Grayson Electric Dream and The Arm

I slept for a long time, dreaming of Grayson Perry and a strange electrical disturbance caused by a rotating, electric auto-pointing miniature watercolour paint brush. This device shorted out every electrical object in the large, hall-like, room which was filled with people doing things. Everything electrical seemed to be coming alive, and full of sparks in a dangerous way, but it calmed down after a while. We switched on the television to see if the whole world was affected but it didn't see to be. In an earlier part of the dream, I was a teenage boy in school, or playing one in a TV drama. In the street the drama continued, and Deb was with me. I noted that many characters, four, had one eye or right eye problems (glasses, strange yellow eyes without pupils, injuries). I talked to a man about wood carving. He showed me some light-wood carvings over a piece of walnut wood which he was proud of, but the walnut wasn't particularly beautifully grained and I told him so. Later, in Grayson Perry's house, I observed some beautiful walnut on his ceiling, as I lay on my back on a table and propelled it backwards by kicking in the hall-sized room.

I awoke with a song idea fully formed, a song sung by an amputated arm in a country-drawl style a bit like The Beatles' 'Rocky Raccoon'. These ideas are probably influenced by the recent David Lynch films.

Wild At Heart, Lamp, Escape Angels

Focusing on music today, trying to stay peaceful and creative in a world in turmoil. I watched the end of David Lynch's Wild at Heart last night, a good film, better than I had expected. Not a subtle film, every symbol and idea was overt, but many scenes were powerful and compelling, and several that were not powerfully emotional made a unique visual or emotional impact. I liked many ideas, the woman covering her entire face with lipstick, the men with false legs scene, the chat around the table in the nowhere town (I can't even remember the name of it).

One thing I would have done is ended the film with Sailor, Lula, and their son riding their car over the rainbow to 'Love Me Tender', rather than merely singing it. Well, I say this, but I'd have not made a film like this at all of course, but, perhaps similarly surrealistic. I've read a script for the unrealised Lynch film Ronnie Rocket, which I found online years ago, and as a script alone it is a great film. That script still fills my mind with images. It's a pity that the film was not made and probably never will be.

I also watched a short film, Lamp, in which David Lynch makes a lamp, well, descorates one with plaster-like material. It is a precursor of YouTube 'making' videos, being filmed in the pre-internet era, but is little more than this; surreal in itself for being so ordinary.

Artistically I've re-recorded the 'Cherries' song today, and some new vocals for the end of 'Years of Art'. I'm more confident of my singing voice now, though still improving, faster at hitting the right note and more comfortable at improvising in a scale. These things are a key aim of my music at the moment. I'm leaning more about vocal production work too. I've tended to be too minimalistic perhaps, using a voice like a lead instrument, when it works best with some accompaniment or compliment from an sub instrument.

I've also recorded a new song, 'The Escape Angels', the surrealistic song I mentioned in an earlier post, which uses a saw, although the music is largely based around cellos and a deep synth bass. The hard part is making such a strangely structured song, which is designed to evoke feelings of fear, abuse, and damage, appealing. It is also one of my most free songs in timing terms, most of the instruments were played live without any guide to timing, simply layered, although there is a sort of verse/chorus/verse structure.

Finally today I've played around with a new production of my 'Plastic Superman' song. I couldn't decide if it should be a rock song like The Kinks' 'Superman' or electronic like a Giorgio Moroder or Vince Clarke song. Electronic seems to work best.

Cherries

I've reworked the 'Cherries' song today. Have spent far too long working on this strange art song, but it had to be right. Today was dogged by technical problems with my faulty and old sound equipment which has a habit of shorting out and need reconnecting during takes. Careful preparation is the key. Any frustration must be faced with pure logic and calm resolve. The first version sounded too suggestive, it kept creating images of Laurence Olivier talking about oysters, but also the chorus part was an improvised after thought. I thought I could make the words better generally, and wanted a rhyming couplet and stronger images. I feel ready to move on now. I've spent weeks on this album project and have only this short song finished.

Cherries

When you're young you like sweets
Tastes of cherries
As you age you explore
And crave nuance
Your mature tastes are bitter
Dark and strange
A crimson soul
Protecting coal

In hearts of darkness
fire and ice meet
Love's tang is sour
stroked with sweet

All Lives Matter

A slow day. Went for a walk and visited Deb at a distance in the park.

