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I'll be improvising like mad this weekend: it's the Respect festival at The Street Theatre in Canberra, hosted by Impro Theatre ACT. Actually, I'm usually improvising but this time it's official...

The Blue Bear has been recording local hiphop people Young Proof and experimenting with bearish beats. Thanks here to Multicultural Youth Services ACT.

I'm knitting a soundwork from Moya Simpson's voice and some noises of London for the show Big Voice: at The Street Theatre starting May 13th. It features Moya and Sandy Evans, and is directed by John Bolton.

Rehearsals are well under way for NachtMusik, the latest concert from The Pocket Score Company. Australia's Renaissance blokes take on a slice of good music from German-speaking countries, from the thirteenth-century Neidhart von Reuenthal to JS Bach, via Senfl, Isaac, Hassler, Eccard, Othmayr, Gumpelzhaimer, Vulpius. We hadn't heard of some of these chaps either until we started nosing around a bit... and you can't go past a composer called Gumpelzhaimer. In fact, we were thinking of re-naming the group The Gumpelzhaimer Brothers. Or perhaps The Liederhosen.

The concert is at 3pm on July 5th at All Saints' Church in the Canberra suburb of Ainslie. So it's NachmittagsMusik rather than NachtMusik. We needed to change the time... but it's still full of good stuff like Heinrich Isaac's hit Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen — here we are, rehearsing in tenor George's kitchen:



And on May 3rd you can hear Clarity Clarinet Quartet play my tune Starling live from Melbourne's Iwaki Auditorium courtesy of ABC Classic FM: Sunday Live starts at 3pm.

You can now hear some audio from recent Radio 3 adventures with Andrew Cronshaw, Tigran Aleksanyan 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And there's a hitherto unpublished review, by Bill Stephens, of Quantum Leap's show My Sister, My Brother in the online Canberra journal the riotACT.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've been recording the distinguished rhythm section of Liz Frencham (bass) and Jon Jones (drums) for a project involving Fred Smith and The Spooky Men's Chorale in a collection of urban sea shanties. Which made a nice change from working on a chunk of sound art involving London's most melodically inclined tube train driver (with a unique intercom style) and the trains themselves, duetting with bass clarinet in a piece entitled '...the burning Thames I have to cross', featured at Canberra's M16 artspace in the exhibition The Gathering. The title alludes to the English ballad The Grey Cock aka The Lover's Ghost - another spooky man who might have found it 'quicker by Tube'... as they used to say in the old days, when in fact it wasn't at all. Back then I appreciated the rattle and hum of those Northern Line trains when they did eventually turn up, reeking of warm dust and electricity, stale smoke and an unidentifiable whiff that set the reptilian brain a-thrumming...

The Grey Cock, originally from the singing of Cecilia Costello, also turns up on the second Pyewackett album The Man in the Moon Drinks Claret.
I was (pleasantly) surprised to find a Pyewackett Appreciation Society on Facebook a few days ago. Thanks Frances!

Other recent recording includes a new song, Kids at Heart by Johnny Huckle, and a concert at the National Gallery of Australia by The Griffyn Ensemble which involved chasing the band around various galleries as they matched music to artwork: field recording in comfort! And Lynne Pilbrow's early childhood music education resource Fun Music for Little Kids is coming along nicely, providing an excellent excuse to play a lot of the studio's instrument collection: mbira, banjo, bass clarinet, sax, ocarina, cittern, concertina, harp, zoob tube and ukulele so far. I'm awaiting the opportunity/excuse to break out the Stylophone again.

My years of experience making animal noises for BBC Schools radio programmes (The Song Tree) came in handy the other day when I sessioned at someone else's studio (David Pendragon) for Kathy Possum's new kid's music project. Lots of fun: I got to be a dinosaur. However, Jon Jones, drummer about town, got to be a belching dinosaur. From time to time we pretended to be a rhythm section...

The Quantum Leap show My Sister, My Brother takes the stage at The Canberra Theatre today for four days of performances: take a look at the QL2 promo.
I've written and recorded a piece for the segment One of Us, choreographed by Patrice Smith and the Quantum Leapers.

The new combo with Andrew Cronshaw, Tigran Aleksanyan and Svetlana Spajic made its debut at the WOMAD BBC stage in Wiltshire last weekend: a rich mix of Serbian village vocal music, the mesmerising sound of the Armenian duduk, and two Englishmen trying to keep up.

And I've just ventured into this blogging business...