Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-05-19 - 12:05 a.m.

I agree with Robin that the best way to get a file between 2 computers at home is to mail it oneself - especially if the contents are too big for a floppy.

A frustrating start to the day getting the car sorted - the job took much longer at the garage than was planned. This kind of put the rest of the day rather out of kilter. I can't help feeling I ought to have become more resistant to the disruptive effects of these vicissitudes by now.

I did some more work with upper middle drone sounds - starting with a steal from VU and then sampling the Introduction from Bryter Later. I have already mentioned the technique - running two loops at speeds which stand in relatively simple ratios. I added some beats - about 80 bpm and quite a heavy swing - some bass drone with a long slow waveform modulation envelope, maybe a little crushing, certain chorus parameters.

Part of the stimulus to this remixing some old Amiga based recordings. At one stage I used an ambience device for recording flute parts that claimed to reproduced tape echo. The way I had it set up was plenty noisey and so several tracks have an undercurrent of white-ish noise. With the re-mixing I started to wonder whether the noise wasnt doing something positive for the track oveall - maybe reinforcing related frequencies in the mix or setting an atmosphere. Anyway a certain amount of today was spent experimenting in this area - eg with techno timbre beats and cluster chords over rich upper middle "drones". There seems to be something there - butI felt reluctant to jump in and improvise - something to do with not being 100% focused.

The Roger Dean book on improvisation is really a piece of work - a great compemdium of approaches that one might want to refine and adapt maybe to run workshops. I think it must feed any impulse that there might be around to create tracks in new ways. It's a very uptodate summary of different strands of improv across the globe many of which are completely new to me. I hadn't heard of body contact improv, for example, which seems to have grown out of an ideology of performance that was unaesthetic, collective, a sexual. Having watched some tapes Dean comments how it seems there is such a variety of ways of falling down compared with the limited number of ways of getting back up again.

All over the world for the last 30 or 40 years grouples of people have been determinedly pushing back the boundaries of spontaneity in the making of art, largely outside the established institutions of culture. During much of this time jazz itelf has lacked a single avant garde but nonetheless it is probably the most important exemplar for people to work off.

I started to read Adorno's account of learning composition with Berg. (The music teacher who made me start the flute was a pupil of Webern.) Adorno seems to have been in love with Berg but I think that was the impact that Berg had on men and women. Berg was a compelling physical presence with a personal style on the edge of eccentricity - laconic even over his own last illness, leaving it to late to deal with the blood poisonning that killed him.

We had supper with an ex-colleague of Yvonne's who is also the mother of a contemporary of James. She is married to a journalist on the FT. James' contemporary has just (today) sold a black Les Paul junior for under �600 including a hard case. I had a little go on it last night and I thought it was really good value - quite light for a Les Paul. I would have certainly have bought it if I had known it was for sale. The journalist himself has a California Strat - it just made me think how confusing the Strat range has become.

I wrote to Nick Brown - with a copy of Plundafonix - the excuse is that is a point of departure in terms of treating standards.

I watched some of the BBC2 programme on Matisse. I hadnt realised that he had been such a stimulus to Picasso eg to paint the Demoiselles d Avignon. I saw that painting in NYC in February. I thought it lived up to it reputation. But there were some Kandinsky's in the same room which took the place by storm. Both Kandinsky and Matisse understood the abstract power of colour - Picasso deliberately went in the other direction at that point. And then in the middle of the First World War Matisse followed Picasso - there were also a couple of his works from this period alongside the Dems which really impressed me in terms of the power and depth of dullness that they embodied.

R Dean has some good sections on painting and improv. Pollock believed deeply that his work was routed in jazz. People always refer back to the film of him working - but never let on that the process of making the film had such a disastrous effect on Pollock's equilibrium.

At supper they played Kind of Blue - I realised how the sceond side of the vynil is so much less well known that the first three tracks. I remain baffled as to why this music should sound so fresh after nearly 50 years. It is still quite preposterous that this record is mostly first takes - within a genre which most of them hadn't encountered before. As I listened I wondered if any of the musicians are still alive - certainly not the frontline or the bassplayer or one of the two pianists.

In his most recent e-mail Paul Wheeler talks about feeling overawed by the vector of life, its onward push into time. There is a kind of 20th century theology which is in this area - which builds on the thought of A N Whitehead - who collaborated with Russell on Principia Mathematica. (There is an odd tale about the relationship betwen Mrs W and BR). Whitehead builds from the fact that there is this edge in life between possibility and the irrevocableness of what has happened. It isn't generally realised that philospophers don't really agree on the status of propositions about the future - for example - that I will go and make a cup of tea soon. Suppose as I write now that proposition is true - does the status of its truth remove by freedom to chose - this unfreedom is not a matter of science but a matter of logic? To avoid this risk (logical determinism) you can claim that propositions about the future are neither true or false possibly some third ctaegory - there are even three value logics which might manage this state of affairs.

Even probability is hard to handle - are statements of probability true statements of our current partial ignorance or related mental states - statements about the present? Are they statements about the objective world - of some kind of "perhapsness" which is built into how things are even if the human race had never existed. Heisenberg (I think) goes for the latter point of view in terms of the motion of electrons - but people still find this unsettling. I was unsettled by the discovery that Heisenberg led the Nazi's A bomb programme - maybe he had no choice. Maybe the proposition that he would was true even before he was born. Time for a cup of tea.

previous - next