H.O.T.T.D.[Song For Midsummer's Day]

Gosh... so that's it. A whole year spent making one song or piece a week, and posting them up here, on Clean Machines Of The Betwixt And Between, has passed... feels quite strange really! And to end on Midsummer's Day too, what a bonus... so I had to mention it somewhere in this week's song title, didn't I listeners? Oh, and I like the fact that I managed to rhyme "Elizabeth Wurtzel" with "My head it still hurts..."!

Yes... and it's my birthday tomorrow, and I'm really pleased that I managed to keep making this much music! I'd recommend it to anyone, really... the music that I've made for this blog has fed back into the music I make with other people, and I've learnt to work faster and more productively, and, most importantly, to not care too much about any ideal of perfection... just to show up and start putting music onto my trusty MacBook, and trusting that something, somehow, will take shape, and then, at the end of the evening, a new song or group of sounds will have been brought into being, and I like that, and it's what keeps me going, music and love, and making stuff, and the world is good. Yes!

STEPHEN A WOOD; 

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 2009.

It Was Twenty Three Years Ago Today...

...Yes, historical curio time, listeners! It was indeed 23 years ago, one fine day around this time of year, mid to late June, that I did my first gig! We were called Television Head at the time (we changed our name to Attic Head for our next gig the following autumn, and the rest is, erm, history...), and we played the Herculaneum Room, on the Carnatic halls-of-residence site, in Mossley Hill, Liverpool 18... "C86 Explosion" indeed!

Television Head were Elizabeth Ford, Mark Saberton, Simon Jenkins and myself... and we were joined later in our set, for a riotous and unusual version of "Purple Haze" by David "Thomsett" Palmer, and Daniel Overton... (I'm still in contact with almost everyone, but Simon and Dan, if you ever read this, get in touch...!) 

This is one of the first songs I ever wrote, called "Looking Down", and its quite surprising, and a little strange, listening to it again after all this time... makes me think of the passage of time, and how I felt that sunny June afternoon, chain-smoking with all my bandmates 'cos we were sooo nervous, and how I felt about the future then, and all that kind of stuff... which is kind of apt now, too, as a whole year of blog posts is almost up; next week is my birthday, and I started this blog on my birthday last year, so that means 52 pieces of music have been freed from my head, and released out there, into the world... all very strange, and actually a bit emotional too...! Just one more post to go, then, who knows?...!

N>T>T-N>T>P [Neither The Time Nor The Place...]

This rhyme just popped into my head yesterday teatime, I recorded it to Dictaphone 'cos I knew I'd forget it otherwise, but it was quite odd; why would the words and meter of the song occur to me there and then, with lines like 'When they get the gack in, then I really feel like yakking"?!

Oh well, that's the Clean Machines for you I suppose... this track also features the debut appearance of a plastic green and purple pull-flute, free this week with "Peppa Pig" magazine, listeners - get them while they're hot!

The Road To Spondon Town

Well, I was doing Vocoder Vocals, for "Dusseldorf Airport", to prepare for tomorrow's Funsize Lions gig at The Lexington, and this happened, a little electronic folk song, to be sung by a robot with its finger in its ear, in the middle of a Campaign For Real Oil pub, sometime in the next hundred years.... Spondon is in Derbyshire; I remember my Dad asking for directions, about twenty years ago, and the lad in the petrol station said, "... take the road to Spondon"... the phrase, and name, stuck with me for years, so here, courtesy of Clean Machines Of The Betwixt And Between, is the end result...!

CCS 1:23

This is very loud and kind of stupid, so Please Please Please TURN THE VOLUME DOWN BEFORE PLAYING!!!....  Don't know how it got quite so loud really, but I realised by the time I posted it that my tinnitus was even more pronounced than usual...  this was going to be a quiet folky piece! Just goes to show how easily sonic mutations can arise; even with the simplest of intentions, you just have to go where the music goes that day, I suppose...

Oh yes, and remember to turn the volume down, listeners... did I say that already? Pardon? ... oh dear....

Auspicious Pictures Of Land & Sea

Codex From A Splintered Carnival

Another attempt to do a Terry Riley rip-off has gone all skew-whiff again! This doesn't really sound like him at all, unless it's the sound of him lost in a labyrinthine souk with only a Yamaha PS100 for company... the clicking sound you may hear every now and then is the sound of my fingers on the keys - there's no audio output on a PS100, so had to stick it in front of my Macbook and record it through the built-in Mac mic... busking it or what?! Yup...