Monkey is coming to London and I am very excited about playing my saw in the orchestra pit of the Royal Opera House. Whatever next? I have also spent a great deal of the last few months in the studio with Damon Albarn working alongside him as Musical Director of the new album which will hopefully be released later on this year. Watch this space.

This is what they say about it on their website...

First performed in the UK at the inaugural Manchester International Festival in 2007, following sold-out runs, Monkey: Journey to the West is a new opera for the 21st century directed by the world renowned Chen Shi-Zheng with music composed by Gorillaz award-winning mastermind Damon Albarn and design and animation by Jamie Hewlett based on the ancient Chinese legend of spiritual enlightenment.

This reworked version is a dazzling spectacle involving nearly 40 circus acrobats, martial artists and singers from China with an orchestra of Western and traditional Chinese instruments. Performed in Mandarin with English surtitles, Monkey is a thrilling experience, an unforgettable sensual and spiritual journey.

Very much looking forward to playing in the live version of the album I contributed saw to a when I was in Los Angeles in 2006. Kate St John is MD and the band is fabulous!

Rogue's Gallery - Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys
Featuring Baby Gramps, Martha Wainwright, David Thomas, Gavin Friday, Ralph Steadman, Robyn Hitchcock, Norma Waterston, Teddy Thompson, Martin Carthy, Julie Fowlis, Eliza Carthy, Pete Doherty & more

Based on an extraordinary recent CD release featuring Nick Cave, Sting, Jarvis Cocker, Rufus Wainwright, Bono and others, this concert features contemporary re-workings of traditional sea songs and chanteys.

Expect songs about drinking, women, death, nasty crimes on the water and of course pirates... funny, beautiful and sad songs. Special guests tbc.

Produced by maverick genius Hal Willner (known for his tribute records, covering the music of Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen), the idea for Rogue's Gallery germinated on the set of the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, with actor Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski.

The songs (on the CD) have titles like 'Baltimore Whores,' 'Boney Was a Warrior' (about Napoleon) and 'Little Boy Billee' sung by the artist Ralph Steadman about eating the cabin boy. A sea chantey (often spelt shanty) is a work song that was sung on the ol' ships in the day. Rhythmically they matched the activity speed of these men hauling on lines. Many of them are really filthy. Many are very beautiful.

'The ocean: it's all about the vast blue that engulfs two thirds of the planet. The human being cast against that abyss creates an interesting bit of perspective. I think the sailors of the time were dancing with death, and these were there tunes.' '
Gore Verbinski

I am Musical Director for this show which has given me the amazing opportunity to call up a bunch of my old friends and put the House Band from Hell together!

Barbican Contemporary Music Programme
Autumn 2007





Only Connect, the Barbican's unique series dedicated to crossing boundaries and confounding expectations, presents the startling new song cycle Plague Songs, a unique event which explores the themes of the film Exodus by Penny Woolcock and the Plague Songs CD.





Sun 28 Oct 7.30pm

Plague Songs

Barbican Hall

Produced by the Barbican in association with Artangel

Tickets £15/20/25



Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness. (Exodus, Chapter 5 verse 1.)



It is unlikely there will be a musical event in 2007 anything like this live manifestation of the Plague Songs project, produced by Artangel. Under the direction of David Coulter - music supervisor for Damon Albarn's acclaimed contemporary opera Monkey and Tom Waits' play Black Rider - an extraordinary selection of international musical talent will explore the themes of the film Exodus, itself a contemporary retelling of the Plagues of Egypt.



In 2006, the seaside town of Margate was transformed by a series of live events commissioned and produced by Artangel for Penny Woolcock's Exodus film. Ten songs, inspired by the plagues of the Old Testament, were written and recorded by some of the world's leading artists; as part of the filming, local singers and musicians performed their own versions of the songs at a concert at the town's Winter Gardens produced by Coulter.

