Drongomala

Death of a friend

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:07:25 PDT

I feel compelled to write a little eulogy for my friend who committed suicide - he was found dead on some train tracks in Bangalore a few days ago.

I could hardly believe the mail when I read it but in truth I wasn’t surprised as over the past few years he had went from not being contactable to sending distressing mails to his whole address book. These mails talked of accounting for sins and the mistakes he had made in this life. After some digging I found out that he was on psychosis medication and he had moved back from the UK to India where he was living with his parents.

I first met him in the UK when we were working together on tech projects. He was from Kerala and we soon became friends as a result of our common love of South Indian Carnatic classical music. He was a Brahmin and had clearly been well educated. I remember him telling me how he used to enter quizzes in order to get money for university. He said he was a ‘professional quiz competitor’ and he did well due to his photographic memory. He was erudite on tonnes of topics, unafraid of controversial statements and awkward situations and to top it off he was really funny with it. His grasp of English was better than most English native speakers. He used to tell me I was prone to hyperbole ;)

He hooked me up with a number of musicians in the UK and I recorded a light classical/folk album for him with some leading lights in the UK scene. We did it in his friends living room and it was a great experience. I really must release it.

When I mentioned that I was looking to go out to India to do some music for a few years it was him who advised me to “go to Kerala as it will be safer for you – you won’t be ripped off or hassled as much” He was right. He even helped me with connections in customs in order to be able to take a tonne of music equipment into the country. He opened up his friends in Kerala to me and was very generous indeed.

The last time I physically saw him was when he visited my place in Manchester. He was clutching a book on Symbols and we hung out in the garden under the night sky talking about the stars and life. He told me about how he was sad that the arranged marriage he was due to be involved in fell through. He discussed how difficult it had been living in the UK and that would return to India. He forgot his book of Symbols the next morning and it’s on my bookshelf today.

Near the end he had became obsessed with a variety of cults and suspect philosophies. He was lost to nearly all. I miss him.

RIP

Michael Jackson Is Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:46:29 PDT

I thought he was great and wondrous and it's a shame to see him go but it's for the best.

He was mawkish in extremis at the end.

All the newspapers announcing his death are running the reanimated mummy look he had over these past 10 or so years. It was a cardiac arrest that killed him.

The period I feel in love with Michael Jackson and his music was Off The Wall. I found it on a copied cassette tape in the street and played it over and over. I even bought the songbook to practise the songs on keyboard.

He was utterly funky, wild and sensual then.

His voice was as raw as James Brown when he was 10 or 11. He could wail like no one and his falsetto stretched into the heavens. Girls loved Off The Wall in the way they love Stevie Wonder records.

Poor Mikey - he was a sauvant of a gospel-like spirit. He was as innocent as he seemed.

As the White Crane Flies

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:49:42 PDT

12000 miles’ debut album As the White Crane Flies is out now. You can buy it from the Flying Mountain shop for now - it will be on iTunes and other places soon.

12000 miles is the silicone egg brainchild of Boofa and myself. After meeting online in 2005 we decided to work on a project together and 12000 miles was born.

12000 miles is the distance between drongomala (Manchester, UK) and Boofa (Wellington, Aotearoa).

AS THE WHITE CRANE FLIES is three years of bouncing ﬁles through cyberspace, winters and summers.

12000 Miles have played ‘in analogue’ once in Manchester in 2007. Also guesting is the stellar flutist Iain Dixon of Manchester.

The Story...
Drongomala and Boofa met by chance on myspace in 2005 - they stumbled on each other’s music and dug what they heard. Drongomala was already 4 albums and six bands into his experimental musical path and Boofa was just finding his footing making simple yet provocative down beat electro. There was a natural alchemical connection that both D and B felt, they decided to work on a track together which soon turned into an idea for an album.

Keeping the demo files ‘low weight’ in the beginning allowed the pair to bounce whole suites of changes back and forth across the net. As the tracks developed then so did the size of the audio and midi files and eventually the pair moved from using Reason and a common-soundbank to Ableton Live and audio.

“We really challenged each other sonically and ended up with something that we could never have made alone. The overall sound is something that we came to by experimenting and doing things that we weren’t doing on our solo stuff. By exchanging files over the net, each session was open to the other completely ripping the material apart, so in a Buddhist styley we couldn’t become to attached to any material or ideas, just two takes each of sonic experimentation” Boofa.

The file exchange cycle became longer and the pair survived a band splitting up, 2 breakins, released three other records between them, started a t-shirt company and a degree in music, moved house 4 times and much else but they still managed to ‘tag’ one another over the two years with the developing demos. Boofa flew to his home town of London to see friends and family and made the trip up to Manchester where Drongomala and Boofa spent 6 short days working their 20 or so demos into a manageable live set for the 5th day in Manchester at the alternative Glastonbury event put on in Manchester’s Green room.

The set was raw and well received and the real life collaboration cemented the original connection that the pair made. After Boofa left the UK back to Wellington NZ the guys got to honing the material for an album, but what started off as an idea of 6 months max for a finished album turned into two years.

Drongomala got the auteur wind player Iain Dixon to come in and play flute over the material to cement the feeling of air and wings in the album. This was the second record that Drongomala has done with him and he says of Iain:

“I can’t rate him highly enough - he’s a master wind player. He is Macbeth and Puck in the same breath and regularly only needs to gentlest of nods to click into constant motion. I say ‘Cranes attacking Pygmies on the beach’ and that’s what comes out of the horn/flute/clarinet. A proper conjurer like a musician should be. Iain also turned down a Van Morrison tour just before he recorded with us which is a fun detail” Drongomala.

D & B then reworked the original material remotely - the music melted together and produced an expansive sonic landscape. The crane mojo was at work.

The album is quite different to anything that’s out there at the moment. It’s dynamics are almost operatic with some tracks sounding like a dropped pylon cable in a timpani section while others are gentle and conciliatory. As an album it is more than the sum of it’s parts - the spell doesn’t seem to break.

Don't take our word for it - listen now !

As The White Crane Flies by 12000 Miles

Bill Drummond and The17 - Northampton Fish Market

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 02:45:15 PDT

On Saturday I took part in a performance in Northampton, England of the17 organised by Bill Drummond. It began in the Northampton Fish Market Gallery.

Bill Drummond is an art agitator in the UK that has been involved in a number of psychologically challenging projects (burning a million quid, taking an effigy of Elvis to the north Pole) and has a musical history that began with his management of Echo and the Bunnymen which he then left to form his own band - The KLF. Check out more about Bill here. His main output appears to be writing now but one of his ongoing music projects is a 'post nuclear' choir where Bill imagines that all music has dissapeared and we begin again from year zero.

What is The 17?

Bill has some simple manifesto posters that he uses to explain it - I don't need to paraphrase

Having read Bills book about this project it prompted me to check out this event which was only an hours drive from where we were. As ever, leaving the house with my girlfriend can sometimes take longer than preferred and we left ourselves with 20 mins to get to Northampton fish market to register. Only the 1st one hundred people were to be allowed to register and take part. We broke the speed limit and got there to discover that the Northampton Fishmarket Gallery wasn't so busy and we were numbers 7+8 on the registration form. My agitation at missing out dissipated but my girlfriends agitation at my agitation took a little longer to leave.

The gallery was big and open. We had some nibbles, a cider and waited. I bought a nice artwork made by cutting out paper. It showed a sad man with his feet dangling over a hole and at the bottom of this hole in the forest there was a red heart. All cut out of paper on yellow, black and one splash of red. We watched the mechanical pigeon on the rafters drop out it's fake poo periodically and people slowly assembled.

Awards for top three outfits
1. The lady with a Vivienne Westwood stylings replete with bright red '17 t-shirt' and red hair.
2. The denim jacket with "Bring me noise!" in primal white daubs from a big brush
3. The chique Nouvelle Vague t-shirt. I bought their record recently after trying on a tweed suit in Scotland and in some ways this was the most punk thing to wear to such an event. Nouvelle Vague are a band that 'do' classic songs from dark 80's rock bands like Echo and the Bunneymen and further, do it in a latin lounge style with a succession of singers that never jump out but merely smoulder in the background. It's a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. It's the ultimate anti-the17 statement here.

The Surround Score
My girlfriend and me were taking part in a score called 'Surround'. The full version of SURROUND will be performed in Beijing, China in August 2009 - we were at the English trial-run.

Rather than use notation for scores Bill uses the everyman approach of plain text to describe how the choir should perform each score.

