snapshot of score of Music from the Heart of a Dog

Music from the Heart of a Dog for bass clarinet and pre-recorded sound

Good afternoon! Welcome to my web site, where you can find out about my music, and listen to some of it, as well as my various other ventures over the years.

29 March 2020

...and here we are in the middle of the coronavirus crisis, so I hope you're washing your hands and staying well as you read this (well, not washing your hands as you read, but you know what I mean).

With a view to to a revival of my old Life and Times with a new Perfect Stranger band, I have now made a MIDI recording of all four movements, along with a new score. Please continue to watch this space...

Quite separately, I’ve added a couple of little solo guitar pieces to the site. One is a rediscovered ditty called Face. The other, perhaps my oddest piece, is Lullaby.

PsychoYogi News

(For newcomers to this site, along with the activities described here, I also play fretless bass guitar in PsychoYogi — see my Biography.)

Gigs since we played at dear old Biddle Bros. in February have, unsurprisingly, been cancelled. One was at the Birds Nest, and we were invited back to the Hermon Chapel Arts Centre in Oswestry, which we’re particularly disappointed to miss. We only hope these places will still be in operation after this wretched disease has finally gone away, and that as a bonus they’ll invite us back to play there.

My own Kapadokya, which was developed from one of the tunes I originally wrote for The Europeans back in 1995, has developed somewhat and is now a semi-established part of our repertoire. This is, as far as I know, the first non-Ramsing composition PsychoYogi has ever played!

The ‘live’ videos of four of our songs have been well received and appreciated. These were not in front of an audience, hence my scare-quotes, but we did play and record in real time — it was all done in our (former?) drummer Jonas Golland’s bedroom! It was good fun, if a little tricky to negotiate the stands for three mics, three cameras and three lights in a very confined space — but we managed. They’re all on YouTube: Therapy Session, The Magic Tellingbone, Happy Family and Evening Call.

I put ‘(former?)’ before Jonas’s name above because he has followed other directions. Instead we have the excellent Ravi Low-Beer behind the kit, so all is well drummer-wise!... except that since I wrote that sentence Ravi is now also snowed under with other commitments, so we’re working with the excellent Arnold Lane on the traps. But neither Ravi nor Jonas is ruled out for future collaboration.

The album Shrine is still available to download and listen to on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon (among others?).

Older News

Apart from all that, naturally, this web site: explore my works, read my biography, keep track of your harp pedal settings, and see what’s on the various other pages. You can also get in touch with me via the Contact form. And for those with a taste for historical technical curiosities, there’s even a page about my NotaFile document — and the document itself.

As well as listening to my MIDI recordings on this site, you can visit my channels on YouTube and SoundCloud to hear the same MIDI realizations of a number of my works, and see the same YouTube videos as you can see here, to get a glimpse of the scores (in most cases). These pieces are available:

Also on the Listen page is my standard disclaimer about MIDI recordings, and a note about browser compatibility with the players for YouTube, SoundCloud and plain MP3s embedded in these pages.

 
And in case anyone’s wondering, what I’m actually looking at in that photo is not the score of Music from the Heart of a Dog, but a large owl perched on my wrist.