For this concert, some of the artists from that CD – including Rufus Wainwright, Imogen Heap and King Creosote – are joined by a unique assembly of musicians. British vocal legend June Tabor, alt country stars The Handsome Family, vocal individualist Phil Minton, the US singer-songwriters Sandy Dillon and Daniel Knox will join the Sense of Sound Choir and other artists yet to be confirmed. Margate's Anthony Johnson, one of the leads in the film and a highlight of the original Plague Songs concert, will also appear.



As well as leading from the front on musical saw, Coulter has assembled a house band which includes two members of one of Tom Waits' classic line-ups – saxophonist Ralph Carney (who has not visited the UK in two decades) and drummer Michael Blair. They are joined by Kate St John (reeds, ex-Van Morrison and Dream Academy), Thomas Bloch (who specialises in rare instruments including the glass harmonica), Rohan Kriwaczek (president of the Guild of Funerary Violinists) as well as keyboardist Roger Eno and guitarist Leo Abrahams.



New plague songs have been commissioned for the show, which will include a Plague of London anthem. Clips of the film Exodus will make up part of the audio-visual accompaniment to the music, in this unparalleled evening of pestilence.



The Plague Songs CD, released on 4AD, features Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, Imogen Heap, King Creosote and Scott Walker. The CD received some rave comments, such as the five star review in The Independent which said, "The skill lies in choosing the right performers, and nearly all these are perfect for their plague."





Media partner: Plan B magazine


The film Exodus, commissioned by Channel 4, will be broadcast on Channel 4 at 9pm on Monday 19 November.


Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS Box Office: 0845 120 7550 www.barbican.org.uk

Getting to the Barbican by Underground/BR: Barbican, Bank, Blackfriars, City Thameslink,

Farringdon, Liverpool Street, Moorgate and St Paul's are all within a10 minute walk

Monkey article from the New Yorker

FROM THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE

High-wire Act

Damon Albarn scores an opera.

by Sasha Frere-Jones

July 30, 2007

It was a clear and cool Friday evening in Manchester, England, the streets still full of summer light at twenty minutes past seven. In front of me, in an orderly queue that stretched down the pavement in front of the Palace Theatre, were two teen-age boys wearing T-shirts and jeans. They were engaged in a comic routine: after glancing at the theatre's marquee, they would look at each other and repeat a carefully stressed mantra, "We are going to an OP-er-ah, an OP-er-ah." When I asked the boys why they were going to an OP-er-ah, one, lunging forward and placing himself in front of his friend, as if there were television cameras trained on him, replied, "It's Damon out of Blur, innit?"

It was, in part. Damon Albarn, the thirty-nine-year-old musician and lead singer of the British band Blur, who already has a fairly elaborate résumé for a pop star, wrote the score for the opera "Monkey: Journey to the West," which was having its début run in Manchester. Getting teen-age pop fans into an opera house isn't easy, but Albarn and his collaborators—the graphic artist Jamie Hewlett and the director Chen Shi-Zheng—have done a remarkable job of making an imposing art form accessible, funny, even slightly crude. The opera, which was commissioned by the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris, where it will be shown in September, is based on a sixteenth-century Chinese novel by Wu Ch'Êng-ên about a bratty monkey king who seeks enlightenment (and immortality, the egomaniac) by providing protection for a monk who needs to get to India and back unscathed. To Albarn's credit, the score is neither an aggregate of pop songs that people already know nor an attempt to garner highbrow bona fides through imitations of the classical canon. Like the opera itself, a delightful alloy of martial art, acrobatics, and cartoons, Albarn's score—which features several arias—is a hybrid that mingles movie-soundtrack ambience and goofy sound effects with the repetitive fecundity of modern composers like Steve Reich. There is even a catchy song about peaches that could possibly make it as a pop single, if the English-speaking world were ready for a hit in Mandarin. For many in the audience, Albarn's name is what brought them in. (During a preview two nights earlier, some people clapped after every scene and left their seats to buy pints of lager.)

