Guitar
- Swans In Arena Wien | Concert Review
Swans is not a band I'm familiar with, for some reasons I missed them all these last three decades - maybe because for me post-punk was mostly British, and no wave was more on the side of free-jazz or contemporary music… Anyway, some...
- More Sketches
music of the month: it's been long since my last post so I heard a lot of music, and it's not easy to chose. What actually stood up are bits of Astor Piazzolla songs I heard here and there - at the music school where I take my kid every week,...
- More Sketches
I've decided to cheer up my guitar sketches posts with a few lines about music - more exactly about the music I listen to while drawing. Most of the time I listen to many kinds of music on the radio or social networks, so I will focus...
- Concert Review: Lysn In Hbc, Berlin - 19 Feb. 2011
Lysn is a electro-acoustic impro act created and fronted by trombonist/electronicist Hilary Jeffery, with guitarist/vocalist/electronicist Marc Weiser, trumpetist Franz Hautzinger and drummer/pianist Steve Heather - all four familiar to European...
- Coarse Tuners Part 2
As described in an earlier post, I've tried to make a compact set of coarse tuners to go with the fine tuners on my Schaller 456 fine tuning bridge, so I could reduce the headstock and loose the big and heavy traditional tuners. The earlier attempt...
Guitar
Daevid Allen has reunited with the Great Cosmic Mother
Today is a sad day, one of my music heroes, Mr Daevid Allen, just passed away. I've been listening to Gong all my life, and Angel's Egg was one of the first LPs I ever bought as a young teen - when it was badly out of fashion. I was always playing his music to my friends, even when everybody (including me) was only listening to punk, post-punk, industrial music and later techno or noise - and they always ended up loving it against all the odds. Now I play Gong to my child (whose name is the title of a Gong song - post-Allen Gong so he's not called Pothead Pixie nor Zero the Hero) and we dance to it… And lately - since I got me a wah pedal effect - when I play guitar with the Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna, I have reminiscences of Steve Hillage and try to just let go… (BTW Soft Machine was another band created by Daevid Allen).
Gong probably heavily influenced my later eclectic tastes in music, mixing rock, jazz, electronic music, trance, asian traditional music, sonic experimentations... - I also listened a lot to Daevid Allen's solo work with sounds cut-ups including William S. Burroughs' voice, and one of his sentences is haunting me since: 'you never existed at all'. Few people are ever able to not take serious their own genius the way Daevid Allen did. You can easily overlook the poet and the composer and just remember him as a silly hippie clown, but maybe it's not bad this way… Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to see him on stage, even if I was living in Amsterdam on and off at the time of the Gong Unconvention. But I met him in his music and I'll meet him again and again, and spread his blessing.
Daevid Allen was one of the persons I wanted to thank for making my life better...
- Swans In Arena Wien | Concert Review
Swans is not a band I'm familiar with, for some reasons I missed them all these last three decades - maybe because for me post-punk was mostly British, and no wave was more on the side of free-jazz or contemporary music… Anyway, some...
- More Sketches
music of the month: it's been long since my last post so I heard a lot of music, and it's not easy to chose. What actually stood up are bits of Astor Piazzolla songs I heard here and there - at the music school where I take my kid every week,...
- More Sketches
I've decided to cheer up my guitar sketches posts with a few lines about music - more exactly about the music I listen to while drawing. Most of the time I listen to many kinds of music on the radio or social networks, so I will focus...
- Concert Review: Lysn In Hbc, Berlin - 19 Feb. 2011
Lysn is a electro-acoustic impro act created and fronted by trombonist/electronicist Hilary Jeffery, with guitarist/vocalist/electronicist Marc Weiser, trumpetist Franz Hautzinger and drummer/pianist Steve Heather - all four familiar to European...
- Coarse Tuners Part 2
As described in an earlier post, I've tried to make a compact set of coarse tuners to go with the fine tuners on my Schaller 456 fine tuning bridge, so I could reduce the headstock and loose the big and heavy traditional tuners. The earlier attempt...