So at midnight tonight here in England, we began with the Indiegogo campaign for the new MOAT album Poison Stream to be released through Schoolkids Records in the not too distant future. The album is the second collaboration with Swedish-German multi-instrumentalist composer Niko Röhlcke who plays with popular Swedish band Weeping Willows. The album was made with our usual crew with Dare at the controls, Eddie John on drums and Olivia on strings and design. The front cover picture was taken by my old Swedish friend Jan Uddenfeldt. It’s exciting. A new album ready to launch, two songs released, GONE BY NOON and the latest ACID RAIN and a whole new album to discover. A gatefold sleeve with all the lyrics, translucent green vinyl and CD digipak and there’s even music! There’s going to be all kinds of items available to support the campaign including, handwritten & illustrated lyrics, house concerts, skype concerts, postcards from exotic locations, signed prints and mystery boxes! So check out the campaign here.

 
I seem to be filling up every minute of every day with something and by the time I got to bed last night my head was spinning (like The Exorcist) with the following days’ responsibilities. I was up for day 16 of my ‘swim a mile’ regimen and it was tricky today because the pool was full of turtles. The problem with the turtle is that it has no concept of rhythm and if there is a slick streamlined dolphin (that’s me) coming up behind them they have no awareness and don’t let you pass. It’s not all of them but enough of them to make it a problem (caravans in August). It’s hard fitting in a mile in 50 minutes and when you have to stop and wait it means you have to swim harder to fit it in. But I’ve knocked five minutes off that mile from when I began 16 miles ago, I’m down to 45 mins which seems like about 10 minutes behind the fast lane but makes me fast in the medium lane (it’s all relative). If I carry on like this I’ll be finished before I start.

Thanks to Gert Volkmer for sending some ex-band artefacts, two bootleg cassettes and a 7-inch single, all good material for the archive. Donations to the archive are most welcome whether they be rare Peruvian Psych or the ticket you saved when you went to see ABBA in 1978 and can no longer think of a reason to keep it. I see the archive as a museum of artefacts as much as I do of music. Books, instruments, and concert tickets as well as anything else you can think of – it’s a veggie Hard Rock Café, except instead of Prince’s jacket, it’s Robert Wyatt’s. Instead of Eric Clapton’s guitar, it’s Tom Verlaine’s but really as I write this, I realise everybody is welcome, it’s just that we include those that are not welcome at the Hard Rock, too.

Outside the trees were shaking so hard that they were blurred. As I walked past them I wondered about the birds, where are they when the wind blows like this if not in the trees? But what do they do when the branches are bending and catapulting anything that sits on them high into the air? You couldn’t see the birds anywhere. Where were the seagulls? Even the hardy crows were missing. The smaller birds, the sparrows, the wagtails, the chaffinches and the jenny wrens, the robins and even the magpies and the jackdaws were simply gone. The wind raged on and up in the sky the rain clouds were being blown in and blown out just as quickly. The blue patches seemed like they may endure but the winter’s grey was too thick and eventually, the drizzle came down and drove everyone inside, the birds remained aloof.

I had sessions today, Jeff in Ohio, but Noelle wasn’t well (get better Noelle) and Chris was taken up with work, but it freed me up to finally write down all those records I was playing in September. They’ve been leaning against the stereo for weeks, I just haven’t had time to add them to the list but finally today, I did. If you ever want to see what’s being played at the In Deep Music Archive, then go here. I’ve kept it up for about four years.

Music today comes with the shocking news that Eddie Van Halen has died of cancer at the age of 65. I knew he was sick, I’d heard a rumour but to lose this giant of the electric guitar is hard to take. All those virtuosos, all those unbelievable guitar players that adopted that style that blew our minds in the late seventies into the eighties but it was him that never sounded like anyone else, a true innovator. His style was so personal and so perfect, he destroyed the old school, he did for guitar players what Punk did for Top Of The Pops, he rewrote the manual on how to play the guitar for the masses. How sad that he has gone. RIP Eddie.

Song Of The Daze