Even before Albarn wrote the score for "Monkey," his career had taken some unconventional turns. For some Britons, he continues to be "Damon out of Blur," though the last Blur album was released four years ago and the band's most recent significant commercial success was a self-titled album from 1997 that contains the only Blur song most Americans know. A clangorous rock number, it has the title "Song 2," but many people who have heard it, in car commercials and at sporting events, know it by Albarn's whoop in the chorus: "Woo-hoo!" In England during the nineties, Blur's four members were stars, part of a musical moment that was dubbed "Britpop" by the journalist John Robb, ostensibly because something inherently British and poppy had taken hold in rock, as punk faded farther into the shadows. Blur's supposed rivals were Oasis, a band that has also been reduced in America to one song, the Beatles-y ballad "Wonderwall." In England, Oasis was celebrated as the band of the working class, while Blur's members were knocked for being "students," a term of derision indicating a lack of manliness and a surfeit of schooling.


Albarn and his bandmates were easily distracted polymaths. During the nineties, the group's sound changed with almost every album; waves of loud guitar gave way to stylized music-hall songs, only to be replaced by disco and variations on American indie rock. In the past eight years, the band has released two hypnotic, if disorganized, albums that resist classification. (In turn, many record buyers have resisted the albums.) As Blur decelerated, Albarn began working on a series of projects that allowed him to reach beyond rock, pop, and the English language, and, eventually, to eclipse his band's profile.

In 1998, with Jamie Hewlett, Albarn founded Gorillaz, which is how many people know his work, though they wouldn't necessarily recognize him on the street. The "members" of Gorillaz, which has sold fifteen million records worldwide, are highly detailed cartoon characters, drawn by Hewlett, and their faces are the only ones a Gorillaz fan sees. The music is low-key hip-hop, with bits of reggae and rock thrown in, as though all the music playing in the hotels and clubs of London on a single night had been distilled into one elegant and knowing style.

In 2006, having completed a series of live performances for the second Gorillaz album, "Demon Days" (a multimedia presentation that was received as warmly in Harlem's Apollo Theatre as it was in Manchester's opera house), Albarn recorded an album called "The Good, the Bad and the Queen," with the bassist Paul Simonon, formerly of the Clash; the guitarist Simon Tong; and the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, who at sixty-six remains one of the world's most relevant funk drummers and, as a member of Fela Kuti's band in the sixties and seventies, is credited with creating the Afrobeat style. In some ways, the mild-mannered and economically sunny songs on "The Good, the Bad and the Queen" resemble tracks that Blur might have played; the band's début album is a song cycle about England ("a stroppy little island of mixed-up people"), a Blur-like concept. The band sounds nothing like Blur, though. Songs unfold at a leisurely pace, soaked in echo. Keyboards and basses dominate, and though none of the album is reggae, exactly, it has the slow, burning feel of much Jamaican music. There may be a younger generation of listeners who have no idea that Albarn ever had anything to do with loud guitars and shouty anthems.

Languor has become a central feature of Albarn's music; it suits his sweet, easygoing voice and his taste for short melodic phrases—like the piping way he sings "feel good" in the Gorillaz hit "Feel Good Inc.," pitching his voice high enough so that it sounds as though he were simply saying "doot doot," and lodging the motif permanently in your head. He is the rare rock musician whose work sounds better when it is stripped of high volume and speed—and, arguably, of Englishness. In 2000, Albarn approached the owners of a record shop called Honest Jon's, near his home in Westbourne Park, about starting a label that reflected their interests, primarily African music, Jamaican reggae, and classic American soul. The label's first release, a modest but sparkling album called "Mali Music," was a collaboration that Albarn recorded in Mali with various local musicians, including Toumani Diabate and Afel Bocoum. One of the label's most recent projects is a live recording—for which Albarn was the sound engineer—of the Algerian popular music, often played at weddings and celebrations, called chaabi. (The album has yet to be released.)

