http://bln.kr/33R

Listen to '' by Figure 2 on http://bln.kr, where artists can share the music they make on twitter, facebook and myspace instantly.

- 1pm, Dunblane -

I arrived home in Dunblane at about half past ten this morning after - just - catching the 9.38am Aberdeen-bound express. By an hour later, Mum was up out of bed at the nursing home and we were ready to wheel her wheelchair outside and into the adapted van, via Tescos for lunch provisions and then home. Dad and I set up the lights in the front room and I put on a CD I know she used to like and, in the space of a few minutes, her inarticulate moaning was over and she was dozing, with a smile on her face. I kissed her on the cheek. Offering some initial assistance with lunch preparations, I headed outside for a smoke.

I worked my way around to the back garden but was compelled to tramp across the sodden lawn, up some rickety steps to an upper lawn and then on over the low wall and via a none-too-available pathway of sorts up into the woodland which I associate with childhood games, tree-houses, tunnels and making patterns in the happiest Christmas snow I’d encountered up until that year: 1980.

What was once a reasonably manicured patch of woodland is now wild again: storm-felled trunks rot into a lush undergrowth. I smoke a cigarillo, leaning against a swaying, lichened birch trunk and listen to Daniel Lanois’ Acadie; an album perhaps inspired by New Orleans (although that period may have come later in his career, but I prefer to think of it as melodies and stories of human beings against the great, north, wilds of Canada.) I look up to see bare birch twigs dance in the breeze. Silhouettes of birds sail against the bright grey light of this rain-soaked day. And in this combination of memory and the present I feel utterly, utterly blessed. Furthermore, as I type this at the kitchen table, lunch has been announced as ready.

- later, back in Glasgow -

Dad just ‘phoned and we were talking about sounds (I’d earlier played him my ‘rainy afternoon’ piece of yesterday and, to my astonishment, he actually liked it.) He gave me the following description of one sound unusual to the house in Dunblane (vaguely paraphrased):
“When I unlock the door to enter the house at night, I enter the vestibule and put a key into the lock of the inner door. But with the outer door still ajar and a breeze in the air, what can happen is that the key ring gently taps against the inner door frame and what this sounds like is the low murmur of someone chattering.”
I don’t know about you but for me, this description is double-barreled. At the one time describing something tangible, specific, even banal it also sets up a gamut of imaginative curiosities: one imagines the dark interior of the empty house within. One imagines these ‘voices’ for a moment as perhaps real and that the wind itself is conspiring in bringing to life some event, either happening on the edges of the conscious present or charging-up towards the immediate future.
In other words, I’ve noted it down because I think it makes for the wonderful beginnings of a ghost story...

Hiya.
I've got a site I'm gradually building up focusing more specifically on individual creative projects: some video; some architecture; some music all swilling around and between their ostensible media defaults.
Therefore, if you have an interest in this blog here, you should know that I'm now concentrating on writing on the other site which is:
http://www.myspace.com/figure2music
It shouldn't be necessary to log in or anything to view the materials there as I always choose the most public settings possible. However, I would welcome anyone sending a friend request to that site should you want a more permanent link.
:-)
Gordon

Valetta has this entirely understandable but nonetheless curious hybrid architecture featuring equal doses of the Italian baroque I've seen in Rome and the buildings in Barcelona and Madrid. Then, there's a North African vibe to the atmosphere. One waltzes over to a proprietor of a tiny shop as he stands there in the sunshine with a smile on his face. He points me towards the more likely location of a notebook.
Outside the cathedral, three young men, robed in white with crimson, slum around the great western doors chatting and smoking cigarettes.
Again I have to mention the buses, which are typical of the loveable quirks of this island.

I wandered down another side street, led by a large projecting sign reading 'His Majesty's Voice'... something from way before the HMV store and, browsing through the racks of records, dvds, cds and video cassettes it's almost like browsing through another's library: the stock has character. Each item: vintage or obscure or commercial has links to all the others in only a notionally alphabetical order that gives me the impression 'hand picked' and so it's a joy to browse at random.

