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.

Final Meal Requests from Death Row Prisoners in Texas
Below is an array of food like full stops as chosen by prisoners in Death Row. Follow the links to each prisoner for further information. I am no way responsible for how you use this information. The empirical summary of what you eat before execution still surprises me in that it seems to say so much and so little at the same time about our perception of the prisoner

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 working). 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)

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

Via: Flixya

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

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.

• Love U 4 a Long Time Yet (2 piece demo)
  
• Meet U In The Middle (2 piece demo)
  
• Back Off Man I’m A Scientist (2 piece demo)

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.

1. Kick This Habit Of You
2. Spinning Plates
3. Do It Every Night
4. 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)

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

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…

1. southern only i.e. black only,
2. mixed meaning the country white style and the south style
3. 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?

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

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