#liminalondon

[daiwatts]

Liminalondon: Thames Path, London Bridge to Greenwich.

[daiwatts]

Liminalondon: Arnos Park and Railway Arches

[daiwatts]

Stills from the forthcoming 'Liminalondon' video by Graeme O'Hara.

[daiwatts]

The Lads Who Lunch

Having hired the best session singers money can buy, and knowing these self-same singers are about five minutes away from going into astronomically expensive overtime, about the last thing you want to have is a conversation such as the following: 

Client: “That sounds great. Can we just hear them do that line once more without the melody.” 

Stressed media-composer: “Without the melody?”

Client: “Yes, without the melody.”

SMC: “What, you mean, rap it?”

Client:” No, just sing it without the melody.”

SCM, looking anxiously at the clock and wondering why this is happening to him:”But, you can’t….I mean…you…what do you mean?”

Client: “Just get her to sing it, but without the melody.”

Anyone who’s ever composed for media or advertising will have dozens of these kinds of stories- and most will think that I got the spelling of client wrong, apart from the first and last two letters- but this particular incident happened to my friend Lester Barnes. Lester, amongst many, many other things, was most recently the genius behind the recent Cow and Gate ad featuring a studio full of toddlers stumbling into a full instrumental rendition of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen”. I went down to his studio today to play with his unbelievable collection of analogue synth equipment, which literally covers two whole walls of his studio.

After a happy morning tinkering away, we had lunch in East Dulwich, during which many stories such as the above were swapped. Lester told me there is a book called “Jazz Anecdotes” which is absolutely brimming with hair-raising/jaw-dropping stories, and suggested we compile something similar for media-music, which is a brilliant idea- all contributions gratefully received.

After lunch I went up to the Thames to do some more recording for “Liminalondon”, becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that a pub lunch is not the best preparation for handling expensive recording equipment near water. As luck would have it, the tide was right out, and I was able to get up close to the water’s edge, and capture, variously, waves lapping the shoreline, helicopters buzzing across the City, tourist boats thundering down the river, and trains passing overhead whilst standing under Blackfriars Bridge. I also encountered a woman under Southwark Bridge who was sat on a portable stool, with the kind of long-handled device park keepers use to pick up litter, attempting to place small stones on top of a much larger stone. Sensing I was in the presence of a kindred spirit, the kind of person who could happily while away their hours on some utterly pointless Capital-based adventure, I said hello encouragingly, only to be waved away with the litter-collecting stick, inasmuch as to say: “YOU may be engaged in some meaningless flaneur-ish activity on the banks of this historic river; I, on the other hand, am mastering an art form that you couldn’t possibly begin to understand, let alone participate in.” It’s at moments like this that I rue only having audio-recording equipment to hand, because as rich a sonic experience as it can capture, it could never do justice to the kind of silent, dismissive sweep with which my greeting was rejected. Needless to say, nothing makes you more intrigued by an activity than being forbidden to watch it, so I cut a rather tragic figure as I shuffled on across the slippery shingle, pretending to be too engrossed in my own field-recordings to even notice what the shoreline sculptor was up to, whilst simultaneously trying to sneak a backward glance at her work.

I was able to get as far as the underside of Charing Cross bridge before the shoreline eventually ran out, the river slapping up against the walls of the southern Embankment, and I was forced to rejoin the walkway above. Curiously, the beach was empty of all life when I joined it at Bankside, but when I looked back a few minutes later, tourists were tentatively making their way down to the water’s edge, obviously reassured by the sight of someone else walking along the sometimes rather forbidding terrain. Whether they were still reassured when they reached the stone-collecting, stick-wielding occupier of this stretch of Liminalondon, I don’t know- maybe they were too respectful to try and make friends with her. 

[daiwatts]

Psychogeography Teacher

Making field recordings- otherwise known as standing around furtively in public places with a microphone- can be a tricky business. Today seemed like the perfect day to be wandering the highways and byways of the capital to capture sonic gems for the tracks I’m currently working on for the album ‘Liminalondon.’ Beautiful though the day was, it was also unreasonably windy, and the two places I most wanted to take recordings from- Parliament Hill and Primrose Hill, for a track called “The View”- were suffering more than most. Without getting too technical, the louder the source, the lower the microphone on the hand-held recorder I was using  adjusts its level, which meant that many of the conversations I was oh-so-casually eavesdropping, and which seemed to be yielding up psychogeographer’s gold, were barely audible, as the persistent Metropolitan scirocco kept ducking the recording levels. 

You also don’t know when making these recordings what will turn out to be the real treasures. There was a very eccentric chap at the top of Parliament Hill using a metal detector- remember them? must have Christmas presents around 1979, last seen clogging up Ebay alongside untouched Soda Streams- and I was concerned that the noise of his machine, a steady blip-blip-blip, like some badly dubbed R2D2, was going to pervade- and therefore ruin- the recording. He was clearly in no hurry to move on, exclaiming his finds -“50p! How about that?!”- to anyone who would listen, and indeed at one point was filmed by a chap who’d stopped to admire the view. This meant that he was being recorded by two separate people simultaneously, the kind of attention most of us can only dream of. This would no doubt have occurred to him as being nothing more nor less than his due, as regardless of whether he was being filmed or not, he gave a continuous running commentary on his activities, much to the intense apathy of the various suntanning bodies sprawled along the top of the hill. We were, of course, both employed in the same activity, scrabbling around the fringes of the capital in search of choice items that would generally be overlooked. He’ll definitely find his way on to the album somewhere.

Primrose Hill turned out to be a bit of a nightmare- wind now at full strength, crest of the hill covered in some strange mutation of hipster and skater, super skunk and rubbish dance music filling the air. I’m sure I never smoked dope so brazenly in public when I was a slip of an adult, although of course we’ll never know, what with me being, er, stoned at the time. I did manage to capture a couple of German girls having a very involved conversation on the bench next to me; again, one of the pitfalls of field recordings, particularly in London, is that you often capture very animated discussions, mobile phone conversations etc., and unless you can be bothered to enlist the services of a foreign speaking friend- reader, I can’t- you can never be quite sure what you’re using, and just have to hope you’re not broadcasting a heartfelt teenage dialogue about chlamydia or some other such alarming issue du jour.

The recordings are now safely stored on the desktop-(I realise even as I type this sentence that it’s inviting some kind of catastrophic hard drive failure. I have been told by people with no life that nothing is really backed up in the digital domain unless you have three copies of it on different drives. What fun!)- and I’ll begin the process of stitching them into the various tracks tomorrow. Until then, keep being volubly indiscreet in public, preferably somewhere out of the wind.