What I eventually bought:

CDs:
RINGO mal-BAMBOCC: Taximary Barra I-Port [will append photo of the cover]
Niki Gravino: The Politics of Double Beds [for the fantastic title]
IL MALTIJA - and other folk tunes from Malta
[and for completeness'-sake, yesterday I bought 'wide eyed beautiful' by local duo Chasing Pandora (they were featured in the in-flight magazine) and 'Crush' by 'Marilena'... no idea but a lovely face]

DVDs:
La Petite Lili [with Ludivigne Sagnier]
LIBERACE behind the music [this just has to be trashy fun]
To Have and Have Not [in which Bogart met Bacall]
Francesco [in an unlikely casting of Mickey Rourke as Saint Francis of Assisi... and, really, for the glorious H.B.Carter]
Therese and Isabelle - 'the erotic classic of forbidden love' [French, ooh la la]

I have a wee project now. There's this great illuminated sign over the entrance to Valletta proper and last time I was there streams of cheerful people were flowing under it. I will set my video up and then try to add some music...

Just to annoy you, I might upload the totally bizzare and obscurely nuts video I've been working on this evening to my other profile site, such that you'll be subjected to more of my music too. I dunno. Thing is rendering. I noticed that a bulleitin intimating madness somewhat doubled this blog's readership in a few hours so perhaps it's no bad thing. Bananas were once, after all, considered an exotic delicacy. You do the linguistic/metaphorical math on that :-)
Funnily, when I care less, I do more and more people notice. Alesson in the harshess of nature, I guess. But I will say this: having such a crazy idea that it scares one means that one works damned hard on the object itself, because casualness, as we all know, is an artifice akin to fiction and the soft air of society balls.
Anyhow, details later. Stuff is done on a 2GB ram so it shouldn't be entirely painful. It's a bit like doing a beautiful drawing regardless of what said drawing communicates to others. One is inclined to keep the damned precious beauty to oneself like a jealous guy with his girlfriend or someone simply scared to have his dandyish collar besmirched with the lipstick of a mere mortal. And that's all folly. Hence, productivity ensues apace.
Trrra de be dumb dum dum.




:-p

P.S. Everytime (OK: twice, I've come across lead singer of this band he's smiled. Decent guy, I guess. He gets my vote, anyway.)

Hopefully the new settings make this easier to read than the tiny scrawl of Times New Roman which happened by default...

'Some Little Joy' vs. 'Voices From a Locked Room'
or why the creativeness in fiction is so bloody difficult but entirely necessary

Peter Warlock was the name under which Edwardian English composer and music critic Philip Heseltine wrote music. Mainly, he set lyrics to music as well as transcribing Elizabethan songs. For this sort of info, you may as well consult Wikipedia…
Anyway, I recently viewed a couple of quite different films of whom Warlock / Heseltine is the subject: 'Some Little Joy' which is a faithful, well-made independent production made by a trained musician which, out of respect for the composer portrayed, sticks to biographical facts. The other, 'Voices From a Locked Room' is a more Hollywood-style affair, where a hint of divided personality is extrapolated to form the basis of a dramatic action plot: Warlock-Heseltine, in addition to using this dual technical identity, was a heavy drinker and a bohemian but also a scholar; a bon-vivant and a depressive. None of these facts make him a clinical or pathological schizophrenic and although the latter film takes liberties in order to construct drama as pure artifice, like all fiction it attempts truth through a lens constructed to probe beyond the surface of daily events and real time's lack-of-focus.

I know some of the real split involved in alcoholism. The mornings after I had, like all people after a night's partying, I suppose, that great fear about what I got up to; what compromising or brutal things I might have done or said (mainly said and mainly not much at all). But the curious thing is I was still very much drawn to a character - almost but not quite me - who had a glorious lack of the annoying inhibitions which beset the 'real me'; that person's voluminous eloquence; that person's bloody-mindedness to get a job finished. Almost as a murderer returns to the scene of his crime, I was compelled to re-inhabit that other side, again and again, merely in order to make peace with him; trying to be comfortable in two skins simultaneously. I talk here of convivial drunkenness, really, seriously harmful only in the insidiousness of the split so described. Later, that bloody-mindedness would take me more quickly over a brink and into outright insanity and the whole notion of self-identity and reality itself started to teeter all the time and in which the states of drunkenness and sobriety were interleaved via lengthy passages of withdrawal and utter wretchedness.
So, if Philip indeed was a very heavy drinker and perhaps an alcoholic, there is some merit to the notion that his personality was also split. But certainly not to the schizophrenic state portrayed in 'Voices From a Locked Room'. However, much as I'd do, the director of 'Some Little Joy' excites himself over the physical resemblance between the actor he's employed in the lead and, whilst understanding the music but wishing to stick to biographical facts, as I'd automatically try to do, he misses a great fictional story: the one of 'Voices from a Locked Room'. For the first time, I understand why Hollywood mangles a biography to make a film. The artificial narrative arc in drama is necessary in order to convey the emotional truth of a life. Viewed merely as true-to-life events witnessed by a camera one is left with the mere surface effects of character and not the evolving core of perception within.

