glorious that no-one wanted to come to a night of leftfield music and short films and Andy and I played to ooo, about 6 people.

Still, we made up for being stuck in London today by going on a bike ride which started by aiming for, ooo Clapton, and ended up being all the way to Enfield and back which is a good 23 miles of riding on my plucky shopper. Take note: this is an incredible feat for me, I who resist almost all forms of exercise quite stoically, for the main reason that I don't like being a) tired and b) sweaty. We went the whole way on the canal from Bethnal Green and then the Lea Navigation, which turns into the Lea River, taking in all the wonders secret London has to offer: the big teeth-motif graffiti of artist Sweet Tooth, the Olympic site, a brilliant perspective of Hackney Marshes' multiple goalposts, diminishing into the distance with perfect slim-white symmetry. Then there's the grimmer industrial areas, the weird outposts populated by many white working class folk and their terrifying dogs, the huge waste disposal factory soundtracked by deranged gulls' wall of screeching sound. We got bike stickers from a lady promoting bat walks; we took photos of the caramel-coloured ponies loitering under a huge electricity pylon; we saw common terns dip their ink-dipped heads down towards the water in search of fish; we cooled our feet in the cleaner, more northern bit of the river alongside barges entitled things like 'Best of Britain: Alan and Joan Fear' and a jet-black one called 'Valhalla'; we passed all manner of walkers and cyclists from a large family of Hasidic Jews wobbling precariously along (the littlest girl careered downhill straight into a dense bush of pink flowers) to a chap miraculously juggling both drinking a can of beer, smoking a ciggie and texting on his phone. The physical results of today are that my freckles have splattered all over my face, my hands are burnt on one side by sun and on the other by handlebar-gripping, and I am walking like John Wayne. And only partly out of confidence at my newfound athleticism.

Here's a pic.

Nearly howling at the moon

2009-05-22T01:03:00.001-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7.8
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 4
Listening: Bobby McFerrin's 'Circle Songs' and the new Alasdair Roberts album
Hair Day: Needs cutting bad

We found a fab new local-ish pub on Thurs night, the newly-spruced The Britannia at the north end of Victoria Park, and ate poached egg and asparagus salad with thick handcut chips whilst taking in a night run by wonderful indiefolkers The Local. The first two acts were nothing to write homespun about; Nancy Wallace, along with JennyMay from the Elysian Quartet on violin and ukelele', then did a set of traditional-sounding originals which were somehow nothing compared to the last actual folk song, 'The Drowned Lover'. It's the same reason I love singing them almost best of all: they speak so honestly, tunes so stark that the words are laid bare as old bones. I was there to see the headliner, the fabulous Olivia Chaney, all tumbling tresses and shabby Shoreditch chic, who possesses a fantastically supple, hearty voice. Playing either guitar or clutching away on a hand-pumped harmonium, she sings folk ballads, Purcell pub songs and lullabies by Monteverdi, all in this classically/jazz-trained, darkly graceful voice. A total inspiration. All of which gets me jiggly with excitement about my ever-impending EP, under new name You Are Wolf. I am planning a launch of sorts, but have to wait until the final track is recorded, the photos taken, the artwork done, first. But THEN alt-folk-world-domination will follow!

Mood Music

2009-05-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Amount of creative activity acheived in last 24 hours: 2
Reading/Watching: 'The Interpretation of Murder' by Jed Rubenfeld, bit silly/The end of series two of 'Mad Men', the best slow-burner ever
Hair Day: confused

Have been so creatively busy it's just silly. In the last few weeks I have :
a) exploded onto the formal chamber music scene by debuting juice at Wigmore Hall and getting THE best Times quote ever for our troubles ('makes Stockhausen and Berio sound prehistoric'; Richard Morrison we LOVE you)
b) sampled the cultural/drinking delights of Berlin on hol, including excellent sound installation, much walking of entire city, dinner parties with artist acquaintances in cool studio apartments with drills and bits of wire and drawings everywhere, excitement at going to smoking bars and reeking exotically of tobacco smoke the next morning
c) sung at the Macbeth in Hoxton for nonclassical and possibly nailed small record deal for juice
d) been recording/mixing my solo EP with soon-to-be-revealed new moniker
e) whipped up live vocals and slightly silent-movie-piano-esque music in 4 days for Kazzum Theatre Company's R'n'D week on a Darwin-inspired work for kids using clay
f) coached kids, students and adults on the usual vocal stuff in Derry
g) Met composing honchos Jonathan Harvey and Cecelia McDowall at London premiere of my 'dusksongs' and vocal/educational honchos Gabriel Jackson (sporting right cool cowboy moustache and arch wit) and Mike Brewer (seasoned beyond all seasons) at the meeting for a new educational vocal project for teenagers

