I saw this band at Beyond the Border in the summer, and I really enjoyed them a lot. The guy playing the Mbira was a real character and really funny. He was also a great Mbira player amongst other instruments he played.
I wish I’d got their CD now.
More about beyond the border
Here are a few more posts about the Beyond the Border festival if you’re interested.
The last time I went to Beyond the Border I discovered these. That was back in 2014. I’ve waited two years to have the pleasure again, and it was worth the wait. I’d hoped that these would be available again at Beyond the Border, and they were, possibly one of the best foods I’ve ever…
This is what I’ve been using to retrieve my old songs from often crumbling cassettes. Sadly it too is somewhat past it’s best and I’m not sure how much longer it will last.
I’m considering getting an old cassette 8 track. Probably not immediately, but in a while I think.
Some more about old multitracks
If you’re interested in old multitrack stuff then here’s a few more posts on the subject.
It was last weekend and I missed it completely. Which is a real shame for me. So, to make it up to myself I thought I’d post a few of my favourite cassette pictures.
I’ve only listened to this album a couple of times now, but it is great. I’ve been a fan of Yello since I was at school and I was introduced me to them. But in recent years I haven’t kept up with they work. So getting this album was great.
Since I started going back over my old tapes and retrieving them I’ve been thinking about the process of recording to tape, or if not to tape in a linear way and not wholly sequenced.
I liked that way of doing things in the past. There was more room for error and because of that more room for inspired accidents. I miss that. You just don’t get that so much with sequencing.
So I am giving serious consideration to tape again. I might even consider getting a tape 8 track at some point!
I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently going through a process of moving all my old cassettes to digital. It will take a long, long, long, time. I assure you.
But part of the process is listening to music I haven’t heard in years. Mostly things I’ve recorded myself, some great, some terrible, some embarrassing, and all enjoyable in one way or another.
It is a good reminder of why I love music, why I love the creative process. A reminder that software and hardware are just tools for doing something creative and should be looked at as that.
I think it can be really easy to get lost in tools you’re using to the point where you focus so much on what the tool can do and can’t do that you forget what it is you’re trying to achieve. That’s the danger and listening to my old stuff made with simple hardware and usually no software at all made me realise that perhaps I need to think long and hard about where my music is going, or more importantly the fact that it isn’t going anywhere at the moment.
I already have this album, I got it when it first came out, but when I heard that Steve Jansen was selling off the last remaining stock and signing them I thought I ought to buy it again. It’s always lovely to have a signed copy of things and this album especially so. I hope…
I’ve only just bought this album as it only came out today. It’s the first album from David Sylvian since his difficult Manafon album.
Although this is a compilation people have already been saying good things about it, so I’m really looking forward to giving it a thorough listen. Probably tomorrow now.
If you’ve been to this site before, then you are probably aware of my fondness for the music of David Sylvian. Sleepwalkers was and is a compilation that came out years ago. A few months ago a new updated version was announced, and I decided to get it. Here are some pictures of the release.…
Last year I skipped record store day as I’d been queuing at Sister Ray Records in Soho for about 3 hours and at the end of the process I’d got 1 7″. That was all. I wasn’t terribly happy about that at all, as you can imagine. So I said to myself that I wouldn’t…
I decided to start digitising my huge collection of old cassettes. A daunting task. I’ve been putting off doing it for years. Really years and years.
But it needs doing. I started off with a tape of a load of bands that I put on in the nineties at an open mic type event in South London that I used to run once a month.
It is fantastic to listen to some of these bands and their songs again. Songs that have been forgotten by most of the people that heard them.
I don’t even know most of the people who played at those gigs. I wish I hadn’t lost touch, but it is a fact of life that we move on and people drift and do different things and stop being in bands. A shame, but that’s the way it is.
I suppose in a way listening to all this old stuff is a way of reliving the past, but there’s nothing terribly wrong with that. Also you start to remember why some of those songs never got anywhere!
It’s fun to do, and who knows if I’ll get through all of those tapes?
If you’ve been reading my PalmSounds blog for a long time you’ll know that in the past I’ve dabbled with making my own Palm OS apps with a little bit of success. The apps I made were never going to be totally amazing music production apps, but they were free toys and a little bit of fun to play around with.
