The Sigla Blog

For a while now, I’ve been gradually shifting perspective on a few things and find myself with less time than ever to devote to this blog. As Shane pointed out when he called it a day last month, not only do readers expect and deserve posts of a certain quality (and frequency), you expect it of yourself. Otherwise, why bother? So rather than half-heartedly keeping the post count up, I’ve held off writing much, and it’s brought me to a logical conclusion. It’s time for me to stop writing this blog but I’ll continue to write elsewhere, doing work stuff. I’m indebted to all the wonderful commenters and readers who have stopped by to offer their views; it’s what has made the experience so enjoyable. Thank you also to everyone who took the time to vote this blog Best Arts & Culture blog at the Irish Blog Awards for the last three years. I’ve retreated from blogging before and come back, but this time - in this space anyway - I think it will be a permanent break. If you want to get in touch, I’ll still be contactable at sineadATsineadgleesonDOT.com.

However, I’ve really enjoyed Musical Rooms and because of the amount of positive feedback, I’ve decided to keep it going. So I’ve set up a separate Musical Rooms blog and plan to update it as regularly as I can. Feel free to add it to your feed/blogroll if you want to keep reading about musicians and their equipment geekery in the places they create. Let me know of any glitches, it’s a work in progress and I’m still fixing things and adding links to the blogroll. Musical Rooms will also continue to run in print in The Ticket in The Irish Times, usually on the last Friday of every month.

*Happy Bloomsday. Apologies to Molly Bloom for pinching the end of her soliloquy for the post title.

“Right now, my favourite place to make music is this large closet in my basement that I’ve turned into a studio. It’s big enough for three people to fit into, with a large makeshift table made out of a broken door and some milk crates. It gets a nice sound, not much room sound, just as I like it. It’s about 7ft x 10ft. The walls are covered with thick fabric (green and blue) as well as some old childhood blankets. There is also a wall of shelves that hold my records, books, tools and other items you’d find in a nerd’s studio. It smells of cheap incense and dirty man.

I have a lot of equipment in there at the moment because I’m recording. Right in front of me are a bunch of bells and music boxes, several delay pedals, a few Oscillators, a couple of pitch shift pedals, Mbox, microphone, vocoder, talkbox, my computer, and a ghost in the dark ghost. What I need most when I’m in there is water and oranges. I’ve been down here everyday for the past two weeks from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. I only leave to shit or to empty the bottles of piss.

This record has been a mixture of isolation and group work. Most of the tracks are for a percussion ensemble with electronics and voice, so the first month of recording was done with my friend Chester who recorded all the mallet percussion and the kits. The last week was just me, doing vocoders, Oscillators and voice by myself but yesterday and today I recorded the choir. When it comes to recording, the pieces are composed months prior. The recording process starts with me trying to recreate what I do live, but I normally change it and build upon it. It’s fun to try out new things in a controlled enviroment. I also try to record at least one improvisation every few days.

This space is just really cosy. Sadly, I’m moving in two weeks and I’m really going to miss it. It has a charm like few of the rooms I’ve had in my life. I grew up in the basement so maybe thats why I like it so much. The subway rolls by all the time and rumbles up the room, which sounds like it makes recording quite hard, but it adds to its’ charm. It will be fun to pack everything up and try to recreate it somewhere else.”

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Hailting from Baltimore, Dan Deacon is a key player in the Wham City underground arts collective. At his legendary shows, Deacon creates riotous party tunes from what looks like a table of taped-up junk in the middle of the dancefloor - never on the stage. He plays the Future Days Festival this Saturday June 14th at Vicar Street, Dublin with Jape, Deerhunter, White Williams and High Places. According to the promoters, expect “plenty of new tunes, favourites from the Spiderman of the Rings LP, and plenty of singalongs, dance-offs and god knows what else.” For more information, visit www.myspace.com/dandeacon.

