December 12th, 2006

Back in a dour, rain splattered, Blighty and I'm going through one of my regular phases of constantly questioning why it is I do what I do.

Preferring reading, watching films and eating copious amounts of Polish chocolates to the idea of making music, I'm currently in a determined, idealistic, phase which means that I can only commit to what I wholly believe in (with growing extremely fat on East European sweet treats being one of those things!).

For me, it's as important to know what you don't want to do as it is to be aware of what you feel is important to get involved with.

Despite finding the creative processes involved enjoyable, I've become increasingly bored with making improvised or Ambient/loop music. Although my approach of using vocal loops provides an emotional and dynamic edge to a notoriously static genre, the fact that it's so easy to generate a lot of 'interesting' music in this vein, makes me doubt its lasting value. I'm happy to participate and for it to exist in the moment, but less convinced that it's something that should be inflicted on an audience. Consequently, my numerous cdrs of collective improvisation and solo looping are likely to remain unheard (languishing in 'the cupboard of doom'!)

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The collaborative work with Giancarlo Erra/Nosound continued with another new song, 'Warm Winter', being written during Giancarlo's recent trip to the UK.

Richly melodic, epic and communicative, the song is an ideal continuation of the material we wrote together in New York in August and Rome in the Spring.

Our Lady of The Cello, Marianne De Chastelaine will hopefully be adding some sumptuous strings to the song in the coming weeks.

What pleases me most about the songs we've written together is that we've managed to combine strong and accessible melodies along with an interesting approach to texture without compromise or contrivance.

Once outside of my Polish chocolate phase, other collaborations, with US band Mohawk Hithchiker, Italians Stefano Panunzi and Moongarden, and French project Rajna, are looking likely over the next couple of months.

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This was the era in which I originally got involved in making music and its exciting confluence of artistic integrity, technological experiments and pop sensibilities thrilled me then and, in some ways, still inspires me now.

Glossy productions, excess and shallowness were apparent in abundance, but equally, so was work of genuine quality and vision.

Since then, there have been exciting revolutions in technology and many influential and emotional artists have emerged, but as 1980s culture is all too readily dismissed as a time of style over content, it's a decade that I feel is often unfairly overlooked.

September 11th, 2006

Crack open the egg creme and dish out the Hershey Kisses!

Against all odds, I've managed to survive the inhuman intensity of a Summer in New York with some semblance of my pasty-faced Brit heritage intact.

An achievement so rare, a letter of commendation from Mayor Bloomberg is believed forthcoming.

Clearly, you can take the man out of the North, but you can never take the North out of the man.

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Nosound's Giancarlo Erra travelled to America and my first recordings in New York proved inspired and enjoyable.

The two new songs we wrote also provided an ideal opportunity to reunite with former Samuel Smiles cellist, Marianne DeChastelaine (officially the finest name in the history of pop and one potentially posh enough to be worthy of a marriage to the Caviar King Of The Keyboard, Lord Chilvers).

The rough mixes of the recordings sound very promising, with Beautiful Songs You Should Know being one of the most tender and melodic songs I've been involved in writing outside of my work with no-man. Ms De Chastellaine's wonderful cello playing is an essential part of its appeal for me and suggests that she should play a prominent role in future songs and recordings with Giancarlo.

The far bleaker At The Centre Of It All (coming on like a Samuel Beckett suicide note recited over a Prozac-starved Gorecki backing track!) is less loveable, but has a certain compelling intensity.

Again, the piece features a strong cello contribution that lifts the mood in just the right places.

With 30 minutes of diverse co-compositions, the Bowness/Nosound project gathers pace and is scheduled to continue in England in October.

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Elsewhere, I've recently recorded a session in the well-known Sear Sound Studio for New York Post-Rock duo, Mohawk Hitchhiker.

An excellent fusion of a lot of things I like (from Steve Reich to Jim O'Rourke and ECM Jazz to bliss-out guitar noise), all went well.

Ultimately though, it's difficult to know how much of what I did will be deemed suitable for use in the otherwise wholly instrumental context of the band's work.

Sear Sound is known for its collection of top quality vintage microphones and after hours of trial and error, I eventually found myself singing through something that resembled a U-Boat periscope with a bad case of piles.

Surprising look. Luckily, surprisingly good sound.

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With interesting new collaborations, a compilation of my favourite unreleased work (the appropriately named, Hidden Histories) and at least four almost completed albums in the offing, the future is beginning to look as cluttered as the ever-busy Pete Namlook's and Bill Nelson's release schedules combined.

A good thing, I hope.

August 8th, 2006

It's 115 degrees in the shade and my once (very) cool English exterior is dissolving in the afternoon Coney Island heat. Sadly, the fact that I'm paler than the new improved Dulux 'Brilliant White' has failed to reflect the devil sun and send it back to the dimension of Hell it came from.

After seeing Countess Marlboro fill her mouth with fire and Lady Daggers eat a sword for lunch, I'm now passing the Shoot The Freak sideshow, in which, as the name suggests, we're invited to take a shot at what looks like a very ordinary New Yorker.

Stratton Strawless, I forgive you.

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After months of remarkable Fridays and wholly unexpected moves, the time seemed right to add some more execrable nonsense to this deservedly neglected page.

So, where to begin (or not)?

The 'Mine A Million' Saturdays and 'Song Of The Surf' Sundays with Mayor Megabonce of Cromer (henceforth known as The Curator)?

The late night in late March wandering around The Mighty Boosh after show party with Baron Bennett, and the cream of contemporary Brit Com talent?

The genuinely moving experience of performing no-man songs for the first time in Italy?

Seemingly floating on air during a beautiful Lower East Side late Spring evening?

