you can can whole of the recent abstract novel by Tim Gaze in the video above. Highly recommended! Hard copy info here.

Great poster made by David Hand for the up coming gig in Bishops Castle, Shropshire for the tour with the Birchall/Brice/Marks Trio! All the dates are in the live section.

See below or here in published context; the text layout and way it interacts with other contributes is worth seeing.

41. Recount a family anecdote that the sounds you are hearing now put you in mind of.

Not so much an anecdote but a sense of place and sounds where family is. I am listening to and drawing bird sounds in my parents garden. The idea of drawing sounds is inspired by work I’ve done in the last year or so with Naomi Kendrick and Dan Bridgwood-Hill. Dan and myself improvise and Naomi draws what she hears on huge sheets of paper; it works as a really exciting process for us all, working collectively across implied boundaries presented by form. It’s made me think differently about the possibilites of sound, drawing and mark making and led to situations like the one now: I’m actively listening to my surroundings and drawing as automatically as possible what I hear.

Being in the garden of the house I grew up in presents an overwhelming sense of childhood memory, warmth and belonging but also subtle changes and dislocation since it has been a long time since I lived here and was part of the daily rhythms of the house and garden; I am a visitor now. It lies squarely in fairly nondescript surburbia, the multiple possibilities of the city of Leicester just to the south: music, gigs, records shops, rehearsal studios, pubs, smoking, drinking, curry, walking home after missing the last bus…. To the north the gentle rolls of the midlands countryside: woods, fields, fields bisected by roads, birdsong, mechanised farming, small knots of council estate added to villages, looming power stations, distant motorway drone, pylon hum…

Considering the birdsounds from childhood: blackbirds song and their nests, blackbird trapped in the old chimney, its distressed flapping amplified through the walls, it’s really injured we discover once my dad has coaxed it out; later he has to finished it off, my sister and I don’t realise at the time. Finding the tiny wrens nest much later on in winter once the leaves had fallen, wood pidgeons demented with a tiny black pupil in the middle of a huge white eye, huge swooping flocks of chattering starlings waiting to fly south gathering in the swaying poplars, geese honking overhead in a V on their way to raid a cornfield for supper, thrush listening with its head sideways for worm sounds just below the surface, kestrels sometimes…

Hearing some of these birds and sounds again and pencil scrabble as I try to keep up with the pace and rhythms flying in from all sides; the mixture of turn taking and intuitive entry and re-entry into the overall soundscape fascinates me, with so many individual voices present, there is much more listening going on than actual vocalising; a vital part of collective music making. I stop drawing once enough layers of memory are present in the density of the pencil marks.

Doing some work yesterday with turntable and strings which I’ve had on the go the last few weeks. Trying to work through various ideas to isolate what works and what doesn’t, made a bunch of recordings which are mainly textural, drones and processing those back end of last week which I’m mixing at the moment. Mainly I found it was the processed stuff that was least interesting and the agitated string things I was most interested with. This is what I came back to you yesterday; to try and make a stand alone sculptural piece which played itself using just the string tensed between two points and then producing vibration and harmonics from the turning of the turntable. Have a listen to the results below:

Turntablestring13.1.12mp3 by davidmbirchall

I’m really please with this am I going to carry on working on the mixes including it in the material Ive gathered in the last few weeks. Think an early track from this will be included on an upcoming compilation from Electronic Musik also hoping to present this work as an installation/performance piece later in March, tbc in Manchester.

“Bob Dylan’s almost annual nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature receives predictable resistance. Popular music is the result of months of crafting and rehearsal, weeks of recording, countless hours of production and mastering. The process is invisible to the listener, and there are many rewards to be found, even in a brief, three-minute song: a catchy, repeating hook. A potent, repeating chorus and rhyme structure. Literature is nearly the opposite, wearing its process as skin. There is no way to rehearse a book without simply writing it, so the novelist discovers the story in essentially the same way that the reader does, by turning its pages. Rewards are much fewer, and subjective. Patterns are difficult to discern. The opposition insists that Dylan should not be considered for the Nobel Prize for literature simply because songwriting is not literature.

Can we say, then, that improvised music is much more literary than other music? That the creative process is laid bare, measure for measure, and the rewards are fewer, unconventional? That its patterns are fleeting, although purer in form, perhaps elemental?

If so, Tipping Point by David Birchall and Andrew Cheetham is no exception. Birchall and Cheetham (guitar and drums, respectively) met early last year, when performing for Rhys Chatham’s G3 ensemble. From the one-sheet, “Tipping Point is the culmination of endless jamming and working deep into each others psyche, delving into the dark corridors of their deconstructed improv drone-rock.” This is not just empty promotional copy. The text here is raw, chaotic, as if the guitars have been fashioned with tendons in place of strings, and the drums skinned with actual skin.

The opening, title track sets a curry-scented guitar drone against a cymbal-and-tom concoction. It’s somehow both kinetic and completely still, and easily plays as the most scripted track on the CDr. With two minutes left, radio-static guitar raises the temperature even more: the actual moment of tipping? The fading siren of the last minute confirms it. Opposite the spectrum from the opening cut is track three, “Hold On To Your Lamp Post,” a bewildering jazz study that will leave the more rock-minded listeners exhausted. (The artists have uploaded these two bookends for streaming at their Soundcloud page. Know that the rest of the material falls mostly in the relatively restrained middle.) The first minute is especially off-kilter, with a four-hand freestyle drum lick and a loose-stringed guitar seizure. After the manic introduction, “Lamp Post” settles into something remotely psychedelic. The guitar tones favors those of Jimi Hendrix, and the singing distortion, the jazz chord progression are reassuring features.

Track five (“Incompatible Principles”) nicely illustrates the push-and-pull between the composed and the turbulent. It begins with guitar scratching and muted, jazzy percussion. Not a sound check as much as a couple of guys who do not know the PA is on. After the disorderly warm-up, Birchall opts for a alternate-tuning drone and some chiming, high register harmonies. After a minute or two of false security, Birchall/Cheetham allow the pendulum to swing back again, incorporating headstock tricks, pulsing feedback, and now machinelike distortion and glimpses of slide guitar. “All the Reds, Yellows and Browns” closes the album with ten minutes of gypsy bell percussion and Cheetham’s knuckles-on-office-furniture ethic. Michael Ondaatje would prefer to describe the guitar as thinkering instead of tinkering, while Cormac McCarthy might refer to the sum of the parts as riprap.

It would be a disservice to the readers and the artists not to state clearly that Tipping Point is a difficult album. By all means do not think of the Birchall/Cheetham debut as a polished pop, where we learn of former lovers and future ones, of princes keeping the view. Instead, think of it as literary fiction, in which we learn as much about ourselves as anyone else. Tipping Point is available now, through MIE.”

- Fred Nolan for Fluid Radio

Excited about this tour at the end of the month!

Thanks to Jazz Services for helping us out with this.

You can hear a track here from the recording we made with Karl late last year.

reel1 track 1 by davidmbirchall

Poster is probably first one in years Ive actually involved a computer in designing.

Pleased it still manages to retain a hint of Raymond Pettibond.

Manchester gig is via Tubers.

Hope to see you there!

Finally tracked down the rather splendid evidence of the One Scrappy Mass gig in the kitchen @ 31 Albert Road. Thanks to Anthony for these!

was so please with the collection of pine cone bits, seed pods, bark, dust and unidentifiable stuff that i made a drawing using all i had collected as relief material.

below is front and back of the page.

next saturday! going to be amazing