Sort of maybe closing Truck sort of...

So, I've just been informed that I'm currently on last at Truck on the Sunday night...unless some other act is announced for the main stage, or I've made some kind of error then that is a truly astounding thing.

Anyway, whatever happens, it will be cool. It will have to be.

Out of office

I'm about to go on holiday for a while, and I don't currently have access to my own computer...so communication will probably be poor in the interim. Take care of yourselves, and each other.

Fold you I can, mmm.

Recently, BoingBoing posted instructions for making an origami Yoda. Now, normal people would perhaps merely have marvelled at the intricacy of the design and moved on, but that would be too easy:



"Mmm, up late this morning, was I. Snack brunch perhaps I shall procure. There is no try!!!" (I really can't believe I'm doing this....)




"Photosynthesize, I cannot! It is the work of the dark side."




"Lush this planet with vegetation...is."




The public reaction to Origami Yoda. I think Jon (centre) was probably so excited by the small paper model that he attempted to inhale it like a human Dyson.

Origami Yoda by Andrea Kilduff (left), photography by me!

Progress

"The single" has now become an EP, and this has been confirmed. There will be six tracks, including a bonus collaboration between myself and Oli of Trademark, which hasn't really reached the ears of the public before now. Getting these things sorted is always complex, but we are making strong progress. The artwork is looking very cool, and hopefully the whole thing will be available at Truck for seven round coins. You'll get a big toybox of fun from the game, a nice booklety thing with art inside, and of course tunes called things like Darkstar and Vortex.

About a year and a half ago I promised something called a "new dancy direction" and I think these tracks reflect that. I still have a long way to go before realising exactly what that phrase entails, but you'll be able to see the next step along the way to something close to what I have in mind.

Get Rockin

My dad took me to a tribute gig for a sax player I've never heard of called Dick Heckstall-Smith at the Astoria this evening. Bascially, I need a regular fix of middle-aged-white-man-blues ("mawmb") or my hands start shaking and I start mumbling "my baby done left me, she done took the car" under my breath at intervals of approximately thirty seconds.

Mick Taylor, who played with John Mayall and also with the Rolling Stones at various points, was worth sitting through the first band for. Said band unfortunately violated my First Law of Bongos ("never have bongos") with impunity, but Taylor's playing was unusually precise despite the fact that he had the same hairstyle as a woman who taught me at primary school when I was 10.

His band was comprised thus:

On drums, Rutger "I am the Lord of Channel 5" Hauer!







On the bass guitar, Mr Jamie "No biopic will ever salvage my credibility because I made 'Booty Call' and that fact can never be expunged from the annals of history" Foxx!





On the keyboards, Mr Philip "Nobody knows who I am but I was in 'My Hero' with Ardal O'Hanlon...see, nobody knows who I am" Whitchurch!







And...Mr Mick Taylor on the guitar! This image was created for Mick so that he could recall his exact haircut if his battery ran down or he lost his flash card.





Seriously, the profound resemblance of his band members to these people almost caused me to loose my hard-won equilibrium, but then Gary Moore and Jack Bruce (Deities of Mawmb) basically just plunged their guitars through my mind. They opened with a completely devastating version of White Room which I won't forget in a hurry and then did lots of other things which I could only attempt to render in music journalist doublespeak and so won't bother trying to explain. Music journalists, I thus invalidate your purpose.

We left during Colosseum, whose lead singer looks like this:


If you can imagine this terrifying organism flailing and whinneying whilst each of the musicians around him furiously plays a different blues standard in the wrong time signature then you will understand this particular facet of my evening.

They reminded me of Coil for some reason, but don't get me started on Coil.

Dick Heckstall-Smith used to play in Colosseum, but since he was a man who apparently was famous for playing two saxophones at once (a better thing to be famous for is hard to conceive) I would assume that he did this because it amused him. Anyway, my mawmb-lust is sated...for the time being.

Visitation

Today I went to London to visit Oli who played me some rough mixes of new Trademark material. It's all good; in general, they're continuing determinedly down the sparkly autobahn which is 4-to-the-floor electro and that is good news for consumers of such material. Come to Love is a track I've heard live before and one which continues to excite the core of my being, but now there's a more moody backdrop taking shape for the rest of the putative album.

I received an email from gwem today inviting me to play a gig in London at a time when I will be sadly otherwise engaged. Hopefully we will get it together soon. Gwem is a legend - go to his website immediately and download his online album whilst looking at the pretty pictures.

I watched a tape of Derren Brown's "The Gathering" yesterday. It was fairly weak by his standards - I think he should persevere with his regular TV format, as gurning in front of an audience reintroduces the smugness he's sought so hard to repress. It persuaded me that seeing him live would probably be an unwise use of my time.

Speciality

The new single:

So, it looks like it could be Spacetime and this track nobody's heard yet called Velocity. Double-a-tastic.

Hopefully there should be some left over if you can't make it to Truck, but it's a very Truck-centric thingy.

It is still grey and vaguely muggy. I am about to return to the wonderful Ford of Ox for a few days.

Special

We're currently planning a special double a-side single release for Truck, which will probably consist of "Spacetime" and "Darkstar", two tracks from Determinance. Hopefully some kind of mixed mode CD with some game media on it will be possible, but it's all in the works still and this does not constitute an announcement.

I'm looking forward to some further work on the game soundtrack; only a couple more tracks need sorting out now and then it will be done. I was intending to do a couple of remixes sometime soon, as well as a demo of some new faster stuff for a future project, but one step at a time.

Summer has apparently been abutted by horrible drizzle.