Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-04-27 - 9:02 p.m.

I have just spent some time trying out my new condenser mike - a SONY - I have a couple of these already and they are extremely good value. So much so that you dont mind if one of them breaks as it looks as if has indeed happened. Anyway SONY seem to have discontinued their budget range - I got the last one in the shop. I have been having a crack at A Nightingale (in Berkeley Square) - I think there is a format which is the fairly short and rather eccentric version of a standard. The Bloody Valentine on Plundafonix is like that and maybe Careless Love on Serious Music. Anyway The Nightingale has turned out to be a trio - fairly grungy guitar tuba and flute. Well I say tuba - its a low brass patch off the CZ101. The guitar is quite processed - with the Behringer spatial phaser but the flute is edgey and raw - key noise and all. Charlie Alexander and I duo-ed the Nightingale the last time the Formerly Pheasant band gigged in a church high on the chalk near Knockholt and I remember really enjoying that. Not everyone knows that this song was written by someone who worked for the BBC - or that the A section is 10 bars long (a fact I first learned on the slieve notes to Kind of Blue.)

No Sexton in Guildford - I was shocked. So shocked that I went up onto the top of the multi-storey carpark over Sainsbury's - not to throw myself off but to check alignments. St Catherine's Chapel on the Upper Greensand, Guildford Castle and Abbot's hospital are very much in line. I am fairly sure that over the ridge in Stoke Park it should be possible to check Sutton Place and beyond that maybe Old Woking.

You can debate the reality of this stuff but it makes you realise things about the countryside that you might otherwise miss. I hadn't realised how many of the churches downstream on the Wey from here are very Norman - Send, Old Woking and Pyrford for example. These places are now almost engulfed in Woking but that town is a Victorian creation for the railway which took London's dead to the enormous cemetry at Brookwood. (Yvonne is very very keen on the Victorian way of death - some might say excessively - and she pointed out to me a couple of weeks back that you can still see the terminus for the dead outside Waterloo.) Anyway the Norman churches are where they are because of the river Wey. I think Jake will be having a sniff round some of those downstream sites before long.

I also read the information plaque by the iron bridge over the Wey which claims that this is where the original golden ford was - well maybe. More interesting is the fact that Waverley monsatery built the medieval bridge which was swept away by a flood around 1900. Because the catchment area of the Wey is so enormous it can still flood quite suddenly. There are still some bridges upstream that are Waverley Abbey originals. But I was interested in the link to Waverley and how it might relate to the Merton Abbey connection to the church just up the hill. I think Guidford was probably a place of boundaries. The castle is there as the southernmost resting place for the King when hunting in Windsor Great Park. As I write I am facing towards the park and Stag Hill - where the Cathedral and University now are - was established as a hunting ground in 1154 according to the map I bought on Friday and I would guess the Hogs Back was the natural limit for this terrain.

I have goaded James into going out and buying the Battle of Berlin with some of his birthday money. Actually it wasn't difficult. Vita also gave him a journal of German soldier on the Eastern Front which he has hardly been able to put down.

Talking about Knockholt brings to mind Geoff Kitchener who set the gig up - Geoff played bass in HORN and has written a history of his parish just south of Knockholt. His wife's family own quite large chunks of it which is great for summer picnics and croquet. The main reason for metioning him today though is the Radio 3 series on Charlie Mingus which was on at 6.00pm today. Geoffery has been obsessed by Mingus ever since he was a teenager and sounds very very much like him. There was a solo on the speakers just as James and I were sitting down to eat and I said "Doesn't that sound just like Geoffery?" There was a lot of debate about on the programme on the extent to which Mingus fed on be-bop. The smart money said that the big influence was much more Ellington. There was lots of Teo Macero who produced all the CBS Miles Davis records right up to the stuff which was really innovative in studio terms. Teo was in a kind of club with Mingus in New York in the early 1950s it seems. All the members wrote and they got together to play the charts - you could only be in the band if you wrote. I wonder if it ever recorded? Mingus was amazingly opened minded - he and Ornette Coleman went to hear Captain Beefheart in 1969 and apparently Charlie thought the Captain's groove was really on. It was Mingus' idea to team up with Joni Mitchell - not the other way round.

Today I decided I would bank the guitar and flute version of We'll to the Woods No More. There is something about the loop behind it - Cathy singing "laurels all are cut" which is right - in terms of sense atmosphere and rhythm.

