Friday 15 July 2005

I had a fun afternoon at Butterstone yesterday with Lisa Milne and Jamie Maclean, working quickly and getting five songs in the can in very little time indeed.  Lisa manages to inhabit so many vocal characters convincingly that listening back to it, it's difficult to imagine that it's all sung by the same singer. And her Aberdonian version of the Buzzcocks song 'Boredom', accompanied by us on baroque instruments and with Chris Norman playing the three-note guitar solo on the flute (recorded in a Montréal kitchen), is undoubtedly unique. 

Today I edited nearly all of Lisa and Mary Ann's vocal tracks, so recording has now officially stopped on the Lion CD, or SADN II or whatever it's going to be called. Katherine is in town for a few days learning Swedish, so this afternoon she dropped in with luthier Ruth Caldwell (and a half-rebuilt quinton) to hear how it was going. Simultaneously with this, Alison was buying us both iPod accessories in Singapore's Changi airport ...

For a while this week it looked as if my Estey reed organ was going to get its first classical gig, in the Webern 5 Pieces op.10 at the Edinburgh Festival for Scottish Ballet. But it doesn't have all the notes to play the high bits, so we're going to have to find something else for me to play it on. Given that the harmonium only plays about 20 notes in the whole piece, they may as well be the correct ones.