Thanks to everyone who came down to Cian O’Neill’s excellent ‘Music and Paintings’ evening last week. I worked out that it was my first solo live performance for a good few years and although a pretty low-key affair (just me and a laptop) it consisted almost entirely of new material, including tracks from the Savamala project, a few rough demos from the preparatory sessions for Howlround’s live debut next month and even some outtakes from another rather large and shadowy comission-in-progress, about which I’m sworn to secrecy for the moment!
Hopefully all this new material will begin to surface in the coming months as I desperately try to finish off projects and make token efforts at meeting deadlines. But for the moment, this little extract is all I’m going to tempt you with. It features a number of tape loops created by myself and Chris Weaver during a feverish weekend spent in preparation for Howlround’s live debut at the Great Escape Festial in Brighton (further details forthcoming) and sounds rather good turned up loud, which bodes well!
Having had so many enquiries about the possibility of performing ‘Ghosts’ live, I must say that I’m beginning to wonder how closely such a performance is going to be able to replicate the very specific sounds and grooves heard on that album. Listeners expecting us to faithfully recreate the sound of those hallowed corridors on stage might well be disappointed, as the machines are already taking us off in strange new directions. We fed a few basic loops into our two Revoxes and suddenly we were off on a quite different path. As I’ve harped on about before, the beauty of working with tape and the thing that appeals to me the most is it’s unpredictability – you never quite know what you’re going to get. This can result in either triumph, disaster, or a weird combination of the two. I personally think it’s going to sound amazing, but how closely it resembles the original ‘Ghosts Of Bush’ album and whether you consider that lack of resemblance a good or bad thing remains to be seen. Only one way to find out, I suppose…
Robin The Fog 