I unexpectedly ended up working until very late tonight. So this post finds your brave blogger feeling very tired and ready for bed, but a strong coffee made with my new bean grinder (a Valentine’s present from a lovely woman) is keeping me going long enough to spew forth tonight’s post.

A quick plug first of all for a new monthly concert night at Café Oto set up to showcase the musicians that meet weekly at Eddie Prevost’s improvisation workshops in London. The idea being that one musician from the group is selected each month to curate a concert bill involving any of the others but not involving themselves. The first month is put together by Daichi Yoshikawa. A new blog site has been set up to keep people informed about the gigs, and maybe also in the future to showcase music and writing by the musicians involved. The site is here and also includes a nice introduction to the workshop and these shows by Eddie P. Sadly I very much doubt that I will be able to attend the first concert of the series, which is a big shame as the line-up is very nice. Grundik Kasyansky plays with Sebastian Lexer in one of the sets. Kasyansky is someone whose music on CD I like a great deal but I have yet to see play live. Hopefully I can put that right soon, but I’m just sorry that it probably won’t be on this occasion.

I have been bugged in the comments section of one recent post to not gloss over Cathnor releases when discussing my daily listening. As it happens, if I didn’t say something about the forthcoming release that I listened to this morning then this would be an even shorter post than it is already likely to be, simply because its the only piece of music I’ve had the chance to listen to today. I intended to spend some time listening again to the Goh Lee Kwang CDs and also to Ben Drew’s A Folding Table tonight and then write up something about each, but as work had other ideas for my evening this went out of the window. On the way home tonight I was too exhausted to focus on music and so listened to the latest episode of the BBC Radio 4 satirical panel show The News Quiz instead. My favourite line from the show being “The Zimbabwean currency is worth about as much as a banker’s promise right now” A good show that you can download as a weekly podcast from iTunes for free.

So the piece of music I have been listening to is called A wave and waves, a composition for 100 percussion parts by the American composer Michael Pisaro realised for this release by Greg Stuart. This pairing produced the Wandelweiser disc an unrhymed chord last year that I liked a great deal and wrote about here. To be able to write in an informed manner about that release I corresponded a lot with Greg, who in time also sent me some recordings of other works he had since made with Michael, not really as potential Cathnor releases, but just to share his work with someone that appreciated it. A wave and waves was one of those pieces, and after spending about a month listening to it and liking it more each time I offered to release it. My listening to the piece this week has been to try and inspire myself to “see” an image for the sleeve design. I need to get the design completed and signed off by the music’s creators over the next couple of weeks so that it can go to the printer along with four other new projects at the start of March. With the new Cathnor sleeves I have them printed in bulk orders to reduce costs, and then have the discs pressed later as and when the label can afford to do so.

Without going into too much detail the music is a dense mass of many very small sounds that are precisely arranged by a very detailed, very beautiful score. I am working through a number of ideas in my head and in my sketchbook, mostly using graphic elements and mathematical equations used within the score to produce the image. Usually my sleeve design ideas are responses to the actual music itself, perhaps using elements of the musician’s inspirations behind the music as an additional spark, but with this project I am almost creating a visual work in response to the score, just as Greg made a piece of music from it. Its a lot of work and my thoughts are still in their infancy but we shall see how it goes.

Now that felt very self-indulgent….

Here’s a link to a great net label called Homophoni, which most people reading here will already know but perhaps one or two don’t. Some excellent music there, all for free including a new track by Joe Foster and Kevin Parks brilliantly titled Prince Rupert Drops, (music doesn’t actually need to be good when it has a title like that, its already great!) and a nice piece by Michael Renkel and Philip Julian. Yet more music I need to listen to some more and write about here.

On a related note I intend to overhaul the Links page here over the next week or two so that it contains all of the links I have pointed to here of late and will gradually build as the days go by into something of a useful resource. Well for me at least… Actually since I have taken this blog daily the number of hits has trebled and so I suddenly feel that an updated Links page might serve a good purpose. Something needs to be done to offset all this self-indulgence!