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The Sensual Walk, a Kate Bush-themed event to mark Bloomsday will take place on Saturday, June 14th. It kicks off at 2pm, meeting on the top of Howth Head, near the car park with a walk around Howth Head. There will be live music from Mumblin’ Deaf Ro, Carol Keogh & Band, Thinguma*jigSaw, Magdeleen van Eersel (backed by Groom), Prairie Dawgs, Richer Than Astronauts and many more. The walk is just 45 minutes, and everyone then heads off to the Baily pub in Howth village at 4pm, for music, food etc. Whether there’ll be seedcake or not, remains to be seen, but the event is free. Kate Bush obviously won’t be in attendance, but the acts taking part will cover some of her songs, play some Joycean themed tunes and some of their own music.

Thanks to MDR for the heads up.

Link: The Sensual Walk

Drew Daniel: My favourite space is somewhere in the future, with no phone, and a calendar with nothing written on it.

M.C. Schmidt: I am a practicalist, so I would have to speak about several places I have been. The production of our music is burdened with stuff: computers, microphones, mixing boards, synthesizers. I love this stuff, I don’t long for minimizing it, but it does limit the kind of place we can “create music” in. I loved our recent residency in the GRM Studios in Paris. It’s an amazing technical facility, total silence (if desired), weird stimulating architecture/space/community (the entirely round building that contains Radio France, the French National Orchestra, the French National Choir, etc) a charming, super-knowledgeable assistant,
an unparallelled history (it is the creation of the creator of our medium, Pierre Schaeffer) and delicious food served at regular hours and COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE!

M.C. Schmidt: We also go to a place in Whitefish, Montana called Snowghost that is a very different kind of paradise. It is in the mountains of Montana and is the project of young genius Brett Allen, whose obsession is making high quality recordings of all kinds, and he certainly has the gear to fulfill that obsession. It’s in his house, so one can work 24 hours a day, and when you go outside you are in the same kind of landscape as in, say, Brokeback Mountain… but without the sexual angst. If only I could talk him into actually cranking up that espresso machine that glitters at me, seductively, but is never used. There are pictures of Snowghost on the web, and some of the music we have made there, too. We’ve been working there (for years, now) on a collaborative album with the So Percussion Quartet and with Zeena Parkins and Mark Lightcap. so we may finish it this summer!

M.C. Schmidt: Our house in Baltimore is also good. The studio is in a new place for me - a basement. We don’t really have them in California, so it’s new to me: spacious but subterranean, though it has a door that opens to the outside. It has thick, bumpy, clay walls and a serrated wooden ceiling that baffles sound nicely and a shiny old concrete floor. It’s the first studio we’ve had in the house where Drew and I can sit side by side, which is something I’ve always longed for. We have all our keyboards out and immediately useable for the first time, which is probably what made Supreme Balloon what it was, to some extent.

M.C. Schmidt: Another favorite place is my best friend Steve Goodfriend’s home. The studio is in an old shed, a very simple wooden thing with folding tables and old rugs on the floor. What makes it so great is the talent on tap around there. Our friends are great musicians and always seem to have time to do whatever stupid musical experiments we want them to participate in! There is a very judgmental dog there, called Lucy. She knows when what you’re doing is bullshit or not and leaves when she doesn’t approve. I am more frightened of her than of any critic… and she never reads a press release! This place is where we made a lot of The West and the feeling comes somewhat from that place, too. It’s in a distant, sort of rural corner of Los Angeles, a neighborhood called Mount Washington.

Drew: For work, I need Digital Performer on a kick ass computer with lots of hard drive space, and my EMU E6400 sampler, my laptops with Max/MSP and Ableton, and some controllers. I also like to have plenty of outboard pedals and processors that I can play with all ten fingers; curating a signal chain is just as important to me as working onscreen. I think that you need different things at different points in the process. At the beginning of pieces, you need lots of free hard drive space and relative quiet outside. This is so that you can record indoors without sub-bass from passing delivery trucks ruining your recording of contact mic-ed fingernails scraping across a matchbox (a problem we have had). You also an environment that lets you make the most of what you have. Clutter can be inspiring at the beginning of a piece (lots of stuff, lots of options, lots of potential elements) but becomes a problem when you are doing detail-oriented sequencing and editing work - that’s when I crave the kind of hyper-clean minimalist studio that other people have. We are such pack rats that we will never have a studio like that, but that’s okay with me.

