Dark and Long (Session: Saturday July 30th)

Narodni Trio session at the gimp sheds in rural Cambridge. Hot and dark conditions are reflected in some dense and aggressive pieces. Prepared pieces by the not-present Laurence are improvised over by those actually in the room.

Present: Paul Carroll, Stephen Morris, Ian Mottashed.

Narodni Trida Rise Up (Session: Saturday June 25th)

Lots of hard work, poring over a couple of pieces again and again this time. Not so much of the open-ended abstractions today apart from a lovely fifteen-minute piece which I'll put on the home page.

Our Hungarian friend Marte added some expert bluesy guitar to a new piece that Munka named 'Kelj Fel!' - it's double-meaning Hungarian for 'rise up'. Nicely apt. His style and sweet jazz chords led us into some different musical shapes. A nice workout.

Present: Paul Carroll, Stephen Morris, Laurence Saunders, Marte and Munka (our Hungarian friends).

US photographer commissions NT

We're delighted to have been commissioned by US photographer Liz Dembrowsky for the use of our track Exhibitionism to promote her show at the Firehouse Gallery in July.

You can read more about Liz's photography on her Graffito website. And, of course, the Exhibitionism CD is still available to buy from our website...

Small Good Things (Session: Saturday May 14th)

Plenty of open-ended and almost abstract pieces take 'shape' as we concentrate of providing moods and textures for our film soundtrack work this afternoon...

It's pedals to the fore as the sound is often smeared out of the instruments with washes of bass augmented by expressive drumming and edgy guitars. One piece in particular features a solemn, stately bass figure with dry-as-a-desert-plain slide guitar - luckily it proves to be more than just a small good thing...

The other main innovation is the use of a roving microphone to dub up individual instruments through the studio's PA with PC taking the role of Dub Professor. Proceedings are wrapped with a thunderous version of Motorik.

Present: Paul Carroll, Stephen Morris, Laurence Saunders, Phil Wyatt.

The Necks live in London - amazing, Australian improvising three-piece

The amazing Australian three-piece The Necks are playing London, Brighton and Newcastle this month. They are outstanding on record and are, reportedly, even better live. Recommend that you check them out.

I'm going to the gig at London Spitz on May 19th. The format is that they'll be playing two improvised pieces of 45-60 minutes each.

If you fancy hearing them on record first, try Hanging Garden and Drive By. Both are hour-long pieces that build and build almost imperceptibly. However, they are absolutely astounding and compelling.

www.thenecks.com

Triosk live at The Premises in Hackney (25/04/05)

Triosk were blinding. It was a well-intimate gig in a rehearsal roomin Hackney. Quite a plush rehearsal room with space for an audience of 25-30 but still a rehearsal room with a rock band providing a muffled background between songs.

They played against loops coming out of some mini-loopbox on pretty much every track. Mostly adding good atmosphere, sometimes seeming a bit superfluous. Nice octopus drumming often changing from brushes to sticks half-waythrough a piece. Sometimes putting a cymbal on top of snare and tom to create a sound more as texture rather than straightforward drumming. Lots of scratchy, light skittering sounds like on the record.

Bassist alternated between double bass (oooooh, double bass) and electric but using the electric more as a soupy, textural thing - building a wall of noise through a delay pedal - rather than as a straightforward bass. He certainly inspired me to think about playing less notes, more often.

Keyboard guy played sat between a baby grand and a Rhodes, occasionally playing both at once. He also controlled the loop box thing and during the encore (which had the drummer playing mad 16ths and keeping up a chunky, funky, jazzy rhythm) dropped the piano/rhodes out for a bar at a time which sounded amazing. Amazing in the way that it sounded wrong the first time it happened, like it was a mistake. Perhaps they were improvising and it was a mistake first time round. Whatever, it sounded great.

They opened with a completely improvised thing, played half-a-dozen from 'Moment Returns' and four or five new things. Jaw-droppingly brilliant but (and I don't think I'm deluding myself) not using techniques a million miles away from our own little improv world. They have this signature thing that they slipped into a couple of times - the kind of four-to-the-floor bass/bass drum/cymbal combo pulse (see Love Chariot for an example of this on the album) - just like we have the spazzing thing that is kind of a Trida signature. Like on the end of this untitled piece.

Hopefully they will come back and do some proper gigs within reach of London.

www.triosk.com
www.posteverything.com/leaf

Danger! Spontaneous Composition

Have just finished editing, mp3-ing and uploading a couple of rehearsal tracks to the MP3s page. They're live recordings made with a single microphone (a good microphone, natch) straight down to minidisc.

We like to try and record everything. Using a single mic limits what you can do with the track in terms of mixing and editing afterwards, but sometimes it's good just to capture the moment, as it were.

The two pieces represent a couple of spontaneous compositions. It's sobering to think that this is how the great Gods Can used to work. And, given that we're thirty years down the line, the equipment they used probably wasn't a whole lot better than what we have at our disposal. Sobering thought, that one.

Anyway, the tracks are on the website - www.narodnitrida.com - and line up as follows. Let us know what you think.

Untitled #1 (2005-04-09) (6:33, 4.6mb) Menacing, building post-rocker with some interesting sounds, evolves into a nicely controlled spaz-out.

Untitled #2 (2005-04-09) (8:42, 6.1mb)Dubby-edged groover emerges from angular moodscape.