One of the staples of my childhood was watching “The Benny Hill Show” on ITV and if you aren’t familiar with that particular show, it always ended in a Keystone Cops-style chase with Benny being pursued by various characters to the inimitable saxophone track. Well the player and composer of that song was a musician called Boots Randolph and he died this week after slipping into a coma. When he was alive, he said that not many people could play his tune and that he was proud that it was his trademark. Well, for some of us it was a cultural watermark and there’s always a wry smile whenever I hear that piece of music.
And here’s evidence that this song can make just about anything funny…
Category: Diary
So I have made a concerted effort to do some more recording. I’ve been slacking off lately, preferring to play silly games on the Xbox 360, but with some new drum loops at the ready I’m going to produce some more mediocre musical musings. The first one up is a bit of a cut and shut job. It’s working title is “Balls” because I think it sounds like a load of old sphericals. It’s a work in progress, so I am not sure exactly how it will end up. Anyhoo, get your lugholes around this old noise:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Oh, and happy 9th wedding anniversery to The Missus who will probably read this entry tomorrow. You are almost the size of a small whale, but I love you and our child that you carry with such aplomb. What an adventure, eh?
I am a bit of a stats whore and every month I look on in glee to see how much data I’ve shifted off this site over the past thirty or so days. For the month of June, I managed to put out there over 83Gb of data, mainly video and music files, of course. 83Gb! Wowser, that’s a lot of data and a personal best for the site.
This is clever. It is a website that allows you to search for music and plays it back in a seperate Flash player, allowing you to search some more. You can even embed playlists created by searches you’ve made and here’s the one I’ve done for a couple of the MP3s hosted on this site.
SeeqPod Music beta – Playable Search
The really great thing about the World Wide Web is that most viewers/listeners are very generous with their praise. The ambient/looping/soundscaping stuff I do with my guitar gets a lot of good responses from surfers and this is one of the reasons I have continued with it, despite my own reservations that I’ve done all I can do with this type of music.
Now I got turned onto looping via a couple of albums/artists. The most important and often-underlooked is Terry Riley and I remember buying his “Rainbow in Curved Air” album on a whim after discovering a portion of it was used as background music for the “Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy” original radio series. When I heard the CD way back in the late 1980s, it was one of those “blow the top of your head off moments” and I found this kind of music very contemplatative and ideal for my sleep problems (and I don’t mean that as an insult, this kind of music relaxes my mind to sleep). Then after that I naturally explored the Fripp & Eno looping experiments. Getting to Fripp via Peter Gabriel and King Crimson, the “Evening Star” CD is still an album that continues to entrance me. I’m not a particular fan of “No Pussyfooting”, the previous looping album the duo produced, it’s too dense and hard to digest for these ears. However, “Evening Star” has an opening suite of tracks that just work for me and are quite tuneful for a looping experiment. Since has led me onto Robert Fripp’s later audio concrete experiments “Frippertronics” and latterly the Soundscapes series of recordings.
So what is this music? Well in the case of Robert Fripp and his Frippertronics system, he used to use two tape recorders to put down loops from his guitar and then he’d solo over the top. The way the tape recorders were connected meant that the loops would degrade over time and so they’d naturally evolve and distort and disappear, being replaced by new loops recorded on the fly. Think of it as an echo but an echo that repeats for a couple of minutes before disappear: it has that quality. This two-tape system was later replaced by Eventide units which replicated the process digitally and with the addition of guitar synthesisers, his palette of sounds has been expanded somewhat.
The way I approach soundscaping is a little different as I don’t have access to the same equipment as Fripp, but I am using a Boss RC-50 Loop Station that allows me to do similar things, but it does have its limitations. The great thing about this kind of music is that there’s two basic strategies to adopt: you can either improvise or start with an existing idea and improvise over that. I tend to just make it up as I go along. The trick with this kind of music is learning how to react to it because essentially you are soloing against yourself and sometimes if you’ve three loops all bouncing off each other it can be easy to lose track of yourself. It’s the easiest kind of music and also the most difficult to produce too. Too little detail and you have a drone, too much and the it turns into dense noise. It’s a carefully prepared sound soup.
Anyway, this was just a long pre-amble to my latest spurt of soundscaping. I’ve gone back to basics and I’m just making up using a short delay and a single repeat. I like this one because it is simplistic but the deeper tones reverberate within me. Here it is:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Oooh look a new site is selling my music and here’s a little widget that gives you a 30-sec snippet of each track as a promo. Clever, innit?
Yesterday, the MediaGuardian website posted yet another sniffy dissection of popular culture of year’s gone past. This time around it was Lucy Mangan’s turn to have one of thost post-modern pops at Bergerac, the extraordinarily popular cop shows from the 80s starring perma-tanned John Nettles (a real leathery tan, none of that spray-on or sunbed orange crap you see these days). Now I have to post a defence of Bergerac because it was always a highlight of Saturday evening TV for me, not only because I once had the chance to see a fight scene being filmed in 1982 but because Jersey was a frequent holiday destination for me as a kid. While my childhood wasn’t as rosey some others, I never went without and was always lucky to be taken away on my hols by my grandparents and a fortnight away in Jersey every year was bliss for me. In fact, me and The Missus spent a week there at the beginning of June for the first time in about eight years. I like Jersey because it is quiet, the food and weather is great and I can sit on a beach and not be bothered by anyone at all. It’s a hermit’s paradise. 🙂
The Missus poses with Bergerac’s Car [6 June 2007]
Bergerac used to be a big TV advert for the island, so much so that during the 80s and up to the mid-1990s, it was John Nettles face that used to greet you in the airport as you arrived via a giant billboard. Very kitsch, but welcoming like fresh sheets or a comfortable pair of trainers that have holes in the soles and you can’t bear to throw away. Now my recollection of the TV show at the time was that it was never taken seriously. For example, Jersey isn’t a hotbed of crime – when we was away the most serious news item in the local rag was about a car being scratched by a vandal – and you could always trace the criminals back to dear old Charlie Hungerford. I remember that we used to have a laugh at it back then as it wasn’t a show that took itself too seriously – I mean, the island of Jersey is so small you couldn’t even have a proper car chase as its about 25 miles in length! It was more about escapism and comes from a more gentle era of TV viewing. I mean it was superseded by Lovejoy, Heartbeat and to some extent Stephen Fry’s Kingdom. It’s more about a good yarn with no surprises that everyone can watch, I think and I reckon that all those TV shows I mention will soon be sneered at by the Guardian word manglers. Again, it’s another easy target to take a pop at but people forget how popular these shows were. But the passage of time gives you the ability to take the piss out of just about anything. Luckily, with shows like Doctor Who and the aforementioned Kingdom pulling in the punters, it looks like a return to those halcyon days of “family viewing” might be on the cards.
Mind you, when me and The Missus took our first holiday to the island back in the late 1980s, her mother earnestly said to her: “You be careful out there with all that crime. I’ve seen Bergerac, you know.” How we laughed.
And here’s the opening titles for you to get all nostalgic about. Note that the theme tune’s bass line is a rip-off of The Police song “Walking on the Moon”. 🙂