The heaviest time was the two-week period where I was required to sing for several hours a day whilst grappling with some kind of (non-swine-fluey, though it burst out at just the same time) ghastly throat vileness, which didn't go away even when I had to do three gigs in three nights with three different bands. The culmination of this was DOLLYman's rather hilarious outing at the City Showcase's unsigned London bands showcase and competition, the nearest I'll ever come to being on X Factor. Amidst 7 other mostly half-decent acts very much of the pop persuasion, we came on and did our part-instrumental, part-sung punkjazz thing and awaited the panel of four judges' verdicts. Having already sampled their ludicrously banal quotes for previous acts, we couldn't wait to see what they might be able to say to us. We'd already been introduced, marvellously, as 'they're all MUSICIANS, they're all composers' (somewhat suggesting to the previous 4 singers that they were nothing of the sort), so we knew what was coming. We had some wonderful compliments first off, and I was very pleased to be told I had a 'gorgeous, beautiful' etc, voice (I'd really gone for it, wrapping myself around the mike stand and being as glowery as possible), and looked as sincere as I could to the comment that I'd 'really given a part of myself to the audience tonight'. Then we looked bashful as we were told how it was amazing that we created MOODS, not just through a voice but through our INSTRUMENTS and how AMAZING that was. The northern soul singer girl told us she didn't like the instrumental number as she was a singer, and so, y'know, she only really liked ones with, like, singing, in them? Panjabi Hit Squad Man dissed James' usual 'cello histronics and best of all, the journalist woman was mean about our tights! We didn't win, felt kind of cheap and used, but overall it was a good experience and we were really well received. Quite amusing sharing a stage with a) a group of 13 year-old boys with the same haircut playing basic rock, their Dad loping about after them with guitar cases and b) one of my old students from the BRIT School, Sarah Williams White. Also challenging to keep a straight face when told by a judge that he understands us as he, like, knew some jazzers once, when all four of us have MAs in Composition or Performance and two of us are Doctors. Imbeciles. RedmanRed, edgy shouty Brighton-based indie, were deserved winners though, and I reckon we could've come 2nd or 3rd had there been more prizes. We did get a couple of contacts out of it, which is the main thing.

Finally, Wycombe Wanderers are making a triumphant return to the grand and lofty third flight. OK, in truth it was as haplessly ungraceful as it could possibly have been, with WWFC - needing a draw to breeze through - conceding a goal late on and Bury probably only not going past us on goal difference because their supporters miscalculated the points and staged a pitch invasion when they scored a penalty, which was actually still one goal away from an promotional victory for them. Ha. Fools. But who cares, we're through, go the mighty Wyc!!! Am SO looking forward to the London games, particularly at Leyton which is only THREE tube stops away from me!!!!

31 Year Old Woman's Hour Has Come!

2009-04-07T02:40:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 9
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3.5
Watching: The final episodes of 'The Wire' season 4.
Hair Day: Nicely bedheaded

So I am now 31, and marked the occasion on Sunday fairly quietly with a stroll and huge morning nosh-up at the marvellous Pavilion Cafe in Victoria Park, sitting in chilly sunshine whilst watching the lake, followed by a rehearsal, then some tea and cake at Franze and Evans on Redchurch Street with some pals and an evening in with 'Persepolis', sausages and the footy. A very downbeat affair for moi, lover of large parties, but will make up for it with Andy and my joint knees-up at the weekend.

But it's been a pretty damn good start to being 31. On Monday, juice got up very early to get to Broadcasting House as our agent Jill had got us on 'Woman's Hour'. WOMAN'S HOUR! The most popular programme on Radio 4 after the news! I was only slightly disappointed that Jenni Murray, everyone's ideal Mum, wasn't presenting, but rather Sheila McLennon, but they're all mums of a mumsness. I mean much of a muchness. All half-moon glasses and big scarfs, and the air that they could whip up a big cake in seconds while enjoying a large glass of hearty red and discussing the latest play at the Royal Court. We met a rather formidable, super-pro Maureen Lipman in our waiting room, she being on the show before us: the first thing she said to me was 'you wouldn't get run over in the dark with those', referring to my super-neon-green new American Apparel legwarmers form my bro. She can obviously do this sort of thing - chatting with seasoned wittiness about her work, doing the subtle plug - standing on her head. We did two live numbers and a wee spot of an interview, in which we were mostly sold as crazy girls who take any sound they hear off the street and turn it into vocal. Not entirely true but we had fun demonstrating our half-arsed versions of Mongolian and Inuit throat-singing. Hee. It was fine, and I tried to not think about the 1-2 million people listening to us as I rambled away - talk about the biggest exposure EVER!

