Kams
Things
Knob twiddler, vinyl avoider, nappy changer, veg grower, vector manipulator etc
Posts by this author
Dickso FJS
More Effort Please Originals 002
Well – we nearly fell down the big-blog-black-hole over the summer. No posts since July!! RRRRRuuubbbish.
Well we’ve been busy parenting, raving, MacBook wine-spilling, moving, love spreading, rain-camping, motherboard destroying, wedding-attending, Mills & Booning and more mundanely, working… depending on which one of us you’re looking at.
Well let’s get back on it. Here’s another original Kams track fresh off the hard-drive.. bit of a late night sprawler – one for tired bum shake 5am kids. Hope you like it!
Keep an eye out – cause I’ll try and be a bit more active over the next few months.
- Kams - Dickso FJS [14MB]
Bumping For Alteration
More Effort Please Originals 001
A little track of my own for your ears…
Twin Beams
Pedal Steel III – Susan Alcorn
Finally I get to finish off the pedal steel trilogy… well worth waiting for though. (Feedburner tells us there are 14 of you now… crikey, someone ring the lawyers!)
The third track ‘Twin Beams’ is by the Texas based pedal steel improvisor/composer Susan Alcorn whose gorgeous solo pedal steel pieces are really worth tracking down.
This piece was written as part of a collaboration that Alcorn had taken part in with Chris Cutler in 2002, accompanying poetry he had written about the Kosovan war. It is also included, as a solo piece, on the 2006 album ‘Curandera’ on Fleece Records, which I couldn’t find for sale online – but should be available by emailing the label I’d imagine. Go on – buy it.
I had a very pleasant and obliging round of emails with Susan – who sent me the track via email last week. After reading that she had previously collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, an artist with a deep understanding of live instrumentation and electrical and electronic processing, I asked particularly about the relationship with electricity and whether the amplification of the steel guitar bore any influence on how she composed. Below are excerpts from her reply.
Concerning Pauline. Yes, I have worked with her, and even more importantly, her outlook on music resonates with me. Pauline’s approach is to listen deeply. She calls this Deep Listening, and she’s built a whole theory of music around it. It’s a more feminine, more round and holistic, way of approaching notes and sounds – listening, reacting to and incorporating everything you hear.
I think Pauline thinks deeply about electricity and its relation to sound. I, on the other hand, don’t really think much about that on the conscious level (though at times I wish my instrument were acoustic – I have played slide guitars for almost my whole life, and I miss the pure and direct sound of the dobro. I do, however consider sound as an abstract quality, though I never really intellectualize it (nor anything else in music for the most part). I try to play my instrument as a partner with respect, listen to the instrument, listen to the sounds inside and outside my head, feel what it is I want to communicate. I’ve played the (electric) pedal steel guitar through amplifiers for over thirty years, much of that in bands at dance halls, so perhaps because of that, I take the electric and amplified aspect of it for granted.
Whatever subtleties come out of the notes I play, are for the most part not related, I don’t think, to electronics. They’re more related to the ways I approach the string and the instrument physically.
Actually (I’m contradicting myself and thinking as I type) amplification plays a big role because without amplification, the tiny little things which become so evident when you hear them on a recording or live are only audible due to amplification. I use a volume pedal and that’s an important part of it. I can use different manners of picking, etc. to help bring out different sounds.
I wrote the ‘Twin Beams’ piece at about 5 or 6 in the morning in Leipzig, Germany for a concert with the Chris Cutler Project. He had written a series of poems related to war, Kosovo, etc. (2002), and he encouraged us to write music for them. We were in rehearsal, and he still needed more material, so I wrote it before rehearsal the day before we were going to play. The piece – written for piano, percussion, three voices, cello, and pedal steel guitar – made use of quarter tones and chord voicings that combine very “consonant” sounding intervals with dissonance – so you have, on the one had a very physically pleasant sound like a major triad and then an extra note or two that is fairly outside that tonality are put in, which to my ears it makes it more interesting. When I play this piece solo, to accommodate the quarter tones, I bend my bar which gives it a more microtonal feel. The sounds that seem to arise from nowhere out of a note are done with harmonics and bar manipulation. This is the steel guitar and the different communities of sound coming out, and electronics plays a part in this being able to be heard, kind of like a microscope does visually, but I rarely think about this. I usually think (though that’s not a good word) about something I want to communicate and go from there. I try to listen and give room for space. So there, to make a short story long, is the answer to your question The short answer, I guess, would be, “very aware, though I rarely think of it consciously”.
