Her Vanished Heart

As I continue archiving old cassettes of original music I have found some that had no cover designed at the time (early 1980's) and so my soul-mate and muse Rachel has cunningly fashioned some new art for the pieces with a sort of 80's retro-look to them.
The music - in all its hissy, lo-fi glory - itself can be found here - it's all free to download.

Russian Woodpecker

Many years ago my uncle - a keen Radio Amateur (and how that title seems so strange and silly) - would complain about what he called "the Russian Woodpecker". I was young and did not fully understand what he meant, imagining a very real, feathered woodpecker somewhere deep in the tundra pecking at a radio transmitter that somehow interfered with Radio Hams all over the world. I came across the term recently and have produced a ten minute instrumental track using some samples of the dreaded 'pecker.

You can read about the real Russian Woodpecker on wikipedia here.

You can listen - and download for free - my music here.

As always, love to Rachel for the cover art.

Greek Siren

I was trying hard not to comment on this because in a way, it's exactly up my street. It concerns perceptions of what a 'writer' is nowadays, as well as what constitutes an 'author'. Certainly under any normal criteria Jacqueline Howett would not be considered an author. Clearly struggling to write in the English language her tragi-comic attempts at poetry and novel-writing are so awful they defy satirising. Her self-penned blurb for her latest novel should tell you everything you need to know:

"What is an eighteen year old newly wed doing traveling on a massive merchant ship anyways? Hadn’t she gone to Greece on tour in a ballet as a dancer? These are questions Katy asks herself while traveling the high seas with Don, her chief officer. However, little do they know, a smuggling ring is also on board for this ride, on a blue diamond exchange. When explosions and threats to sink the ship also happen, they must try to save themselves."

No, what's really interesting is how a mildly critical review (I would say too uncritical, frankly) on an obscure blog has attracted scores of other self-published 'authors' to add interminable hooting dissent to Ms Howett's original - and clearly hysterical - comments. They are all too quick to condemn Howett's increasingly disjointed responses whilst at the same time clearly enjoying the company of fellow 'authors'. It was as if they had arrived at the scene of this literary accident and had been pleasantly surprised to see all their peers there, so then stood around nodding and agreeing with each other as the wreckage still smouldered.

But the truth is stranger. Hardly any of the commentators joining in the melee are true published authors themselves, and a fair amount of their vitriol seems aimed at Howett showing them up as the amateurs they so obviously are. Grammar and spelling went out of the window in this parade of people who felt they had at last found someone so bad they could safely sneer from the sidelines, knowing that however unsuccessful and unrecognized they were, here at last was someone who was worse off. And in case Howett didn't realise this they spelt it out for her in no uncertain terms: the fact she would be 'blacklisted' by publishers world-wide, and would be forced to write under a pen-name from now on. One went so far as to say Howett had damaged the reputation of 'self-publishers' everywhere.

But of course, ironically, the more they did this, the more they tweeted about Howett, the more of these self-appointed literary critics and self-published authors came out of the woodwork. Big Al's page became a magnet for the unsung tens of thousands of people who think they can write or who think that their opinion on literary matters matters.

And it didn't rest there. If you google 'Jacqueline Howett' now you will discover that numerous lit-bloggers have blogged about her. This is because it helps reinforce the illusion that these lit-blogs actually matter in the real literary world. Ironically you will also discover that if you google 'Jacqueline Howlett', 'Jaqueline Howett' or variations thereof more and different lit-blogs will appear - the ones written by people who have not checked the spelling of her name.

So in a way Howett has done everyone who inhabits the mediocre world of self-published 'authors' a favour. She has become the watermark against which they can measure themselves. It's only that the level is so extraordinarily low that pretty much everyone else in that world can now feel they are extremely talented.

Falkland

Since I was contacted by a prospective record label about releasing some of my old work I have dug out a number of cassettes from this period and am now busily transferring them and scanning in old cassette covers...



In the summer of 1982 I became a politically engaged artist for the first time. The Royal fleet had just returned from the South Atlantic and my friend had bought a Roland Juno 6 synthesizer. I borrowed the Juno as much as I could - it being the summer holidays my friend and I saw each other most days so it was convenient some of the time to leave it at my house. The track 'Falkland' includes 'found sound' in the form of tv news broadcasts of the war and conceptually it is in the key of F (for Falkland) and feels quite sad and lonely - the three week voyage from Portsmouth to the Falklands - with an upbeat bit at the end provided by my Casio VL Tone. You can hear or download the track here.

Affluenza

Dr. Oliver James ground-breaking polemic against what he calls the Affluenza Plague was first published in 2008 and I have read it several times. Its central conviction is that everyone is too rich nowadays and only want to increase their own richness. This Affluenza Disease is sweeping the planet and James sacrificed the precious first eighteen months of life of his own child to investigate societies all over the world, all of which only reinforced what he had already concluded: That rich people just want to be richer, and everyone wants to be a rich.

This profound argument prompted me to write a conceptual piece of music as a celebration of Dr James' thesis. It is in three movements:

The First Movement suggests the decadent, lazy way in which most people saunter their way through life. Aimless yet automatic. Radio announcements about the coming plague are heard in different languages.

The Second Movement is redolent of a malaise where even rich and successful people get extremely depressed. I chose to set this piece in a busy ambient environment to highlight the loneliness they feel even when in a crowd.

The Third Movement should have been optimistic but I find no optimism in Dr James' book - even he himself is emotionally shattered by his over-bearing father and sees no way out of that feeling, wanting to be a successful writer and cultural commentator. Hence, heralded by an announcement (in English) of the coming of the plague, the Third Movement is lead by a dark sequencer. Some of Dr James' conclusions can be heard: "Danish girls never wear short skirts, Russian girls are always beautiful..." The piece attempts to show the money running out - indicated by the instruments disappearing one by one until we are left with a drum box and some simple gamelan percussion... the simple life is the only one that can save humanity, and it is to the Far East that we should look.

The piece can be heard on my bandcamp site here.

The cover was created by the irresistible Rachel Laine after the iconic picture on the original cover of Dr James' book.