We have been receiving some really great reviews for the MOAT – Poison Stream album and as they are on various different websites and print, I’m going to post one a day here so they get the biggest chance of being read. The MOAT FB page has substantially less traffic although after reading these reviews one wonders why. It’s the age-old problem of people would like it if they were exposed to it. There’s this thing about hip magazines considering you for review, they see how much you spent on advertising and then you’re in, their reasoning it’s the only way to survive but that doesn’t bode well for excellent records that have no promo budget and I’m talking mainly about younger acts that have no budget until they have exposure, Catch 22. I can’t imagine that every review they print has to go through this, surely not, but who knows. Of course hip and rich acts are in there anyway, it’s the ones in between and it’s sad to think that you are prioritised if you are rich or hip instead of good, but then what is good? The first review is from Ryan Martin on the Jammerzine website, broadcasting from somewhere in the USA – it’s short and it’s sweet:

The Test Drive: MOAT – Poison Stream + Video

I went on a massive walk today meeting Julian in town and Olivia later. Julian took me on a walk to a part of Porto I hadn’t seen yet. We passed by his new apartment that he bought and is having renovated. He’s another Brexit escapee who chose Portugal as his destination. In five years of living here, we can become citizens and be free to live and travel in Europe without all the restrictions that are now in place. We have been here for 3 months now and with the new rules, that would be it. It’s only my Portuguese residency that allows me to stay in mainland Europe for longer than 90 days – Olivia is ok because she holds a German and a Swedish passport. Strange times, the double whammy of the pandemic and Brexit.

We walked through some areas which are more off the beaten path where the locals live but having said that it’s not really too far from where the seething mass of tourists will be when the world gets back to normal. Covid new cases today 691 from 394 yesterday, so a jump upward after a big jump down. Let’s see, it’s been going steadily down and we hope to be opening up here with schools apparently back 15th March and everything by the end of the month. They are trying to be careful, in the first wave it was very unaffected here but after Christmas came the highest peak, we don’t want it back.

After we had walked through the local neighbourhood we came to the Dom Luís I bridge and walked across to Gaia where we met Olivia on the other side who arrived on the tram at Jardim de Morro. We looked across at the Douro river and beautiful Porto and thought ourselves very lucky to be there as well as realising that this is the last time that this city is going to be this empty. Usually, it is full of throbbing throngs of tourists, we know they’ll be back but we’re just not sure when. When the cities open up again people will be desperate to get away, to places like this. Below us were derelict houses in prime locations with beautiful views of the city and the river and one imagines that in 20 years Porto will be a different place as they slowly but surely renovate the whole city.

The Rickenbacker-stringing YouTube video attracted some attention, mostly positive comments and one mostly harmless negative one, lots of views and likes and one dislike and one who let the negative fellow have it, haha, now that’s support! On the subject of gear on the way back home we went past the Dance Planet shop, they sell DJ stuff, studio stuff. It was 7 PM and the man was still in there (Miguel), I bought a desk mic stand but when I got back home, there was only the base, great, so I have to take it back and not sure if he’ll be in the shop as it’s still lockdown. We’ll see, inconvenient, I gotta sleep.

Music today started with some of those Beach Boys albums that no-one seems to talk about beyond Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile. Wild Honey (1967), Friends (1968), 20/20 (1969), there’s also Sunflower (1970), Surf’s Up (1971), Carl And The Passions – So Tough (1972), and Holland (1973). I also listened to Al Stewart’s Orange (1972) and Past, Present And Future (1973) and The Scorpions‘ Fly To The Rainbow (1974), quite different things as usual. I also watched two mimed Echo and The Bunnymen videos from Belgian TV, Turquoise Days and A Promise from Heaven Up Here (1981) – keeping it eclectic. I have to be up for a sesh in Sydney at 9.30 AM tomorrow. Goodnight.

