Late last year I started gathering together all the sounds/songs/sketches I’ve been collecting/writing/making over the last few years and arranged ten of them into an Emphemetry album that I’ve had in my head to make for about six years. Me and Jim (Cork, from The Little Explorer and Crash of Rhinos) started recording it properly at dub:rek in December. It was fecking cold. Dub:rek is situated on the third floor of an old dairy warehouse, where the brickwork is designed to keep the cold in rather than out.

This record is all about Derby at night. About wandering around when no-one or not many people are even awake let alone outside. I do and have done this a lot, and this record is what goes through my head when I’m there. It’s pretty quiet music, and dub:rek has loads of bands practicing all the time…so we made this record really late at night, or really early in the morning…basically any time when no-one else would be around. One day, it was -7 degrees outside, and probably colder inside, and we did a live take of a song in the big live room, and you could hear me shivering between lines.

We got most things done, but took the rest of the recording to Robbie at the Snug Recording Company because it was too cold at dub:rek to perform one of the last songs. My fingers wouldn’t work. Everything got taped on one Sunday afternoon there, and then we got drunk on Polish lager.

Speaking of booze, I was drunk in a museum last summer, and spotted that one of the violinists in the string quartet playing there was my old music teacher. I got it together enough to get her phone number, then they went and I finished off the free vine. Basically, I’d had a few sessions playing with Harry Cooper on violin, and wanted some strings on the album but knew of no-one and had no money. Luckily, Strictly4Strings play because they love to, not to get paid, so I ended up visiting them a few times with a score. The song I wanted them to play on has some strange and subtle time signature changes, and my musical notation is, to a professional, nonsensical bollocks. Violinist Karen Eveson was gold and invited me to her gaff in Long Eaton for a couple of evenings of getting the score to sound right, in time, on the beat, with all the necessary flourishes.

The night before I was supposed to be in Berlin with the finished album for mixing, I got the four of them to pop up to my new studio on the top floor of a mill next to a weir, and recorded the piece in two takes, before heading back to dub:rek, gone midnight, to record the guitars and edit it all together.

Basically, this record has been carried around all over the city for most of this winter just gone, and mostly at night…which wasn’t deliberate or pre-planned. It was just…necessary. I struggle to find superlatives that do enough justice to my thanks to Jim, Robbie, Sarah, Karen, Pete, Gary, George (who came to the mill on a Saturday afternoon to play flugelhorn), Claire (who popped up on a Sunday morning to play violin), and Harry (for helping me to understand what a violin could sound like on my recordings).

The mixing was done by Nils Frahm at Durton Studio in Berlin, and that was a whole other experience entirely…

Quantum Opinion #1

I was once walking down Sadlergate (more about Sadlergate later) and, I think it was the butcher’s shop that had just closed down and was becoming one of the high-fashion shops (that are now closed down, but more about that later as well), and the ugly eighties plastic hoarding had been ripped out to make way for a new pretty wooden/plaster one. Underneath you could see the old Sadler’s hoarding from god-knows-when-ago, all old tar coloured wood with faded gold letters. Someone’s initials and surname, almost definitely a dealer in some horse related paraphernalia from when the street would have smelt like a hundred horses’ arses, from all the horses arses shitting all over the place as they got their hooves and saddles and whatnot seen to.

It was a kind of Proustian rush back to a time I’ve only seen one faded photo of in a book about old Derby. I go in search for those sights a lot. The bits that have never changed. Even restored building are enough, so that all you have to do is squint to see back to before cars when there were trams, and before trams when there were horses and the roads were soil…

Quantum Opinion #2

Having thought about it all day, I can still say that this is a good idea. But a few things strike me as odd, and these things make the ‘good idea’ come apart at the seams.

Take the previously mentioned Sadlergate. It’s a beautiful street that’s up there in old beauty with York. The shop fronts are all very nicely done up and for the most part the buildings are really well maintained. One thing that strikes you at the moment about these shop fronts though is that they’re empty. There are no shops in them. There are still shops open on Sadlergate, but the ratio of open ones to closed-down ones is getting more even every week. So, if one part of town that already looks nice can’t attract business as it is, how is making another part that doesn’t look as nice look as nice as the one that already looks nice going to attract any more?

By travelling in time, the council are trying to retrace their steps to before they signed off on Westfield building what Charlie Brooker perfectly described as a “hollow, anaesthetising capitalist moonbase”. Business in the actual city centre has been going downhill pretty steadily since the Big Grey Block appeared on the skyline, and will continue to do so until someone pulls it down/blows it up, or better: until businesses reject it for what it is and move back to somewhere with a soul. I’m not ignorant, I know rents are high outside of the moonbase, I know the footfall is less than half that of in there, but venture into the sunlight one by one and see how much better lunchtime is in the market square that in Logan’s Run’s food hall.

So, rather than spending a million on architecture, maybe spend a fraction of that on some consultancy between landlords and businesses. Strike up some deals. Make some introductions. The age of the bricks won’t attract business if the books don’t balance on paper. Fix what you’ve broken before building something new, because going back in time aesthetically is not time travel.

Tonight, QUAD are showing The Time Traveler’s Wife. They contacted us lot at Time Travel Opportunists to put on a night of words to follow a literary adaptation (of which there are a few kicking about at the moment). Now, The Time Traveler’s Wife is looking like it might disappoint a bit, but it’s still about TIME innit, so we’re putting on a night all about time to follow the film that should either extend the enjoyment (if the film is as good as the book that it’s based on) or flood it out (if it’s not) with time themed wonders from the worlds of short films, fiction, and music.

Here’s what the evening is looking like:

WORDS:-
Time Travel Opportunists – me, Nathan Good and Emma Lannie, reading our original fiction.
Dr. Paul Hammond OBE – local actor, entrepreneur and savant shares his theories of time…
MOMO – We’ll be reading selections from Michael Ende’s classic throughout the evening.

FILM:-
‘On Time’ by Ted Chung – an incredible short film made in 24 hours at the 2008 Berlinale Talent Campus.
‘Back To The Future The Musical’ – one-man, one-theme tune. That’s all that needs saying.
‘Chronos’ by Ron Fricke – a visual journey through time (we’ll be playing this ambiently throughout the night)

MUSIC:-
Time themed musical journeys will be spun throughout this merry evening by DJ Emmett L. Brown. Great Scott!

All this is FREE as well. Seeing the film isn’t (it’s the usual price of about five or six quid), but the whole night afterwards is. We’ll start at 8:30pm, after the 6:10pm showing of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Join us. JOIN US.