I’ve written many words about my fondness for the original Penguin Café Orchestra and its proprietor, Simon Jeffes, and you might have already read my review of the recent concert by the revived, rebooted, Penguin Café helmed by son-of-Jeffes, Arthur. Well now there’s an album of new material written by Arthur Jeffes featuring this new configuration of musicians.
It’s a hard job to fill anyone’s footsteps, probably even harder to fill your father’s footsteps but “A Matter of Life..” is brave attempt at resurrecting his musical heritage. Before you even listen to the CD you have to commend his strength of character for even attempting such a feat. I mean, what if the record is a stinker? What if it is just a piss-poor shadow of the original Penguin Café music?
Thankfully, the answer to those questions is a resounding “No!”. There are some classic moments on the record where you forget that this is Jeffes Jr work and you kid yourself that the PCO are back in town, the opening track “That, Not That” and “Landau” are examples of the music just spiriting you away to the good old days and a are worth the price of admission alone.
And while it is a brave record, you can sense that there is a lot of nostalgia here, the tunes are looking back and not looking forward. A lot of the musical cues and ticks and styles are borrowed wholesale from Jeffes Snr (the “Fox and the Leopard”, for example). Is this a bad thing? Yes, if you are looking for a work of startling genius. No, if you accept the record and the project for what it is: remembering and reviving.
I must admit I’ve never experienced music or a record like this before. It feels right as a continuation, but the snickering cynic at the back of my mind asks: “Is this music genuine – does it come from a genuine place?” I don’t want to even try and answer that because I have already accepted the record and I can’t imagine my own children being remotely interested in the music I make, let alone setting out on a path to recreate it.
The bottom line is that if you are a Penguin Café Orchestra fan and you want the closest thing to bringing the band back from the dead and experiencing a new PCO album, then this is it. My only criticism is some of the later tracks feel a little underdeveloped and meandering, but the original band were guilty of this trait sometimes too.
It truly is a remarkable piece of work and my admiration for Arthur Jeffes continues. I look forward to seeing the band again in May.
This is a little track I recorded on the 14 July 2009 – I must have done this back in The Shed – and I thought I’d test out the new media player in WordPress with it today.
The interesting thing about this track is that it is a live performance of myself on the bass guitar playing through the Boss RC-50 looper. I am also using the Boss SL-20 slicer pedal to add that weird rhythmic slant to proceedings and then I am soloing over the top.
The overall vibe of the track gave it a title this afternoon and that’s it really. A little unformed sketch that was never used…
After the recent weeks of comment spam and weird traffic to this site originating from Chinese IP addresses, I’ve finally decided to dump Movable Type as my content management system and move to WordPress. I’m hoping that removing CGI scripts from my site and relying on PHP instead will mean that the attacks on my site will stop and the spamming will be diminished. It appears that WordPress as better anti-spam support than Movable Type and so it will be interesting to see what happens next.
Of course, I’ve not quite finished this project yet – it is an ongoing work – so expect bits to drop off, wither and die over the coming days. I am hoping that this will encourage me to make more postings.
I have been using Roland guitar synths since 1994, starting with the now legendary GR-1 and working my way through to the most recent GR-33 version. Being a tech fanatic, it is no surprise that every time Roland releases a new shiny box, my pulse races and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. When the announcement of the new GR-55 guitar synthesiser was made at the 2011 Winter NAMM, the news was equally, if not more, exciting.
This time around Roland was marketing the GR-55 as a kit-killer, a one box solution that would do away with the GR-33, the VG-99 guitar modeller and any other stomp boxes you might employ. The promotional videos near enough spelt this out in huge flaming letters four hundred feet high. So, the GR-55 had a lot of hype to live up to but this didn’t stop me pre-ordering my unit.
I’ve had my GR-55 for a couple of weeks now and I thought it was time I posted some thoughts on it. First off, I must commend Roland for returning to a metal chassis when building their effects units. The VG-8 and VG-88 both sported metal cases and looked like Stealth bombers and this gave the units a sturdiness that was comforting. Other units such as the GR-33 or the VG-99 have relied on lighter, less solid plastic constructions, so it was nice to see that the big blue GR-55 was rock solid. It instantly makes you think you’ve bought a quality piece of kit. The buttons are solid, the footpedal exudes quality and there’s a nice big rotational control knob flanked by press buttons to act as your main navigational tool.
This is my Roland GR-55 guitar synthesiser
The display is lovely and large and is a refreshing change to other guitar synths I’ve had which often have relied on double line LCD displays which tire your eyes really quickly. The GR-55’s display takes a page from the VG-99 and writes its messages to you in large friendly letters. The editing and patch access takes getting used, relying on lots of flicking through the “Page” buttons to access features and it can be a bit overwhelming remember where patch functions are. But I am sure with some more practice this will come second nature to me.
But what about the tracking? Yes, the most important quality of a guitar synth is how well it tracks on your guitar and I can say, hand on heart, that the GR-55 is the best guitar synth for tracking I’ve ever owned. With minimum setup, even my nylon string Godin Multiac ACS was triggering sounds very accurately. The sounds themselves are very high quality and in my opinion, superior to the GR-33 and hark back to the top end synth sounds of the GR-1. Of course, some of the patches are near useless and will need tweaking, but I was very impressed with the pianos and the wind instruments. The flute patch itself is very expressive and sounds utterly convincing.
