Busy doing nothing, working the whole day through

Apr 2, 2011 | Uncategorized

keeping busy

Since my last post, which drew but a single comment, I have been busy doing lots of things, some of which would count as work in some circumstances but didn’t feel like work.

Some was in the form of sorting out some shelves for the many books in the attic, mostly put together from some chipboard I’ve had lurking around the house for a while.  It is hardly cabinet making but it does the job and was fun.

I met up with a chum of the Big Canadian, a professor who is over here on sabbatical.  It had the potential to be an awkward search for light conversation but actually we got on famously and supped some pints of the excellent An Teallach Brewery‘s Crofter’s Pale Ale in the process.  Topics covered witchcraft in Scotland, guitars, the roots of Scots Law, the state of academia and other things besides.  This led me to dig out some notes from research that I did nearly twenty years ago for an article which never got written.  Looking over that research again didn’t feel like work either.

Peter Hammill

I got to looking at the manuscript draft of a book I started writing on eProcurement and that certainly didn’t feel like work.

I went to see Van der Graaf Generator in Glasgow last Friday and thoroughly enjoyed it although it wasn’t quite so viscerally thrilling as the gig in 2005 on their reunion tour.  Then they were thoroughly on fire towards the end of a tour whereas this time they were still warming up at the beginning of the tour.   Bloody good though!

They were touring a new album, A Grounding in Numbers, and the new material is not yet ingrained in my head with the familiarity of the old – although the old was well represented by Lemmings, Meurglys III and Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End with a blast of Nutter Alert for an encore.

Van der Graaf are not to everyone’s taste and never have been.   When their contemporaries were getting lost in Topographic Oceans, VdGG were exploring isolation and despair and making a heck of a racket at the same time. They were a progressive band but not a Prog Rock band in the sense now used.  And they are still out there touring new material which is edgy, experimental and uncompromising in their sixties – and long may it continue.

Still standing on the highest hilltop

And finally, some new cds have appeared in the house.  I’m not going to attempt a review of them, at least for now, but I thought I’d mention them.  It is fair to say that none of them will trouble the commercial end of popular culture but I like them all.  They are:

• A Grounding in Numbers: Van der Graaf Generator (2011)
• Last: The Unthanks (2011) (bleak, melancholy and gorgeous)
• Grain De Sable: Tryo (2009)
• Greggery Peccary and Other Persuasions: Ensemble Modern (2004)

The last of these is something of a successor to the Yellow Shark material which the Ensemble Modern did with Frank Zappa and includes material from his last, synclavier dominated material, which has been transcribed or otherwise orchestrated by the Ensemble.  I’ve only listened to it once so far but it is obvious that it is every bit as good as the Yellow Shark (if you like that sort of thing).