In the evening we made our Wigmore Hall debut, via the Park Lane Group series, sharing it with a sax/piano duo. Under some duress, I'd bought a long dress to match the other two's outfits, but really liked it in the end - I sported a sort of Jane-Austen-dosses-in-Bethnal-Green look with a grey empire line dress plus spiky short hair and tattoo. Tee hee. The first half was slightly shaky, although started really well with my 'luna-cy'; the rest was harder music on stands, which cut us off from the audience a bit and was way too long. We gave the first airing to our commission from Gabriel Prokofiev: 4 a cappella movements using different languages to explore elements of modern life. They will be good but we need a while to warm into them I think. The second half was much more US, ridding ourselves of scores so able to stand at shoulder-rubbing distance and belt out 5 more classical/folk/jazz/percussive numbers. There were lots of smiles in the very substantial audience; we're crossing our fingers for good reviews as there were certainly a couple of scribblers there, including our fan from The Times, Richard Morrison, who gave us a glowing report in '5 to Watch' last Friday. Hurrah! We celebrated backstage whilst Hannah the sax player finished off the concert (including a cheeky encore, hhm) by stuffing our faces full of cheescake and glugging warm sparkling wine, then held court with our coolest pals and family at the nearest pub afterwards. Marvellous.

Betsey's Salon and other weekendartadventures

2009-03-28T12:15:00.001-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 8
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 1 Watched: The fantastically intruiging, disturbing Werner Herzog docu 'Grizzly Man' on More4.

Hair day: rockin' a nice short new look yeah!

I did a little solo turn at highartpals Mikhail and Uriel's informal performance/debate night, Betsey's Salon, which has gradually moved from living rooms and small pubs to, this time, the Royal College of Arts, or should I say, the Office of Real Time's (hosting a temporary exhibition within the RCA) 'space within a space within the space of an institution'. Or something. Mikhail is the kind of guy so counter-cultured that the time an underground event turns into something successful is the time to terminate it, so this might have been the last one! Last night focused on the voice and words, hence it being a good forum for me. The poet Cherry Smyth, also involved in running the salon, read an ongoing poem about the womb (not as hyper-feminist as it sounds, actually wryly incisive, especially read in her dryly contemplative Irish tones), followed by my acquaintance, avant-soul improv diva E.Laine and her pianist hubby, the frowny Leon Michener trying out some new stuff. Then the sweetly bonkers Richard Parker read some stuff, and Mikhail transformed into Dizzy Gillespie for the beginning of his ridiculously puffed-cheek number, 'Promise'. I ended the performances with two numbers, the now more-developed storytelling version of 'shamansong' and 'catalunyanpoemsong', with my loop station not conking out like last time, mercifully.

Then followed a rather too formal discussion, with the artists seated starchly in a circle, and me feeling both disinterested and not clever enough to debate the separation of voice and text and meaning... I just do it, y'know? PhD an' all, what an unacademic girl I am. But I feel I'm growing in confidence every time I perform, and can't wait to do more.

Had a lovely hiphoppin' time at Jamm in Brixton on Saturday - we were there to support our favourite white-jazz-hip-hop friends, Lazy Habits, and grooved a bit amongst a friendly crowd to them and beatbox buddy WanDan who did a short set with the camply scary Nathan 'Flutebox' Lee doing his beats/flute thang. Followed this up on Sunday by renewing our Tate membership and seeing the cracking Rodchenko/Popova exhibition, which made my brain work so hard at contenplating the nature of art (Constructivist, functional vs something purely aesthetic and on a higher plane) I actually crumpled into tears. That doesn't normally happen... The early paintings of both artists (later rejected by them as 'useless') were beautiful explorations of shaded lines and forms that seem to boldly pre-date Abstract Expressionism; these segued into the more well-known propaganda posters and advertising collages, though also included the more interesting theatre set designs and fabric designs. Imagine wearing dresses emblazoned with New Labour roses - hhm, a different, headily (and misguidedly) politicised time...

