Monday 15 August 2011
I’ve had the archiving bug for the last week or so, with all my spare time spent sifting through boxes of scores, cassettes, photos, programmes, reviews, all kinds of things, throwing out lots and filing away the rest. We haven’t moved house for 11 years so there’s a lot of it: this will be an ongoing project for a few months. I also found some very entertaining old Concerto Caledonia photos which made it onto the scanner and might find their way into the gallery here eventually.
Yesterday morning I also had a wee digitisation corner of the sofa with my old Walkman Professional hooked up to a field recorder and portable speakers, rescuing a few things from analogue oblivion. Sadly the cassette of this album that was given to me as a present in 1975 or thereabouts refuses to play properly so I’ve had to find a vinyl copy on eBay. It contains classical treasures performed with the right combination of respect and complete disregard, on Hammond organ with big band, and it was clearly an important part of my musical education. The girl on the front of the cover has her fingers in her ears for a reason, and the cassette even has a strapline in the corner ‘The sound of good music’ in case all the available evidence pointed the potential purchaser or critic in the opposite direction.
On the other hand, currently digitising in the corner of the room from vinyl is my copy of The Lodge LP Smell of a Friend, dug out of the LP cupboard after re-acquainting myself with its predecessor Kew.Rhone. Frustratingly, the CD-ROM reissue of Kew.Rhone. demands that you run your computer in 8-bit colour to see all the intricate extras, making it oddly obsolete after less than 15 years. Anyway, it’s great to revisit Peter Blegvad’s lyrics which acquire more layers of meaning with time. ‘Solitary’ from Smell of a Friend is made with cut-ups of quotations about milk, and includes this: ‘What gladness to flee the world into a new world made largely with the intellect. Amid the ravishing lucidity there, things that can be & cannot be get well churned together.’ The tune’s good too, and his cover painting shows all 28 original milky quotes (no references though).
I’m coming round to the idea of spending the next year or so on a kind-of playing sabbatical, not attempting to make very much music for a bit. I wonder how it will go. The last year has been far too busy, and the business of archiving old work is a good way of sensing the backlog of undone stuff and loose ends left untied. Sometimes you have to clear up the past before you can move into the future. This week’s work involves planning potential projects for 2012-15, and it would be good to come at them with a fresh sense of the possible.