The idea in Northampton was to position 100 people around the streets of Northampton at intervals of 40-50m around a 5 kilometre circumference of a circle. Each spot was marked by a spray painted 17 logo on the pavement/wall/pole.

The score was to pass on a throaty shout descending to the note A from note C around the circle 5 times among the 100 people. The complication of having each 10th person begin the shout simultaneously and then pass it on clockwise was jettisoned when the logistical difficulty of having them notified at the same time became tricky. I guess that would need either a firework or 10 mobile phones calling another 10 mobiles of every 10th participant.

Quickly it was opted to have it begin with one person who would get a phone call to start.

We got Bills inspiring intro to the concept and the piece Surround and he got us all to practise the 'Hey Ho' shout so we were confident. It had to be loud as not everyone had line of sight with one another. My girlfriend was relieved she didn't have to sing 'professionally' or know what the note of C was but I was a bit disappointed that the only post-music expression I could input would be the volume or character of my shout. Other scores have called for chanting, free utterances or meditation on skylarks ascending. No matter.

100+ of us trooped out of the fishmarket following Bill.

Each person was dropped off at their point. I wangled to get us dropped off early as I needed a pee and spotted an early 17 in spray paint outside a working mans club. A photographer took shots of everyones foot next to their spray painted 17 but mine was on a wall and I was full of pee so they had to take one of my face for safety. Being dropped off early meant there was time to kill until the other 85 people had trooped the 5km and been dropped off. We hung about and got to know our new neighbours dotted behind and in front of us. Ten minutes later the bloke near me decided to abandon his post as he needed to get his bus. This was a bit of frustration as the magic line and number had been broken. Bill was obsessive about there being exactly 100 otherwise it 'wouldn't work'. I spoke to our line and said to ask passers by.

This stand-in job is a difficult sell to someone in 2 mins and I got a variety of responses including

I'll do it if your girlfriend up the road there gives me head (from someone on the way to see their girlfriend)
I'll do it - I'm just away home to get my Elvis costume
How much will I get paid?

One of the girls two numbers up the line managed to call a friend and get her down. She would be here in 10 minutes.

Passers by in cars were hooting and noticing the pattern of people on the street. It was fun in the build up.

The replacement member of the 17 choir arrived 4 seconds before we had to do our thing. Destiny called out and we were not found wanting.

We all shouted 'hey ho' five times to one another and passed our energy around the circle. Shout number 3 seemed to be far too quick after shout number 2 and I susepct that a mis-fire happened somewhere along the line.

We trooped back to the Fishmarket Gallery to get our photo taken - drunkards from the pub were shooed out of the shot which would be only of the 100 with the photo being displayed on the wall of the gallery. I'm the one with the coffee cup and glasses.

Thoughts on my 'the17'

I love the concept but not the one I was in. The realisation of the score didn't touch on the new concepts of music I was hoping it would. I wanted a less mechanised shout and something that could evolve further and go deeper.
The 'piece' was too short. Short burst versions of the17 (i.e. less than 3-4 minutes) don't prompt the participants to reveal more of themselves to one another. This score didn't require anything other than good natured but ultimately distant participation.
The group camaraderie was fun - there are definitely not enough reasons for small dynamic groups to bond and have a connection - this project has this shared experience at its core
For most of the other Scores Bill did an audio recording of the event and then played it back at the end. Importantly, for Bill, the recordings were always deleted when the participants had heard it only once - the only remnant being in memories or Bills book notes. For events that didn't take place in the same temporal timeframe (i.e. recording 4 different schools on four different days) he collated and layered them on top of one another for playback and subsequent deletion. I would have liked to have seen an attempt to record our piece - it could have been done on a) our mobile phones b) an omni directional from a silent helicopter or kite;) or c) from 5 or 6 strategically positioned mics. I miss the ceremony of playback and deletion that the book pimped.

At the end of the piece I said a quick Hello to Bill and told him I'd mail him about Electroraga.

Check out the17.org, take part, challenge your thoughts about music.

"Bill Drummonds fundamentalism is the roar of the universe - lang may his lum reek."

Drongomala

Online Music Collaborations (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:07:08 PDT

I'm coming to the end of a musical collaboration with my initially online and now real-life friend Boofa (from Wellington, New Zealand).

We began our collaboration '12000 Miles as the White Crane Flys' in 2005 and met via MySpace and it's only now that this record is finally at the stage where the last mix is being done - three years later!

In between I've finished three other records and it's now time to write the Part 2 of the blog on online music collaborations (see part 1 here)

Boofa and I have learned alot during the collaboration and I thought I'd share a little bit of it with you.

It seems that the collaboration we did had a few distinct phases to it :

1. Flurry of ideas : this was the beginning phase where we threw lots of files back and forth. This is easily the most 'fun' section and it's exciting to get regular musical deliveries in your inbox. We were careful not to use any proprietary software so that what we heard was the same. We used the out of the box Ableton Live software with no 3rd party plugins...just what came with the software.

2. Flesh on lots of bones : We had around 15 tracks in a very basic state and this phase was to put some more work into them. The way we approached it was to take half the tracks each and spend more time trying to develop the ideas.

3. Switch: We swapped the tracks with each other and did a little more each.

4. Agree on the tracks to jettison: we both produced a top 10 list. We only had one or two disagreements but were easily solved.

5. Hook up : Boofa came over to the UK and he stayed at my place. He arrived with a big beard and a massive neon suitcase. It was great to meet up. My band was playing and we used it as an excuse to test some of the 12000 material on a live audience. We hooked up some midi controllers and practiced performing the tracks as they were. We only had a day to prep and then perform in the night.

6. Taking the candidates to the next level : over the lifetime of the recording we discussed the concept we were looking to hang the album on - it was something to help us understand what we were doing. We came up with the idea of Cranes and both liked the metaphor of our files thrown back and forth being like some sort of migratory birds flocking between Manchester and Wellington. I had been working with Iain Dixon the legendary flute player from Manchester and it struck me that nothing would communicate birds wings on the air better than a flute. I popped round to Ians with a laptop and recorded him playing to what we had. His single takes for each track added a super useful navigational tool to lead us to the final arrangement. I did a bunch of editing and once I was demented with the sound of flute I threw the tracks over to Boofa. At this stage file sizes were beginning to swell so DVD's were used to send data.

7. Some crackhead broke into my place and nicked my laptops. This was a setback and Boofa worked on the tracks adding calm and coherence. I moved house/town a few times in between before settling and getting more recording gear.

8. The final furlong : Mix time. By far this was the most difficult phase of the project and I think this is where Boofa and me had the most disagreements. In retrospect this is understandable as mixing is often a matter of taste and the final 'render' of the tracks is something that we both had a vision on. This is the one part of the process that I think would have been better sitting next to one another - we got there but not without some blood on the tracks.

But all the time and pain dissipated - we both feel it sounds great. It was worth the 100 transfers, the fights and the frustration. It'll be available in April ;)

In Summary..

Don't be too precious - whole tracks, complete mixes, great performances are all subject to your partners opinion. Keep your eye on the prize and let some bits you care about hit the cutting floor.
Credit the collaboration equally - writing and arranging and mixing. Even if one of you did more than the other for a track or the whole thing breaking it down into who did bit 'x' will only lead to bad blood.
Have patience. Life gets in the way when you are working on a big project that is online. If you are trying to make something that is timeless then it doesn't ultimately matter how long it takes....if you are trying to make something that is 'now' then perhaps online isn't the best approach for a big project
Don't use the tracks you are working on for some other reason without consulting your collaborator

Tools Used
Here is a list of tools we used for our online music collaboration. I've listed them in the order that we used them....

Ableton DAW software - this was he workhorse of our tracks. Can't recommend highly enough. I notice that now we are finished Ableton have announced new collaboration features. Three years too late for the benefit of this project though.
www.yousendit.com - this is a great free service that allows you to exchange large files
www.skype.com -when it's all getting to be a bit too impersonal it's nice to do a video call and shoot the breeze. Keep it human.
Google Documents - we used this for track notes and developing the text for the album cover. Google docs is a great service - don't be fooled by the tag 'Beta' as it's been in use for years
www.soundcloud.com - This is a great tool and worth even a basic subscription. This online service allows you to upload tracks and exchange mixes with one another. The best feature is that you can see the waveform of the track and click anywhere to make a timed comment. This allows for simple exact commenting such as "that cymbal sounds wack"

Don't let them tell you it's all Gloom

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:01:24 PST

All is Calm?