Finally DOLLYman returned to the Ritzy Cafe for another Sunday night set. Rather unhelpfully, the heating was kaput in the entire building and so we played (badly) with our coats on, fingers as dextrous as sausages, cello and clarinet seizing up occasionally. Not our best gig by a long way, though we did get to air the new DOLLYclassic, Lucy's deranged piece about her horrible experience being ignored in Homerton hospital even though she had anaphylactic shock and how we, the other three Dollies, basically saved her life. YES!

spellbound

2009-03-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 8 (but probably should be higher)
Amount of creative activity acheived in last 24 hours: 0, but just you wait!
Reading: 'Winter in Madrid' by C.J.Sansom - marvellous, intelligent wartime-spy-thriller/ Watching: 'Red Riding' - unbelievably dark, brilliant series featuring our most local actor, Sean Harris as a devilish bent copper.
Hair Day: quite good, actually

The project that has mostly consumed my working life for a few months has now been and gone: Connecting Across Difference, in which I worked with three totally diverse classes in three schools in Tower Hamlets over many workshops, writing/devising them a piece on the way for a final multi-media, theatrical performance at the V&A Museum of Childhood. The project posed a completely insane amount of challenges for me, demanding a feat of juggling fit not even for the best fire-eating sword-tossing etc Covent Garden busker: I had to meet the needs of not only 50 kids with a wide array of abilities and access requirements, but teachers and three associate musicians/trainee workshop leaders, compromise with a wonderful but oft-differing-of-opinion 2nd composer, squeeze in a visual artist's physical/musical installation way too late in the day, and make it all work in a public museum with a daft acoustic and bleaching amount of light. And the kids didn't even meet until one session before the day! Bonkers.

I think I did pretty darned well considering, waking up only once or twice with cold sweats and heart-clutches, and thus 'The Spell', a 40-minute piece was performed last Friday, all very close to the bone but just about there, with the kids and staff rising to the occasion beautifully. It had a questing, magical narrative written by me and inspired by the imagery the kids came up with; tried to draw on kids' strengths in a very personalised way; and used a marvellous cornucopia of technological delights, created by wide-eyed mus-tech wunderkind Nick. I felt pretty proud of the result and rather gutted that the artistic director didn't ask me to take a bow! But man, am I glad it's all over. Now it's all onto fun things: working on my solo EP, writing a few little pieces, preparing for lots of juice work namely Wigmore Hall, and exercising/eating only seeds in order to fit into the long dress I've bought for it...

Had a nice Ma's day weekend which highlighted the wide gulf between my hood and our opposite end: the evil and horrible West. Ha. On Saturday night we went to our fab local curry house, Al-Amin on Cambridge Heath Road, for sharp hot fish curry and rubbed shoulders with the shouty East End locals. On Sunday we couldn't fail but to rub shoulders with the locals as we squeezed past grotesquely broad poshos heaving great long shiny rowboats into the glittering Thames for several races at the start of a knee-throbbing walk from Putney Bridge. The rowing fraternity (Andy slightly offended by my ogling of 50-year old men in gumboots and revealingly high tight shorts with, as Mum said, 'remarkably impressive physiques') are an irritating lot, all scrubbed, smug faces and what-ho's, and it was good to at least get onto the more rural tow-path. Star-spotting a rather hefty-looking Matthew Macfayden jogging past on the way (he slipping in our estimation as he must live in the hideous environs), we crossed to Hammersmith and through a sea of white rugby-loving middle-classes drinking lager next to the river, past ludicrously posh houses and onto Barnes and more rowers. Ugh. Back home for the evening it was a different story: to the seedily theatrical Palm Tree pub in Mile End next to the canal, we sat on stools drinking St Clement's and thick ales whilst three extremely cool sixty/seventy-somethings, jammed into a tiny corner, crouched over their piano, bass and drums, seemingly not even thinking about the fantastically deft, dextrous trad. jazz and brilliant they were tossing out. They were occasionally fronted by a very square, boxily-jacketed smoothie who crooned some standards whilst nodding and winking to the locals, a mix of 70-year old men and women dressed up for the evening, European girls dancing in front of them, and hardened artsters. YES! The East rules.

Like the echo of a...

2009-03-11T04:24:00.000-07:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 8ish
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3
Reading / Watching: 'Amsterdam' by Ian McEwan / 'Red Riding' on Channel 4
Hair day: Long bit at the back has got so silly I've starting plaiting it.

