London Viola Player, Fiddle Player & Arranger

Martin Ash Grad Dip

Riot at the Asylum

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The Filthy Spectacula played Weekend at the Asylum last year as a relatively unproven act headlining a relatively unproven concept, that of a roughshod rock-n-roll dancey music event within a steampunk convention.

Asylum remains, of course, the biggest steampunk event in the world. The new idea went down so well that the same concept was upgraded from a primary school hall to the Lincoln County Assembly Rooms, a US-based band flown in to take the second slot, and even in somewhere as big as this the whole thing was sold out weeks beforehand:

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Meanwhile the band have gained so much prominence in the last year that we still got asked to headline the upgraded event.

I’ve been known to be a little sniffy about steampunk crowds when playing with rock bands (‘dressing up for grown ups’; ‘lots of sitting down drinking tea in expensive costumes, not much dancing’). I have to take it all back for the Steerage Ball.

Opening act Captain of the Lost Waves proved you don’t need big beats and yelling to get a crowd engaged, attentive and participating, basing his act instead on surreal-science fiction storytelling, a troubadour roving performance style with bouzouki, ukelele and a headset mike letting him play and sing from anywhere (including, literally, the back row) and vocal acrobatics that could have got him into opera if he’d wanted. He’ll go far on the steampunk circuit.

Frenchy and the Punk really got the party going though. The two of them took a lot longer than the four of us to set up, and had a correspondingly massive sound, built up with two big percussion rigs (one of their numbers sounded like a samba band most of the way through), synth drum pad, vocal effects, guitar and loop station. The energy of their set was overwhelming and irresistible.

I’m not going to try and review our set (though it was another resounding success for the new electric violin – I think we just need a stooge in every sound check to stand in the middle of the room and prompt for me to be turned up above rhythm guitar … benefits of band wives that come to gigs). This was a fantastically responsive crowd though. We finally got we asked for with Drinkski Song – in fact got it about nine songs early, as highly skilled Cossack dancing kicked off in our opening number. Turns out the bloke is in fact Russian, and disarmingly modest about his abilities he was too. Through most of the set we had a pretty full dancefloor, and they even responded to between-song banter. Seems (some) steampunks can let their hair down after all.

The trick may be to have two evening music events to choose from – Newgate novel / penny dreadful or Henry James, depending on your preferred style of Victoriana. Asylum had done this on the same night, and Steampunk Wales did the same on consecutive nights a few weeks back. The Filthy Spectacula’s next outing, Steaminster this Saturday, aren’t running a big enough event to justify that, but looking at the line-up they seem to be running a tea and fabulousness daytime programme and an evening of debauchery. Spread the word steampunks – you can do dirty dancing in a corset or a silk waistcoat … especially to us!

Out and about

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Saturday was a double header for the Kindred Spirit quintet line-up. In the afternoon, we were at Wokingham Festival, a sort of pocket music festival with one main stage, acoustic tent, a field’s-worth of food stalls and an impressive ale and cider bar (damn those gigs where I have to stay sober to play another gig later … ).

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Previous act The Salts nearly succeeded in bringing on a rainstorm with a sea shanty entitled ‘Stormy Weather’ (no, not that Stormy Weather – though I would like to see that done with banjo, mandolin, upright bass and blokey Americana harmonies … ) but luckily the great British weather changed its mind and left people out in the sun to watch us, and even in a few cases dance and sing along! My first gig opposite flautist-vocalist Emily Nash laid the foundations of some very promising duelling improvisation, building on each other’s licks at every turn. We kept polishing that through the second and third gigs of the weekend …

Fast forward a few hours and the band were down the road in Sandhurst, at the Rose and Crown. In many ways this music-loving, originals-favouring neighbourhood pub resembles a slightly more middle-class Mill Plumstead (see earlier post). The big difference is the décor, heavy on Dia de los Muertos motifs, a sprinkling of steampunk gadgetry, horror film posters and replica Egyptiana (drummer Chris Goode ended up sat next to a full size sarcophagus. As you do). However, they certainly weren’t dead enough to not get pretty lively as our set progressed, as well as being charmingly appreciative of a very original-focused first half. I’m pleased to say we’ll be back!