Music Of The Daze

I spent the evening finishing off the illustrated lyrics so that Olivia has something to illustrate and now as we have the tubes we can send them out. This year has just been one big waiting game and although we see some people are getting their MOAT – Poison Stream vinyl, we’re still having difficulty with the Portuguese customs and getting the CDs for me to autograph. They keep on threatening that they will arrive but just to give you an example of the unforeseen, today Olivia went to the post office to send off some flat-pack mystery boxes and they told her, sorry, we can’t send anything outside Europe today as the computers for international transactions are down and we don’t know when they’ll be back up. So there’s issues at every turn but we are striving to make things happen. Look at it this way, last time the company went bust and we lost a load of money, this time it’s just a delay and all due to such outrageously difficult circumstances that the world is currently suffering. Through it all, everyone that contributed gets their record or their perk as they did with Noctorum and as they will with MOAT, thanks for your patience.

Finally today, the How To String A Rickenbacker 12 String YouTube video is up and waiting for you to spend one hour and 12 minutes watching me string a guitar. Haha, sounds enticing, right? Well, it’s at least educational, think of it as a real-time tutorial for budding Rickenbacker 12 string players who need to know what they’re getting themselves into beyond the actual playing of the guitar – which incidentally isn’t the easiest task either with the thin neck, the strings close together and a certain technique that you might need that is only similar to playing a six-string guitar in that there’s chords. Of course, you can do all kinds of similar things, arpeggios and if you are like me you can even plug it into a fuzz box and thrash at it like a wild animal. But then you’ve also got to keep it in tune and remember that the fuzz box has an off switch so the guitar has to be useable with a clean sound on other parts of your Rock masterpiece. Also, you can’t really bend strings and it’s fragile, they don’t tend to get up unscathed when they drop to the ground. One of the great things about a guitar like this is that it makes you play differently, for example you probably don’t want to play Speed Metal on it or Blues, it’s its own beast and it’s up to you to tame it.

We are on a mission to get another 290 subscribers to the YouTube channel so we can be at the magic number of 1000, then we can start selling advertising to Coca-Cola, Marlborough cigarettes, and car companies. But seriously, if I can think of something interesting to do regularly and I can find the time we could have a regular connection, but what could I do regularly that doesn’t take hours and hours to prepare? Reading Edgar Allan Poe? Discussing the different Amon Düül lineups? Something with words and music or perhaps I could act out the storming of the Bastille with 12 string and fruit?

Outside in the street today, it was colder, new covid cases were down to 394 for the 1st of March and it will be getting warmer more regularly very soon. Also this month the clocks change so we’ll really have the feeling of spring with more light in the evening. It changes on the 14th of March in the USA and on the 28th of March here. So we’ll be throwing open the windows and instead of having huge heating bills, we’ll have huge cooling fan bills. We are yet to experience a Portuguese summer so we’ll see how hot it actually gets.

Music today came from the almost completely unknown Deep Feeling who released their debut album in 1971. There’s a review here that tells you all about it in more detail than I could and well worth a read if you are interested in discovering a band that seemed to straddle Beach Boys harmonies and Progressive Rock simultaneously and seamlessly. The complete Deep Feeling reissue delves deeper into past sounds and has an altogether more sixties sound including on their first single Do You Love Me as they touch on singer John Swail’s past (aka Guy Darrell) but the album proper sticks more to the harmonies and Progressive idea. Sounds mad but works and it’s a great find as far as forgotten classics that you need a nerd like me to uncover for you – if you like this kind of thing.