When Albarn accepted Shi-Zheng's invitation to collaborate on the opera, "Monkey" had already been staged as a play and as a television series, which ran first in Japan for two seasons during the late seventies and, later, in England and Australia. (The Japanese series, a low-budget affair—a pair of exaggerated sideburns is the only visual cue that the lead character is a monkey—became deliciously inexplicable when dubbed into English by British actors mimicking Chinese accents.) For the opera version, Shi-Zheng reduced Ch'Êng-ên's rambling text to ninety minutes and nine tight scenes, thankfully abridging the monkey king's journey, which in the novel lasts hundreds of years. Even so, Monkey, who is also known as the Great Sage Equal to Heaven—a hubristic name, not unlike a rapper's alias—has plenty of time to develop badly needed people skills while managing to protect the monk, trash a peach banquet, spar with a variety of ghouls, and wear gold shoes. Monkey, you see, is a rock star.

The opera, perhaps to the relief of those encountering sung exposition for the first time, begins with images. On a thin scrim in front of the stage, the Chinese ideogram for "monkey" appears, followed by a series of crisp animations by Hewlett that echo the opening sequence of the Japanese television series: a stone egg perched on top of a mountain lights up, wobbles with pending life, and rolls down a hill, where it breaks open, revealing the monkey king, who emerges with a loud "Eeeeeeeeeee!" Then the scrim lifts to show Monkey, played by the Chinese singer and acrobat Fei Yang, surrounded by his subjects, also monkeys (and acrobats), who scamper up green bamboo poles. Yang is brilliant: a petulant Peter Pan in a tracksuit, who seems to have been plucked from the stands at a soccer match. Some of Monkey's wire-flying and coördinated fight moves would be familiar to anyone who has seen "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," but Yang's more intimate gestures are unexpected. To announce his presence, Monkey throws one shoulder back like a runway model, makes a hissing noise in the back of his throat, and smiles.


Monkey spends the first third of the opera wandering around in search of shortcuts to immortality. He is dismissed as too self-centered by an old monk who decides to teach him only rudimentary magic. (High leaps, shrinking objects—nothing major.) Monkey also wants a really cool weapon, and to that end visits the underwater Dragon King—the opera's blue, befinned version of James Bond's gadget vender, Q. In one of the opera's most enchanting sequences, the live action is suspended and the scrim returns, showing animations by Hewlett of Monkey diving from the heavens into the sea. Albarn scores this moment with a single burbling line played on the ondes Martenot, an early predecessor of the synthesizer. When Monkey reaches the bottom of the sea, he gazes up and sees a school of fish swarming in the black above him. A spotlight illuminates Yang behind the scrim, walking in place and craning his neck to watch the fish.

"Monkey" maintains an unpretentious, jerry-rigged charm in both the staging and the music. When one of Monkey's fellow-travellers, Pigsy, introduces himself in an aria, he sings each phrase in a series of grunts that Albarn has separated rhythmically so that Pigsy, who looks overweight, sounds out of breath and close to collapsing. Before agreeing to work on the opera, Albarn and Hewlett made two trips to China with Shi-Zheng. While visiting the city of Yinchuan, in Ninzxia Province, Albarn spent an afternoon lying on the floor of his hotel room recording the sound of horns in the street. When he returned to London, he enlisted David Coulter, a multi-instrumentalist and conductor, and the visual artist Gavin Turk to help him build an instrument that plays notes using nothing but the air horns found in cars. The resulting instrument—Albarn calls it a klaxophone—is almost as big as a piano: thirty-six air horns housed in a wood-and-Plexiglas box powered by an air compressor from a dentist's office and operated by a series of colored buttons and a pink joystick lifted from an arcade game.

Albarn has integrated the klaxophone into the score, using it to buttress the horn section and bring an edge of tart urgency to several fight scenes. His themes, rather than building into huge orchestral waves, repeat and stack up like samples; for instance, a woodblock mimics both the canter of a horse and the tick of a clock, and is joined by a mass of strings and horns carefully trading off the same three-note motif. Many of the key melodies are played by the workhorse of Chinese music, the pipa, a stringed instrument that in tonality falls somewhere between a harpsichord and a banjo, though it looks like a lute. (After touring the headquarters of the Chinese National Orchestra, in Beijing, Albarn decided that the pipa reminded him of stringed instruments used in soundtracks written by the Italian composer Ennio Morricone, an insight that made him feel that he could write music for it.) His score calls for two pipa players, as well as a Chinese zither, a string section, two percussionists, and a battery of untraditional instruments, which, in addition to the klaxophone, include the Crystal Baschet (a series of glass rods played by moistened fingers) and the glass harmonica, an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin that looks like a glass kebab laid on its side.

