11-track CD-length album by Greg Fox featuring a 12-minute grotesque comedy for recorder-player with and without head, the distilliation of the 'natural' side of a beautiful beautiful night which was otherwise very human (the only trace of this in the recording is the attempt to tell the birds about it) - surrealist take on nature-music with odd zooms and priorities in subtle combinations which could almost appear in nature.... also a large ZX Spectrum sample sequencer tribute to Georges Aperghis and some improvised electronic pieces. To finish, a remix of the Jonny Scott Band.
1. Recorder Concerto, 1994: for mainly headless recorder, organ and FM radio 2. Thousand and one prelude for artificial and impossible chamber score 3. DM Portrait 4. Purr-Bird, May 2005 : a spectacular night from dusk til dawn, the blending of cat and garden birds. 5. NC Portrait 6. A Slap 7. Hey for Georges - hommage to Aperghis for crude beeper and Z80 processor 8. Farewell Amalgam - for Yamaha DX21, about to be sold 9. First of the fakes 10. Evening out - an insult to group improvisation, 2005 11. More Jonny - studio remix based on recordings made by the Jonny Scott band during the early 1990s.
Track 7 uses the methods deployed by Aperghis in his 'Récitations', here applied to sampling software on the ZX Spectrum. The sequence consists of a series of address-pairs and playback rates. The samples are just loaded into RAM. The software is supplied in TAP format thanks to Lee 'Blood' Tonks.
Track 4 documents a very beautiful night, the first of May 2005, when a very dear friend, then a lover, and I spent the night til 6 in the morning singing "Tera Chehra" by Adnan Sami, trying to work out how to pronounce the words from the lyric-sheet. The recording doesn't focus on those human aspects however: it consists of Zaky the cat purring over the top of birdsong recordings. The purr zoom is close and there's a lot of speeding up and layering so that it sounds quite ominous. The birds are a little silence-erased but otherwise untreated, and I occasionally attempt to join in with them, with little success as my main whistling noise is just long notes.
Track 1 is based on a cassette 15 tape I made in 1994 at home using recorder, organ and pause button.
Track 10 is an initial attempt to write (fake) 'group improv' using chance operations. Can indeterminate approaches work with tonal music? I think so, though this isn't necessarily an example of how best to do it......
Track 8 is a layered exploration of some of the voices I'd written for the Yamaha DX21 keyboard during the 80s and early 90s. Kind of wish I hadn't sold it now as I never kept the voices. Easy enough to replicate though - most FM sounds are just variations on a theme to be honest.
Track 11 is a remix really: a piece made from finished material by the Jonny Scott Band. The original tape was never in my possession, only brought along for the remix session, but will hopefully be salvaged one day. Jonny Scott is an incredible songwriter based in England, born in Ulster. He sings of love and the practical realities thereof, as well as documentary tales of sunday lunch and visits to the record shop, scuba diving and the atom bomb. This remix was undertaken at Huddersfield in 1997 with Alan Smith, the great modernist trumpeter, and is essentially a destructive, bravado cut-up.
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