Finally reuniting on stage with Mr Wilson after a 12 year gap and managing to avoid disaster?

Indefinitely leaving the safety, friends and creative community of Norfolk for the meaner than mean streets of Cockroach Central, New York City?

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The Italian dates with Nosound proved a rewarding and enjoyable experience, with the first live performances of Things Change (a full thirteen years after it was written) being my personal highlight.

The Rome headline went better than expected, with a full house of enthusiastic fans in attendance and a strong performance from the band. A couple of days later, the Tony Levin support, in a beautiful converted church in Umbria, was more muted and stately. Barring the incredible psychopathic rudeness of Tony's Italian promoter, it was also equally enjoyable. The friendly and superbly named Larry Fast provided some insights into his time with Peter Gabriel, and Jerry Marrotta understandably fell madly in love with Nosound's drummer extraordinaire, Gigi.

An atmospheric new track completed together in the studio in Rome means that my collaboration with Nosound on their new album is likely to be more than just a minor one.

Genuinely decent and talented people, they made my time in Italy a pleasure.

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It's five minutes to doors opening and the broken-footed SW asks the broken-ribbed T-Bo if they should play a no-man song. A broken non-version of Day's In The Trees leaves them feeling a little despondent.

Moments later, I suggested that Steven join the T-Bo Band on a couple of no-man songs that, in true Blue Peter style, we'd prepared earlier.

10 seconds of establishing that it could work and Andy Butler was on stage kicking off the latest Burning Shed extravaganza in fine style (a week earlier, Andy, The Curator and myself performed a potent improvised support set for the Durutti Column).

Leading into intimate Bowness/Chilvers piano/voice renditions of California, Norfolk material, the next 45 minutes included everything from a full T-Bo Band set to the debut Nosound UK performance. The versions of Days Turn Into Years (with an excellent extended fade out) and Make Me Forget were as good as any we'd done, and over a year and a half after our last date, it was good to see that the band had lost none of the spirit it previously had.

After the break, Fear Falls Burning and SW created a mighty vintage guitar drone, which eventually segued into a strong solo SW set (which pitched the man Wilson as a more melodic, sophisticated Rock, equivalent to the early 'one man and his guitar' Billy Bragg).

And then, the impromptu no-man reunion for real. Wonderful, slightly tentative, versions of Watching Over Me and Together We're Stranger followed. The Bearpark/Wilson interplay on WOM worked well and the vocal loop fade on TWS sparked some powerful collective improv.

The response was warm and enthusiastic and the experience emotional.

With nothing prepared, we returned for an encore of Things I Want To Tell You (decided on as we walked back onto the stage). Despite no rehearsal, this went unusually well and was perhaps the highlight of the evening.

The fact is that it 'felt' like no-man. To me, there was a quality of emotional commitment that transcended both of the preceding SW and T-Bo sets. For my part, I performed with a greater level of self-confidence and a lesser sense of self-consciousness than before.

As much as I enjoyed my previous set, the no-man section was about complete immersion in the music and the moment, with everyone contributing inspired performances.

The after show reactions were superb and there's a sense that a no-man tour (the first since 1993) is now a realistic possibility.

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July and August found me avoiding sunlight and chasing shadows in Gotham.

Where for art thou, East Runton?

March 17th, 2006

Laid low with a persistent cold and a badly broken rib, I've finally decided to add to the ongoing chronicles of despair and rampant debauchery that are 'the Bowness diaries'.

So here goes:

The year has definitely been a productive and pro-active one so far.

A lot of writing of new songs has taken place and quite a few potentially exciting live dates, collaborations and unexpected reissues look likely.

Of the new material, the project with Alistair Murphy has developed into something very strange and occasionally very lovely. Imagine Scott Walker sings Ligeti, Fripp & Eno go Folk Pop Flamenco, or maybe just t-bo loses the plot in rural Norfolk with a gargantuan headed Southerner (known to both friends and family as Megabonce). It's been a wilfully experimental, creatively open and extremely enjoyable project, now nearly completed, but I've still no idea how it will be received, or what exactly it is. Good things, in many ways.

Another song has been written with Giancarlo Erra/Nosound and a gig in Rome has been arranged for the 29th April.

The new song, Change Me Once Again, is as epic and emotional as the last (Someone Starts To Fade Away), and perhaps represents a more romantic and richly melodic variation on aspects of the last two no-man albums and Nosound's own Sol29. While the Murphy project leaves me questioning the potential response as well as my sanity, the Nosound collaboration has been a natural and sympathetic union that I believe has produced something that will communicate strongly to the majority of no-man and Nosound fans.

In other news, it's looking likely that some work on the new no-man album will take place sometime in the Summer, and collaborations with Stefano Panunzi and Hector Zazou are also on the agenda.

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The Tonefloat vinyl version of Speak has finally arrived and it's every bit as impressive as their vinyl edition of Together We're Stranger. After the problems no-man have been having with other labels releasing badly packaged editions of our work, it's been good to be associated with a company who have such high standards and are easy and straightforward to deal with (ditto Snapper).

Centrozoon are currently preparing an album of remixes, alternative versions and outtakes for Tonefloat, to be called Never Trust The Things They Do.

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Elsewhere, in my Burning Shed guise, I've recently been in contact with two very different, but equally talented Kevins, Kevin Moore (OSI/Chroma Key) and singer-songwriter Kevin Hewick (whose Such Hunger For Love album provided an ideal soundtrack to my teenage angst). Both of them seem on top of their game at the moment, and it's been good to be in contact with musicians who still clearly love listening to and making music.

With any luck, we'll be seeing both their names on the Shed site soon and by that time, I'm hoping that my rogue rib will have stopped wobbling like a Weeble inside my body.

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