Brian Lavelle » www.brianlavelle.org

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.

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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.

I received a giant parcel from the great Scott Wilson at Yunnan Sourcing today. The main bulk of this order is a set of seven pu-erh beengs of the Menghai classic recipes 7542, 7582, 7512, 7532, 7262, 7572 and 7592, called Six-Famous-Tea-Mountain (I love that hyphenation and awkward singular/plural!).

The whole caboodle comes in a lovely woven basket:

The overall package is so beautifully put together that it almost feels wrong to start drinking the tea. Perhaps that’s why, with the purchase of these 7 cakes, Scott has also included a 50 gram sample of each tea. A great idea; and I can’t wait to get started on these, allowing the seven full cakes to age gracefully. I will enjoy them, I think, in my new Yixing Zisha Shi Piao Hu pot from Stéphane Erler of the Taiwan-based Tea Masters blog:

And aside from contemplating the climbing of mountains of tea, I’m really delighted to report that I’m in a band again for the first time in years. Space Weather is a trio consisting of Alistair Crosbie (electric guitar), me (synthesizer) and Andrew Paine (electric bass guitar). As these fellows are some of the nicest people you could hope to meet, the decision to join them was one of the easiest and quickest I’ve ever made.

We’ve had a couple of recording sessions so far and the music seems to come so effortlessly and interconnectedly that I think we’re definitely on to something. The pieces are simple, linear, largely melodic in the conventional sense and entirely improvised. Although we’ve all recorded in separate duo combinations over the years—Alistair and I, and Alistair and Paz, as well as a possible forthcoming Lavelle/Paine outing—this is the first time the three of us have worked together as one. The two sessions have been relaxed, warm, funny and wonderfully joyful experiences: good company and great music (well, we think so anyway: there should be some samples up soon at the MySpace page linked to above, so you can judge for yourself). You can’t really ask for more than that.

Our little power trio already has enough material for an album, just from these two afternoon sessions, which is astonishing in my experience given the melodic nature of the music. Next time we meet, we’ll just need to decide on titles, some fine editing and the sequence of the pieces—and probably just keep recording. I can’t wait. Expect at least some if not all of the tracks, or indeed the album itself, to be called Space Weather…

Here are my first efforts with this camera. The film is Ilford Delta 400 and these are scanned from prints, which were developed locally. They’re straight scans, without any processing or cleaning.

I’m not sure I like the tints which the developing process has added to some, although not all, of the five I’ve posted here. I’ll need to investigate developing at home!

There were quite a few of the photographs I wasn’t happy with; I certainly need more practice with the camera, but these five at least confirmed my FED-2 seems to work well enough and the FED 50 lens is clear. More soon.

I’ve always enjoyed what I consider—no doubt pretentiously—to be rather unusual musics. There, I’ve said it.

At school, I came across a group of strange individuals performing under the name Ring. There’s very little about them on the great interweb, perhaps reflecting how individual and obscure their music was at the time. They had an early demo tape (untitled) which was released in 1984 on the anarcho-punk label BBP Records and Tapes (a sticker on the cassette proudly proclaims their motto “DIY not EMI is our game”). Ring’s first “real” (ahem) album, again on tape, was O De Dun Dun, self-released in 1989. Both were wonderful. There is, apparently, a Levitation connection in their guitarist Bic (Christian Hayes) who went on to form that group with others. I’ve never heard them.

And then there was this tape—Nervous Recreation—their third and last outing, which was just extraordinary in so many ways I find hard to express now.

I dug it out tonight, from amidst a huge unlit pyre of magnetic media, just to see if it was as magical as I’d remembered, despite nearly two decades of unreliable nostalgic mist. Its cover is still as odd to me now as it was then. The music is complex, playful and accomplished, and as the site above notes, in thrall to the genius of Tim Smith and Cardiacs. That, in my book, is A Good Thing. It’s incredible to think, in fact, that this material was recorded on a four track cassette recorder.

And, remarkably, listening to it for the first time in probably 15 years or more took me back again to happy (if frustrating) times in 1989, sitting in the refectory at school, trying to explain the last track on the album, “Some Fish Have Teeth”, to anyone within earshot, even those who thought Iron Maiden were the pinnacle of invention in music and hairdressing.

But especially I tried to explain this music to Judith, to whom I was in thrall. I failed to explain it, probably, but at least I tried. Not that she ever knew I was in thrall. I think. It just seemed to me, at that point in time, that there was never more of a beautiful truism than “some fish have teeth” to the point where it became something of a mantra. That all seems a bit silly now.

And Judith, if by some quirk of fate you’re out there and reading this, do get in touch. I think I know what the song means now.

There’s a positive little review of The Petrified Forest in this week’s edition of Vital (issue 631), which had this to say:

Brian Lavelle recently surprised us [with] ‘Supernaturalist’, and the two pieces here were recorded just before that and show the best side of his: manipulating field recordings and very much altering them into microscopic detailed pieces of ambient drones. Slowly changing patterns of what seems to be rain fall, deep bass sounds in ‘The Wood Turned Dark And Silent’ and more synthetic in ‘This Twisting Glade’, which sounds like a church organ being dissected. Very nice. (FdW)

Thank you Frans!

I’ve just received a beautiful new (well, really quite old) FED-2 rangefinder camera made in the former Soviet Union some time in the 1950s. The FED-2 was the first and very successful attempt by Soviet camera makers to improve upon the original and vastly more expensive Leica II and IIIg designs.

The camera above is unusual because it’s finished in black enamel, so this is an opportunity to see how the FED-2 would have looked if that finish had ever been available on a camera out of the FED factory. It never was, and this finish is in fact the detailed modern enamelling work of a skilled restorer from Odessa in Ukraine.

The story of the FED factory is an interesting if unpalatable one. The factory (???) in Kharkov was an orphanage-turned-work-commune named for Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the original Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka (later the NKVD).

And the origin of the title of this post? It’s from an old Soviet song about war journalism:

With Leica and with notepad
And sometimes with machine gun
We passed through fire and frost.

Stephen Rothery has a controversial conspiracy theory that the early Leica I and II models were clones of the first FED rangefinder (the FED-1 or Fedka). He posits that the Leica in the song was simply a genericised trademark and that, for some time in the 1920s to the early 1940s, Leica in Russian was a synonym for a 35mm camera. I’m not sure about this, but it’s a good story…

Anyway, these are rugged, inexpensive machines that take great photographs, on good old fashioned film. I plan to use this pretty much exclusively for black and white photography; perhaps I’ll post some shots here after I’ve used it for a bit.

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[Edit: 23 June 2008: I worked out the camera is from 1955 and is the type 'a' version of the FED-2. I've added a wonderful little wrist strap from Gordy's Camera Straps. Elegant, simple and rugged. And very reasonably priced too! The camera, which is heavy enough, feels safe hanging on it. Highly recommended.]