But what if, having identified this, one starts to construct one's own life with more regard for its re-telling as a story? The biographer Douglas Botting suggested this was somewhat true of writer and naturalist Gavin Maxwell. Gavin excelled at poetic, descriptive writing but he also relished a good old heroic adventure. As he found this next-to-impossible to make up, as in a novel, instead he plunged himself into crazy real-life circumstances, again and again, in order to write biographies that read like novels…

Is this the Faustian pact of the artist: to sacrifice happiness and even success for some future-constructed story? Or is this simply the modern idea of the artist in our biographically-obsessed age? Although, is it not inevitable that we live in a biographically obsessed age when there's such a sea of information washing over at us, constantly? Do we not therefore reach out for 'friends' who, in a line's-worth of biographical resume, sum up major conundrums underlying the lives of us all? I mean, how many people today have been comforted once in a while by the 'Van Gogh - never sold a painting but now they go for $50 million plus' notion? The Warlock/Heseltine version pretty much says 'it's OK to be a suicidal drunkard because it can still produce Bethlem Down'. It used to be the case that one was drawn into art then filled in a few contextual details of biography in order to develop further an understanding of the art. This was in an age where Reason and Objectivity were the Progressive Saviours of Humanity. Now, we're not so sure. Perhaps the focus on people rather than upon the objects people make isn't a descent into gossipy, lurid trivia but, in fact, a return to focus on that which is more important. What, most of all, 'changes lives for the better'? Advances in medicine? Only once we've realised that there are lives at all and that these are of a substance that can be bettered. And in this sense, artists act as place-markers to the notion of human individuality because, like the Saints of old, they make icons of sorts: their productions and they, themselves, blend into quasi-persons many of us can relate to. So, it's as important to me that Philip Heseltine was a drunk as his music is. And the lurid, liberty-taking drama of 'Voices From a Locked Room' is, in fact, one helluva lot closer to the experience of such a life as lived by that person than the objective facts, viewed from a cool distance, might appear. Being objectively even-handed and generalising about individual subjects is a nonsense. But that doesn't, where humans are concerned, actually limit their scope. One doesn't need to generalise in order to reach far, wide and, crucially, deep.



I've uploaded a few snapshots taken earlier around town to a new album in the pictures section. Of special note are the fabulous old buses, but a 'must' I have is a flight on the daily seaplane from the harbour here over to Gozo. I envisage a 3 minute video with wonky arpeggiator soundtrack :-)

Maybe there's a song somewhere in this? I'm thinking maybe make some things more specific, others more general, get some rhythm and rhyme in there i.e. write a damn song ;-p

My sensibilities are, fundamentally
Continental:
When I awake,
It's coffee I want, not tea.

I scroll through hundreds of albums
On my iPod,
To yours,
When I want company:
Your voice like a scolding mother
Telling me to shape up
- get over the hangover -

I feel like an old man
Thinking this way
But am drawn to the better, younger version
Thinking of you.

So whilst my head pounds
And I run a bath
I smile a little
At your whimsical, eloquent
Morning lullabies

...



[and listing what I'm currently playing would be rather too much information :)]

I have half a piece entitled 'Peter Warlock vs. Philip Heseltine'... I'll get around to posting that and other stuff over the next few days.
But I was just standing out on the mini-balcony with its night-time view over the harbour at Valletta, Malta here. I was smoking a cigarillo and sipping a glass of Bacardi 'Superior' rum and coke and listening to Nana Mouskouri singing 'The White Rose of Athens' and I thought: "Gordon, if you never get anywhere else, you have arrived here. And it's sublime.'
And, bless 'em, Air Malta didn't charge a penny for transporting my vocoder keyboard here, which I'd substituted in place of a cheap, light, midi controller keyboard at the last minute.
So, now I have it all: peace, a view, all the photographic and musical equipment I want...
I'll probably produce zilch, of course. But right now, I'm so excited about the possibilities I could burst.