Went to the rather lovely Toynbee Studios at the beginning of the week to see something rather unusual: Paper Cinema with Roger (bruv of Brian) Eno. Two people manipulated cutely drawn cardboard marionettes to create a beguiling live piece about people's dreams in east London, with nothing more than hands, paper, a video camera and a couple of cleverly poised lamps. The film, populated by idiosyncratic animals and humans bobbing on buses, bicycles and cars, was not without a little of 'Belleville Rendez-Vous''s gothic quirkiness and had some remarkably deft jumps in perspective. Eno's piano/synth/accordion accompaniment was a little 'Amelie'-lite in places but matched the charming mood and helped in turning an arty adult audience into delighted children. A rather fanciful miniature delight for an ordinary Monday eve.

It was my turn to perform last night, doing three solo looped numbers for Music Orbit to open one of spnm's monthly Sound Source shows at King's Place. Pretty marvellous to be able to perform in Hall 2 to 200 people and with a crystal, confidence-inducing sound system which made me sound actually quite good. The night was called 'Crazy Wisdom' and was supposed to marry film, dance, music and words, so I did a storytelling introduction to 'shamansong' followed by some drowning Inuit gasps (very specialist technique, you know...), then 'trainsong' with Andy playing glowing guitar, then 'catalunyanpoemsong'. It generally went very well except for two hiccups: well, one technical hiccup where my loop stopped but I got it in again very quickly, and a rather larger phlegmy belch when, in my last tune, I went to add another loop to my atmospheric coda and for the first time ever, my loop station screen said 'Sorry, too busy!' and cut out rather dramatically. Oops. I did get it back in but that was a rather glaring mistake. Whatever next from my up til now reliable Boss RC-50? I press a pedal and it says 'Sorry, have gone out for a fag. Back soon!'? Most amusingly, in the interval a very polite and very posh lady came up to me and asked if one of my lyrics had been 'like an echo of a cunt'. I had to take a second to remember it is in fact 'like the echo of a gun'. She seemed rather relieved as my subsequent lyrics had been about the sky being knifed and bleeding all over the place and thus I wasn't a militant sex-is-rape feminist. My laughter echoed all the way up the five floors of King's Place's atrium... ha ha ha!

I have to say the rest of the show (we escaped after the lengthy first half proper) was not so great. Whilst promising a relaxed, walk-in, walk-out atmosphere, you could do anything but, the seating was terribly formal and restricted viewing for most people, the musical performances were waaaay tooooo lonnnngg, and there were silent films with no music at all which thus had the air sucked out of them. Must do better. And appoint me as freelance, drift-in-when-I-want-to-and-offer-nuggets-of-advice, producer.

Connecting these two events, besides Andy and myself, was the presence of a larger than life character we once saw on train: a rotund chap who only wears bright pink, orange and yellow from top to toe, right up to his oversized spectacles. Sort of like looking at Christopher Biggins having eaten too many lollipops whilst you're on acid. But who is this mysterious rainbowish artman? And at what high-art mixed-media event will we see him at next? The story continues...

Gig-a-bite

2009-03-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Amount of creative activity acheived in last 24 hours: 0
Reading: Just finished Ian McEwan's pert, beautifully concise 'On Chesil Beach'
Hair day: the asymmetrical long bit at the back has got so long I've started to put it in a wee plait

Gosh have been so busy and haven't blogged a darned thing. Have done a number of gigs at nice churches to beamingly gratified oldies with juice, unassuming jazz bars in Stokey with DOLLYman and metamorphic, been heavily embroiled in my educational project with local schools and the Museum of Childhood, and eaten lots of curries. But, fighting the frequent urge to curl up in a ball in front of BBCiplayer every night, I've also been out to some great gigs of late:

1) Tanya Tagaq at Cafe Oto, Dalston
Oto is such a great venue you forgive it even when it programmes dismally introspective muted-trumpet improv on a Saturday night. Sarah and I, flying the flag of experimental vocal music high, went to see the sometime Bjork-collaborator and Inuit throat-singer Tanya Tagaq. Our most high-art pal and general friend to the stars, Mikhail (on whose new album, Morphica, juice features) was there to introduce us to the Canadian vocalist, who had the most frighteningly disarming, bonkers manner, insisting she'd met us before before swerving onto telling us about her ex-boyfriend who was currently 'fucking his way through Europe' with electrodes attached to his body in the name of art. She then proceeded to perform a kind of highly-sexed snake dance along to increasingly tribal-trance leanings from her laptop and drum boys. In truth, the music got a little samey, but there was no denying her incredible array of vocal utterances: she seemed to pull seagulls and tigers screaming from her throat, and veered from breathy tunes to earthquake-starting rumbles. Afterwards, she explained to Sarah and I, after we'd come to congratulate her, that the reason she was so good was because she had a pussy. We retreated gently as she shouted at us how much she loved her pussy, grinning and nodding, wishing we weren't so inhibited and.... BRITISH.