Anyway, I’ve moved them all here now and you can get them in the ‘PDA Obsessions‘ page.
I do plan to do some more apps using old Palm OS and some other mobile OS stuff too, most notably Android, but more of that in another post.
For now I hope you like the old Palm stuff. Give me some feedback if you do.
I bought this CD EP without ever having heard Ingrid Chavez before. I knew very little about her music I just knew that David Sylvian was on it and I am a long time fan of his.
I was pleasantly surprised by just how beautiful this EP is. It starts of in a fairly conventional form and gets progressively more experimental with each track, which is fine with me. However, it never gives up any of the lyrical elegance that struck me when I first listened to it.
Since listening to it several times over the weekend I’ve bought a few more Ingrid Chavez tracks, and her music is really growing on me now.
Ingrid Chavez, Little Girls with 99 lives, signed copy
I got this book a week ago and as it’s so short I’ll probably read it very soon. I’m looking forward to it to see just what kind of arguments are made for this. We’ll see.
So I bought it, I’ve got it, I’ve listened to it. It’s about 15 minutes long, it’s only one track and that’s it. So what did I think? Well it certainly isn’t the best thing by Mr Sylvian that I’ve heard. Calling it music might even be a stretch. I think it is more appropriate…
My last post was about going to WOMAD, and since then I’ve been thinking about why I like festivals so much, especially ones like WOMAD, in fact, especially WOMAD.
A lot of UK festivals are just too big for me. I like smaller festivals like WOMAD where I can wander around easily and go from one stage to another quite quickly. That’s one of the things I love about festivals I can check out lots of different acts during the course of a day and stay for 5 minutes or watch the whole show.
It is like a kind of musical buffet where I sample some things and don’t get on with them, and others I have to eat the lot. If you know what I mean.
In some ways this goes against what I’d said before about listening and consuming music. I guess that this buffet approach to must is further along the consumer path then the dedicated listen. However, in many ways it is different from that argument.
I always enjoy coming away from WOMAD with a few new things to listen to, and this year they were.
The first time I saw The Portico Quartet was at WOMAD a few years ago. They were amazing and made a really big impression. Of course, now they’re no longer the Portico Quartet, and they’re just Portico, which is fine. Their music is quite different now, but I still like it. However, for me I…
Another great memory from WOMAD days was of Nouvelle Vague. I went to see them in the Big Red Tent and thought they were amazingly good fun. I subsequently bought quite a lot of their tracks. I say their tracks, of course for the most part they are covers, but what excellent covers they are.…
As I was thinking about WOMAD I started remembering some of the high points over the years and I thought I’d share them. One such high point was when WOMAD was back in Reading, before it moved to Charlton Park in Wiltshire. I remember seeing Mitsoura for the very first time there. They were amazing.…
I wasn’t able to spend the whole weekend at WOMAD this year, I was only able to go for the day this year. Which was ok. The weather was pretty awful on the Friday, so the Saturday was a good option in the end. So as always here’s the obligatory photo of the flags. I…
I think I’ve been going for about 10 years now, so in some ways it would be a shame not to go, but the line up isn’t inspiring me this year, which is a shame. I’m thinking about it, but not convinced as yet. I may just go for the day. I’ve done that a…
They only released two albums and the last was a long time ago. Dura Dura Dura (their last album) was excellent as was their first album but it’s been years since they did anything. It’s a shame. I wish they’d done more. I’ve checked their site occasionally and there’s never anything new. I suppose it’s…
I was really pleased to get to see the Radiophonic Workshop at WOMAD this year. They did a talk and also a performance as well. Both were really enjoyable.
This was a great talk from Mr Ware from Heaven 17. I really enjoyed it, he had some great insights into the development of synths since the 1970s. Of course it wasn’t for everyone, but I thought it was awesome, especially as synth 20 was an OP-1!
I felt compelled to get this nice little box set at WOMAD this year. I’ve got quite a lot of the tracks already, but it’s really well put together and it came with a load of bits and pieces like postcards and stuff, most of which have actually survived the weekend and trip home. I…
I am Ashley Elsdon 