There was a similar prank this morning, As I breakfasted I decided to put on a Debussy CD which I got in Woodbridge. First up is Nocturnes though I actually bought the CD for Chanson de Bilitis about which more another day. Anyway I decided I would snatch a chord from the first section into Vienna Soundfont. I added a synth string from the ROM and started fiddling with some of the parameters. I took the soundcard stereo output into my cassette portastudio and used the other two tracks for the audio output from the D-HORN. Yesterday I got this rather strong impulse to take a hack at Place To Be - so thats what I did. I mixed it down to stereo using the delay from my little Korg multiFX and then this afternoon put some electric guitar on. We'll have to wait and see.

There is a similar set up on Serious Music which attacks the Chorale Stravinsky wrote on the death of Debussy (the music ended up as the final section of his Symphonies for Wind Instruments. Incidentally that Chorale is the earliest instance I have found of the So What chord). For the improv line I used multiple outputs from the D-HORN - the audio and a MIDI chain encompassing the CZ101 plus my early 1990s Casio GM box. The reason I mention this is that I noticed today a similar phenomenon when you have different patches all under MIDI breath control. Depending on the gradient of the blow which kicks the note off you can get different patches to trigger in different ways which can be a drag but can add to the expressive repertoire.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell the story of the D-HORN acquisition. It was my second or third trip to Tokyo and we were staying as usual at the New Otani - utter bliss. This just up the hill from the Emperors Palace in the direction of Mount Fuji (which I have only ever seen once from sentral Tokyo - my predecessor in this job actually managed to climb it). The drive in from the airport to the hotel is always a gas even though one is utterly jet-lagged. The Tokyo transport system is very very layered - road over road over railway over railway over canal and as you get towards central Tokyo you find you are going past the ninth storey of a block of flats on an interchange in the coach. For some reason as we reached the road leading to the hotel we noticed a temple which we had never seen before - something to do with the fact that on the other side of this street is an "entertainment zone" where we often hang out of an evening. So we decided that after a shower and a doze we would spend the afternoon (ie the time when normally one would be deeply asleep) looking at the temple.

It turned out that this temple was the one which formely had been linked to the Emperor - effectively Tokyo's Westminster Abbey. The American's had broken the link after the war as part of their programme to convert the Emperor from a god to a human being. When we got there the place was full of activity - a Noh theatre complete with band was in full swing. We soon discovered that the reason was the early summmer festival. Outside the temple was a very long procession of dancers percussionist and other musicians dressed in the Japanese equivalent of Morris Dancer's gear - people of all ages. The band started and they marched round the temple then up the main steps into the centre of the temple (they are usually arranged in a square.) There was a lot of very dramatic ceremony - dancing, a kind of maypole which was climbed and then burst out white ribbons. This got me very interested in Shinto and I bought an introductory book on it back at the New Otani.

The main melodic instruments were a kind of fife - there were maybe 20 players one of whom (a woman in her 20s) was the soloist - boy could she play. I decided the root scale for the instrument was a kind of B minor.

Well I decided I had to get one of these fifes and I got Richard Jones from the embassy to tell me which quarter of town the music shops were in - not far from Yakihabra where everyone goes to buy electronics. The next day I dragged some colleagues over to hunt down the fife. I never found one - what I found instead was a Casio DH-500 windsynth - part of a range which Casio launched at the end of the 1980s. The DH-500 was never sold in the west. I kind of remember seeing a DH100 in Bath maybe in 1991 - I asked in the shop about it but neither they nor I understood it. The DH500 has eight onboard patches, onboard reverb, a fairly rudimentary tremelo and a brilliant portamento. The fingering is vaguely Boehm but with more possibilities. I managed to try it out in the shop (despite the lack of a common language with the vendor) fell in love with it and bought it.

A little before this happy accident I had taped a SONY condenser mike to my flute and fed the signal into the little Korg FX box. I really liked the result and had put a fairly hairy line over a sequence of the first section of Debussy's Ballade which I have liked since I was a teenager but I had never really persevered with that set-up. Its hard to explain what it means having all that new range of timbre under one's fingers and at the end of a column of air - like discovering say that 3 dimensional world one has grown used is actually 7 dimensional.

As far as Place To Be with a modulated rip from the Nocturnes is concerned we'll have to wait and see - but it came into the world pretty fast. AND I have just found a long interview with TM - at www.furious.com/perfect/teomacero.html. The link between Varese Teo and Miles has absolutely made my month!!

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