Drew: Some parts of sample construction and editing are best done alone; once it is time to try out different patterns and rhythms I think it’s better if Martin and I take turns so that things don’t stall. Sometimes we go into “volley” mode in which I make one sequenced loop, and then he does, then I do and so we can have a conversation going in the way that the form emerges. We use Microphones, mixing boards, samplers, synthesizers, computers, VHS players, portable recording machines and objects and phenomena in the world. I guess that makes us sound simpler AND more pretentious than we are!

Drew: What I love most is how easy it is to reconfigure our set-up. In the new studio we have lots of wide open table space to just re-order things and play with new signal chains and MIDI set-ups, and the luxury of space is something that we never had in our San Francisco studio, which was like one of those hoarder apartments that crazy senior citizens who collect mountains of garbage live in.”

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Signed to Matador Records, Californian duo Matmos make music out of the sounds of objects, animals, people and actions. They have collaborated with Rachel’s, Kronos Quartet and Bjork (with whom they have toured extensively), taught seminars on sound art at Harvard University and the San Francisco Art Institute, and DJ’d at proms for homeless teenagers. They have had pieces in the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and have scored the soundtracks for five gay porn films, one pinball machine, and one NASCAR television commercial. They recently released their sixth album, Supreme Balloon, made entirely using synthesizers. They make their Irish debut at the Future Days festival in Dublin this Thursday, June 12th at Andrew’s Lane Theatre. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/matmos1 or Matmos.

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The 2008 European Championships kicked off yesterday and Fústar has started a chronicle of matches, with the odd player profile and nostalgic recollection thrown in. I’ll be adding posts, and my first - on why I’m supporting Poland - appears today to coincide with their first match later. Yes, I know they’re playing Germany (the favourites in many people’s eyes) but I’m an eternal optimist.

Link: Super Euro Soccer Party. (To find it from the homepage, just click on Euro 2008 in Categories in the righthand panel).

I have a double pass to give away for the following three gigs over the next few days. If you’d like to win one (and have a preference for a particular gig), answer the question below and leave your answer in the comments.

Gig 1: Vetiver with support from Paul Curreri - Sunday June 8th, Crawdaddy, 8pm:
“Americana indie folk act who have been described as ‘deviously surreal and lullingly pleasant’. They are on tour in support of Thing of the Past, a album of covers including such luminaries as Hawkwind, Townes Van Zandt & Loudon Wainwright III. Review of Thing of the Past.

Gig 2: Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Monday June 9th, Tripod, 7.30pm:
“Former member of Pavement, Stephen Malkmus will no doubt be showcasing songs from his current album, Real Emotional Trash his fourth solo record and the second with the Jicks. The band’s line–up now includes Sleater Kinney and Quasi drummer Janet Weiss.”

Gig 3: The Dodos - Friday June 13th, Crawdaddy, 8pm:
“The latest signing to Wichita (Bloc Party, Los Campesinos) and currently on Les Savy Fav’s US French Kiss label, The Dodos are a San Francisco band who have garnered comparisons to the less abstract moments of Animal Collective and the output of other new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer according to Pitchfork Media.”

To win a double pass for one of the above, leave a comment below or email me the answer to the following question:

Q: Which legendary female folk singer guests on Vetiver’s current album, Thing of the Past? (Hint in this post)

Update: Winners are Sorcha (Vetiver) Joe (Steve Malkmus) and Jim (The Dodos). Enjoy, and drop back with a comment to let us know how the gigs went…

Links:
www.vetiverse.com
www.myspace.com/vetiverse
www.paulcurreri.com
www.myspace.com/paulcurreri
www.stephenmalkmus.com
www.myspace.com/stephenmalkmus
www.dodosmusic.net
www.myspace.com/mericlong

Declan Burke - journalist, blogger and crime novelist - is publishing an entire novel (entitled A Gonzo Noir) online over the next couple of months. If you want to read it in installments, here’s some background and Part 1, and you can follow its progress with Parts two, three and four.