This was also my first gig with in-ear monitors (stretching out a recent list of firsts!), and once I’d got the transmitter and receiver levels right to avoid clipping on the signal it was a good experience, the slight sensation of being in a space helmet more than made up for by the clarity and (sorry Chris!) ability to block out a lot of drumming. Plus, it’s one less reason to be worried about moving around, including out in front of the PA speakers …

Write-ups of the Filthy Spectacula in Lincoln, Kindred Spirit in Carshalton, more new gear and an upcoming West Country steampunk appearance all to follow …

Winds of change

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It’s been a little while … life has been slightly getting in the way of art, or at least of blogging. Shocking behaviour, Wilde would never have stood for it.

Sunday’s Kindred Spirit gig counts as a resounding success. Largely it went as I predicted in my last post. However, this being England in the summer, what no one could predict was the weather. It was sunny enough to bring out the west London punters – a decent crowd when we played and the riverside filled up still further through the afternoon. It was also blowing a near-gale up the Thames valley! On the previous day the tech crew actually lost a gazebo into the river during setup, and after our set there was localised flooding in the festival site. While we were playing the risks were limited to severely unstable cymbal stands, and some interesting ghost notes coming from Stevie’s flute if she was at the wrong angle to the wind!

You can see some of the wind’s effects (particularly on my hair!), and hear some very fine music notwithstanding the circumstances, in this live video from the gig. Why not subscribe to the Kindred Spirit YouTube channel? There is more footage to come and it would be a shame for you to miss it!

We’ve got not one, not two, but three gigs this weekend:

Saturday afternoon at Wokingham Festival, with food, real ale and a live music line-up running from our set at 5.

Saturday evening at the Rose and Crown, Sandhurst (rare opportunity to see the full 5-piece band do 90 minutes for free!).

Monday lunchtime (it’s a bank holiday remember!) in the Acoustic Tent at Carshalton Environmental Fair.

In between all of that lot, on Sunday I’m squeezing in a meet and greet followed by headlining the Steerage Ball (steampunk for the willing to get dishevelled) at Weekend at the Asylum with the Filthy Spectacula.

See you at something!

Brave new worlds

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This Sunday sees the full band, original-songs incarnation of Kindred Spirit play Richmond’s On the Edge music festival. It’s our highest-profile gig for a while (though not a very long set – be punctual if you want to see us, at 1pm!) and should be a great event in general (fingers crossed for no rain).

It will also be the gig debut of my new electric violin, which I’m tremendously excited about (get behind me, feedback! I have a super-rock-looking shiny black instrument that kills you stone dead).

And it will be the Kindred Spirit gig debut of Stevie Mitchell on flute, saxophone and backing vocals, whom some of you know as my girlfriend (and many more people in the world know as a superb musician in her own right, I hasten to emphatically add!).

Several new chapters open … be there to witness it at the start …

Against odds

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The last two Filthy Spectacula performances have gone surprisingly well. Not surprisingly because we usually struggle, but because in each case there were what the economists would call ‘headwinds’ to a successful set for all concerned.

Ten days ago we were headlining the Pirates’ Ball at Steampunk Wales. The idea was well-conceived I think: a lot of steampunks don’t want to go to a rock gig, they’d rather have amusing music they can listen to sitting down and having a drink without getting sweat all over their gorgeous, expensive and impractical costumery. But some do want to dance around to rock-n-roll, so have a couple of evening events with chap-hop and similar solo artists for one camp, and a rock bands night, rather less classy, for the other. And we are certainly a good match for that latter vacancy (less so for the former class of steampunk crowd and event, which we have played to the evident mild frustration of both parties).

Unfortunately, doors for this event were at 7. By the time we finally took to the stage at just past 11, there had been substantial sets by three other acts who were not, I will dare to say publicly, very well suited either to the audience’s expectations and desires or to being warm-up acts for the Filthy Spectacula. Barely half a dozen people had been seen dancing all night, albeit to a comedy-punk duo and two backing track-driven two-pieces, and most of the people who had been in the room at some point had already left. Our expectations were low by the time we finally played.

And yet, those people who were left, or came back out of the hotel lounge when we started, proved to belong to that relatively rare breed the dancing uninhibited steampunk, and we had a very good and fun, albeit slightly tight on time, set with lots of great feedback afterwards.

A week later, we played on the Floating Globe stage at Lakefest. A very mixed festival (not necessarily in a bad way), but that second stage is where a lot of the more alternative and energetic music hangs out, and by mid-evening Saturday it was busy and ripe for a high-energy band (with all due respect to reggae groovers Samsara Collective who played before us). So the right event and the right slot, according to us, the crowd and the organisers, even if we’d never willingly clash with Jonny Kowalski and the Sexy Weirdos.