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:52:23 PST

Dear Reader,

Hoping you are having a good December so far!?

I'd like to invite you to download, for free, my version of Silent Night.

Silent Night - mp3 version

This version of Silent Night was recorded when I was living in Kerala for 2 years recording with Carnatic musicians. When I recorded it the backdrop was the unfolding US policy as a result of 9/11 and it seems all these years later there are still problems all over the world.

Recently in Bombay there were terror attacks and there still continues to be demonisation of whole ethnic groups on all sides across the world. This track, from the album 100 Fields, was made with 2 Hindus, 2 Christians, 2 Muslims, 1 agnostic, 1 spiritualist and a Drongomala - it's easy to make music really.

The track Silent Night will be free to download from this blog post or from www.drongomala.com all through Dec 08 until 2009. A notably wonderful Veena part played by Biju is a must listen on this track.

Drongomala : vocals, acoustic guitar and arrangements.
Balu - mridangham
A.R. Biju : veena
Jon Thorne : double bass
Ian Holmes-Lewis : percussion
Sanjay/Merlin/Lenoy/Sandra/Ramesh/Sujith - choir

"NOW AVAILABLE TO BUY!" (iTunes, CDBaby, FM)
Album Title : 100 Fields

Artist : Drongomala

Catalogue : FMCDA003

Label : Flying Mountain

For more information

Visit us at: www.drongomala.com

Email : silentnight@flyingmountain.co.uk

Louis Oak Anderson - Up North in the Coalshed

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:54:52 PST

Drongomala on Louis: At a stag party up on the Scottish island of Jura a friend of mine played me some demo tracks by Louis 'Oak' Anderson that he wanted me to hear (the island of Jura was where the KLF burned a million pounds).

I liked Louis’ fragile voice and it reminded me of the tightrope romance of Tindersticks. I ended up producing this EP for him and was lucky enough to get Iain Dixon on flute. Iain's Flute runs from Macbeth to Puck and he does things like turn down touring with Van Morrison. Iain has played with artists as diverse as Joni Mitchel and Primal Scream and is a leading light in the UK jazz scene.

I sang harmony to Louis and played ‘gypsy’ percussion on pizza boxes and Oxo canisters. I produced it using old BBC ribbon microphones for that warmth and natural sound.

The first mixes were ready. This was in 2006 and then the master tapes were stolen by a skaghead in Salford, Manchester.

I've finally managed to recover the sessions and mix it a couple of years later. Louis' voice has the sound of loss, anger and tenderness. His insistent metronomic guitar pushes the music forward yet the sound remains relaxed. Louis has a car boot full of songs and these are just the ones I wanted him to record.

The songs on this EP are predominantly about people and the simple lyrics delicately capture moments in his life. Louis’ mobile phone messages to me often says he's moving into a new caravan soon and he’s always heartbroken about a girl. When he came to Manchester to meet me it was the furthest North he’d ever been.

It's was done Up North In the Coalshed
Drongomala, April 2008

Available at Gigs Now - in iTunes in May 2008'ish.

We're doing a gig this w/e in Devon to mini-launch it.

EP: Up North in the Coalshed

Artist: Louis Oak Anderson

Flying Mountain Records FMCDA005
songs written by Louis Oak Anderson
arranged and produed by Drongomala
louis website: http://www.myspce.com/louisoakanderson

louis oak anderson - voice and guitar, Ian Dixon - flute and clarinet, Drongomala - voice and percussion

genre: true folk
sounds a bit like: Incredible String Band, Nick Drake
check it: Ian Dixon has played with Primal Scream and turned down Van Morrison and is featured on another release we have coming up in the summer 2008 - 12000 Miles as the White Crane Flies

Mr Suicide

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:56:15 PST

In memory of my band The Good Hurt splitting up I searched for some iconic Greek imagery to commemorate it.

This is much better - it's Mr Suicide. Stick him in your bath tub and when you are done pull his lifeless plastic body out and watch the dirty water dissapear.

Allet.

All Together Now

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 14:44:51 PDT

A blogworthy week of music events in the lead up to the Flying Mountain Extravaganza gig on Friday 22nd June at the Green Room Manchester............with The Good Hurt as the house band.

Monday 18th June
Get a text from rapper Brother Ghazi that's he's pulling out of the show on Friday because he's seeing family in Liverpool. I texted him back the one word "sucky" - he'd known about this gig for over a month and a half - it's even on his myspace gig list. Text is a copout for a cancellation. Mail some more back and forth with Pauline from the Manchester Sing Out choir. One of the members expressed an interest in doing something with me having checked out my other music and I've tentatively suggested that they come down on Friday. The recently performed with Gorillaz when they were in Manchester. Great stuff.

Tuesday 19th June
Get a call from rapper The What Supreme saying he was pulling out of the gig on Friday. At least it was a call rather than a text however cancellations 3 days before a show really leave me icky - posters, mailouts and promo were now all wrong and the time spent by the band rehearsing a few extra pieces of music for rappers could have been spent elsewhere. This leaves no rappers for the rap portion of the Friday night's show - so that's now skratched. I make some phone calls to some of the other musicians playing on the night just to make sure they were good. The idea of the show is that The Good Hurt will invite a load of guests up to play with us. I keep calling it the alternative Glastonbury.

My e-friend Boofa (aka Beaufugg aka Generik) is coming up from London tonight. Boofa lives in NZ and we worked on a project called '12000 miles as the Crane Flies' which was an electronic music project that we had collaborated on over the internet (see my previous post on collaborative workingLINK). Boofa was coming over to the UK and he factored some time into coming and hooking up in Manchester so that we could finish the project in a face to face capacity - Wellington, NZ is 12,000 miles from North Manchester, UK which is how we arrived on the name of the project.

I check out Cranes on the internet for inspiration and the more I read the more I liked the idea of Crane lore being a visual cue for our sonics.....some crane lore and facts below that I dig from the research :

Migrating cranes fly in an echelon, a V-formation, so that birds following the leader save energy by not having to push aside the air as they fly
Apollo is said to have disguised himself as a crane when on visits to the mortal world.
Homer told of the nation of Pygmies who each Spring would wage war on the cranes on the banks of Oceanus.
Mercury is said to have been inspired to create the shapes of the Roman alphabet after watching Cranes and their body shapes.
When a flock of Cranes are sleeping they nominate one Crane to stand watch with a stone in it's talon/claw so that if it falls asleep the stone will fall and make a sound so the flock will know they are no longer protected

Boofa and me will be playing an electro set of the 12000 project on the night - it's a handy bit of pressure to get us cracking this week.

I meet him and his lime green suitcase full of gear at the Tram station in Eccles in the early evening. We quickly get down to work after a delightful home-made curry. As I had been liberated of my laptops by oiks from Salford we weren't sure which versions of the files I had for the project but luckily after a quick check on Boofa's machine things were in order and I seemed to have the latest.

I've been lucky that the people I've met from the net for music have been normal/human/semi-sane and Boofa was no exception which was a good thing. I was glad he was here.

Wednesday 20th June 2007
Boofa and me get down to some jamming during the day and Phil Reed the flute player turns up to do a session for the 12000 Project in the afternoon. For V-Formation Phil does a cool trick of playing 2 flutes at once which looks like a V shape - we dig it. The soundcard is acting like a muppet and keeps putting digital fizz and crackle on the audio so we only manage to get some chunks that aren't wrecked. Phil puts on the jam session in Chorlton known as Extraordinary Rendition. Before we know it we have to go to the soundcheck for the Circus Rock show tonight at the Mint Lounge in Oldham Street. My girlfriend hears us on the Revolution Radio 96.2 station on the way in - hooray. Between you me and t'internet it took a lot of doing to get them to play us. During the soundcheck Pauline from the Sing Out Choir calls - they are in rehearsals and want to know some details - I try and tell her over the sound of drumkits and musicians lugging gear.

Thursday 21st June
Recording and prepping for the gig tomorrow with Boofa. All day from midday to 2am. Synchronised button pressing, knob twiddling and new styles of dancing are the order of the day.

The tracks that we have are : Tsuru, Before The Stone Drops, The Wisdom of Two, Mercury Alphabet, Cranes vs. Pygmies and V-Formation.

Friday 22nd June
Glastonbury is a festival of music and double mud this year it seems - at least our alternative Glasto is sans glow sticks and rain. Tonights gig is for Universal Promotions. I always tend to do a little something special for shows via Universal Promotions because I like the guy that runs it. He called me up a month ago to do something under the banner of Flying Mountain Records to draw together some of the more disparate music I'm involved in.

