Music what else.

OK hi, how are you? I am fine. In addition, I was without internet access for about two weeks, hence my apparent departure from the virtual realm. That has been remedied and here I “am” once again.

As you may be aware, I plan to start recording “the overproduced album” this summer. I think mid-June will be a realistic starting date. No idea when it might be finished, as it is going to be a very dense, and hopefully – as the title suggests – overproduced album with a lot of instruments including things I can’t or have never yet tried to play like trumpet and sax, lots of my terrible violin/cello playing, and a lot of Hammond organ and piano which I am sortof able to play now and with daily practice getting so I can play whole songs without hitting too many random notes in every other chord. You know I played some piano and organ on my latest album Bob’s Drive-In, but there it was more like the occasional “sprinkling” of organ/piano. Well yes so anyway The Overproduced Album is going to take some time.; I’ll let that take as long as it wants.

In the meantime, because I love to amuse myself making nice little fingerpickin guitar/banjo tunes, I think I’ll also start recording a very simple instrumental album of those, which will be a download-only FLAC format album. That won’t take so long to do; I’ll let you know when it’s done!

I don’t know, what else….that’s it for now.

April 30 and May 1 in the UK

Hi, I’m here in London where I’ll be the guest of Kavus Torabi on the Interesting Alternative Show on Phoenix FM tonight at 10PM (GMT), playing a selection of tracks from various bands which I’ve recorded and/or mixed over the years, and some other stuff which I had nothing to do with but just think are worth a listen. Then on 1 May, Kavus and I will be performing some of my songs live at the Resonance FM 10th anniversary party at Corsica Studios in London. Here is an exciting video to tell you all about it:

OK I think that’s all for now, see you next post!

Gig in London 1 May and other “news”.

I’ll be doing a set with Kavus Torabi at the Resonance FM 10th Anniversary party on 1 May at Corsica Studios in London. There are all sorts of bands and events scheduled for what promises to be a wild night! Our set will be a guitar/vocal duo, performing songs from my latest album Bob’s Drive-In and one or two from The Skull Mailbox and Other Horrors too. Here is the Resonance FM 10th Anniversary Party facebook event page.

I have been working on finishing up my new studio, every day for nearly two weeks now. Though I keep thinking I’ll post some photos, I never seem to get around to it. Once it’s finished I will certainly post some! I also want to tell you some of my impressions about building with earth and straw, which on many websites I have seen described as “an absolute pleasure”, or “a joy”…I can’t say I agree and think what they really mean is that it’s a “joy” to sit back and watch their hired workers or slaves build it for them. Anyway, yeah I’ll tell you all about that in what promises to be a highly amusing post in the near future.

And still coming up with song ideas for the next album. Been planting a few shrubs: varieties of Oleander, Lavender, an Atlas Cedar which yes isn’t a shrub but a tree, various Viburnum and several varieties of Spanish Broom. Last night I spilled old beer all over the motherboard of this very computer (accidentally) upon which I am now typing but it didn’t seem to have any effect.

I will be playing the drums on a few songs with Thinking Plague at the RIO festival this September. That will be fun, and it will be a sort of reunion of some of the original In This Life band members as Shane Hotle will be on keyboards. Did you know that when Mike and I were trying to come up with a name for what eventually became known as Thinking Plague, I suggested Pleasant Pestilence? I proposed it to Mike, who thought it wasn’t serious enough, and a few days later he came up with Thinking Plague which he liked a lot better. I didn’t think it was as funny, but I didn’t fuss about it so TP it was and ever shall be for the rest of eternity.

I will depart this immediate region now (attic) and descend to the lower levels of the domicile and perhaps, almost certainly, consume some edibles.

Best and Worst

What’s more fun than doing an internet search of your own name to see what you find? I just found that my 2005 album The Shunned Country was on rateyourmusic.com’s “Best of 2005” and “Worst of 2005” lists. How can you top that?! So to celebrate, here are a couple of tracks from said album. This one is entitled “On Account of Eva’s Fatigue“. The words (which are there on the SoundCloud page) are extracts from one of my favorite books of all time: “Phenomena of Materialisation: a Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics” (1923) by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing.

And here’s another amusing little ditty from the same album entitled “It Has No Name“.

OK that’s all for the moment, going to clean up the attic now.

Lenses, broken Jesuses, songs, etc.

Though I have been lax in my posting frequency here in recent months, lax does not describe my comportment in general during same period. I have been very busy with a variety of things, which, though pleasing when finished, and need to be done, are not terribly exciting to write about such as a lot of “home improvement” type projects. More thrilling perhaps for me anyway is that over the past 10 months I’ve come up with the basic ideas for 12 songs which will make up most of my next solo album, which is still expected to be entitled Bob Drake’s Overproduced Album.

I love working early in the morning on songs. Sit down with a guitar and a little recording device just as the sun is rising and whittle away at the ideas, with a good cup of coffee there next to the little recording device. That can easily keep me excited and busy till noon when I put it away and go do something else like pour cement for the new garage floor or plant a tree or whatever activity beckons or must be attended to. The songs – the songs are following on from the very melodic direction I was seeking on Bob’s Drive-In; attempting to take that a step further, and as the proposed album title suggests, the production will be very dense with a lot going on, the opposite of the deliberately stripped-down Bob’s Drive-In production. Now that I have enough song ideas for the album I’ll spend as much time as necessary working on the arrangements, which may take a while as I really want to have a lot going on in these tunes. Very excited! Actual recording will begin only after I have the arrangements worked out for all the songs so I can’t guess as to when that might be just yet.