Deep Feeling: The Complete Anthology – Album Review

Music Of The Daze

In 2018 Anekdoten played in Rome and as Olivia was involved in a classical concert/rehearsals in Germany at the time I decided to stay for three extra days when the band had gone back to Stockholm. It was a fascinating trip walking around the living museum that is Rome. I visited the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, and St Peter’s Square – and some record stores. I met Corrado there, a native, he follows the music I make and was a perfect guide at night as to where to wander and eat. I met his family and some friends and a jolly time was had by all. The reason I mention this is because at one point we were driving along and he pointed out of the window and said nonchalantly, “That’s where Julius Caesar was murdered”. It struck me as something so historically important that I had become unsure if it was fact or fiction, it has reached mythological status. Then there’s Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar and I always remember the line from Caesar’s soothsayer, “Beware the ides of March” and that is why I bring this up because today is the 1st March, so look out!

In reality, the streets of Porto were rather normal today. It was cloudy, not raining, colder but there seemed to be more people out. Olivia went to send packages out at the post office which is proving to be a rather tedious and time-consuming process and is ridiculously complex – she can’t send everything at once. I went to the computer store to pay for my USB speaker output and buy printer ink and was talking to João about the frustration of being in such an amazing place with all the facilities closed down. He told me, Hey, it’s the same for us and we’re used to having it like that. I checked daily cases today and it was 781 for 28th February, it was 16,500 for 28th January. We are in week 7 of lockdown and it looks like there will be at least another two weeks left before places start to open up, could be longer. I still have to find the swimming pool. João told me that the vaccine was coming and that the government had ordered 37 million shots so that they could help other Portuguese-associated countries like Angola as well as Cape Verde and themselves. When will the vaccine hit men over 60 in Porto?

I spoke to Salim tonight in Dallas, he’s been going through it with the recent Texas disaster and we tried our best to encourage each other to believe in a light at the end of the tunnel. I had a sesh today with Craig in Atlanta and after sessioneer Doug commented yesterday about how punctual I am – I was 8 minutes late. The reason – everything happened at once, Olivia had a Portuguese lesson, I was coming back from the shops and the main reason, Fernando from the local music shop was bringing back the Spanish guitar that Olivia bought from a girl on the expat page. He restrung it with the nylon strings but was unable to fix the body that looks like someone trod on it – but, he said that this, a Paco Castillo, was a 900 euro guitar, Olivia paid 40 euros for it.

I got news today that my studio monitors are on the way from Germany so I can get a real idea of what music sounds like. At the moment I have some computer speakers that also came from the expat page and cost 10 euros that have no bass and a Bose slab that is too boomy – they aren’t really cutting it. I need to be able to hear my music, sessioneers’ music, and records through speakers that have some quality, or more to the point some accuracy so that I can hear what the band were thinking their sound should be when they made their record. Of course, this is an age-old problem because everyone’s system is different, speakers, amps, buds, headphones, and even the rooms people listen to music in make the music sound different – and then there’s the phone.

Last but not least I woke up feeling terrible today, that’s why I wrote it at the end of the mail because now I feel OK.

Music today was Sweet Dreams: The Anthology (1992) by Roy Buchanan, one of the great Blues players whose tone and touch was inimitable. He played a Fender Telecaster and it sang. If you don’t know who he is, he also played on The Stones’ album Black and Blue (1975) and was called “the Best Unknown Guitarist in the world”. This album is for fans as it has live, rare, and best of tracks but new investigators should go for his self-titled album (1972), Second Album (1973) and That’s What I’m Here For (1973). Buchanan died at age 48 after being arrested over a domestic dispute and was found the next morning hanging from his own shirt in his cell, his death was classed as suicide and the conclusion has been disputed.

Music Of The Daze

Last day of the month and up early (by my standards) for a sesh with Arctic Lake Tony in Sydney. It was a long one today, when you’ve made a record with someone there’s a lot to discuss. But there’s also a lot to think about when you sing, play the guitar in a live setting and today was the day I promised myself that I would restring my Seagull 12 string. It’s been a while and I was showing Stephen in DC To Where I Am Now (the song) the other day and I realised that the strings were in trouble. When you’re not doing regular shows or recording the guitar can go months without new strings and I can’t even remember when I last changed the strings on this guitar. It’s been on planes and been sitting around in the studio, it’s been three months in Portugal, it has in fact been all over Europe. Since there have been no live shows since last year’s European tour and since I’ve been in the studio working on the Space Summit LP, Arctic Lake EP, and the Ahad Afridi LP, it hasn’t had that much to do (lots of competition with other guitars). Since we’ve been in Portugal, we have done four internet concerts as part of the MOAT – Poison Stream launch campaign with me using this guitar. Now we have four more booked in March and April and the guitar pulled me aside the other day and said, “Really?” and when I looked, the guitar was right, the strings were a disgrace.

