I’ve got this picture in my head -
The three M’s … M and M and M
Miles – everything with style
Kind of Blue? All Blue, baby!
Mad Monk – dancing like a man possessed
Telling it Straight! No chaser man!
And Mingus – roaring out a message
Sliding into that bass irresistably
Irrefutably
Undeniably…

Here he comes!
Swingin’ into town
The Bird calls
That gunslinging Bird
That blue Bird’s
Got the Bird blues
Paid his pussy cat dues
Woodsheddin’ on a bridge
Round midnight

Got this sound in my ears
That mood indigo
Them old devil blues
Those nodding your head
And tapping your feet blues
Down on fifty-first
Where the street musicians are wailing
That boogie stop shuffle
It’s a colloquial dream
Just scenes in a city.

Moanin’ a testament
Painting a blue montage
A back home blues
A sad and deep cryin’ blues
They’re painting me a portrait
In three or four shades of blue

Been thinking a bit about the world’s obsession with things that are “dark”. For the record I’m not an occultist of any stripe. I get a bit superstitious sometimes if I’m exhausted… or under great pressure. For a time – a long time ago – I looked at Crowley – tarot, astrology and the qabala, and through hindu philosophy – the theories of raga and time and season as elements of performance. This led me to develop some concepts based on Western Occultism to generate pieces of music using the hierarchies of Hebrew / Renaissance philosophy.

What all this made me realise is – although the occult stuff is bullshit – it’s extremely interesting bullshit. As a stimuli for fantasy it’s – well – fantastic… And using these theories as a composition tool – (the hebrew letters have a numerical and sonic value) I can tell you – the demonic hierarchy DEFINITELY produces more interesting pieces than the Angelic.

More later – possibly…

Enjoy Erzulie – she’s a cutie – even with the dagger and the seven cuts…

This space is initially being constructed around a handful of incomplete, but interesting, files.

For years I’ve been looking for a way to synch still images to music in a way that didn’t require a degree in computer science and thousands of dollars worth of software. All the solutions I’ve found up to this have been inconsistent in timing as they moved across platforms.

Recently a good friend pointed me to a program called Proshow which does exactly this with a reasonably simple interface. Serendipitously this program arrived just as I was completing a project to bring a few tunes I’d created in Fruity Loops to a kind of completion… they aren’t complete – there’s still “real” instruments and voices to go on when the equipment becomes available to do this. Still, they are “complete” enough to bring out for a preliminary airing.

The images in the shows are mostly mine with a few exceptions – none of which constitute a copyright breach.

So – sit back – light em if you got em – and press play.