franglen.net - Home

Legacy 7 Prep - 7 Bags Full.

Mon, 21 May 2012 20:35:05 +0100

3.30am - all alone in a strange place, just the way I like it.

I had just carried another four bags in to join the previous three. Everything had changed for the worse, so it took me 8 hours to get to this point. It should be getting easier each time but it's really really not.

Large deserted buildings make a surprising amount of noise and I knew no one else was in the place. The ticking sound is water dripping through the ceiling. Getting there.

Beached - Legacy 10 Preparation

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:53:12 +0100

Ain't solar power great? If a bit cruel.

Legacy 10 preparation. Getting there - I'm hoping all the elements of Legacy will come together by the end of May.

Legacy 7 Prep Continues. (3 Bags)

Tue, 01 May 2012 04:03:24 +0100

Rheingold, Scene II. An open space on the mountaintops.

FRICKA:
Wotan, Gemahl, erwache!

WOTAN:
(forträumend)

Der Wonne seligen Saal
bewachen mir Tür und Tor:
Mannes Ehre,
ewige Macht,
ragen zu endlosem Ruhm!

FRICKA:
Wotan, husband, awake!

WOTAN:
(still dreaming)

Gate and door guard
the sacred hall of my joy:
man's honour,
eternal might
extend to endless fame!

Music by Wolfgang Sawallisch and Bavarian State Opera, 1991 on EMI.
Buy it from the great Harold Moore's Records: hmrecords.co.uk/

Legacy Prep Continues: Up to The Leap

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 05:37:12 +0100

So the wonderful Mark Fry and Friends show has been and gone, and what a resounding success it was. We'd all like to do more shows together, and judging from the reaction of the audience at Village Underground they'd like us to as well. Watch this space.

From the heady heights of Thursday night it's back to the previous, slightly grubby matter in hand - nice grubby, rather than grubby grubby that is - Legacy preparation continues. I'm glad it's been raining recently, fills the reservoirs. Not enough for the farmers, but enough for me. (See footnote below.)

Film below: I guess you could call this Pre-Legacy prep. I don't know the programme, just caught it on late night TV. A lot of these old buildings are used as charismatic backdrops for TV programmes, which can be quite useful for planning, and it's always a buzz to see 'your' gaff on the telly. The only reason I can think of recommending the appalling film Sahara is to catch its Pyestock moments - Cell 3 and Cell 4 both dolled up for Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz... I must say I pity the poor bastard assigned the job of getting the pigeon shit off everything before filming started.

Why at least some of these remarkable places can't be preserved in some historically relevant way, rather than just knocking them down for lorry distribution centres or turning them into inappropriate flats is beyond me. Go around the Ruhr valley and you'll see disused industrial works turned into art and public spaces that respect the history of the place. A couple of years ago I live mixed John Cale's Dark Days installation in the old coal works in Essen, now partially art spaces and a kind of a park. Families walking around, cafeterias, good buzz, while all the time the original coal machinery looms over you, reminds you how the place once was. I might be being a bit naive - when I naughtily popped over a locked gate to see the coal works close up I wound up in the junkie's den, not quite the family atmosphere I'm describing - but at least they're trying something, respecting where it all came from, appreciating how it defines the area and the people in it.

Not so here in the UK. Flatten it, move on. I would say Rant Over but I haven't even started yet.

Footnote: Someone told me recently I was being a right tease with the obtuse way I'm presenting what I'm doing at the moment, and to a certain extent I am, but there is a proper reason for that too: I'm not even half way through setting up this installation - by far the most complicated thing I've taken on - and if I made too much of a song and dance of it I'd probably have to abandon the whole thing. I've been planning this for months, with tricky-to-research purchases from China, Athens and Argos, so abandoning it is not an option, especially as I'm way beyond the 14 day return period for Argos.

Springtime In Shoreditch - Mark Fry Live Show

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 04:11:14 +0100

I've written a piece for ClashMusic about Mark Fry and the show we're doing next Thursday 19th at Village Underground in London. This week we've been rehearsing together as a band for the first time and it's been fantastic.