It seems odd to strictly obey rules that appear to be widely flouted. The Black Lives Matter protests continue worldwide and seem strange, like an explosion of pent-up frustration rather than anything about racism. I seem to be the only person who, when hearing about the death of George Floyd and seeing the footage on Twitter, didn't for one moment consider it a race issue, but one of simple police brutality. My opinion was quickly usurped by the media. The police officers involved have no realistic chance of a fair trial. We are in a new era of mob rule on a scale without any historical precedent.

All lives matter; it can only divide races by focusing on one, or on any differences between us. Everyone, I expect, feels marginalised, ignored, oppressed, unfairly treated. The measure of civilised life is tolerating our misfortunes and being aware of the misfortunes of others. Judging from afar, it would seem that posh people, 'rich' others, are the most picked on (or democratic leaders - authoritarian dictators tend to crush critics). I doubt a 'Posh Lives Matter' protest will emerge. It seems that some who feel oppressed can gang together and jointly feel jointly oppressed, so perhaps individuals who feel marginalised and oppressed don't protest for this reason, these things are social events rather than philosophical statements or arguments. The speeches made at such rallies are like rock hits before fans, generally cheered irrespective of content as an act communal self-affirmation.

Of course, some lives matter more than others. Bacteria are considered enemies, even though 99% or more of species are harmless to humans, yet all are killed by bleaches, soaps, and other chemicals casually and without guilt. The smaller an animal is and the more alien it looks, the less its life seems to matter. The only life everyone wants to exterminate at the moment seems to be the Covid-19 virus; it is colourless, although the computer models on television are grey with red spots, which itself makes it looks rather like a space-alien. Of course, as it can't self-replicate, a virus is not a life-form by some definitions.

Vocals and Surrealistic Music

A bad night of agonising stomach pain, I slept perhaps 30 minutes. This regular pain always reminds me of Bergman and Beethoven.

Despite this, the morning was full of energy and I jumped into lively vocal recordings of songs for this Pyjama album project. The Year of Art song (previous post 'fun') and the Cherries song are just about finished. The 'fun' lyrics are sung in a high falsetto, sounding like the singer at the end of Blackadder II; rather strange. I can see how falsetto leads to a feeling of high energy itself; high pitch means high energy in physics. High pitch is youth, energy, life, fire, excitement.

In fact, these two unusual songs, really like nothing else I can think of, are the ones I've enjoyed most and found easiest. I've also recorded vocals for a new recording of Norman Bates, but the backing sounds too sparse and the melody too fixed. I'm wondering if my guide melody in the dub track is too restrictive, in timing especially, so I'll try some recordings without one.

I thought last night that surrealistic music barely exists. Perhaps Dali's Être Dieu is close, but Dali was not musical (he claimed to fear music). Surrealist poetry is common, and most surrealist music is jazz. Even David Lynch's music is lyrically inventive over fairly standard blues music.

I did make a few surrealist audio pieces, for ArtsLab, and some were featured on Tree of Keys. These were like audio plays. I decided to write a surrealist song last night and I conceived it, like the ArtsLab pieces, linearly one line at a time, dialogue or image or sound step by step, with no preconceived ideas about structure, perhaps like Dali and Buñuel when writing the script Un Chien Andalou. I then thought of breaking the result up into a verse and chorus structure to create an amalgam of play/audio montage and pop song. It is audio based, but, image based too, which is my favourite way of working. This is an important discovery and different from the other songs. I will keep experimenting with musicality.

It begins with the sound of sawing wood and a woman's sexual moans, and then a bass-line over this. I can imagine this being performed live, with one performer sawing, a world first for music! The general mood is fear, however, anticipation of something bad happening, and the sounds give way to surrealistic poetry. I'll record this over the next few days and may create others, well, I certainly will in future.

Today's singing was good practice, as was some live guitar playing to Roxy Music's Country Life last night, an album I don't rate that much because it's very rock based, very little synth or imagination of production, and the tiny red writing is impossible to read on the CD; the visual look of an album, I've found, really affects how I feel about it. Look, fashion, feeling; these things are so important yet are often ignored in musical art. Only in glam is it (was it?) considered important, when, I think, it is always important and does end up complementing the sound. I must aim to sing or produce or play guitar as often as possible. All artists must be learning a new, challenging skill.

Subterrain

A poem today inspired by the Sacred Wonders of Britain documentary on BBC2 this morning, the Neolithic practice of digging for flint, although flint is plentiful on the surface, so it was speculated that it was a partly reverential act. I was reminded of the song Rawhide by Scott Walker, a song about Neolithic life.

Subterrain

With our picks of antler
we bite at the chalk flesh
of the earth, down
we go
removing the barbs
of black flint
which hurt it.

