Another video from my concert in Coton in July 2011. This is “Duplicity”, my homage to the music of Steve Reich, inspired by his piece “Clapping Music”. The initial violin figure is looped live, and then I play along with it, but every eight repeats I move one quaver out with the loop, resulting in a variety of interesting cross-rhythms. Eventually, by continuing to move out of phase by one quaver at a time, I “catch up” with the original loop, and we end up in unison.
This has been a staple item in my live concerts for many years, and continues to be fascinating and challenging to play, and hopefully to listen to as well!
This video was recorded live as part of a concert in Coton, Cambridgeshire, in July 2011. Many thanks to my friend Phil Toms for the excellent arrangement, and to Nicky Anderson for the lovely venue!
Last week I played again at the excellent New Cut Arts Centre in Halesworth. Situated in rural Suffolk it’s an excellent venue where I’ve previously performed solo, and also with the “Touchable Dreams” show.
Last Sunday I was there with my duo partner Kelly Jones as “Phase 2″: This exciting collaboration has seen us exploring not only the acoustic violin duo repertoire, but also building up an interesting array of arrangements for electric/electric and electric/acoustic combinations.
Sunday’s show included duos by Wieniawski, Miklos Rozsa, Bartok, Judith Weir and Philip Hansell, plus arrangements of Arvo Part, Satie, Nyman and even Massive Attack, using a mixture of violins with, in some cases, some live looping. For two pieces I used my Bridge Octave violin, which is basically one octave lower than a normal instrument, providing some useful bass pitches.
We filmed and recorded the concert, in order to provide some useful clips for the new Phase 2 website, which I’m currently putting together at www.phase2duo.co.uk. Meanwhile here’s a video of the Nyman piece we played – a new one to our repertoire – which went down extremely well with the audience. I hope you enjoy it!
After many months of work, initially recording, then editing and mixing – plus a tremendous amount of time spent contacting poets and their publishers in order to get copyright permissions – my CD with Jeremy Harmer entitled “Touchable Dreams” is finally at the pressing plant ready for a September 1st release.
Because of the amount of time it took to get all the poetry permissions sorted – and we really only managed it due to some superb help from professional permissions person (what would be the correct title I wonder?) Rachel Thorne – and also due to a last minute refusal for what would have been our closing poem, we have been able not only to get the CD pretty well exactly as we would like, but were also able, while trying to find a replacement final track (and with some excellent inspiration from Jeremy!), to end the CD in a really (we hope) inspiring way.
I asked my son Chris to do the CD artwork and design for us, and he’s also taken some excellent photos at our most recent live show, some of which are now online on a new “Touchable Dreams” blog site – http://touchabledreams.posterous.com. Do take a look at it.
It’s now just over a year since we first did the show live, and it’s hard to stand back from it and view it objectively, but we feel that the CD is an exciting and fairly unique recording, mixing words and music in a way that we haven’t come across before. We certainly hope that others feel the same about it!
You can buy the signed, numbered limited edition “Touchable Dreams” CD from my online store. It will also be available for download from iTunes and other stores very soon (with just two poems missing where download permission was not forthcoming!).
Our next live “Touchable Dreams” show in the UK is in Ely on September 10th (details here), but we’re also doing it in Bucharest on September 4th!
Plans are also now afoot for a new show featuring the words of Charles Dickens. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…” (A Tale of Two Cities)
For my first post of 2010 I’ve got a new video release: It’s part of the “Touchable Dreams” performance which I did with Jeremy Harmer in December 2009 in Cambridge. This clip is just me doing a looped version of the famous “Canon in D” by Pachelbel. I worked out the programming needed in order to perform it properly in it’s original form – bass line and three canonical violin lines – a while ago: It involves a straight loop for the bass line and then lots of careful loop/replace functions for the canon. I was delighted it proved possible to do; and it proves popular in live performances.
This particular concert was the first outing for my new Bridge 5-string electric violin: More about the superb Bridge instruments soon…..
