2026/04/27
!! JUST RELEASED FROM CAPTIVITY !!
** AN HOUR OF AMAZEMENT **
Now at https://headscope.co.uk/downloads/product/staring-sane
Earlier, and sold out!
Truly hot from the press of Trunk Records, BASIC MATHS, a riotous romp through my 1980-81 music and associated noises for Central Television’s 28-part educational TV Series: featuring Oberheim 8-voice synthesiser, piano, banjo, guitars, mouthorgan, percussion, voice – and other older analogue synthesisers including the legendary Synthi. Jonny Trunk is rather keen on this one!
All this material has been restructured to expose musical lines not much detected in the original mono mixes. As was, and still is, common in the film and TV Media, the sound was the last sensory experience to complete the programmes. I had little time to consider my reactions to the films, so drew on subconciously-stored experience to make something appropriate. The multiferously contrasting moods are now exposed in glowing stereophonic vibrancy. Get it here.
Now for two new downloads in top-quality 24/48:
FACEROLL is two whole works, as if two sides of a vinyl LP, in a high quality WAV file, together with a 4-page PDF image and descriptive text including an informative Judy Trim obituary.
1. Judy’s Lovely Laugh unknown date/ 2001
This unedited piano solo was wholly improvised shortly after hearing of the untimely death of the lovely Judy Trim in 2001, first wife of the then Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. They were close friends with us from about 1969 to the end of their marriage. We continued separately with both of them, Roger fading away a bit as he gravitated towards America and climbed through a few stratae.
2. Dribblers (Ron Geesin) unknown date/ 1980s
A note or two on the futility of talking – a scream of subconciousness: made with one voice, and a few random radio inserts, all in one take. This was realised by my well-tried technique of running ¼” magnetic tape between two machines and round an extendible arm to adjust the delay time, the left-hand machine in record and the right-hand machine in playback, feeding the recorded sound from that machine back though a mixer into the left-hand machine. With the levels all set correctly, the sound result is a spiralling canon. The level of the right-hand machine playback can be varied during recording, so long as it is not more than the overall level. The final result is then cut out of the recorded tape that has been collected on the right-hand machine.
Through most of 1980, a very good friend of mine, Murray Grigor, directed a series of four documentaries for Granada Television called ‘Edge of Britain’. These were themed around the early days in the life of the historian A. J. P. Taylor where he revisited the Lancashire coast, the area of his upbringing. He was born in Birkdale, near Southport.
The four programmes, Southport, Blackpool, Morecambe and Preston, were first transmitted on consecutive Thursdays starting on the 18th September 1980. Later, a one hour compilation was eventually networked on ITV on the 21st January 1981
You might have worked out by now that I made all the music for this series and, judging by this 38-minute Suite that I have completely remixed from the original 8-track components, I identified with, brought out and enlarged some of Taylor’s idiosyncratic observations.
All this work was made during my Oberheim 8-Voice synthesiser period, so many of the sounds are from that rich but synthetic multitonal monster, intermingled with my usual manual capabilities on piano, banjo, acoustic, electric and bass guitars and percussion. Actually, the hands were also responsible for adjusting long delays on tape between two machines and all those complicated synthesiser knobs. I have also made some creative use of stereo when all the original sound for the films had to be monophonic.