Lit by the sun's eye
we descend, man, woman,
then, like a hand sideways
into finger-holes of blackness
to feel damp chalk,
and glass flint.

We breathe the cool air
of these stone lungs
and become the earth,
air and ground together,
nurses
to tend the universe
as the universe tends us.

Fun

Working on music today. I feel in the artistic zone, trying to avoid the news and focus on new culture, history. Topics for reading today included Heiner Müller, plus Liu Shouxiang, Henri Richelet, Abraham Palatnik and kinechromatic art.

Most of the day has been spent working on the music for a new song, currently titled 'Song for Ron and Russell', but it probably won't be called that in the end. The key element with art is to be new, to be pushing something somewhere, somewhere new. I'm happy with this album so far, partly because the songs are of an unusual structure. I feel that I am pushing somewhere. Anyone can just output anything; anything can be called art, but it has to be difficult to prove its worth, because this makes it rare, and rarity makes it special. New art should always take effort, energy, thought... an entropic reversal. Life is about entropic reversal and art should be the paragon of life.

I want to create more songs now, to push and learn in new ways. Today's song was developed (as you might guess) as a tribute to Sparks, the band who have inspired much of this album. One thing about their music is it is fun, perhaps this is their most American component, and yet, it seems that for year and year they had album after album that seemed to go nowhere. This is what being and artist is, truly, but I felt a sense of fun vs. tragedy that I could use for a song.

Musically I've used my new Hammond Organ simulation for the bluesy chorus. The verse production was inspired by 'Tonight We Fly' by Divine Comedy with bits of 'This Town Ain't Big Enough'. Other influences so far include Scott Walker and David Lynch, but my palette needs pushing wider, into new, stranger worlds. Of course, Tree of Keys/ArtsLab did this a little. Let's see what happens. Meanwhile, here are my words so far:

Fun
You had fun
We had fun
It was fun
It was so much better, don't you think...
...than tragedy?
Oh, you don't know how hard it's been
You have no idea what it was like
The long years
Desert years
Of dust meals
Of flake and thirst
The trail of claws, in silence,
Brittle hope
And faith
Only faith

Shakespeare writing The Tempest
While my monkey weeps
Fun
It was fun
What choice do we have?

The Watusi
The Twist
The Charleston
The Strand
This dance ain't big enough for the both of us
The Dreamer
The Unwoken Fool

Cherries

Slow, buy steady, progress on my music project. I want to make some songs that are inventive and energetic, with the primary artistic aim of more practice of vocal work and production, and to create. The results so far sound good, but I'm running out of ideas so these next few days must be inventive. This should be the fun part, the joyous part, but it's strange that they often feel unpleasant, like being thirsty and tasting sips of many unsuitable drunk recipes.

I'm trying to listen to new and different music, seeds of inspiration. Last night I listened to Tilt by Scott Walker, one of the strangest albums in my collection - I have 100 CD albums at any one time. There are others that I don't think of as good enough, compilations etc. that I store in the 'wallet of shame', but the 100 are the 'best'. When I get a new CD it enters a trial period and if it is better than the worst of these 100, then it replaces it, thus I evolve the 100 best albums ever (in theory).

Anyway, Tilt is one of the strangest (the others perhaps being The Shaggs album and the Van Def Graaf Generator albums). All of the Tilt songs are long, with amelodic and non-repeating vocal lines over an orchestral backing, which barely seems to follow the vocals. It's an extension, perhaps of Climate of Hunter, but that was far more conventional. Tilt reminds me, in tone, of Beethoven's Late Quartets; strange music from solitude. I've yet to appreciate it fully and keep it in the 100 partly because it is extreme rather than appealing or technically excellent.

One song, Patriot, inspired me to write a song in a very approximate imitation this style:

Cherries

When you're young you like sweets
Tastes of cherries
As you age you explore
And crave nuance
Your mature tastes are bitter
Dark and strange
And my tastes are bitter
And eclectic

But you don't know where it will end
Where it will end
Where it will end

It reads (and sounds, musically) like it is about some sort of perversion, perhaps in a way it is, as it is about liking weird music. Tilt isn't remotely children's music; not catchy, not sweet, barely musical; like bitter chocolate, a Bendick's Mint, a bite of rocket; very much an adult palette, which is what Cherries is about.

One other thing I did today was emulate very closely a Leslie Speaker, an audio gizmo, by using a chorus effect that also used the same triangle oscillator for the effect depth. The Beatles used a Leslie Speaker a lot on Revolver, apparently. Yes, Revolver is one of my 100.