Cubelog

Apologies again for a lack of posts recently - life, and to some extent electricity and phonelines, have been disrupted round my way due to decorating, but hey, almost a month after the event, here’s my run down on the Cut-Up evening you’ve heard so much about if you’ve been following this blog over the last year or so . . .

I’m somewhat notorious for cutting it fine - the old curse of perfectionism means there is always more you can do so why ( and how can you ) stop sooner?

Still, as ever, I managed to get there with seconds to spare with the DVDs and their backups freshly burned in time to stop Mark from ushering on the Orchestra to perform without the special video I’d put together to conduct them.

The Orchestra, which included Peter The Conductor himself, performed brilliantly - I sat in the audience and watched the footage of Jesse in the bird head explaining Peter’s signs and then conducting them . . .

. . . It worked really well and was good from the audience’s point of view to have everything clearly explained, so the reactions of the Orchestra could be easily understood. It was a bit of a shame that they were first on really, as some people were still arriving, or missed it completely, but there will be another chance to see it at Watershed next Wednesday ( the 30th November ), if you book quickly in advance.

Next up was 9 V cell, and the realisation of a long held cube ambition for me. Having previously emerged from under the stage, performed behind the screen and even spinal tap-equsely abseiled on the stage, with full stuck carabina embarrassment moment, I’ve always wanted to use the space underneath the audience’s seats, known to volunteers as “The Void”.

As 9 V cell use light sensitive instruments, that also can make the most of full darkness, they were the perfect ones to do it. So that’s what I asked them to do, with a night-vision feed so what was going on could be seen on the cinema screen.

As it turned out the audio also went to the main PA - a bit of an oversight really as I had hoped it would have just come from below. Another thing about 9 Vcell, as the name implies, is they use portable battery powered instruments, including large speakers allowing them to turn up anywhere and make some noise. It was a great and wonderfully unsettling performance . . .

. . . but I think it really would have benefited from bypassing the main PA - it would have meant this part of the evening wouldn’t have been as loud as your expected Friday night out, but ears soon adjust - and the engaging visuals would have been all the more apparent to be coming live and directly from below. But hey ho, it still worked well, just in terms of audio erred more on the conventions of entertainment than art which was the original intention.

Following this was the realisation of another long-held ambition based on a simple idea that I’d handed over, this time to Jay Le Surgeon.

The Turntable Orchestra, comprising of 4 performers, 6 decks and 1 mpc, performed using multiple copies of the ‘Sir Adrian Boult introduces the Instruments of The Orchestra’, a commonly found budget label charity shop record that I’ve amassed several copies of over the years, and always wanted to use to form a virtual scratch orchestra.

Beyond this initial idea I’d no clue what to expect, as I’d just left them to work out what to do in the weeks before while I edited away on the main video piece. On the night I thought they were, quite simply, incredible . . .

. . . especially as they had had only one previous practice, and the budget label vinyl isn’t the easiest to manipulate. It was the highlight of the night for me and I just soaked it up with a massive grin on my face.

After they had packed down . . .

. . . it was finally time for the screening of the main video piece, ‘Cutting Up my Friends’ - a video piece made from footage of lots of people captured improvising on their own, brought together in the editing to make them play together as a virtual orchestra. Or the first draft of it anyway. At the time a round of applause before it had even started had me even more nervous - I was rather worried it wasn’t worked enough, but thankfully all the feedback I got has now let me convince myself this was simply foolish thinking - though I am of course continuing to work on it more.

I made the piece specifically for widescreen projection and this was the first time I’d got to see it big on the cinema screen, which was something of a treat, and the genuine appreciation of the audience was, well almost too much really ( see me looking pleased and sleep deprived above ). Thank you, and thanks to everyone who helped and performed - especially RLF, Diss Miss and Colin Smith who took care of business in the bar.

I would thank the tech crew too, but they already got chocs . . .

Now to tour . . .

AHOY THERE

“One day all music will be made like this“, Thus Spake Mark Whiteford and twus done all over the land. Enemy turned to enemy, the lion to the lamb, the Hawk to the Sparror (little Cube injoke there), all were united in declaring the sheer insanity of this proclomation.
Anyhow here’s the method as demonstrated by these fine young people.

Basically a number of pieces of paper with either Verse, Chorus, Middle Eight or Go Nuts written on them. Our task was to come up with very short pieces as directed by the variety of people game enought to do it.
The results can be heard here.

Anyay it was great fun. Not gonna go on too much this week, or put up too many pics, but I really really must point out, that Liam is the new Dr. Who
and that we were inspired by some music and storytelling by Ale to consider a performance with spoken word artists doing short stories. If you’re interested get in touch here.

Ciheers me babber Richie Paradise

Playing catch up this is a review of last weeks Orchestral happening.

This time we did a few things, one of which was swapping instruments, you never heard such a 6th form esque noise nonsense in yer life, but twas alot of fun and some fun pics too (more to follow).