Pauline told me that maybe 6 or 7 people might turn up from the choir - at around 9:30pm twenty of them turn up. The staff from the Green Room are lovely and we manage to get a little practise room recently vacated by the Flamenco dance classes and get down to working on three of the tracks for 20 minutes.

It sounds wonderful with just the voices and guitar in the sweetly reverberant room. Everyone in the room gets proper tingles and I'm stoked to hear one of my tracks get the gospel treatment. The Manchester Sing Out Choir have a really good group unity feel about them and it's infectuous. As some of the choir are younger we manage to wangle getting the three songs that they are doing shoe-horned earlier into the night. We play Good Souls, Amazing Grace (my arrangement from 100 Fields) and U Got the Love by Candi Staton. The choir do their best to fit onto the stage and it goes down a treat with the audience but the fact is that the sound was better in the rehearsal room. Ce la Vie. The band we jumped in front of to squeeze in our gospel thang are pretty peeved and a few of them stromp about onstage with their little grey clouds and teeth set to 'crunch'. I say goodbye to the choir and buy a few of them a drink....I'm feeling pretty invincible and then around 30 mins later we play a blistering 4 song set with the Good Hurt - featuring Annette Gregory and Phil on Meet U in the Middle and then the core three of us (drongomala, sinik and tree) tear through Blowin Up Tryin 2B Somebody, Leave Ur Mind Where U Want to Pick It Up and Kick This Habit Of U - we pack our normal 40 minutes of energy into 10 minutes and the crowd really dig it. Sarah Evans follows us and does a oratory piece called 'Bisexual Speed Dating' which gives us a chance to set up the 12000 Project and to enjoy her freaking the room out with a blend of character performance, saucy wordage and defiant smoking. Even though the laptop was having a mini flakeout 20 minutes ago the electronic Drum 'n' Bass tinged 12000 Project set goes down perfectly and Boofa and me are stoked that we've pulled it off.

We hang out for the rest of the night - Tree jams along with the act on after the 12000 Project and Sinik b-boys to the turntablists. The Universal crowd are good and we have alot of repeat attendees from the last gig we played at here in the Green Room.

Finish up at around 4am.

Saturday
Boofa and me take a break and we go into town to hang out for a bit - to preempt the 'cabin fever' that is creeping in. We get some food in the café underneath the Buddhist centre in the Northern Quarter and some coffee from Nero where Boofa asks the waitress to "bake me a cake" in Polish. We have a super productive day and the tracks that didn't make the selection for live performance are worked up a little.

Sunday
Final day of tweaking for the 12000 Project - this is much less fun than the writing part but smoothing out the rough edges and the structrure of the music we've been working on lets us finally sit back and enjoy some mixes. We watch a bit of the Who at Glasto as they sing and almost hurry over the line "Hope I die before I get old".

that was the week that was
drongomala

One, two, three, four
Can I have a little more?
five, six, seven eight nine ten I love you.

A, B, C, D
Can I bring my friend to tea?
E, F, G H I J I love you.

Sail the ship, Chop the tree
Skip the rope, Look at me

All together now....

Black, white, green, red
Can I take my friend to bed?
Pink, brown, yellow orange and blue I love you

All together now....

Sail the ship, Jump the tree
Skip the rope, Look at me

All together now....(the beatles)

Timing In Video - lesson 1

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Sat, 26 May 2007 16:42:30 PDT

this is an perfectly timed little piece of reality TV....well snipped

Via: Flixya

Planet of the Apes 4Brains

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:56:59 PST

Recently I undertook a one-off concert with my band The Good Hurt where we themed the visual side of the show on the movie The Planet of the Apes. By that I mean we dressed up in white boiler suits and had a French VJ (Emmanuelle) broadcast and remix the original movie onto our clothes and faces while we performed. We had a few guests that day (Brother Ghazi, The What Supreme, Annette) and luckily they all came along and wore white too. I also played acoustic guitar rather than electric to give it that final postnuclear back to the basics feel;)

The concert was held in a little cafe place called the Koffee Pot in Manchester (just off Oldham Road) with a bring your own booze policy. The event was part of the Futuresonic 2007 festival and as the festival has a big emphasis on context, technology and video it became the excuse I needed to finally 'get down' with my obsession with Planet of the Apes' or more specifically - the thread between ape and man. I only need the slightest of pushes in this direction to get momentum and have often thought about the social truisms that might have sprung up round a shared fire by 'primitives' that went later with recorded records to become species behaviours and societies. Those bonobos bang the bongos too you know.....

In the film three astronauts survive a crash landing on an earth-like planet. Their last chance of contacting home disappearing under the waves. The first and last scenes bookend the film brilliantly and both, in essence, have a very similar theme of the frailty of man and his technology. The opening showing a wonderful piece of technology, a spaceship, sinking into an ocean while the last scene shows something of a similar nature - one of the most iconic statues made by man (Venus de Milo aside) shown half buried in the sand and revealing to the astronauts that they are in fact on planet earth albeit 2000 years into the future. It's a hell of an ending. The movie was adapted by Michael wilson and Rod Seling from the novel La Planete des singes. Rod Serling is better known for his work on the TV shorts The Twilight Zone and it was his genius in adding the last scene which did not exist in the book - eventually envied by the original novelist for the weight it adds to the story. Those two scenes are very powerful and encapsulate the film in a simple arc. The rise and fall of man and the cyclic nature of technology and more primatively....dominance.

MOVIECLIP HORSEBACK MANHUNT

I love this clip of the gorillas hunting down the primitive mute humans and the accidentally stranded astronauts horribly caught up with the hunt. The use of the camera by the gorillas in the scene after the hunt is priceless too as they stand with their feet on the human spoils and laugh. It's proper chilling. The Gorillas clad in leather military outfits on horseback hunt down humans using tools such as nets and guns to a soundtrack of alarmed brass instruments and strings. 2000 years in the future and apes have domesticated the horse and replicated one of man greatest achievements, along with guns and cameras.

The 'mastering' of the horse was so fundamental in getting the really 'big wheels' of our recent globalism started. Historians and archaelogists have suggested the domestication of horses by humans first took place in the Ukraine at approximately 4000BC. The use of horses by this early Indo-European culture shows in the rapid spread of the Kurgan culture and the ease with which it dominated over Pre Indo European cultures. Communications, speed and force were all on the side of cultures who had dominated the horse. Persian Emperors commanded their empire more coherently than their earlier counterparts of Assyrian and earlier still Mesopotamian cultures. Responding to an uprising or a rebellion was much easier with the use of horses to firstly hear about the uprising and secondly to send troops on horseback to quell it.

The humans on this future version of earth are dumb creatures and easily dominated by the apes - used for sport and labour. They are taken back to ape city and they are subjected to experiments. Charlton Heston, who plays the lead man, is subjected to court rulings by the variety of lead monkeys and women. The logic against man and his barbarity, or apparent barbarity as the humans see it, is argued over by the chimps, organutans and gorillas in a complex social discourse not too unsimilar to our own.

In a Science article, Carel van Schaik reports observing geographic variations in orang-utan behaviour that could be considered culture. In her study, van Schaik outlined the characteristics of culture into four sub-sections:

1. labels, "where food preferences or predator recognition are socially induced,"
2. signals, socially transmitted vocalizations or displays,
3. skills, innovations like tool use that are learned by the group, and
4. symbols, "probably derived from signal variants that became membership badges of the social unit or population."

Not all anthropologists agree with this but I do as a punter. Whales haven't been rearranging sea algae in to multiple alphabets and concocting large dialogues between them selves about the existential sense of whale and monkeys are still primitive and habitat focussed in their signage to one another. Today, for the most part, only humans have all four elements of 'culture', but chimpanzees and, now, orangutans have been observed to exhibit the first three.

"The presence in orangutans of humanlike skill (material) culture pushes back its origin in the hominoid lineage to about 14 million years ago, when the orangutan and African ape clades last shared a common ancestor, rather than to the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans," says van Schaik.

In the flip world of planet of the Apes there is a fully developed set of symbols that operate among the chimps, orang-utans and gorillas. Symbols on archtiecture, on clothing and externalisation of self is everywhere. Not only do apes rule and act in a rich manner they have a class system encompassing the main families of ape.

The gorilla police, military, and labourers;
The orang-utan administrators, theologians, and politicians;
The chimpanzee scientists, intellectuals and workers.