Declan’s second book, The Big O (published here by Hag’s Head Press) will be published by Harcourt in the US later this year.

Update: You can read the entire novel as it unfolds on its very own blog, http://agonzonoir.blogspot.com.

The Dublin Fringe Festival are holding a FREE workshop for anyone interesting in theatre production. It takes place at 6pm on Thursday June 26th at the Dublin Fringe Festival Offices, Sackville House, Sackville Place, Dublin 1. Anyone interested can participate, just RSVP by June 14th to jennyATfringefestDOTcom or give them a call on 01 817 1677. Numbers are bound to be limited (especially as it’s free). Details below.

“We are seeking energetic and enthused people who are looking to get involved with producing theatre, dance, music or other events. There are dozens of opportunities within the Fringe to get invaluable experience and really help make a difference to participating artists. We are hosting a workshop and network opportunity in June that will bring you through a step by step guide of how to put a show on in the Fringe – from getting the team together and creating a budget, to fundraising and promoting the show.”

Richie Egan has been on a rollercoaster over the last two years. The Dublin musician aka Jape landed most musician’s dream: a major label record deal - only for it to almost slip through his fingers. Ritual, his third (and hugely anticipated) album had been long finished, but record company drama held up the release. Chatting to him in Dublin on a sunny afternoon, he’s delighted the album is finally being released. “It’s been hard to get excited about it, as the songs feel – not old exactly – but they should have been out ages ago. But I’ve been able to counteract this because I’ll be playing them live and that requires me to rework them in a very different way. It’s fun to deconstruct the songs for a live situation and mess around with the dynamics of the song.”

The uncertainty surrounding Ritual’s release led to some dark times, and Egan is glad they’re behind him. “I got a bit depressed for a while and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t write at all.” He confesses that instead, he drank and partied, while feeling bad about himself and his writer’s block. “I didn’t know if the album would ever get released or if I’d get signed. I had left my job and wasn’t sure if I could make enough money to get by. It was really stressful. But finally, it’s coming out now and I actually learnt some stuff about myself in the process.”

All that sounds at odds with the kind of chap Richie Egan is – amiable and very friendly. Having worked by day as an audio visual technician, Egan decided to give up work and focus all his energy full time on music. “I had a real ‘it’s now or never’ feeling, and knew I’d regret it if I didn’t give it a go. It was hard – when I was in my kitchen with no money and asking myself what the hell I was doing – but it was also really liberating. Despite all the stress and upheaval of recent years, Egan took the positive away from the experience. “I’m definitely the kind of songwriter that has to live shit. I work in bursts – I do stuff, take stock of it and then funnel those experiences into songs.” One such experience has resulted in one of the album’s finest tracks: an unlikely tribute to Phil Lynott. Egan sings that one day he too, will be “a dead man who plays the bass from Crumlin”. “I was at a gig with some mates and my dad texted me to tell me about the lunar eclipse. Onstage, the band was covering a Thin Lizzy song, so it was like this mad spiritual moment. The next morning, I wrote the song in ten minutes, it was like turning on a tap. If you’re from Crumlin you’re totally proud of Phil Lynott. He was a cool fucker.”

Lynott proved that a bass player from Crumlin can achieve big things, and there is huge UK interest in Jape, with Ritual the album that could see him make a breakthrough there - not least as he’s on the bill for Glastonbury this year. In the meantime, he has already attracted some high profile attention – Jack White’s band The Raconteurs covered one of his songs on their entire last tour. How did they hear about his classic song ‘Floating’? “I down in Kerry when I got a phonecall from a friend who works in Whelan’s, who told me that Brendan Benson [from the band] wanted to talk to me. So he puts him on and Benson goes ‘Hey man, we’ve been covering your song and we’re playing the Olympia tomorrow night and want to invite you along’. Off I went with my cameraphone in the air feeling totally chuffed.”