On our forum we have started to discuss ideas for following meetings. being a fan of Arabic music and inspired by William Dalrymple’s tv program on Sufi music which was on Channel 4. I can’t rebothered to go into too much detail but basically Arabic music is created in a different way to western music. Basically imagine it like this, Western music is harmonic in that instruments tend to follow each other whilst Arabic music kind of ‘Riffs’, different instruments play different things that seem to work together. Any way we tried it. And we sucked. At first. But then we got better and we Cube Orchestrered it and it sounded quite interesting.

We also tried playing in different time signatures, which was odd at times and we kept falling back into 4 and out again Ariel photography also complicated things. Talking of pics I tried an experiment in revolving my camera on a countdown to see what would happen. The idea was somewhat stolen from a recording method The Beatles used where they swung a microphone (Tomorrow never knows), anyhow heres the result
Yes I know, I’m a freakin Genius.

So to our swop shop experiment. To be honest I think the pics are the best thing as we didn’t listen to anything anybody else played. To kick off how scary does Marcus look on my percussive set up? but in contrast how cool does Tomoko look here? Hopo did a sweet Elton John impression Bel went all 50’s jazz
I call this one ‘It’s called a piano love (and a bass sunshine)‘. Elmo Philips once said he didn’t blow his own trumpet (that’s what girls are for) but I digress, I’ve been meaning to take up the trumpet for years and here was my chance. Now I think I’m a natural and I did hear some others after saying how much I blow on the trumpet…………

Anyhow it was back to winning ways, so well done one and all.

Ciao for now Richie Paradise

29th of September : Orchestra Cube do their first rescore - ‘Brazil’

This has already been covered by Richie, so there’s not much to add, in fact there’s not even much photographic documentary from me . . .

. . . but going through the pics it reminded me of almost nearly vaguely, to be honest not really at all, interesting “life” incident that must have happened later in the day in the Picton Takeaway when independently various Cube regulars, Hog, Lady, Me, Morgan, James and Colin arrived just about filling that space up. It was a shame that The Cube itself was far from full for the Orchestra’s rescore of ‘Brazil’, though those that were there seemed to be captivated - Rog How the sound tech described it as “Mesmerising”.

Doesn’t take a much to work out that the poor turnout was due to poor promotion, something we’ll hopefully sort before the second Orchestra Rescore - ‘The Wild Bunch’ on Thursday 22 December 8pm, at, oh yes, The Cube. Ink it in to your schedule now.

We had some fun fast-forwarding sections of ‘Brazil’ as it was played from DVD and the orchestra continued re-scoring, though this technique won’t be used with ‘The Wild Bunch’ as it’s going to be shown from original print.

Also already covered by Richie the Cube Birthday Party . . .

Which featured performances by The Hard Returns, The Chap and dancing to The Chap, the Rod & Ray dance ensemble . . .

. . . the accessory of the season was still going strong, and tied in well with the O.G. ( Original Gentlemen ) Chap theme . . .

. . . Movieoke suffered a bit from going on later, to a more lubricated and, in the main, uninitiated audience. It wasn’t terrible, and several people who saw it for the first time said how much they enjoyed it, but I suspect at the point in the evening, if I’d been a punter, I’d have probably favoured the frenzied dancing in the bar ( pictured much much later and much much less fuller above ) . Still Colin, Richie and Tom did a sterling job under the conditions and Hog amused us with ‘Bailout‘ interludes . . .

. . . and I got a chance to do a movieoke myself at the end of the night, stepping out from behind the Max to be Darth Vader to Tom’s Luke.

Earlier in the day Ali had insisted on borrowing my camera, and then disappeared in to the staff toilet. Fairly odd behaviour one might think. When I checked the camera I saw he’d taken various pictures of the, ahem, palimpsest of promotional material and graffiti that has slowly built up over the last few years . . .

. . . by the time of the party it had all become a bit more ordered and a lot more colourful with various excess programmes being used as wallpaper . . .

28th of September now . . . I managed to catch Kate and Jesse ( of the wonderful Greatness of The Magnificence nights ) . . .

. . . in the final stages of packing for their move to France. They kindly indulged me in making a video recording of Jesse going through Peter’s Cube Orchestra conductor signs.

We managed to capture them in bright bursts of sunlight in-between brief downpours with umbrellas and coats over the camera.

A more sustained bright spell allowed us to get a full improvised piece with Kate on trumpet behind me behind the camera, so Jesse had some reality to interact with.

Jesse wore the bird head mask that he also wore to conduct the Orchestra at the Venn festival earlier in the year, which was originally made, I think, for a Liftmen video.

This was all for me to edit up for the Cut-Up evening where Orchestra Cube would perfrom to the instructions ( seeing the footage ‘live’ for the first time ).

As seasoned world travelling musicians there’s no doubt they will be back at some point in some form - “commuting’ even I heard to bring us more occasional magnificence. I know Jesse used to check this blog when he was in Bristol at least, so may well be out there now, if so hello! We all miss you, and for the meantime Bristol is a less colourful and soundful place without you.