When Olivia gets some spare time in between projects she will be editing a video I did for our YouTube channel called How To String a Rickenbacker 12 String. You may consider it to be exciting 12 string nerd fodder but I’m sure it will also be an extremely helpful tool. Today’s task of stringing a Seagull 12 string acoustic is a far simpler exercise although I did have to tighten the nut on 11 of the 12 machine heads (details) and in fact today in one unusual moment of distraction I put the ‘B’ strings where the ‘G’s should be, causing untold trouble. The guitar was furious. I haven’t made a mistake like that for years. I felt like an air traffic controller who in one momentary lack of concentration can cause a disaster. I managed to rescue the situation with pliers and perseverance and eventually had the guitar strung up. Usually, I keep the old strings (I don’t know why, I never use them) but when I saw the state they were in and when I saw the looks the guitar was giving me, I just threw them away.

So the guitar was strung and now it was rehearsal time because this coming Saturday we will be doing the first of four internet concerts and as we have had the idea of ‘you send the setlist’ then there’s always songs on there we need to interpret for 12 string, violin and voice. We can’t do everything that’s asked for but we will have a go at anything so we ask people to send a list of 20 songs, maybe we can do half of them and add some others we know. Today we were rehearsing If I Had A Dream from the first MOAT record, changing the key and doing the same with The Lantern from In Reflection. Some of these songs take some working out arrangement-wise, key, violin parts, lyrics, chords and we spent some hours just working on these two songs. We’ll be working through the week in between seshes and French and blog and breathing and getting the MOAT – Poison Stream music and perks completed and sent out.

Liverpool were playing tonight so we watched them beat Sheffield United 0-2 over dinner. My VPN died in the middle and I had to get in touch with Customer Support to get it working again but I got to see most of the game. Good for Liverpool today as Man U and Chelsea drew 0-0 and Leicester lost 1-3 to Arsenal. After that it was straight into a sesh with Doug in Wappingers Falls and trying to connect the organic creating of the music to the technicality of recording it – we can’t all be Todd Rundgren.

Music today started with Rubber Soul (1965) and that spilled over onto Help! (1965) – a get-going Sunday boost with The Beatles never goes amiss. After that, I got a message from BJM Ricky to buy Phil Parfitt’s record, Mental Home Recordings (2020), so I did.

Then I felt like something uncool so I listened to Heart’s Red Velvet Car (2010) and Dreamboat Annie (1975) but meant to listen to Television‘s Marquee Moon (1977) as Tony was talking about turning a young band he’s met and seen in Sydney called The Moving Stills onto Television because he thought they had some guitar connection and of course they’d never heard of them. But anyway, sometimes more easy mainstream music can be relaxing, seventies Rock over the cool people can be just right after a long, long day and I’m 16 hours of non-stop into this one, so let me listen to Heart (the female Zep), it’s great if you like that kind of thing. Ooh baby mama, yeah! In the meantime check out The Moving Stills – positive, melodic, guitar Pop, something new for you, if you like that kind of thing.