If you like my photos, take a look at my French Cemeteries photo album…a couple weeks ago I bought a never-been-used Kodak kz650 digital camera with a really good lens (Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon) at a junk shop for 50 Euros. It’s the first digital camera with which I always seem to get good pictures since my little old Casio EX Z3 which I bought in 2003 and is now held together with tape! Anyway that cemetery album has several new photos taken with the Kodak (the first 2 and 4/5 pages to be exact, as of this date.) Another note about these latest photos: though you’ll see them occasionally in my pictures, I generally try to steer clear of cemetery photo clichés such as angels and crucifixes. In my recent cemetery strolls however, I’ve been encountering so many fabulously dilapidated Jesuses I have temporarily at least suspended my crucifix/religious personage avoidance.

About the middle of last month Chris Cutler was here for 10 days and we put together the first four episodes of his radio program entitled Probes for the Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Chris describes the program as: “A history of taking music apart and thinking the unthinkable: C20 experiments in music and noise.” Don’t yet know when they’ll be broadcast or otherwise made available but will let you know when I do.

Steve’s guitars, fountains, cemeteries, etc.

My oldest best friend on the planet is Steve Courtright. We became friends back in Watseka Illinois around 1970 or 71…something like that…anyway it’s been a while. We played in bands together, wrote stories, and had all sorts of indescribable adventures out there in the humid, haunted cornfields of the rural small-town midwest. Some years ago, Steve (who now lives near Chicago) began building guitars. I’m not actually sure how many he’s made now…4 or 5? but he takes his time and crafts them with great care and attention. And he is currently building one for me! You can follow its progress and other things there on Steve’s blog if you are so inclined. What a great thing it will be to have a fine, hand-crafted acoustic guitar built by an old friend, and it will certainly feature on my future recordings!

Lots more to say as usual, but I’ll save it for future entries or else I’ll just keep typing and never post this informative and profound ditty. Coming up in future posts: update on the Iceberg including my enlightening comments about building with straw and earth, news about the next album’s progress, and things I can’t remember now because I’m impatient to go outside, so please remain calm.

OH ONE MORE THING: just remembered this: if you like my photos of fountains and cemeteries, I’ve added some new albums over the past few days so have a look.

Postponed tour

Due to circumstances beyond control, the March 2012 Drive-In Band tour (see posts below) has been delayed until an as-yet-unkown period later this year or early next. You readers will of course be the first to know about it once something happens!

Been digging around in the old cassettes again.

Back in the late 70′s – early 80′s while I was scraping and struggling along there in Denver, which is a story in itself which I want to tell you some other day, among other things I used to do was make solo albums on cassette, just me playing everything as usual, recorded by ping-ponging between two cassette decks, or sometimes, when I was able to borrow it, a Teac 3340 4-track. In those days when I recorded by myself I wasn’t interested in trying to make “songs”; just “things” with sounds, musical instruments and the (utterly minimal) recording gear. I’ve selected around 47 minutes worth of “good” stuff out of the dozens of hours of recordings and put together an album entitled Bob Drake 1979-1983 which you can listen to or buy for the princely sum of 2 dollars here on my friend Kurt Bauer’s Bangsnap Records page.

And over on my Soundcloud page, here is an atmospheric 22-minute improvised piece by me and Mike Johnson recorded in 1980 entitled appropriately enough What We Did That Day. We used to spend hours getting all set up; a couple of electric guitars, at least one “prepared” electric guitar on a table, a couple of acoustic guitars, loads of old effect pedals, my Moog Taurus pedals, a drum kit, a reel-to-reel used as an echo/distortion, microphones in different places and rooms, all patched into a little mixer and finally fed into a cassette recorder. We’d press RECORD on the C-90 cassette, start “doing something”, flip the tape after 45 minutes and continue on till the end of side 2, keeping an eye on the remaining time so we could taper off towards the end. I took the 90 minute performance and cut it into 4 sections of equal length, layered them on top of one another and mixed them together. Sometimes you hear them all at once, other times just one or two.

And how about 20 minutes worth of abandoned industrial sort of atmosphere? Try this one I made in 1987. There’s a full description there if you want to know how it came about.

You know I was in all sorts of bands in Denver back in the 80′s, here’s a live set from one called Dry Heaves and the Teenage Corpse Eaters, recorded in 1981.

More strange atmospheric improv from 1980 by Great Banana which was me, Mark and Sharon Bradford and Mike Johnson.

That’s all for now, plenty more yet to come, just have to wait for another drizzly winter day when I feel like further riffling through the boxes of billions of cassettes.

March 2012 tour update.

As mentioned in this post, I am trying to set up a little European tour in March 2012. That’s coming along, and now there is an added attraction: it will be a double bill! My friend Lukas Simonis will be also touring with us, opening the shows with a 20-30 minute solo set using guitar and electronics. Lukas and I have worked together on a lot of projects over the years like AA Kismet and Vril (you can find some songs here), and as you can see on his website he’s a busy man in the funny music scene himself. So that’s pretty good news. OK that’s all for now, how are you?

Frequently Asked Question B:

I’ve been asked a few times in the weeks since Bob’s Drive-In was released if I’m going to take six years again to release another solo album. “No” is the answer, unless something utterly unforseen intervenes! I think it’s safe to say that the next one, to be entitled “Bob Drake’s Overproduced Album” may be released sometime in 2013. The long songwriting pause I took after The Shunned Country was deliberate and necessary, as that album really drained me with its 52 highly condensed tracks, and I’d done those six albums between 1994-2005 pretty much one after the other, taking about two years apiece. So yeah, after Shunned it was a good time for a solo album-making pause.

That’s it for now I guess, see you next post? Maybe I’ll have something more to say? How can I know? Now some popcorn.