Iain Cameron's Diary
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2005-07-21 - 10:37 a.m. The bid dominated the day in the office. About twenty years ago I was in charge of a bit of software that managed multi-dimensional data structures - it could handle up to 7 or 8 dimensions. The bid involves just such a structure - probably four dimensional. Where you have a team working on a common goal which has a structure like that at its core there is some scope for confusion and indeed that is what we had yesterday - probably more today. By the end of the day I had mailed a first pass at the first half of my (two dimensional) bit off to the bid-writer. The eccentricities of the software suite that I have on my PC are part of the problem - also the limited number of the people about the place with an adequate Excel skillset. Watched a Prince narrative vid from the late 80s - quite challenging in the sense that the music is mostly pretty good but the use of narrative is non-standard. I am also listening to a Luther Vandross retrospective. There is a good comparison in terms of the way the two artists use digital synths in a soul/RnB context - also related to the approach that Miles evolved during his last phase - and of course Miles was keen to work with Prince. The sophistication of the LV crew in their approach to the beat is under-estimated. As I may have mentioned the BBC2 soul programme tended to dismiss 80s soul for being light. It isn�t light compared for example with late Philly soul because part of the palette that appealed to 80s producers was the beefiness of electro percussion - but neither is it the same as hip-hop - with a strong emphasis on one and two. Indeed the artist that has most similarity to hip-hop grooves is Prince. In the hands of LV the rhythm becomes very closely tied in to the dramatic narrative of the song - furthermore complex harmonies - ninths and elevenths are distributed across instrumental fragments - some virtual and some real. Its good stuff - and you also need to realise that the producers had probably been listening to early Detroit techno. When I first started working with sequencers I was using 8 bit samples and many of them came from the instruments on these recordings . At that time one tended to programme each drum in a drum pattern and for that reason I am very sympathetic to the way the groove is broken up in some 80s soul. As I see it now Marcus Miller was my big influence at that point. In the Wayne Shorter interview there isn�t much about Trane (which there could be - it would be good to know more about the conversations about philosophy in the early 60s).
This is a really interesting point of view given that WS is acclaimed as a jazz-composer - and it was also the feeling I got from D Graham on Friday. The Pheasant band I was in in the 70s never rehearsed - well we did once - but that was it. We could get away with it because we played various evenings in a pub in Drury Lane and we were kind of neo-classical in that we did bebop and Broadway standards. I used to think we were marginal - but nowadays my view is shifting. For example Miss Mitchell said that she thought that Herbie Hancock didn�t take her 100% seriously until she did an album of standards. So just getting the standards down is no bad thing - either from the point of view of knowing song construction or knowing improvisation. Did a bit of video sketching taking a sequence taking stills from it , processing both the stills and the movie and blending them. Also took some stills and worked on them in the photo editor. In the editor my style involves rectangles , colour inversion and passages of seriality. I think of it as a bit like Flavin and the neon tubes - also some crude spray can as a gesture to Basquiat. There has to be transgression of course - we have Detroit Mike Kelley to be grateful to for that. Ren mailed from LAX en route to NYC with more about Pasolini and Kafka. He has specialized in early Pasolini - up to St Matthews Passion which is the one I know best from that period. When we were students we watched Oedipus Rex and Theorem which are a bit later. He also knows something of Kafka/Milena - but he is just moving into ND. This is a really interesting platform to work on.
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