As every songwriter knows, there are crests and troughs to the creative process, and not every song comes so easily. Egan is fairly prolific, constantly rotating new tracks on his myspace page, many of which he never actually releases. “I’ve got loads of half done stuff on my hard drive that I randomly put up on myspace for people to listen to. It’s good to get them out there and nowadays people are more accepting of stuff that sounds rough around the edges.”

His previous albums Cosmosphere and The Monkeys in the Zoo Have More Fun Than Me demonstrate his sheer ability as a writer, capable of being poetic and emotional, before switching gear to a party tune with irreverent lyrics. Ritual is weighted more in the direction of glitchy electronic pop, something he says was a conscious decision. “I wanted to make a record that was accessible, push up the BPM but keep it in a pop format. The album went through a lot of guises and was actually a lot more dancey, but it has ended up being more of a mix of electronic stuff and guitar tracks.”

As a process, Egan has no set way of writing - he constantly mixes things up, sometimes starting with lyrics, sometimes with music in a bid to keep things fresh. “I think it’s good to be confused as a songwriter.” He also plays with The Redneck Manifesto, a four-piece post-rock instrumental band with a sizeable following. His solo work differs hugely from theirs, and although he grew up playing in punk bands, he’s not surprised at where he has ended up musically. “I’ve been making music for years, recording stuff on to a four-track, and it was always very melodic. I’m constantly tinkering around with melody. It’s very organic. I can’t imagine myself not making music. If I didn’t have music, I’d go off the rails.”
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Ritual by Jape is released on Co-Op on June 6th. Richie plays tonight, June 5th at Dolan’s Warehouse, Limerick, the Roisin Dubh in Galway on Friday June 6th, a (free) launch gig on Saturday June 7th at 6pm in Tower Records on Dublin’s Wicklow St., Electric Avenue, Waterford on Sunday June 8th, Thursday June 12th at Cyprus Avenue, Cork, Sunday June 14th at Vicar Street as part of Future Days with Dan Deacon and White Williams and June 15th at Spirit Store in Dundalk, Co. Louth.

Link: www.myspace.com/richiejape
Review: Ritual
Musical Rooms: Jape

JAPE
Ritual
Co-Op
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If the title of Richie Egan’s hugely anticipated third album suggests order and routine, his last couple of years have been anything but. Having had many interested labels snapping at his heels, he finally plumped for V2, only for it to be bought by Universal. In stepped Co-op, V2’s independent wing and after what seems like a chaotic age, these 10 tracks finally get a collective airing. The first thing you notice is that Egan has once again moved the musical goalposts, defying what people might have been expecting of him.

Since 2003’s Cosmosphere, Jape has consistently taken chances with his art, inverting any stereotypes of what one man and his guitar can do. In this case, he piles up layers of electronic glitches and sampled detours, creating a melting pot of styles and tempos.

If The Monkeys in the Zoo… hinted at his electronic obsessions, on Ritual they’re fully realised. Although the album is bookended by more measured tracks like Christopher and Anthony and the sublime, spacey ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’, in between, you can’t miss the increased BPM. The party tracks - the sharp, sullen ‘I Was A Man’ or the electro strut of ‘Streetwise’ - bubble away with a danceable fizz. But then Egan has always been able to gear up and down effortlessly between songs that make you dance, and ones that make you think. He can be bardic one minute, and bawdy the next - and that’s without an uncanny ability to inject seriousness into the most anodyne subjects.