The unit also features a USB stick reader so it can be used to playback WAV files – making ideal for solo performers to pack backing tracks with them – and there’s a 20-second looper on board too. The looper itself is good fun allowing you to capture ideas and to overdub on the top of the original loop ad infinitum, but compared to one of the RC units put out by Boss (Roland’s dedicated guitar business) it feels quite limited. However, it is an extra value feature you get with the unit and should be considered in those terms.
Connectivity involves a USB connection to a computer allowing you to backup any patches, but I don’t think that there’s a dedicated patch editor for the GR-55 yet. This would be a great tool to have, especially if you have trouble editing on the GR-55 unit itself.
But the big question thrown up by the GR-55, or more specifically by Roland’s original promotional material, is whether you can throw away all your other effects units if you buy a GR-55? Well, you can certainly sell your GR-33 on eBay because this is the superior item on every level. But if you use a VG-99 for recording, then you might want to consider holding on to it because some of the COSM guitar modelling sounds OK, but nowhere near as rounded as the VG-99. Of course, hearing is subjective and you might think them acceptable. I can see the GR-55 being used by gigging players to replace racks of equipment as I think the pedal would be great in a live situation.
Overall, the GR-55 is a jump forward in the technology and a welcome addition to my sonic armoury. If you are considering purchasing one of these units then you I believe you won’t be disappointed. If you are looking for a cheaper option or your first foray into guitar synths, then check out eBay for all those GR-33s and GR-20s that are being offloaded by new GR-55 owners!
And here are three videos I’ve made to demonstrate the GR-55. I used my Godin Multiac ACS nylon string guitar to show how well the GR-55 tracks.
Roland GR-55 Piano Patch Demonstration
Roland GR-55 Flute Patch Demonstration
Roland GR-55 Patch Compilation
And here comes the self-publicity bit where I foolishly try to convince you to buy some of my music, much of it recorded using guitar synthesisers, funnily enough:
Well I must have pissed someone off out there…
Not sure who I have annoyed, but it seems that from what I can gather my poor humble blog is being spambombed by miscreants unknown whose IP addresses are registered to China.
It started last month with some weird traffic, then there were the numerous spam comment messages to my blog. I installed a “call and response” code to my comment section but this seemed to accelerate the problem. Today, I got a message from my host telling me that the code on my website – the bit that handles the comments – was accessed so many times that it caused their server to crash, disrupting all the customer accounts being co-hosted on that server.
Looking at the logs, whoever these people are shifting gigabytes of data from my site and generally fucking things up for me. So far, the comments.cgi page has been accessed 130739 times these last eleven days and my archive pages have been accessed over 4000 times each. This is a massive spike in traffic.
Who knows? Maybe I am a big hit in China and my fans are clamouring for my songs? I doubt it. This is an all out attack and it looks like I might have to take this site down.
I am not being melodramatic. I am worried that my host will pull the plug on me if my site is that disruptive to their business. I am also worried that this excessive use of bandwidth might be charged for despite me being on an unlimited hosting account.
So if my website suddenly disappears, you know why. I’ve been hounded out of existence and there’s bugger all I can do about it.
I must admit I am feeling a bit sad because I’ve had a website on this domain for over a decade now (in various forms) and now it looks like it is coming to an end and there’s nothing I can do about it.
I was going through some old photos on my computer this afternoon as I was searching for a picture of a guitar I am selling on eBay at the moment and I came across this photograph.
This is the shed where I lived for nine months. OK, I didn’t actually live in it, but I spent a lot of time there: running the Lock business empire from it, printing up newspaper round sheets, doing my VAT returns and compiling my business accounts. It was freezing in the winter and like a sweatlodge in the summer.
I recorded over half of my “EchoNET” album in there and mixed the record in the shed too.
I really miss that shed…
One of the things I was expecting having kids was being able to field their difficult questions and now, it seems, that little Verity is at that age where the most innocuous probing can put you into a tricky position.
“Why has that man got a different coloured face?”
“Why has Ceri from CBeebies only got one arm?”
“Where is your daddy, Dad?”
The first two I was prepared for and one elucidates about the differences there are between all of us but at our core of humanity we are all the same. I could go on and blow her mind about every living creature on earth being related and every single man-jack of us sharing a common ancestor from the trees to the tapeworm to the blue whale, but I held back on that little doozie.
The last question, I skirted around. I dodged it. Quick answer, keep it brief, keep it short, keep it closed, so there’s no room for any further questioning.
“I don’t know, darling,” I reply, “He left a long time ago, when I was little.”
I was expecting more questions but she looked at me with an understanding look and repeated what I’d said about him leaving a long time ago. She asked again the following day and I repeated my answer. I suspect that I will be probed further and I’ll have to give more details for Verity likes to know the truth. It would be much easier to just lie, no? I could say he fell under the drum of a steamroller or he ran away to join a troupe of Romanian tumblers with the circus, but if I did that Verity would only ask more questions and dig deeper and the truth about lying is that to tell a lie, you often have to tell another and another.
Of course, there might one or two readers out there who stumble across this entry and want to throw their coffee cup at the screen. I am just reporting my life and what happens. This is not passing judgement on anyone, this is real life. What’s passed has passed. But, for every action we make there are consequences, every thing we do has ongoing repercussions down the line.
If you click any Amazon or Adsense link featured on this website, I will earn a shiny silver micro-penny. (I’m just doing this to make sure that I’m abiding by FTC law in the US, which has zero bearing in the UK)
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