It’s got a title, but this is how it is: a Darkness Box. Ursula Le Guin prefaces her story of that name by telling us of her daughter’s challenge to guess what was in a little wooden box. All the guesses were wrong. The answer, delivered with a slight lifting of the lid and ‘an […]

Pyewackett has popped up on last.fm. Persistent bunch. There’s also a nice Squidoo lens courtesy of Rick Wales.

I spend a couple of months of the year in London. Not being here all the time is an incentive to get out and experience the things which you always thought there’d be time to get around to when you were here all the time… So it’s off to Greenwich, via the usual Tube and, […]

Heard Sonia Paço-Rocchia doing fun stuff with bassoon and MAX last week at a Forum Composers London concert. There’s a certain something about the bassoon: ‘It has the medieval aroma…’ according to Frank Zappa: ‘I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing a bassoon. It’s a great noise — nothing else […]

While in London I’ve been visiting Walthamstow to explore some new tunes with Andrew Cronshaw: he’s coming to Australia for the National Folk Festival at Easter. But let’s talk about wood now: one of the select pleasures of driving round the North Circular from Finchley to Walthamstow was the Shadbolt drive-by veneer-spotting moment. A door-sized […]

A big recording and mixing weekend at the Blue Bear Studio: ‘celtic big band’ Humbug is moving forward with their album of Irish and Scottish favourites, and I’m mixing totally new stuff from bassist Rafael Jerjen’s quartet, which features pianist Luke Sweeting, Niels Rosendahl on sax, and drummer Aidan Lowe: remarkable musicians all. And in […]

My first lesson in shadowpuppetry today: for Jigsaw Theatre’s production of Wendy – a new twist on the Peter Pan story. I didn’t know I was going to be doing this – thought I was just playing music and attempting to act, but it’s a fun addition to the job description – which includes being […]

You can now hear some audio from recent Radio 3 adventures with Tigran Aleksanyan, Andrew Cronshaw and Svetlana Spajic at this year’s WOMAD. Look for Track 6 at CronshawSpace. And there’s a hitherto unpublished review, by Bill Stephens, of Quantum Leap’s show My Sister, My Brother in the online Canberra journal the riotACT. I wrote […]

Brenda Cifuentes asked to be my SpaceFriend recently, congratulating me on my work with Ricky Martin: so I thought I’d better check up on what I’d been up to. I googled myself (we all do it but most of us don’t like to talk about it ) and amid the crowd of Ian Blakes up […]

I think it was Goethe who was responsible for the ‘architecture = frozen music’ equation. Ely Cathedral turns out to be a proper drink on a stick: here’s the Lantern, a feat of mediaeval engineering inspired by the previous tower’s demise and the need to be gentle with the foundations. More Elystuff in a Facebook […]