Brian Lavelle » www.brianlavelle.org

To whom I owe the leaping delight
That quickens my senses in our wakingtime
And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,
The breathing in unison

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
And babble the same speech without need of meaning.

No peevish winter wind shall chill
No sullen tropic sun shall wither
The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only

But this dedication is for others to read:
These are private words addressed to you in public.

—T.S. Eliot, A Dedication to my Wife

There’s a nice review of ‘Ustrina’ on the Chain D.L.K. site, written by Andrea Ferraris:

I think many of you out there have already Brian Lavelle for this or that release, but in case you’re absolutely new to his works you’ve to know between 1996 and today Lavelle has recorded for labels such as Bake, Diophantine, Freek, Staalplaat, Elsie and Jack etc. This drone based long track shows the incredible strength of proportions and the importance of balance, infact this sixty eighty minutes circa suite could be dead boring but ends being absorbing and fascinating instead. While being a little bit darker than many of the Lavelle’s output I’ve heard so far, it has nothing to do with dark ambient, it’s lulling and someway narcoleptic and summed up with a couple of other characteristics it brings to my mind DJ Olive’s “sleep” work on Room40, I’m tented to say the two releases are similar and equally as catchy. From what I’ve read inside the press sheet this english artist has reshaped some old sounds that probably has been collecting dust inside some rough recording and inside a black corner of Lavelle’s mind, but he managed to give it all such a good new definition I’d say this blast from the past has been damn successful. I can exactly say which were the exact sound sources/instruments for this recording, waves and the layers would suggest some keyboard/old synth sources twisted and renewed for good but with today’s technology it’s really hard for me to be one hundred percent sure. The pictures and the whole layout are great and I think from the front cover to the last page they give the impression of this environment Lavelle wanted to re-create. So the question is if we have to cross or not the bridge we see on the front cover?…by the way from the dead leaves it’s easy to imagine an autumnal landscape if you add the melancholic atmosphere of this work it’s hard to deny that’s not a joyful marriage.

Thanks to Andrea for looking to the whole release, at every aspect of it, as I’d hoped people would.

William Gardiner
29.VIII.1920 – 23.II.2009

Excellent online experimental music review Wonderful Wooden Reasons has a great little review of The Petrified Forest in its latest online edition:

There are two Brian Lavelles. There’s the Brian Lavelle that creates mature and mannered ambient compositions that slowly reveal themselves like a flower unfolding to greet the sun. Then there’s the Brian Lavelle that creates head mangling, massively psychedelic, cosmic drones. I like the first Lavelle but his music has a tendency to become just a little too nice for my palette. I love the second Lavelle! When he fires that tone at you there’s no escape. You’re along for the ride and the ride is always good.
Well, I’m happy to report that this 2 track, 20 minute set is definitely from the latter and it’s cracking stuff. The amorphous bloops and swoops mean it’s just sci-fi sounding enough to make my inner geek giggle with delight and it’s soaring fluid composition is ‘out there’ enough to make my outer space-cadet groan with psychedelic ecstasy.
A fine recording from an artist working at the top of his game.

Thank you Ian!

Well, I promised at the start of the year that I’d post more often about tea, which was really one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place. So here we are, just one tiny month later, with a post about tea: it’s almost unbelievable…

The tea in question is slightly mysterious. It’s a very generous free sample from Nada – my thanks go to him for this experience. I got this a few months ago, but haven’t had the right opportunity to try it. Today it’s a cold Sunday, the start of February; Jill is “recovering” from her hen night yesterday; I’m on holiday tomorrow; and so this afternoon is a free (and guiltlessly free) one, almost designed for a serious tea session.

The handwritten insert with this small sample simply says “60s loose leaf sheng”: essentially it’s an aged Chinese puerh tea, without artificial fermentation, although I’m assuming from the description that it was always loose leaf and has never been compressed into a cake or brick. The dry leaves certainly don’t look as though they have, although after at least 40 years, it’s probably difficult to tell. It’s quite humbling to have this tea which is older than I am, perhaps by several years. That is one of the pleasures of exploring a tea like puerh which lasts.

There’s about 4g of leaf, so I used a small (100ml) pot, the smallest I have. The aroma of the dry leaf in the pre-heated pot is interesting: damp earth mustiness, with faint hints of spice or cinnamon. A curious mix.

After a first flash rinse (not drunk) of the leaves, the aroma is more mushroom-like, with that same damp earthiness. The first drinkable rinse of 10 seconds gives a resultant liquor of a glorious deep-amber colour, verging on ruby red.

The taste is smooth, earthy and relatively “creamy”, for want of a better word. Hard to describe.

I’ve enjoyed young, green puerh for a while now. It has a crisp, refreshing and biting taste that I really like, particularly if you can find a good quality tea. On the other hand, I’ve yet to taste an aged puerh, and moreso any fermented (shu) puerh, that I really like. MarshalN posted a great piece on his blog recently about what it is we may actually be tasting in the first few infusions of an older tea: those infusions of an aged puerh which I have trouble getting through. The initial taste might be effect of how the tea has been stored.