Not according to the power supply, which cut out (for about the fourth time that evening) two songs from the end of our set. We kept the crowd engaged in the dark for quite a long time with drums and yelling, eventually giving up on trying to jam ‘We Will Rock You’ about five minutes before they got the power back. Then with just ‘Drinkski Song’ to go Mr E’s guitar, or a connected bit of the PA, got upset by all the drama and wouldn’t be comforted, so he had to play the last song thrumming desperately into a microphone.

Despite all of this, several people said we were the best band they’d seen all festival. The stage manager couldn’t stop giving us more drinks. We sold all the albums we had. It amounted to a rock star reception. It goes to show you never can tell.

In two weekends’ time we play the Steerage Ball at Weekend at the Asylum, a similar concept to our gig at Steampunk Wales but, being the steampunk convention of the year, on a somewhat grander scale. It should be a great event – it’s already sold out – and the one of the two support acts I know of are an excellent match. Here’s hoping for no technical failures this time!

That might be arranged

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Off the back of #shinyday, I’m engaged in upping my game at professional arranging. As well as a certain amount of direct enquiry, advice from pro contacts has led to a website revamp – mainly a new page for arranging, though there have also been some updates to the page on my playing and the home page. Please let me know what you think – feedback is much appreciated! And of course, if you know anyone looking for an arrangement, whether it be string or horn parts added to a band track or a transcription of a whole concert / stage work, please point them my way …

Rewiring

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Early this year, it became clear that the pair of Headway Band pickups I had used to play amplified gigs on both violin and viola were nearing end-of-life, and a like-for-like replacement wasn’t going to be the best way forward. They had served me well, especially at the price, but it was time for an upgrade, or at least a change of tack.

The viola Band went first, but the nature of what I play amplified viola for (String Project gigs mostly, and some work in pocket string sections for relatively restrained ensembles / performers), and the fact that I play a relatively large proportion of the time acoustically, meant that a more nearly similar replacement was the obvious choice. The onstage volumes are (again, relatively) low, feedback had never been a significant problem and I didn’t want to acquire another instrument – especially as violas are almost always different sizes, and it’s bad enough swapping between violin and one viola without my muscle memory having to try and play in tune on two different viola scale lengths too! On a mixture of recommendation and availability, I ended up going for a Fishman V-200:

viola with fishman pickup

As you can see, this fits semi-permanently to the instrument, which is arguably the big difference to the Band (I can remove and refit it myself, but it’s a hassle and involves taking a lot of tension off at least the bottom two strings, so in practice I don’t). It certainly doesn’t have any of the issues of loosening, physically buzzing etc. that tend to dog the Band, especially once it’s in at all bad condition. The output level is higher (I think) and the frequency response curve different, which means engineers used to one take a bit of time to get used to the other, but I absolutely don’t think there’s anything inferior about the quality of the sound.

Interestingly, as well as rehearsing, I’ve played two chamber group-sized acoustic performances recently with the pickup still attached and not noticed any problem. Presumably there must be some impact to the sound involved in wedging a small piece of springy metal into one slot of the bridge (the fact of clipping on the output socket is probably negligible when the body is already weighed down by a chinrest and shoulder rest), but it doesn’t seem to be noticeable to me or anyone else else at my level of playing and my audiences’ level of listening. The instrument still seems to be more powerful than average too!

The violin pickup has held up longer (in fact thanks to superglue I can and will be using it a little bit yet). But the vast majority of my amplified violin performances are fairly heavily amplified, with The Filthy Spectacula and Kindred Spirit. Either I’m playing with rock drummers on full acoustic kits – in which case monitors are correspondingly loud and stage volumes high – or doing Kindred Spirit duo gigs very close up against monitor and front of house speakers, without anyone riding the desk to try and head off feedback. And in both cases I’ve taken to varying the sound by using a distortion pedal, which even at the same volume is more prone to feedback.

The sensible response to this had to wait for some income to arrive that wasn’t part of the ordinary run of things. But here it is:

electric violin

A Harley Benton HBV 870BK if you want to go and look up the specs, fresh arrived from Thomann (don’t ask me why the most practical solution turned out to be to buy an American-made instrument, in the UK, via a supplier in Germany).