Each of the ape groups has a wonderful style of clothing that identifies them and their social place/rank. I've even checked out the possibility of getting clothing as used in the movie but it's limited to ex Hollywood stock at very high prices on E-bay and crap generic monkey masks masquerading as legitimate film related merchandise. It's a blend of leather and cloth and the colours are so deliciously 1960's that any one of the outfits are on my top 10 bits of clothing to get. Chimps are green, Orang-utans are orange and the Gorillas are purple.

Humans, who cannot talk, are considered to be "less than ape" and as such are treated like cattle for sport and experimentation. The arrival of the astronauts who can talk throws ape society into disarray and the majority of the apes, especially the gorilla's, want to eradicate the humans...some chimps however take pity on the humans and seek to know more about the phenomenon and to know more fully where and 'when' they came from.

Many animals have been observed using tools: Dolphins use sponges when fishing, crows use sticks to forage for insects in dead wood, capuchin monkeys use stones to break open nuts.Researchers can learn about chimpanzee "culture" by tracking nut-cracking behavior. Cracking nuts is no easy feat, and it can take a chimpanzee up to seven years to learn how to do it correctly. The technology is passed from generation to generation and diffuses across populations. Knowledge is a virus, language is a virus as real as any forest fire or ocean swelling.

Zaius, the Orang-utan and eminent scientist soon discovers Taylor's ability to talk and puts him on trial when he tries to escape. After the trial, he is taken to see Dr. Zaius, who threatens to emasculate and lobotomize him if he doesn't tell the "truth" about where he came from. But Cornelius and Zira (the leading chimp synpathisers) execute a plan to free Taylor.

They flee to the Forbidden Zone - not a million miles away from the idea of a Twilight Zone - a place where anything could happen and you must expect the unexpected. As a destination - you know that the Forbidden Zone is going to be the shiz - the name makes it such desirable as location. The forbidden zones of our own society can often educate and not always for the good. Apes of today have a sense of the forbidden in social protocol with regards food, shelter, and reproduction rights but they are more really rules - no great lore and story associated with it. In the movie Cornelius, the chimpanzee, aracheologist and historian had a year ago visited the Forbidden Zone and found human artifacts there and they return to find out the series of events that led to man losing earth through nuclear war. The story of mans fall and apes rise is played out to them in the forbidden zone and the final sign shown that he has travelled to the future and witness to a horrible fate. That statue of liberty covered up to her chest in sand.

The concepts in the film aren't exactly that oblique and the apes become surrogates for examining human behaviour - not only the treatment of animals by humans but the dynamic between humans themselves. The backdrop for the movie being made in the 1968 was the cold war as examined by the long haired hippies.

The dramatic climax near the end of the movie when Cornelius reads directly from the Sacred Scrolls at the now-captured Dr. Zaius' request : Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.

MOVIECLIP of DR ZAIUS SPEECH

The advent of tool making has always been a double edged sword as far as 'progress' goes. It is thought that shards or flakes from the use of stones to crack open nuts were the first flints or knives and knives can be used for cutting food or taking out your neighbour. Nuclear power has this duality too - cheap and simple power production intertwined with the horrible bomb.

The movie was recently 're imagined' by Tim Burton however it just doesn't' seem to hold the same gravitas with me. The original with it's stark sets and simplistic approach is much more Shakespearian (helped by Roddy McDowall - arguably the lead chimp). The production in it's limited budget and techniques is almosyt theatre-like and emphasises the drama and the philosophical questions at stake much better than the overblown remake.

The original reminds me of a great book I read by James Morrow called 'This Is the Way The World Ends' where the dead hold a trial in the Antarctic of the six remaining living and those directly and indirectly responsible for the nuclear war that ravaged the earth.

You have been warmed....

Drongomala

The Good Hurt

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:51:29 PDT

Kick This Habit of You

My new band The Good Hurt was formed in Manchester late in 2006. We're now playing live in the NW England and it is about time that I dropped a little blog about how the band got together and who is in it and all o' that.

I was wanting to get a live band on the go again - I had been a digi-producer doing mostly hiphop and electronica with a variety of poeple in the UK and I wanted the live feedback of a band setup. The first addition to the group was Sinik. Sinik is a b-boy and DJ who also does photography and film and we first met when he filmed my improvisational Fusion project ElectroRaga He began filming at 6am, took punches for me and worked his way through the 4 concerts in one day right up until the Midnight concert in the Red Light Area in Manchester. The ElectroRaga day was an outrageous event and because we hung so tough on that day we had an immediate bond - they call him The Sinik but I call him by the less snappy title of Romantic Realist.

Sinik is proper quirky and rotates having pink, purple and red streaks in his hair along with some sort of bi-polar happy/sad mania. He adores Devo and The Pixies a scary amount and has some seriously enviable knowledge of funk and hip-hop.

Before forming The Good Hurt with me Sinik played a little bit of guitar but owing to our reduced numbers (2) he had to play bass guitar and a few months later and his natural groove is unencumbered as he runs over the frets like his knuckles and knees used to do on lino. It's a beautiful thing.

We quickly began to demo stuff as a two piece and began working on a set - a mix of my songs and songs that we co-wrote the music for. I don't tend to sing other peoples lyrics as I get psychological problems with it;)

Here are some links/downloads of our little two piece demos that we did at the time. This blog/podcast is the only place that these demo's are available so feel free to download/share.

We really wanted a drummer and after some searching on various bulletin boards and myspace we were lucky enough to find Tree. He's 17 but he plays like he's been living out of a transit and rocking it for years beyond his age. The first rehearsal was great and we knew he was 'the one'. Tree got stuck right into the mix and our dynamics opened up deliciously - the set grew and we managed to turn from roar to whisper in a heartbeat. Tree plays all the time and does some pretty avante garde projects on the side including Carcophony which he'll be putting on at Glastonbury. It's a large military jeep customised with loads of drums and a PA that Tree and another drummer rock out in and on top of. It's something else alright.

After our first gig Caroline from All FM asked us if we could do a live spot for her show Funky Drive which we were happy to as it gave birth to our acoustic set. You can hear the audio of it here or by clicking on her pic - we play four tracks and chat a bit about current events aswell as some avante either or pop quiz questioning..

When we got enough jams together and after we had played another couple of gigs we decided to record a demo. We do it at Sankeys Soap. We did it live and in a day because it was cheap and we wanted to get the energy of some first takes on tape to match the excitement we were having in rehearsals. Dave Thomas engineereed and mixed it.

We recorded 4 tracks and called the EP Prescription No 1.

Kick This Habit Of You
Spinning Plates
Do It Every Night
Good Souls

A friend did the NHS style graphics for the artwork from a spec by Sinik and me.

Kick This Habit Of You is deliciously punk rock and Spinning Plates, which sounds a bit like early U2 aka Red Rocks period, saw us use the synths a bit more which were slowly creeping into the set and every song. In among the bluster Good Souls, a song I first wrote when I arrived in Manchester early 2006, showcases the band playing in a classic sensitive mould. The demo began to get us gigs no problem.

The Good Hurt don't contrive any sort of identity and instead we dig the challenge of breeding an eclectic yet coherent output. We're not a rock band, we're not a new-wave band, we're not a pop band - we're simply The Good Hurt.

Each live show gets better than the last and the set is slowly being honed into a missile that we are aiming at the UK music biz.

Please consider yourself introduced.

Drongomala

Get Prescription No 1 on iTunes (will open iTunes on yer comp)

Buy a Physical Copy from CDBaby (our Stateside distributor)

Pre Sleeping Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 05:59:21 PDT

A sleeping beauty is always brought to life first in the eye of the beholder.

Gazing on a lover as they slumber.

Watching the seemingly endless calm

wash upon their brow

like waves on an empty moonlit beach.

The only coloured kid at school has had the

eyes of many stare onto her waking face.

Transporting their world on hers and

And now an attempted Romeo looks on solo

The spirit of this girl when she is awake could make mountains quake

and when asleep the tempers of a thousand giants keep.

She isn’t an example of Mother Nature she wears her very skirt

She moves between the Kings and the Madness and the Dirt

This power drawn by inverse engine of chaos and calm

her windmill grinds the gears and commands.

She is strident when she walks this world.

She entertains mosquitoes like she entertains fears

Those with the lucky eyes and ears

Can feel the magic and marvel at those who don’t understand it.

The stakes for a waking girl in this world are high

The challenges for men are many

Talk of morality in bars is easy.