Perha​ps I ought​ to re-​invit​e all my Myspa​ce frien​ds to myspa​ce.​ com/​figur​e2mus​ic but I'm kinda​ shy of that.​ I don'​t like to peste​r peopl​e and I don'​t yet have the full might​ of '​stuff​'​ I'm '​confi​dent about​'​.​ But I have uploa​ded this eveni​ng a third​ piece​ of '​stuff​'​ and I've writt​en about​ it: old habit​:​ my archi​tectu​ral '​stuff​'​ tende​d to glow in crits​ coz I was there​ to talk them throu​gh it but witho​ut me they were left baffl​ed.​ Maybe​ that'​s why most music​ these​ days has lyric​s.​.​.​ peopl​e have this prior​ity in verba​l inten​tion,​ even if it's a visua​l piece​ neces​saril​y intro​duced​ by the wee side panel​ intim​ating​ '​famou​s artis​t'​.​
Anywa​y:​
http:​/​/​www.​ myspa​ce.​ com/​figur​e2mus​ic
Snowh​eart

for convenience' sake:

I'd just written, 1 beer drunk (Leffe Blonde, 75cl, 6.6%ABV) a rather morose warning to those worried about entering the architectural profession in this current economic slump:

Yes [there will be difficulties finding a job]. Current estimate 1-3 years. You'll also have a great deal of competition from older, more experienced people.
However, there will continue to be a market for fresh graduates with some up-to-date skills (computing stuff) and knowledge and a keen attitude unburdened by the cynicism which can drag the older crowd down (or 'as perceived' by potential employers at any rate).
It took me a year to get my first job after graduate school. I was an old-minded, megalomaniac cynic from day one, not full of revolution and changing the world but full of ideas, which weren't welcome.
My advice? Consider your first few years out of school as part of your educational resume/development i.e. try subsidising it; your life, like your full time education and go for your dreams, not filler tracks on an album kinda stuff. My friends who left the same grad school as me who immediately found the financial wherewithal to carry their education forwards via competition entries and ignoring the 'employee' market have done, ultimately, far, far better than I. They had the chance to express their unique capacities in full whereas mine were subjected to a war of attrition.
Result? I'm an unemployed architect and one of those friends is currently building, not as a partner in some major firm but as principal of his own, one of the tallest buildings in the world…

That was on designcommunity.com and was part of a sea of forum posts.

But I knew that at the other end of the room was a piano keyboard and, throughout this evening, I'd been merrily skipping over there, between posts and updates etc. to play along with a Deadmau5 dance CD using not the spectacular grand piano multisamples of the keyboard itself but, through its speakers, the sound of my Access Virus TI 'Snow' synth module that arrived in the post this afternoon. I'd been working my way through the presets until I found this one (RAM 5 7-8 M@trix 1000, if you're interested: it refers to an old Oberheim synth I've never had the pleasure of actually playing) which stuck. So I'd written the forum comment above, the Deadmau5 CD had reached its end and I tinkered with the keyboard. Then I decided to sit my M-AUDIO Microtrack-II on top of the keyboard and played this piece I've called Snowheart. 'Snow' and 'Heart' rather than 'There's no Heart' in the vernacular but, then again… meanings converging to the same thing, right? Then I pressed 'stop' (or, for trainspotters, the 'NAV' button) on the Microtrack, connected said device to this computer, converted the .WAV file to mp3 and uploaded it.

Simple.
It's the issue I have with myself and with architecture and music and… everything. Love included. Most of all love. For a man to be a successful social animal he has to make a distinction and draw out the ramifications of love as opposed to lust. And this, too, is artifice and a compromise against the needs of his heart. Until, that is, having understood both love and lust he finds a person about whom the two: the intellectual and the animal, are united in desire. What comes from the heart isn't complicated. It's complex. In other words, it is not many and various factors competing for attention but many and even more widely varying factors adding up to the almost hallucinatory glitter on the dust of the universe that is one human being. And the complicated machinations of artificial forms of thought: expertise, reason and so on, do nothing except to detract from the truths just awaiting their light-of-day. Truth is the real beast in the cage of society. Understand it and it may still bite you just 'coz… that's what it does. It not only knows no better; it's unconcerned about the meaning of 'better'. There are no options or compromises where truth lives. Danger!!! Yes, danger indeed. No human being has a monopoly on truth, is all I can say in response. Although is it possible for me to say even that without stirring up the memory of 'All Cretans Are Liars'? I have an inkling about myself and a desire to extrapolate to the general and, indeed, management of general context is a necessary human faculty but of course it has pitfalls. Such is life…

Anyway, there's an unlikely - on the surface - connection between my effort here and punk rock. It's the same 'need to say but fuck the skill to say it' ethos. Just that my formative experiences are, presumably, quite different. If I remember my early adolescent years, it's of singing in a cathedral choir in a little country house hotel library with the fire glowing and mince pies after; seeing the snow retreat from light to dark into the vague distance of pine and birch trunks and then looking up into a still night air: stille nacht and dreaming of the Alps. My musical ground-point is forest, not street. And there begins the difference between two otherwise similar people.