Unlike the handful of very budget electric violins I’ve tried, this has the same scale length and neck length / shoulder positioning as a full-size conventional violin. The action height and bridge shape seem pretty normal too (I’m increasingly convinced there’s something unusual about the shape of the bridge on my other violin mind you). This meant I could pick it up and play it first time successfully, and swap between this and an acoustic fiddle without losing tuning or failing to make position changes accurately – ideal for a ‘portfolio’ player like me. Like all solid body electric instruments it’s heavy, but the weight is mostly distributed well towards you as you hold it (the output socket is more or less under the bridge, for instance) and based on first tries I think I’ll be able to get used to it.

It looks very rock-monster, and I’m sure the potential is there to create heavy electric-guitar-esque sounds, but the underlying technology is actually the piezo crystal pickup familiar from almost all electro-acoustic instruments (the model, Shadow, is available as a respectable add-on pickup for acoustic violins, in the same mould as the Fishman above). This means the clean output is very similar to using the Band on the acoustic violin – but with a solid body feedback will be almost impossible, and being manufactured from scratch as an electric instrument and without the knife-edge mechanics of resonating acoustic bodies, there should be no problem with physical buzzes, rattles or losses of signal.

I need to get a bit more used to this before I bring it out in public I think, and I have the luxury of the pickup still working so I’m not rushed, but still coming soon to a gig near you: the chance to shout ‘Judas on the fiddle!’

Slowing the pulse

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Monday night was one of my more unusual performance contexts (I know I seem to be writing that a lot lately).

It was the opening of an art exhibition which in some way (I never had time to find out exactly how) constitutes part of a PhD submission at Oxford Brookes University, by Veronica Cordova. Her doctorate is in combined arts, however, not Fine Art or equivalent label meaning visual and static only; so the opening event also included two short performance art slots. The first of these had live musical accompaniment, and it was this that I was involved in.

So I, or rather we, were backing nine-minutes of semi-narrative, semi-symbolic (I believe) solo movement connected with an episode which took place in a Holocaust concentration camp – explicitly not dance, though I would find it hard in some senses to draw the line; the difference is probably about being rhythmic or not in expression. Veronica had commissioned a piece for this, from a composer in Mexico (her home country I believe). It was scored for the slightly unusual string quintet format of two violins, viola (which I was playing), cello, double bass, and constructed largely around a repeated (but moving around the group) crotchet-quaver pulse in 12/8 time (suspended in a middle section), and a long-drawn-out thread of suspensions, partial or achieved resolutions and modulations of harmony, with corresponding swells and falls in volume.

All of this proceeded at 29 dotted crotchet beats per minute, which is to say just under one beat in two seconds. Try that against a metronome, or even a watch with a seconds hand, and you’ll rapidly understand why we resorted by immediate common consent to counting quavers instead (87bpm is pretty reasonable to count though still not fast). This also explains the biggest difficulties of the piece: staying in time (above all in the 16 bars or so near the centre point without the ‘heartbeat’ pulse in any of the parts), keeping concentration (with very few evident markers except where a part came in or dropped out, losing your place could be fatal!), and sustaining one to a part tone over notes that were often very long indeed.

Interestingly, when we first rehearsed it at the peak of last week’s southern UK heatwave, the speed seemed crushingly slow and it took us about half an hour to find the ‘groove’ (yes, this can be a real issue for classical musicians too!). Coming back to it on Monday in lower temperatures, though admittedly with much better familiarity, the exact same tempo as dictated by metronome literally seemed quicker, I believe because we were all able to relax into it much more easily.

That said, I had to focus too much on playing (see above) to give any real impression of Veronica’s performance over this aural backing. What I can say (with broad consent of the other players) is that having in some sense ‘got into’ the musical piece, despite its evident and achieved goal of being harrowing in most places – a lament and more goos than threnos if I remember the terms of classical literature correctly – it also had moving moments of real beauty. One of the effects learned from modernist harmony (or perhaps earlier, thinking of Wagner or Richard Strauss) is that a context of heavy and/or sustained dissonance and suspension can make a carefully-planned arrival at a simple minor or major triad a thing of startling beauty.

For the next few gigs the viola gets packed away again and it’s out with the violin and pickup. The Filthy Spectacula return to one of our first festival bookings tomorrow (Friday) at Kippertronix (further up the bill this time!); on Saturday Kindred Spirit duo are back at the Hope in Richmond where we’ll see if I can whip the crowd up with violin showboating any earlier in the set than two weeks ago!