She bears the fruit she is the harvest

Not one thing is wrong with her

Freckled nose twitching in repose

Hair lying delicately across a cheek

The hairspray can no longer keep

the sharp day up

and the warmth of her spreads out like a sunrise.

Kissing her on the lips is like particle generator

Placing your body and mind in paradise

Where you have no eyes to see it only your soul

She is always in and out of control

Her jaw is strong and soft

She always walks with her head aloft

Stars at her shoulder welcome her good morning and doff their heavy photon caps.

She is the horse the cart and the trap

She is Michael Angelo and the ceiling

She is every good feeling

Dawn together from different sides of the planet

She drags my heart to hers like a flesh magnet

Amazon woman captures my mind with her grace,

Gardens and dreams and planetary travel appear as a smile on her face.

Infinity refers to her eyes as an example

She is Adam and Eve and the apple

A Ragini Goddess cannot betray her roots

Her life astutely avoids the trivial pursuits.

The nature of man and woman is her work

Chemistry, bravery unexpected bliss,

Never ending belief in this.

There is no fork in the road only the meat

Your heart is only as big as you’ll allow it to be

Gazing with Imagery on sleeping Beauty

for Priyanka 8th Sept 2006

music enclosure : Good Souls by The Good Hurt

100 Fields - Each One Was a Jewel

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 12:44:45 PDT

100 Fields

If ever I did a Zeitgeist Orchestra recording without knowing it fully at the time then it was definitely ‘100 Fields’. This record is now available (hear some) but here’s my story of where, who, what and why…

Somehow, somewhere I was drawn to black gospel music as manifest in America during a time where the tension was pulled tightest. I was drawn to the female gospel singers in particular – Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin.

It seemed to me that the solo singing was best done by the women and the harmony singing by the men and I’ve often wondered why that dynamic prevailed. My end thinking was that the women felt the blues double because they had two oppressors (albeit of a different nature) – whites and the chauvinisms of their own black men. When the women screamed about pain I’m guessing the men shut up. It's how I feel about what I hear. If you listen to some of those recordings by the great women in gospel they carry an authority that is very difficult for the men to match. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, for example, played electric guitar in a wild syncopated style long before Hendrix plugged in and she was Little Richards childhood idol. Not to mention her singing which had the chime of the dawn of time written all over it.

Check out her version of Down By The Riverside

I think I’m in awe of how the souls of black women were stretched during their horrible struggle in America – they sung like broken and beautiful birds and it’s just by luck that recording techniques were around to grasp one aspect of it.

The music in Scottish and Irish churches can be a real dirge…the reasons for this are complicated and possibly something to do with the weather and fields long since being settled but the singing in the Northern churches of the globe doesn’t feel like it’s made from cosmic stuff at all.

I was brought up in one of these kind of churches but because I loved music so much it became more difficult to connect the church with the magical and wonderous when the arts going inside were so leaden. I liked the long quiet bits with no singing where you could just lose yourself in your own thoughts. Church became boring for me and when I could I escaped it. I didn’t give up on it and music though and I looked to gospel music.

I worked back from Arethea Frankin and luckily I could see past the sound quality of some of the earliest works of Mahalia around the 1930’s. I was in a rock band at the time and it felt like no-one was screaming it out like these female gospel singers did way back. I sang along to their songs a lot. I didn't believe in the church that I'd been to but I believed in Mahalia's singing 100% and that felt like religion to me.

Since then I have a few other veins of devotional music that really do seem to touch on the sacred or the timeless for me. Mozart’s Requiem Masses, the Bulgarian folk laments, Indian devotional recordings. I often thought that these musics contained more of God than those somber Sunday masses.

Fast forward to my last days in India 2002 and I somehow decide to do some of my favourite gospel songs with a south Indian folk band - as a way to clear my head after the orchestrally demanding Scale. I don't consider myself to be a Christian or of any religion at this point in my life. In sync with me leaving India more than a year on since the 9/11 tragedies the landscape of the world was teetering with a divisive east west mentality. I still gave a shit about right and wrong however. I had an hours rehearsal with the singers beforehand and then we did the record live in no more than 2 takes for each song.

The recording was a wonderful magical thing and we all felt it in the room. Nearly all the denominations (athiests and 'music'ists included) were present by accident rather than design and the message is in the act of doing it in the first place. My frantic arrangements the night before worked and the musicians played with such soul that were were blessed no matter which lexicon you use.

I felt lucky that the thing even happened at all.

Now I'm putting it out and want to tour it. So naturally I've just had a quick look at the 'market'. Here's an example of one market (US Gospel) that this record will be thrust into and in truth it is in all and none of them. Anyways...

Gospel stations in america fall into three categrories...

southern only i.e. black only,
mixed meaning the country white style and the south style
those that are a little more loose with a definition of Christianity

I read some of the submission guidelines for all of these and it seems the religious sites have went to town on 'what's acceptable' for their gospel music playlist. As a safeguard and not to be swallowed by the madness I intentionally changed some of the songs to include Hindu detities and Buddhist and Muslim rivers - I was feeling more pluralist than simply Chritstian and such statements like my "This is a record that shouldn't be classified as Christian" will mean that a load of my Cd's will hit the bin straight away when they reach the US.

I want the debate and I'll be having it soon. Get on board. John Lennon isn't around so we need you.

I hope you enjoy it.

We hope to do a live concert in Wales using a Welsh Choir and Indian musicians conducted by Drongomala aka me during Nov 2006 - keep an eye on the website.

MORE INFORMATION AND BUY LINKS
100 Fields WebSite on Flying Mountain Records
100 Fields CD Baby Buy Link
100 Fields MySpace Site

Drongomala
www.drongomala.com

p.s. any animators want to have a pop at a video for one of the songs?

VIDEO : Bismillah Khan the great Shennai player dies

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:58:54 PST

I got a phone call yesterday from Greece to tell me that the great Shennai player from India, Ustad Bismillah Khan, had died of a heart attack. His health had been bad for a while and his playing had naturally reached it's peak a few years ago.

The gentle genius of Bismillah Khan is perhaps single handedly responsible for making Shehnai a famous classical instrument. Traditionally used to play music during marriages, Shehnai is the counterpart of south indian nadaswaram. It is also used to play music in temples.

Born in a small Bihar village in 1917, Ustad Bismillah learned shehnai from his uncle who used to play in the famous Vishwanath temple of Varanasi. He brought Shehnai to the center stage of indian music with his concert in the calcutta All India Music Conference in 1937. There was no looking back.

Ustad Bismillah Khan is the third classical musician after Pt Ravi Shankar and Smt M S Subbulakshmi to be awarded Bharath Rathna, the highest civilian honour in India. However even though he was well respected and used by the government as part of the Indian culture promo list he wasn't really kept in the manner he should have been and he even threatened to hand the award back if he didn't get a cheque....he got one eventually. Bismillah had the onus of feeding a hundred persons, ten sons included. He travelled across the world but didn’t like flying. In India he would mostly travel by train.

Bismillah had a retinue of 8-10 accompanists - quite a large number. He would travel to the railway station by cycle rickshaw, heading a caravan of 4 or 5, waving to familiar passersby, no less happy than a prince in a Rolls Royce! He was very well loved by the people and his healthy perspective and example on the overlap of being both Muslim and Hindu was well noted by the people.

I myself was touched by his playing and his rendition of Multani at the banks of the Ganges was what inspired the ElectroRaga Version of Multani recently in Manchester. You can hear me triggering and chopping his Shennai playing.

And here is the original performance that I took it from as hosted on Patrick Moutal's excellent website on Indian music.

This news of his death didn't make it to the UK newspapers or websites as far as I could see. Let us not forget this link with the old world of magic as handed to us in the form of Bismillah Khan. His kind are less every year.

Rest ye well.

Links
http://www.chembur.com/anecdotes/bismillah.htm
http://www.musicalnirvana.com/hindustani/bismillah_khan.html
http://blogpur.blogspot.com/2006/04/bismillah-khan-and-his-shehnai.html

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

VIDEO : HLI+Drongomala Sat12thAug - Birmingham

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:47:25 PDT

Footage links below to the recent gig by HLI and Drongomala at the Rainbow, Digbeth in Birmingham. Footage has a blend of daytime messing around aswell. This was a fundraiser for earthquake victims. Camcorder quality sound.....H(B)ollywood please call.

Filmed by MiMi and edited by AntKnee

Part 1 - hanging out and rehearsing

Part 2 - ElectroRaga

Part 3 - Hi Diving

Part 4 - Homeward

Part 5 - Everything Is Gonna Be OK

Part 6 - Outro with Guest Juice Aleem, Sensei C doing street poetry and WuTheF*@! doing a ditty.

