Now Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan cronies are losing their grip on our pub hours, we will have need of these important pieces of grammar:
binge drink: v.t. (pp bange drank) “I bange drank myself into a stupor”; adj. “I was more bunge drunk than he”.
bunger: n. one who was drunk, as on a binge; “You drunken bunger!”
On Sunday, we rehearsed the Samba band for a kiddies’ concert on Thursday, which annoyingly falls in the middle of the working day. We were accompanying a small band of trumpet, sax, trombone and bass guitar who played jingle bells, rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, and silent night. Only, we assume that’s what they were playing, as you couldn’t hear them over the sound of the Samba do Mendingo Surdo (The “Samba of the Deaf Beggar” - that’s us)
I bet the saxophonist never thought he’d ever be too quiet…
Last night I played my bongos for a rhythm and timing workshop with the salsa crowd. We gave a little spiel on the conga, the bongo, the clave and how they interact in the music and with the dance. I was relieved that I wasn’t rubbish, as I’d had a quick run through the previous night and found myself to be thoroughly dyspraxic.
It sounded absolutely great! We had no amplification, just bits of wood, metal, plastic and hide, and our hands. When the three parts were playing together, it sounded like the real thing! (because it was!)
This brings me to a bee I have in my bonnet about what music has lost since the invention of recording and amplification.
Though what we were playing was quite complex and involved, if people wanted to understand what an individual player was playing, they could stand closer to that player and hear that instrument louder. You also directly understood that a louder sound comes from hitting something harder, and even as an audience member, on some level you are physically connected to the music, part of your mind knows what it must be like to be making that sound, and it’s exciting.
When music is amplified, these two elements are lost. The sound coming from the speakers messes up the sense of location so you cannot focus on individual players, at least not without training yourself much more consciously; and the association between volume and physical exertion is lost. When you can have a human voice speaking over a big band, the sheer enveloping magnitude of a horn section is belittled.
In the nineties there was a fashion for ‘unplugged’ sessions, a backlash against the falsity of acts miming on Top of the Pops. But the technical issues of getting the unplugged act transmitted through the medium of TV meant that really the acts were still DI‘d and not even the studio audience got a real “acoustic” experience.
I’ve had a few discussions about this with John since our Scarborough gig where even a hardened electronic musician like John agreed that a lot of the work was inaccessible and hard to relate to. The question of whether Art (note capital A) should be hard to access is for a separate post. But by contrast to an evening of groundbreaking sound experimentation with laptops and circuit -bending, one of the musical memories that will stay with me the longest is that of hearing a gamelan in a field at Glastonbury. The big gong seemed to make the hillside ripple, and there were no loudspeakers in sight.
The big problem for this cause is the economics. If you are playing genuinely acoustic music there is a limit to the number of people who can stand close enough to hear it, and as soon as you record it or amplify it, you kill it.
This is why I don’t have much sympathy for the music industry’s bleatings over MP3s killing Music. MP3s are only threatening the Industry part of the Music Industry, the Music part was squeezed out years ago.
Some OK dancing http://www.holylemon.com/CrazyDancing.html
An OK bit of theatre http://www.holylemon.com/CrazyPingPong.html
Even in this newfangled world of interweb and PSPs, not everyone is sitting square eyed in front of the computer…
…is a wonderful thing.
Today at lunchtime I left my frustrating job and drove my broken underpowered car through the shitty roads past all the idiots who were trying to kill me and stopped at a dump of a pub that stank, staffed by surly idiots and full of smelly old people in a god-forsaken village near York.
There, I ate a meal.
And left the quaint, old worldy pub (with a genuine open fire) full of fascinating salt-of-the-earth people who all must have had stories to tell, and jumped in my zippy little runabout (that is really easy to park and cost about 20p) and drove through what is wonderful weather for this time of year back to my job which I really quite enjoy.
they say ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’.
I mentioned i got introuble with the dvla for not taxing the car… well for the last week or two i’ve been looking for 500 pounds worth of cheques from salsa teaching that i need to put in the bank. tonight while searching for them i came across a cheque dated sept. 03 for 120 quid…
might I suggest a better saying would be ‘look after the 100 quid cheques you numpty’
… is it’s not the same as effectiveness. A highly efficient way to travel from Britain to America is to sit in a coracle and, on average, face America when you are breathing in more and face Britain when you are breathing out more. Since you would be breathing in and out anyway, this has cost zero, and is therefore infinitely efficient despite only moving you perhaps an inch over the rest of your lifetime.
Our IT services at work are no longer looked after by three guys in York and we no longer have our own firewall and email server to have to look after. It’s much more efficient to move lots of services to Germany and have one guy here who is spending more of his time on ‘integration’ projects than he is on fixing our local issues.
The result? Here I am with a simple hour’s work to do before the end of the weekend, but every mouseclick is taking minutes because some server somewhere has some kind of problem, and we have to look at it through remote desktop, and guess what? There’s a problem with the server, but we don’t know what it is cos whatever it is has broken remote desktop too…
When posting through a newfangled technology, beware of innuendo, lest you don’t get the chance to post the explanation!
Wot I meant to say was, I was delighted to find that a Mac Mini does indeed act like a bona fide Wireless Access Point, thus rendering me able to blog from my laptop or my palm from anywhere in the house.
That’s provided you are competent to operate such things.