Meta-morning after

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On Sunday, anything but fresh from playing a full evening’s music on the other side of London the night before, the Filthy Spectacula assembled at a suburban semi in Twickenham. Joining us, director / video-making one-man band (for this job) Dan Cayzer and an increasing band of cast and extras – special credit here to actress Julie Cloke and long-term band associate and collaborator Greg O’Regan. The task: shoot the band’s second music video, in a day.

If you’re thinking glamour, doing some poncing about for a few minutes in front of a camera and then wandering home, forget it. I was there for 13 hours; Dan it was more like 15 with setting up at the first location and packing up at the second. Inevitably there was a lot of waiting around as different groups / combinations of people did their bits (downside of only having budget for one camera operator) and sets / lighting were re-arranged; no let-up for Dan though.

Things I’d never noticed before, or had forgotten, about being filmed in a non-documentary context:

Even up-to-date low-energy video lights make a room really warm really quickly. Especially shooting during daylight as excluding the natural light (to avoid shadows etc.) generally means excluding the ventilation too. Even more so when most of the shots are either in bed or involving a lot of bouncing around from the cast.

When you’re tight on time, it’s difficult (and I suppose unnecessary) to tell whether the director is getting you to do the shot again because you fluffed something, or in order to get a different camera angle. Either way you end up doing most things three or four times.

You wouldn’t believe how much hard work it is to produce 3.5 minutes of footage over the course of 12 hours!

Given how well the previous video with Dan and the band turned out, we’re very confident this will be a great piece of work. I’m not going to give too much away about what happens in the video, but suffice to say:
The song is ‘Ode to Drunk Romeos’, available from all good streaming/download providers or as part of the album Thrup’ny Upright which is available as CD and/or digital download from our website if you want to send a noticeable amount of money our way!
The literal morning after a hard work night when we were filming was mostly taken up with representing a selection of mornings after in the traditional sense; that was then confusingly followed by enacting what might have been one or several nights before …

No trouble at Mill

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The (Old / Music) Mill is an apparently thriving community local boozer.

OK, now stop. Read that sentence again. When was the last time you read something like that? 10 years ago? 20? Community local pubs are a dying breed, surely?

The Mill does some food, enough to have a chef on the payroll, but it’s certainly no restaurant-style gastropub, or Americanised craft beer and burger joint. It has a very respectable changing selection of draft real ales, but it certainly isn’t sustaining itself on a CAMRA listing and connoisseur tourism. I’ll come back to the music situation later.

So there are two things that make the Mill distinctive as a pub. One is that its clientele are varied in pretty much all respects (age, nationality, ethnicity, gender, tastes) except locality of current residence – no niche, clique or subculture – and yet know each other well and get on well. The other, in the context of the first, is that it isn’t (I’m reasonably sure) imminently about to go bust.

However, it has also partially rebranded itself as a place for music. And its handling of that side of the trade is ad distinctive – and as successful – as its general survival.

There are bands there twice a week now I believe. They are genuine professional performers, who get paid a reasonable fee (I’m not going to disclose what) plus (usually worth having) jug contributions from the crowd, and the possibility of making a fair bit more on merch if you have any to sell. But they play in the bar, no separate venue space, no door charge or even bar markup to those getting the music.

Here’s the really fascinating bit though, the reason the Filthy Spectacula played our second gig in four months there Saturday gone and are very happily looking forward to fixing a date for a third:

The Mill book all sorts of bands. Folk-rock, reggae, punk, electric blues, you name it. I mean, they’ve had us twice … What they don’t book is conventional covers/function/party bands. In fact more than one punter told me on Saturday they only like covers done creatively, changed into a band’s own particular style.

We took an all-originals set – as we always do. And it isn’t just a management thing, this preferring originals; it isn’t a snobbish organiser imposing music he finds aesthetically acceptable on a crowd with no agency. Sure, the Millers (couldn’t resist, sorry) definitely like danceable beats (though some danced to songs we’ve never seen any other crowd attempt!), shouty-engaging frontmanning and over-the-top stagecraft. But they absolutely lap up getting them provided in the form of songs they don’t know and haven’t heard on the radio.

In an era when (and I speak from experience) most bands that are actually getting paid to play are anxiously trying to achieve greatest response by juggling what was in the top 40 last week with what was in the top 40 when their average audience member was 16, and still worrying about being upstaged by a TV showing the football with the sound off, that is truly remarkable. And even a band like the Filthy Spectacula, who have hardly ever played to an indifferent audience, could not appreciate it more.

Here’s to you, Mill folk. We don’t know how you do it, but it’s magic what you do. We’ll be back when you’ve got time for us.