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

Newspaper Article: When Hoodies Attack (ElectroRaga)

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 02:09:24 PDT

southmancreporter-electroraga attack
Originally uploaded by drongomala.

One of the local newspapers caught on to our little drama at the ElectroRaga dawn gig in Chorlton, Manchester.

Feel free to leave comments on their site....already the rights and wrongs of what we did is being debated....

The article is replete with misquotes and made up bits - I'm not complaining though as the hit count for the clip has went from 200 to 2000...I love the press - has Indian classical music ever been so rock and roll?!

FRESH NEWS : watch out for a video report of the hiphop gig with HLI in Birmingham this weekend - coming soon - yes it rocked hard.

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

ElectroRaga VIDEO : Malkauns (midnight) 23/7/06 Red Light Area, Manchester

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:00:25 PST

Malkauns is a dark brooding raga. PLayed late night. (see my article 'Robert Johnson, The Cross Roads and Malkauns)

This gig like the rest wasn't agreed.....thing is it wasn't the authorities we were worried about it was the lawless.....this one was in the red light district of Manchester. Watch out for a cameo by Mick Jagger.

ElectroRaga VIDEO : Yaman-Kalyan (evening) 22/07/06 St Anns Square

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 05:08:17 PDT

Yaman Kalyan is an evening raga. We conspired to slip into St Ann's square and quickly setup as we didn't have permission to play. We hadn't counted on the security guards for the stalls nearby - our generator was freaking them out as a fire hazard and me out becuase it wasn't in the right shruti. Luckily we kept them at bay and managed to get going. Olly Farshi joins in on e-bow guitar.

Part 1

Part 2

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

ElectroRaga VIDEO : Multani (afternoon) 22/07/06 Castlefield

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 05:06:41 PDT

The afternoon concert on the banks of a river....well Castlefield canal in this case...

Bismillah Khan and Ravi Shankar were the dons that I took inspiration from in this raga. Make sure you check out the extra cam footage which has better quality sound and some close up views..

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 - extra cam footage with better sound

or in hyperlinks
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 (extra-cam better sound)

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

ElectroRaga VIDEO : Bhairavi (dawn) 22/7/06 Chorlton Water Park

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 05:06:14 PDT

The dawn concert...in a water park outside manchester....a blend of clubbers, the curious and some psychopaths are all drawn to the lake at 5 on a Saturday morning.....

Part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Part 3 of 3 Malkauns encore and fight

Bhairavi Part 1
Bhairavi Part 2
Malkauns Encore (and fight)

drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

ElectroRaga - from dawn till dusk and then some..

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 07:32:58 PDT

Phew.....just woken up from Saturday's all dayer - 4 outdoor concerts in Manchester during the Futuresonic festival. The plan was to improv with people we'd never played with before - in locations and times to suit the ragas we'd be jamming on. It was to be :

Dawn (5am) Chorlton Water Park - Bhairavi raga
Afternoon (3pm) Castlefield - Multani raga
sunset (8:50pm) St Anns Square - Yaman-Kalyan raga
Midnight Portugal Street East (the red light district) - Malkauns raga

My reasons for doing this event were both simple and complex....

it's less hassle to have everyone just turn up and go for it rather than rehearse
it fits with my punk ethic of taking 'fusion' away from pious jos stick crowd and putting it in a context that people don't expect
using non trained musicians to mix it up with easterners
applying the raga time and location concepts used in Indian music to our new context of Manchester
to be a little irreverant with Indian classical music and musicians
cos it's romantic

Not one of the locations (except Castlefield) had been agreed with the council authorities or location owners because I didn't have the time and they would never agree leaving me stuck in treacle with the 'authorities' then knowing about my plans. That aint the Art of War script at all.

I did try negotiating the top of an NCP carpark for the sunset concert but after initial positive talks it was rejected - the guys wanted to measure out the number of car parking spaces we would take up (and work out a charge) in a car park that was permenantly half full.....I wasn't feeling it...even fallback positions of £200 to cover admin costs meant that I wasn't so bothered when they said - "no go cos of internal schmernals"

I wasn't too deterred and after a quick scope of the city we chose St Ann's square as the sunset spot. In the days leading up to the event I flyered Rusholme (the 'curry mile' as it's known) to much bemusement by local residents and shopkeepers. The HSS hire shop magically had lost my booking of a generator so Friday was a crazier run around than it needed to be.

On the Friday late afternoon I picked up the main melodic lead player from central bus station. He is a Carnatic (south indian classical) saxophone and mandolin player called E.R. Janardhan or otherwise known by the snappy title of 'Saxjana'. Trained in Chennai India by Kadri Gopalnath the musician who brought the saxophone into the lexicon of Indian music. He was coming from London and was arranged through my Keralan contacts in the UK.

We rehearsed in my living room on the Friday night and after some changes to the key/tonic/shruti to suit the saxophone (which was in Bb) we had some great fun playing around. SaxJana also plays a mean mandolin and other than U Srinivas there aren't many playing this instrument in Indian music.

Sinik (Tom Rochester) the guy that had been agreed to manage the filming of it turned up at 4am on the Saturday morning and we loaded the van and headed off. We met up with one of his friends, Abigail Merrick, from art college whom he had just graduated with. Tom had gotten the nickname Sinik from mates for his strong opinions but any man getting up at 3am to do a days worth of madness like ours could only be a romantic realist at worst.

The Sunrise Concert - Bhairavi
Bhairavi is one of the key ragas in Indian music. The ancient rules state that it must be played at dawn but because of it's popularity it is often played at the end of concerts to fit in with modern Indian lifestyles. The mini-paintings, called ragamala's, that are often associated with ragas tend to show Bhairavi as a woman worshipping a lingham/phallus/penis. It could well be representative of life-forces and rebirth but I guess it could also be quite literally have roots in 'morning glory'.

The main worries with pulling this concert off were :

- running a generator in a public park at 5 in the morning without permission
- being harassed by fishermen that we were disturbing
- not finding the back entrance to the park to avoid the security cameras
- nobody being there
- the park attendants or police being called

We didn't find the back entrance but the front seemed to be open so we decided to risk it and hurriedly unloaded the van near to the lake. The generator weighed a ton but we got it into the back of the tree's so that the trunks and leaves could deaden the sound a bit. It had been a dry couple of days so I tried not to entertain the thought of the generator going on fire and setting the wooded are of the park alight.

Daniel Weaver , from Manchester, the contemporary composer and performer turned up to play banjo. Daniel is a kindred spirit in the game of putting on 'event's or happenings that are a little bit outside the 'Night and Day' 30 minute indie set. Those that believe in magic have got to stick together these days.

People who had specifically come for the concert began to arrive aswell as some random punters that had been clubbing. Once we managed to convince some of the more hyped clubbers that there was no way we were going to play 'Girls' by Studio B and that I didn't want a pill we managed to begin our ElectroRaga version of Bhairavi. (I do like that Studio B track though;)

It went really well and my ideal of the birds and park waking up to the music happened just as I'd liked. The clubbers skinny dipped in the lake and everyone watched the widescreen view of Chorlton Park over the lake as we played. To come up with the idea and then to find myself in the middle of the situation playing the music and improvising was a real will to flower power moment.

After we finsihed the folks asked for one more....so we decided to play Malkauns (a dark midnight raga) as it's quite accessible. The bad supernatural forces were at work for Malkauns (read more about it during the midnight slot below) and during it I looked up to see a little oik with two sticks in his hand telling me to shut the music off now or else....he had a PCP style rage on him and he was desperate to fight somebody. Us and the clubbers were caught off-guard with his forced change of mood and he harssessed a few more people (male and female alike) before he was wrestled to the ground by some of the audience. In retrospect we should have thrown him in the lake.

After he was 'managed' he legged it to get his brother who he said had a gun. Little brothers always shoot off their pistols using the big brothers bullets ....Uh huh....it's Manchester so that could be true....we had done our thing and if we ever needed a sign of when to quit while you are ahead this little mentalist has been it.

The crowd helped us get the stuff into the van before the possible spectre of a cavalry from the schemes in Chorlton arriving and after quickly showing the video footage of the oik to the cops that had turned up we were ready to leave. Only one resident came down to complain about the noise - he explained that the lake was a natural amphitheatre and that it was echoing all around the place. I bit my lip and held back the temptation to mention that the lake basin and area was chosen specifically for that reason.