Slightly Amazing Moment Number One: Once we'd played through Mandolin Man for the first time in the rehearsal room, Mark said that was the very first time the song had been played since he recorded it in 1971. Woah.

Slightly Less Amazing Moment Number Two: Billy Bragg lost his jacket in the cafe next to the rehearsal rooms. I hope he found it again. Everyone seemed pretty confident it would turn out right in the end. Phew.

This is going to be an exciting show, and I'm really looking forward to it. Any trepidation I felt about what it would actually sound like went in the first ten minutes in the rehearsal room - we make a cracking band. Grasshopper out of Mercury Rev doesn't fly in until early next week, but even without him the rest of us - Mark and me out of Lemon Jelly, Guto out of Super Furry Animals, Martin out of Tunng and Nick out of The A.Lords made such a glorious noise. It's going to be out of this world. Like I say at the end of the ClashMusic piece, Bring It On....

Come along and say both Hi and Wow - probably not at the same time, that doesn't really work. I've just seen some special offer tickets here - not sure how long they'll be up there for. See you in a gently spaced out Shoreditch.

Legacy 7 Prep

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 01:14:30 +0100

Preparation for my next project.

Carrying a 70 litre bag of J Arthur Bower's Multipurpose Compost up to a high floor of an abandoned building. This is the final stage of a complicated 3 hour journey carrying 3 bags.

Legacy Prep

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 21:57:49 +0100

Warriors

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:36:58 +0100

Sea Pig Slow Dance

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:56:52 +0100

It's not really a pig - I'm guessing it's the size of a nudibranch, but it might be much larger. I stumbled across it while reading up on the continuing discoveries being made of life in deep sea hydrothermal vents. From where we find this rather interesting animal, slightly less attractive but still worth gazing at in awe - it might take a bit of an effort but go on, give it a go - as it appears to have no digestive tract and lives on carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, rather different to all the rest of us oxygen guzzlers. And does this 2000m underwater in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, where sulphur vents superheat the water to 400ºc with a surrounding ambient temperature of 1ºc. Who says there couldn't be life on other planets?

I have a bigger post a-comin' (edit - got sidetracked so not yet) but this caught my eye, and imagination.

Happy New Year. May we all dance, slowly.

Hive - a view from after.

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:11:32 +0100

Hive has taken place, and I enjoyed it. A profound experience.

While nothing will be quite like listening to the piece live in the Dome itself, you can still hear the whole of the piece as streamed at Mixlr by clicking here.

Well, almost all of it - the generator ran out of juice 15 minutes before 11am on Sunday, and refilling it and then resetting the computer and interface took quite a while, so I missed the one minute silence on Remembrance Sunday. It was quite fitting in a way for the broadcast to be silent just then. Strange how these things work.

Click here to hear from 11am to 2pm - this recording starts with the bugler at the Cenotaph. The Mixlr recordings are scrollable, so you can be impatient and go straight to the top of the hours to see how the multiplied news sounds, and check how different it feels at different times of day and night. Some hours felt very impatient to me, others like the radios just weren't bothering. Always shifting though. Some of the audio overlaps were astonishing.

I had a backup recorder running, so hopefully I'll be able to post up the actual 11am silence moment at some point. Of course not all the radios were silent, but the mood changed instantly. I have recorded all of the 24 hours of Hive at higher resolution for use in a further representations of the piece.

I was very pleased with the response to the installation. Thanks to everyone who came by in person, particularly those that made the long trip to the North Norfolk coast, and to everyone who listened live and communicated with me while it happened. Thanks to Sound and Music for their support with Hive, and to Henry Labouchere for giving me my personal flypast in his 1930 biplane, such a thrill I almost dropped my iPhone. Thanks once again to Bevis Bowden for another 24 hours. And most of all many thanks to Patrick Allen, the Friends of Langham Dome and the North Norfolk Historic Buildings Trust for making me so welcome and permitting me to install Hive in their remarkable building.