Music Of The Daze

After today’s trip to the bakery instead of going straight back to the flat, I decided to have a walk through the Marquês square at the end of our street, check out the fountain, and imagine what it might be like to sit on a bench here on a summer’s day. Because of the lockdown, all the benches are sealed up with tape, so you can’t sit down although that tape was put there six weeks ago and by now it has been ripped or gone flat or people have pushed it aside and sat down anyway. That’s how it was today with some people sitting on benches, three bedraggled men, a family, a man by himself, and when I came to the middle a young person sitting on the side of the fountain looking at his phone. The fountain was gushing out water with quite a force and for a minute I stopped there and watched it power out into the basin in its continuous mesmerising circular motion. Over on one side of the park, I saw the pigeons and the seagulls in a frenzy and when I got closer I saw them pecking at a horrible mouldy mess of mixed vegetables and bread. I can’t imagine someone had dumped it there in that state, more that it had gone mouldy as it sat there. It didn’t stop the birds and I was wondering if it was bad for them, does mould make them sick? It was another beautiful day and I was happy to be just slowly wandering aimlessly but mostly in anticipation of spring into summer and one hopes the end to this terrible pandemic that has affected all of our lives so much.

In picking up the pão da avó for the weekend, the man in the bakery was teaching me how to say 8 in Portuguese (oito). Some of the numbers are similar to Spanish and I suppose ‘ocho’ isn’t a million miles away but it shows how these two languages have quite different pronunciations. The problem for me is that I like to work with Duolingo studying French every day, but the app doesn’t teach Portuguese-Portuguese, it teaches Brazilian Portuguese and that means different pronunciation and even different words. So, dilemma, do I try to learn Brazilian Portuguese anyway, I could probably be understood and it would be most helpful in Brazil. Perhaps learning both at the same time might even be possible, after all a lot of the vocabulary and the grammar would be the same. Then there’s the other dilemma, Spain is one hour away, I have some kind of working knowledge of Spanish, shouldn’t I be trying to improve that? How many languages can you learn at the same time? Do they help or hinder each other? And then what about improving my Swedish? Mm, wouldn’t it be great to speak Italian?

I had two sessions today with two sessioneers I hadn’t spoken to in over a year. Lars in Bremen, Germany, and Stephen in Washington, DC. Lars is progressing in the songwriting universe and Stephen is trying to get back into playing guitar more regularly. This is the thing, it’s the regularity (like the languages), I was thinking today that I might even be able to learn to do something I didn’t like if I did it regularly enough, so imagine what you can achieve if you really enjoy something. Time has become our enemy, but we can’t be too mad at time because it’s only about more choices, aka distractions. Entertainment is everywhere even if at this point it’s all indoors, series galore, films, free (or cheap) music of the highest quality. What’s it going to be like when sport, theatre, concerts, movies, the gym, are all back, nobody will have time to eat, which will at least make up for all the eating and drinking that might have been going on since last year, we’re going to have to work it off and there’ll be no lack of events to get you out of the house. The entertainment world will be flooded with choices – talk about distractions, you will be simply spoilt for choice.

Music today has come from the ridiculously named but quite brilliant Hairy Chapter. Thick guitars and raucous riffs and German, their second album Can’t Get Through (1971) will have Grand Funk and Uriah Heep fans loving it and well, everyone else hating it. So yes, it’s really great, if you like this kind of thing and really terrible if you don’t, you know what I think.

This is an overview from the Decibel Magazine website, you can read the whole review if you click on the link:

Primitive Origins: Hairy Chapter’s “Can’t Get Through”

Hairy Chapter’s Can’t Get Through – The Decibel Breakdown:

Do I need to be stoned to listen to this? – It might help.

Heaviness factor – As far as earth-shaking power chord heaviness goes, on the lighter side of proto-metal. But for batshit bonkers “song structures” and ballsy prog-first decisions, they’re up there.

Obscura Triviuma – The band released an album—Electric Sound for Dancing—in 1970 under the name The Chaparall Electric Sound Inc.

Other albums – Eyes, from 1970.

Related bands – The Concentric Movement.

Alright, fine, if you must – Whatever people were trippin’ on in Germany in 1971, which apparently was something pretty serious.

Music Of The Daze