Stoned on Love
“There must be a million things to make a man feel good”
I can’t find anything on the web about Forris Woods other than this track was released on Abbot Records.
So let’s make some stuff up…
Born in 1934 in Wolverhampton, Forris was the son of a local shoemaker. Disliking the smell of leather he joined the circus as a ‘dung boy’ clearing out the animals – this lay the foundations for his future love of mulching and composting, a subject in which he would gain national notoriety for being the first man to say ‘pigshit’ on Blue Peter…
Arrgghgh – just listen to the track.. its great.
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Imitator (version)
Bass warfare
This popped up on my MP3 player on the train to work yesterday and before I knew it I was writhing around winding my scrawny white boy arse in various commuters faces. Bad form.
This is the version with less vocal and more distortion released on a split EP with DJ/Rupture on Tigerbeat6 in 2003.
Low down dirty bum shaker action.
Little Wooden Church On A Hill
Willie Eason
Pedal Steel – Part IIPsalms 150:4 “praise him with stringed instruments”
Pioneering preacher/guitarist Willie Eason first brought the lap steel into the US Pentecostal ‘House of God’ churches alongside his brother Troman during the 1930’s, beginning a tradition now know as ‘Sacred Steel’, where the steel guitarist plays an integral part of the service alongside the preacher.
Almost unheard of outside the House of God communities until relatively recently the tradition has spawned many notable names including the Campbell Brothers, Aubrey Ghent (whose live version of ‘Praise Music’ is definately worth checking out for a proper hairs-on-back-of-the-neck gospel stomp), Calvin Cooke and Robert Randolph, with the latter popularising the sound after developing a more secular rock/funk orientated style.
The track included here is by the original father of the scene Brother Willie Eason. I know he’s not playing a pedal steel on this track.. its a lap steel guitar, but he played a huge part in creating a tradition that now includes pedal steel players – i’m sure this discrepancy is enough to have some muso pedants frothing at the mouth but it’s a good enough link for me.
The track is also available on the Arhoolie Records compilation called ‘Sacred Steel’ (which also contains the Aubrey Ghent track mentioned earlier) which you can download from emusic.
There are some other good articles covering the Eason brothers and the sacred steel tradition found here:
Ghostshrimp
Nice and Precise…
More illustration – this time from the hand of Dan James, part of Ghostshrimp.
Again, the site contains a nice shop selling prints/t-shirts/books etc.
Go see.
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Out Of The Blue
BJ Cole
Pedal Steel – Part IFollowing the joys of my little barbeque three-parter i’ve decided to do more of the same, although this time the common theme is based around the Pedal Steel guitar rather than burning meat and warm lager, a lot more sensible I think you’ll agree.
BJ Cole is an official pedal steel session legend, having worked with nearly everyone who ever recorded an album. Check out the list from his own site here to get an idea of how prolific he has been (I mean, come on… Ken Dodd and Jimmy Nail!) but the steps he taken away from the world of pop are where you’ll find his best work.
I first saw him playing with Luke Vibert after the cracking Hip-Hop/Hawaiian/Lounge/Acid album they made together called ‘Stop the Panic’ and it made me wonder at the time why the instrument isn’t played more often in the way Cole does, bearing in mind its seemingly obvious ability to create everything from swooping psychedelia to metallic screeches and shimmering resonance.
The track included here was taken from his website. It’s a piece of music written by current collaborator and cellist Emily Burridge from their album ‘Duets for Pedal Steel Guitar & Cello’ and its about five and half minutes long… making it roughly ten times longer than it took to think up that album title.
Ninja Mi Ninja
Rougher than Rambo…
Courtney Melody being bloody brilliant. Menace and soul. Soundclash smasher of old.
Thats all…
You can puuurchase this on real vinyl from Juno.
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Jillian Tamaki Illustration
I’m going to add some visual bits and bobs up here every now and again – hopefully to compliment the musical listings.
First off is the website of Canadian born illustrator, Jillian Tamaki. Which contains some nice free desktop wallpaper downloads in the shop section.
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