The second half of the opera, in which Monkey and his retinue attempt to return to China with Buddhist scriptures, suffered in Manchester from delayed subtitles, which sometimes appeared twenty seconds late, if they appeared at all. Happily, these lapses did little to diminish the visceral impact of the images onstage: at one point, an enormous blue hand belonging to Buddha descends from the rafters to trap Monkey for "five hundred years"; at another, a collection of female aerialists in white bodysuits are erotically bound by red fabric strips; and, during Monkey's visit to the Dragon King, a fantastic starfish suspended on wires slowly scissor-kicks its way across the stage while wearing big white Elton John sunglasses. What Albarn, Hewlett, and Shi-Zheng have created with "Monkey" is a lingua franca of pop culture, a visual and sonic shorthand that anyone, anywhere, can understand. Though an opera ticket is still much less affordable than an album, this kind of universal legibility is at the heart of the best pop music, a genre that Albarn may help to redefine simply by ignoring it.

I have been a member of belgian cult underground experimentalist collective 48 Cameras for over 10 years having contributed to many CDs. This is the most recent release and more information can be obtained by checking: www.48cameras.com

This album I produced for Sandy Dillon and am featured very heavily playing saw, electric violinm, drums, etc. One of the most amazing singer/songwriters ever. She is a force of Nature and one of the most gifted performers I have ever had the pleasure to have worked with...

Lian Lunson's Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man was filmed when we were performing the show in early 2005 at the Sydney Opera House. My saw is featured on one of the tracks Jarvis Cocker sings on the accompanying soundtrack album - I Can't Forget

This year I was lucky enough to be asked to contribute a saw arrangement to an amazing track on Rennie and Brett Sparks's fabulous new album The Last Days of Wonder.
Here are a few things the press say about this record...

New album Last Days Of Wonder out now on Loose - www.lastdaysofwonder.info

Album Of The Week - 4 Stars - The Independent (Friday)

"...the Handsomes are making vintage magic in a world of their own" - 4 Stars - The Independent (Saturday)

"Last Days Of Wonder might just be the duo's finest hour" - 5 Stars - The Sun

"...an unqualified triumph - Americana Album Of The Month" - 4 Stars - Uncut

"...genius" - Mark Radcliffe, Radio 2

"...without doubt one of their best" - Word

"...classic folk music wrought anew by a group that grows stronger by the year" - Wire

"...beautifully eerie - a wonderful album" - Daily Telegraph

"...songs of weirdness and wonder, set in a half wild, half urban, entirely mysterious place" - 4 Stars - The Guardian

"...a collection of mini masterpieces" - 4 Stars - The Independent On Sunday

"...these are engrossing short stories as much as they are songs and deserve the attention their stillness demands" - 4 Stars - Mail On Sunday

"...a strange delight" - 4 Stars - The Sunday Times

"...they imply the wild things at civilisation's edge - brilliant!" - 4 Stars - Mojo

I am currently working intensively in the studio with Damon Albarn on preparation of the score for his new opera. ..I am working with Kate St John on the score and should hopefully be running the orchestra for this ambitious new project...Monkey: Journey To the West.. is set to receive it's global premiere at Manchester International Festival on June 28th 2007, part of the first ever Manchester International Festival. ..Monkey: Journey To the West.. is going to be a circus production based on the Chinese literary classic. Written and directed by Chinese theatre director Chen Shi-Zheng (currently making his first feature film with Val Kilmer & Meryl Streep), the music for the production is by Damon Albarn with visual setting designed by Jamie Hewlett (Albarn & Hewlett work toge ther as Gorillaz).