Egan is a natural storyteller, demonstrated by the album highlight, ‘Phil Lynott’. In it he weaves together a tale of a Mastodon gig, a lunar eclipse and the realisation that one day - like Phil - he will be “a dead man who played the bass from Crumlin”. Artists don’t come more innovative than Jape, and Ritual proves that in Irish music, he’s definitely in a league of his own.

Download Tracks: ‘I Was A Man’. ‘Phil Lynott’. ‘Streetwise’.

Website: www.myspace.com/richiejape
Musical Rooms: Jape
Jape Interview

Rose Tremain has been announced this evening as the winner of this year’s Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Road Home. I haven’t read it, but then but I’ve read two of Tremain’s other books and found them really tedious. There were three debut novelists - Sadie Jones, Heather O’Neill and Patricia Wood - on the shortlist, but Tremain, the bookies’ favourite at 2-1 picked up the £30,000 prize.

The shortlist:
Nancy Huston - Fault Lines
Sadie Jones The - Outcast
Charlotte Mendelson - When We Were Bad
Heather O’Neill - Lullabies for Little Criminals
Rose Tremain - The Road Home
Patricia Wood - Lottery

“We have a city-based practice room we use a couple of times a week but it’s a pretty soulless room in the attic of an office block. We use it more for pure rehearsal, but our favourite place to actually break out new ideas and mess about in search of inspiration is a tiny little cottage between Schull and Ballydehob in West Cork. It belongs to an American friend of ours, but previously belonged to friends of our singer Joe’s parents, so using this connection we get to take the place over for a couple of weeks at a time.

It’s a small traditional thatched cottage that probably originally had just one room downstairs and one room upstairs, but has since been extended to the rear and side with - among other things - two fairytale like turrets. We set up our gear in the side extension. It’s a great sun-room with windows that run from floor to ceiling along the entire length of one side and French doors at the end that lead out to a stone cobbled area with a pond and massive garden beyond. The floor is tiled stone and one wall is the old exterior wall of the cottage. With so many hard reflective surfaces it can sound a bit harsh, but it’s got a wooden pitched roof and a couple of couches around too, so it kinda levels out.

Beyond the usual (guitars, bass, keys, amps and drums) we don’t use anything too revolutionary, but in the last year or two we’ve invested in our own recording equipment. Now we have a laptop and a few mics handy to record sessions and help separate the wheat from the chaff. None of us are sentimental about objects of inspiration, but I think the most important thing in any creative space is that you can feel really comfortable. Common household things like couches, rugs and lamps help to create this feeling. Also, a kettle, milk and tea-bags are vital ingredients of any session.

Unfortunately we don’t spend enough time here; we only get here about twice a year. But usually we’ll end up throwing around enough ideas to keep us busy for months back in town - actually doing the hard work of putting these ideas into some sort of structure we can call a song. The enforced isolation of being out in the middle of the country does help to focus our minds. City based rehearsals where you just pop in and out for a few hours in the evening can be hard to create in, because there’s often a time pressure, and it can take a while to get the concentration fully up. Because we all live in the cottage for a couple of days at a stretch, it helps to up the work rate because there’s very little distraction and often you end up working, without realising you’re working, simply because you’re chatting over breakfast or dinner or whatever, and showing each other ideas.

‘Nothing can come from nothing’ said King Lear, and so it is with Fred. Not once have we ever just ‘jammed’ and come up with an amazing song. Someone has got to have the kernel of an idea to begin with. Once this idea is put out to the floor, we mess it around, everyone throws in their two and six-pence, we try it faster, slower, half-time, double-time and so on until often we can be miles from the original idea. Some ideas are more fully formed than others and so may require less input from others.

The cottage is so far from town and any worries or stresses you may associate with the city. There’s no internet, and mobiles only work at the top of the hill. You have no choice but to focus on what you’re doing - or go for long walks in the country which we sometimes do as well.”

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Cork five-piece Fred recently released their third album, Go God Go. They play Dolans in Limerick tomorrow, June 5th, The Pavilion, Cork on June 6th and Crawdaddy, Dublin on June 7th. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/fredtheband.

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