2) Firefly at the Gallery Cafe, Bethnal Green
At a loss on a Friday night, Andy and I decided to go to the nearest place we could, the beguiling Gallery cafe, so near we can basically fall into it from our window. We caught the end of the open mic at one of their Organic Nights, before I realised that three of my workshop-leader acquaintances had brought their band along to headline. And darn it but they turned out to be one of my new favourite bands, a gorgeously goosebumpy mix of folk, jazz, improv and contemporary classical subtleties. They're another band, like the excellent Stravinsky-meets-folkfunksters 7 Hertz, who DOLLYman recently played with, who I feel a genuine affinity with. Hhm, I feel an askew, avant-everything collective coming on...

3) Beatabet Collective at the Shunt Lounge, London Bridge
The Brighton-based arts collective Beatabet, who count loop-vocal queen Bunty who I've programmed at Gobsmack in the past, and Nick, mus-tech wizard who I'm curently working with in schools, among their number, were curating a four-day artsfest. Unbelievably, I've never graced the underground chambers of the Shunt Lounge before, and dang that was worth the ticket price and the 30-minute queue alone! Cavernous brick arches, musty corridors, a shadowy theatre, boho bar areas, coupled with the video and sound art, installations, music and occasional trapeze artist, made us feel like we were slouching around in early 90s Berlin. We watched my 'cello-blues-avant-garde diva pal Laura Moody play a set above on of the bars, played some glockenspiel in a cupboard, avoided the gaze of weird actors and manipulated a sort of sensor-piano-gramaphone thing. It was easily the most happening event I could possibly have been at last night. London rocks, baby.

of the snow

2009-02-03T02:44:00.001-08:00

Level of conviction in own genius: 7
Amount of creative activity achieved in last 24 hours: 3
Reading: Just finished Owen Sheers' 'Resistance'.
Hair Day: nae bad

So BBC London's ENTIRE 30-minute report yesterday was on the snow and the CHAOS it cause to the transport network and WHAT were the head honchos doing about it apart from failing to grit the drives up to the bus depots, whilst Boris, his hair the colour of snow just lightly pissed on, made light-hearted remarks about having nice snow but too much of it. Aforementioned stolid transport honchos repeatedly droned no about adverse 'weather events'. WEATHER EVENTS? It's SNOW!

Frankly Andy and I watched the flakes cascade down, as if we were being seasoned from above with vast amounts of Maldon sea salt, with absolute glee and wide-eyed pleasure on Sunday night, and marvelled at the twilighty, not-darkening sky as the streelights reflected the thickening snow below. We opened the curtains on Monday morning to see what we'd hoped for, our road caked, the big trees laden wantonly, and not a car going by. We marvelled that there would be a day where the roads were not thick with buses, when most of the tubes had shivered and got stuck. Of course, my meeting was only a mile down the road, which meant I positively ACHED to get out, clad in my never-worn-in-London walking boots and silver parka, crunching on the pavements. I crammed with my artist colleague Nick into E Pellici's for a red-cheeked late breakfast and then we walked to the Rich Mix. That so-satisfying chomp of boot on snow! The turfed-up snow that looked like flour, sugar and butter rubbed together: the beginnings of shortbread. My meeting consisted of experimenting with a Wii controller wrapped in a scarf and put into a hamster ball, and rolled around to pitch-shift the string sample it picked up through bluetooth; and singing into a tin can with a stretched bit of balloon on the end and a reflected laser, the laser twisting into circles on the wall as I sang. Such is the good end of my huge educational piece/project, happening in March. Then back through increasingly slushy gunk to Museum Gardens to meet Andy, fall straight down onto my back to make a flailing angel, chuck lumps of finely sifted snow at him, watch the Muslim family in hijabs do the same, and a pair of 12-year olds hold onto high tree branches in order to perfect the top of their snowman. Who CARES if no-one could get to work? Why did you BOTHER!? We have days like this once a decade so why can't the government declare an National Snow Day, turn off every engine and let us all go sledding?

Hhm, it is rather funny that juice cannot get together today to rehearse Elizabeth Lutyens' hardcore serialist-ish vocal trio, 'of the snow', because of... just that.