Verdict - big thumbs up, magic moments and an agrro ending

Castlefield 3pm - Multani - Afternoon Raga
My favourtie versions of Multani are by Ravi Shankar (sitar) and Bismillah Khan (shennai - reed instrument). It's an afternoon raga that is meant to be played on the banks of a river and I took inspiration from Bismillah's version which I have a great video for - he is on a boat in the Ganges with people on the riverbank. His son is also playing backup shennai and eventually began to take over many performances as his father aged. Multani is meant to have a solemn, compassionate mood.

Our Multani was taking place in Manchester and our bank of a River was the Castlefield Canal.

We were meant to have the keys to the old tourist centre meaning that it was our one legit gig but when we turned up it was locked and we couldn't get in contact with the organisers...no matter....we set up at the top of the steps - another perfect little amphitheatre again.

A mate of Sinik (Tom) called Tom Clancy who was filming turned up to help and looked spookily like my little brother....even his disposition aswell....luckily that meant he mucked in with the setup. The heat of the day was pretty intense and there wasn't much wind around....I was proper stewing in my own sweat and remembering the tropical heat of India.

This concert was just SaxJana and me and I really enjoyed this one. The PA was clear and we really managed to move back and forwards more comfortably. Musically I think this one was the most cohesive and it's a shame that the rallies and event in the middle of town had taken some bodies it's way instead of ours.

People on the banks of the hill lay and listened and some came up to the steps to watch and listen. I did a brisk trade in Scale Cd's and we had a little respite before the next raga at 8:50pm.

2 down 2 to go.

St Ann's Square, Manchester City Centre - Raga Yaman-Kalyan (Evening Raga)

Yaman-Kalyan raga or Yaman is one of the first ragas taught to students and is considered to be one of the grandest and most fundamental ragas in Hindustani music. The raga is an evening raga and we are trying to get some of the sunset thing happening here in Manchester. Some ragamala paintings use the image of a poet with vast knowledge of music and a voice that can change character like a cuckoo while other paintings and lore use lords in white garments on lion thrones with pearl necklaces through to simplistic brave noble minded hero figures.

Our security guys were here for this one - Colin and Tom (another Tom now making the count 3 in our stage crew or 5 if you count the SatNav in the van). I went to attempt to park the van in a carpark that didn't have a 6ft height restriction while the rest of the crew tried to find a spot to play. The Manchester Jazz festival had been using the square earlier in the day and there were empty tents and structures all over the place. I tried to get one of the security guards to let us use the stage but the mentality is a jobsworth one these days and there was no go. We got set up - the PA was starting to groan now and one of the speakers wasn't working.

Olly Farshi (in the hat) turned up to play e-bow guitar. It was the first time I'd met him. While he got up to speed on the scale I warded off the female security guard who was freaking out about our generator and whether we had written permission,.

We started the gig anyway. This one had a few hairy moments with the laptop seizing but I don't think it was noticeable. I was pleasantly surprised by Olly's playing having never heard him before we managed to get through a version. SaxJana played Sax.

We all went for a drink at a pub near Sinik's place. I could only drink one because I was driving. It must have lasted 10 seconds tops. We got talking to Colin and Tom - I know Colin through rapping as MC Bantam - he is an up and coming garage/hiphop MC and I'm doing a track with him as a return favour for helping out the nighttime session of Electroraga. They were both great crack and we laughed as we tried to forget the legistics and location of the next set - midnight in the red light area.

Midnight - Portugal Street East (Redlight Area) - Malkauns
Malkauns is a midnight raga said to have supernatural powers. Some musicians are fearful that playing it enourages connections with evil spirits. Ragamala paintings are filled with heroic lords taking pan (natural amphetamine) wearing a garland of skulls. Malkauns is a dark raga and I have written more in my article Robert Johnson, the Crossroads and Malkauns.

After the evening gig I felt like I was on the home straight right up until we got to the midnight gig area. We still had a mini mountain to climb and this gig was always going to be the most dodgy. Brother Ghazi the rapper who was going to spit some lyrics on Malkauns had sent me a text at 11:13 saying:

"Alright man. I'm at the gig location NW sat on concrete. Lots of cars going past, picking up hookers obviously. Gv us a ring wn u turn ur fne on man asap"

...poor Ghazi had been cruised as he waited - some old bloke had said that he looked 'warm'. If we hadn't turned up and got him in the back of the van at 11:50pm he might have legged it. During the day this place was rough but at night it had Sin City overtones that would crush the art-fopp in a hearbeat. Dark, dangerous corners....cars milling about with crazies doing the circuit, prostitutes working the street next to us.

I chose to set up at the loading bay of a disused warehouse - a natural stage of sorts. It was on a part of the polices circuit and low and behold a van came up near the end of us setting up. A policeman driving and a policewoman as passenger. I jumped to make sure I talked to them first. The woman was unhappy and I could see that she wanted to junk the whole thing and make us pack up. The guy seemed better though and I gave him my pitch that it would just take 10minutes and it was the fourth one in the day....I apoligised for giving him such weirdness on his shift and when I said thanks he nodded and drove on. I knew the woman was seething to be over-ruled like that. Thank god the fella must have feared the paperwork or something...

Sinik had sensibly brought some lights for this one and as we switched them on a car of five tough guys pulled up and started getting interested. I could see that our tough guys were getting a little uneasy and that me nervous. There was a load of camera and electronics that would go in the boot of any car or van if the person had the will to take it.

We got started - the PA was still sounding like shit but I decided it diidn't matter and that this gig was more punk than raga. This was Ghazzi's first or second experience of playing live and even though he got airborne a few times with the rap he choked a little. It didn't matter - I jumped up and sang something and then just kept making the music faster and faster until it was indeed the coat tails of the devil himself flapping in the wind. Boom it finished. Jana's mandolin playing was really good - broken riffs and real grit in the playing.

The tough guys in the car must have been freaked out a little becuase they didn' t make any weird comments afterwards or try and rush the mikes. Ghazzi went and kept them busy with some talk so they didn't think to call their mates with hardware and a van and we loaded the stuff into the back of our van.

Another police van came up, we had timed it to miss them when we were playing, and again I jumped to speak to them. I told them we were done and looking to get out of here. They didn't say a word and just looked at me in disbelief with an expression saying "you are insane to do this - get out of here and save yourselves"

The van was loaded and we had done it. My smile was in danger of splitting my face in two and we'd pulled the mad event off. My driving and concentration were a bit erratic but everyone got dropped off safely in the end.

Jana and me stayed up for a bit and talked musical revolution for a bit and then we crashed before he had to go at 7 in the morning back to London.

Did it all happen? Was it just a dream? ?Yes there could have been more people there but as Tony Wilson says - there was only 12 at the last supper and a few of them at the moonlanding.

Watch www.flyingmountainrecords.com or www.myspace.com/electroraga for more happenings, information and music. All photos on this blog by Tom Rochester.

We filmed the whole day and will put clips up on the Doctor Ongo Mala video site.

There may be a special BBC Asian Network show in the offing too.

That's how we do.

Finally - I hereby nominate Sat22nd July with ElectroRaga for the Turner prize.

Drongomala

Flying Mountain Present ELECTRORAGA:22nd Jul Manchester

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:40:27 PDT

Flying Mountain present ElectroRaga in Manchester.

4 outdoors shows in one day - from dawn till dusk.

Saturday 22nd July.

5am (Chorlton Water Park)
3pm (Castlefield Visitors Centre)
8:50 (St Ann's Square)
Midnight (Behind Picadilly Station - Portugal Street)

Full details from the website.

It should be something special.

Drongomala
www.flyingmountainrecords.com

Guitar Amps Dream of Shifting Air Like a Flute

noreply@blogger.com (Drongomala) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:59:34 PST

Madness -this has sat in Drafts for 4 months...oops...

Just had a flute session for Louis Oak Anderson's EP due out this summer with the wonderful wind player Ian Dixon. Ian's played on all kinds of things from the BBC Radio Orchestra to Primal Scream and Joni Mitchell.

Ian was brought up in Lancashire and and after stints all over the UK and his current schedule doesn't look like his biog is slowing down. From the chats we had in the kitchen over my butchered coffee it turned out that he's producing and arranging all kinds of music.

My favourite sessions are always the ones that finish early because it means that all is flowing.

Louis is coming up to play Manchester on the 22nd July 2007 to play the Green Room. Check The Good Hurt Blog/Dates.