Waveforms - an album
Each track is the first take of an improvisation using a Fernades Sustainer guitar connected to a Roland GK20 guitar synthesiser, a Boss Giga Delay and a Digitech JamMan.
All were recorded in February 2010 except Kyle, which was recorded late in 2007 for a friend whose son was missing. While intended as a message of hope it now stands as a memorial.
The influence and inspiration of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno are obvious and the album is dedicated to them.
February 14, 2010 in Albums & songs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Civic Architecture of the Heart
Here's the first collaboration with Torpedo Buoy. His words and voice, my music. The creepy tale of a town planner in love.
Download Civic_architecture_of_the_heart
The words:
Civic Architecture of the Heart
When she left him the planner became obsessed.
Every time he started to sketch a new design
he could not exorcise her from his aching mind
the sweep of a street entering into a crescent
became the curve where her thigh met her buttock,
the circle of a roundabout
was the hollow of her belly button
and the cupola of the new town hall
doubled each time he tried to design it
to rise as her perfect soft-domed breasts.
He lay awake night after night trying to fight off his obsession,
to drive it away, as he’d driven her away,
until exhaustion and sadness weakened his brain;
she crept back in and he crept back to work again.
Colleagues noticed at once a change
his logical, numbered street systems had gone awry,
grown over with organic curves
and hollows and hummocks and vegetations
and his town grew seemingly without process
of grid and block or long cogitation.
The town planner worked like one possessed,
the designs seemed to flow from somewhere inside his breast,
looking to something greater than the town itself,
the curved boulevards, slim, shapely avenues
curling through then into ankle slim alleys,
to elegant crescents like ladies’ insteps,
as if this were part of a greater design.
Far to the north five crooked lanes,
joined at a square smooth as an opened palm
leading down the street to an elbow like bend,
then along to the fuzz of a light-wooded hollow
where school boys may hide from sight for a fag,
or young lovers kiss, away from the streetlights –
the planner pauses from his frantic drawing (scribbling)
and presses his nose to the translucent paper,
trying to conjure up a lost scent –
then continues on a sweep of lawn
rising gently to the twin glass domes
of the botanical gardens, beneath their rooves
tendrils writhe and seethe and wrap around
themselves in steaming, choking embrace.
The plans are universally acclaimed
and the building starts at once, the drains
and the skeleton of foundations and concrete bases
for arteries and veins of roads and rivers and alleyways
to be built on to, waving tendrils of roads in rays
spreading away from the town’s head,
a pointed spire of church with twin naves
and the open mouth of the sunken, subterranean market,
a gaping breach opening above it to sky,
where the town supplies will be fed in and traded,
are swiftly erected and excavated.
All is complete and the town planner
lives in a house he has built in the heart,
a little below the botanical gardens,
a short walk from the button lake
and down to the woods of the graveyard,
the river running from it rising in a monthly flood
between the beautiful V of the shapely twin avenues
leading to the lower town, each house with views
as individual as a fingerprint.
One day a stranger brings her children –
she’s heard of its charm and beauty –
and at once is enchanted, at once is feels familiar,
she feels that she could drive the lanes blindfolded,
anticipate their every turn.
She parks and they walk in the botanics,
admire the domes, the gentle hills and soft grass smoothly covering.
She walks on, following the brook, feels somehow drawn to a home
she’s never seen before, yet at once feels like she’s always known.
The planner stands outside the entrance,
He beckons, opens wide door, smiles:
‘I always knew you’d come,’ he says.
The river seems to rush to the throb of her own heartbeat.
Powerless she leaves her children behind and steps inside.
With a solid clunk the doors close tight.
May 17, 2009 in Singletons | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