Given the age of this tea, and based on MarshalN’s observations, I wondered if I would start to taste a difference round about the fifth infusion and thereafter. The infusions had been: 10s, 7s, 12s, 15s and 20s up to that point. From that fifth infusion, and the next (30s), I didn’t notice any perceptible difference. Perhaps it was slightly less earthy and more drinkable, but that could have been that I was used to the taste. I felt the tea liquor coating my mouth, in a not unpleasant way. I didn’t notice any massive qi with this tea, but I generally don’t for some reason. Perhaps I’ve never had good enough puerh!

I kept going with seventh and eighth infusions (45s and 75s) but again didn’t notice any change in the tea. It certainly kept going too! As the infusions went on, I got a slightly fishy note in the aroma, which wasn’t pleasant. I’ve read about people experiencing that before – I hadn’t up to this point.

The session with this tea was an unusual one for me. I don’t know how much of that is born of disappointment based on my own desire for this tea—after all, a 1960s sheng, for goodness sake—to be delicious. I am going to keep it until tomorrow and try longer infusions to see where that takes it.

I’m grateful to Nada for this experience – I just don’t know what to make of it! Did I actually enjoy it? Possibly not, but it gave my some interesting insights into what I like in tea and what I know I don’t. I just hope no one thinks it’s a lack of respect for my elders!

I’d like to wish a happy and healthy new year to all my family and friends, and to everyone else who stumbles upon this blog. One of my resolutions for 2009 (one of many…) is to post more often, and to post more often on tea.

It’s a big year for us: Jill and I will be married on 21 March, the vernal equinox, and I’m a month into a new job which is going very well.

Hope to see you all in 2009!

My latest album, Ustrina, has just been released by Andrea Marutti of Afe Records in Italy. It’s a limited edition of 100 copies in a beautiful full colour photographic sleeve. My thanks to Andrea for the release and for doing such a fantastic job with the sleeve.

I also have copies available myself for anyone who is interested. Get in touch if you’d like one.

—

Press release:

Ustrina consists of a single long-form work entitled ‘Pyre Nullity’, which is a set of dense, shifting cloudscapes, perhaps a little darker in focus than Lavelle’s last few releases and certainly his longest single composition to date. Its layers of ghostly, distant voices, subterranean drones and processed field recordings evoke forgotten realms, but this is not dark ambient music. Its compositional approach, subject matter and photographic imagery all point to hidden places, memories from a Golden Age cast on the fire, but not necessarily the darker side of existence. Indeed the cover suggests a possible modus operandi: cross the bridge, open the gate, move within.

The album utilises compositional ideas which date back to the mid 1990s, but which were not realised until very recently. Within the layers of ‘Pyre Nullity’ are electronic passages from certain recordings over a decade old, previously unreleased and now reworked, rejuvenated and redefined.

I’ve been listening to the Weather tonight, and for a large part of this week in fact.

By that I mean I’ve been listening to the fruits of the Space Weather recording session last Saturday in Glasgow. The line-up was as it is now and ever shall be, amen: Alistair Crosbie (electric guitar), me (synthesizer) and Andrew Paine (electric bass guitar).

It was another excellent session, full of laughter and joyous camaraderie, and it makes me think that for all we strive to do our solo recordings on our own to the best of our abilities, there is nothing like playing good music with good friends. I begin to see why certain people hate all the faff of studio work and live to play live together, whether that’s in front of an audience or not. There are some moments and extended passages of real beauty in what we did at the weekend, and that’s down to the three of us doing more or less with what we have in front of us.

There were pieces from the session which were just beautiful: understated and contemplative, but slowly burning with that strange SW magic that infects the first album we’ve already done (the cover is image at the top of this post).

There are also moments of pure wonderment at how these tracks come across in their recorded form, when compared to how I remember us playing them. Did we actually do this? It seems hard to believe. But the actuality of the smiles on our faces as we played them, and the memory of those smiles now, are the greater rewards in all of this.

One of the pieces essayed on Saturday was a long floating instrumental, which reminds me quite a bit of the work of a US group called Alien Planetscapes, who were stalwarts of the 80s home taper scene. They worked in a few experimental styles, but this kind of eerie space rock, with brilliant free floating bass (courtesy of Mr. P), was the kind of thing they did best I think.

One more session like last Saturday’s and we will have a second album to contend with before the first is even out. It makes you think…

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
–They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro–
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

At school, I had a fundamental difficulty with Robert Hardy’s work. I read Return of the Native in my last year, and I recall not enjoying it at all. Worse than that, Hardy’s Wessex was colourless, plodding and its denizens devoid of hope, at least as far as I could tell from my limited reading of that novel twenty years ago.

The poem above (’Neutral Tones’) is from the 1898 volume Wessex Poems And Other Verses and I was amazed to drink in its bleak outlook. It rejoices in its lack of colour and now that seems to me to be an integral part of its beauty.

Our tastes changes over time; what was once dull for me because it seemed colourless is now emotionally effecting precisely because of that colourlessness. I should try Hardy again in longer form. Perhaps twenty years later I’ll be able to take some pleasure from its joyless panoply.