Tom Service presents the best in new music performance, including a BBC commission from composer Lisa Illean performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, two pieces from a recent concert by the Ligeti Quartet and Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre, and more from Another Sky, a festival showcasing experimental music from Southwest Asia and North Africa, curated by Sam Salem and staged at London’s Cafe Oto. Plus we hear the inspirations of bassist and composer Ruth Goller, whose new album Skyllumina was released last month.
Blew off the weekend to do physical labour and woolgather. Today, all kinds of different parts of me hurt, and I have to shift gears into work mode. No more randomly streaming old tv shows while I noodle at structures and scene ideas. Eight typed finished pages every day this week or else. Probably eight typed finished pages every day this month. And then sowing seeds for an hour after work every evening.
And, while I was typing that, I was informed that we need to buy a new car. AND the coffee machine is starting to produce short shots, so I need to clean that. It’s going to be a day. Here we go.
Because of its size and location, the henge would have been a prominent place in the region and provided a major site for ceremonial activity. At this time, Crowland would have been a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water and marshes, and the henge was situated on a distinctive and highly visible point projecting out into the Fens.
The henge seems then to have been deserted, perhaps for many centuries, but the significance already given to the site by the substantial prehistoric earthworks—which would have still been visible into the medieval period—meant it was probably seen by hermits like Guthlac as a unique landscape with a long and sacred past.
Scribbled numbers, wiped-away letters, word-like scrawls: all of these recur in Kikuo Saito’s paintings of the early 1990s, a selection of which form a wonderfully mystifying solo show on view now at James Fuentes gallery in New York.
First thing today, I was up and out and running the garden shredder for an hour.
These pots are deep, I’ve run out of homemade compost and bags of shop-bought are getting pricey again. So I drop some old pots on the bottom for drainage and taking up some volume, and then half-fill with wood chips. I’m also out of Perlite, so I scatter a couple handfuls of grit in there.
Golden Harvest mange tout, germinated and raised in one of the mini-greenhouses, in these very handy re-useable plug pots.
I like the old fashioned tools. Probably down to having watched Jack Hargreaves’ OUT OF TOWN every weekend as a kid. Handling them is part of the meditative pleasure of garden work for me.
All in, bamboo wigwam inserted, some extra rows of twine for support, netting tied in over the top for plant support and hopefully deterring the squirrels.
We will see if they all immediately die. But I got plenty of air and sun (and three thousand steps) doing all that, and that’s really the goal. Peaceful couple of hours.
This year has been nothing but high gales and heavy rain.
And millions of seeds blown in by the storms and then watered in by the bloody rain.
A lot of these weeds are garlic mustard, which is a quaint old name for what is basically THE CYANIDE PLANT OV DEATH.
Anyway.
This broken old mini greenhouse has been righted, put and tied down, with string trellis supports suspended inside.
Redcurrant and cherry put in the ground.
Golden berry and cape gooseberry that I overwintered undercover have been planted out, and tomatoes started indoors have been potted up – one is a variety called Blue Pear that I’m interested to see what happens with.
Cleaned and top dressed the blueberries , did the same with some of the raspberries, emptied a compost bin, dug out a ton of weeds (three tons still to do), started refilling the empty compost bin. Got about half of what I wanted to get done, done, but half is better than none.
Taking a moment to look back on my mark-making here recently and pick out the pieces I thought worked better than others, mostly for my own consideration going forward.
Spring rains this morning. Not ideal – I’m still dealing with a little back pain, but I was hoping to get out there today, plant a couple of trees and do some weeding. I have some eyestrain this morning, so getting away from screens for a while seemed like a good idea. But! I haven’t done enough scripting this week, so I need to push it some more.
There are plenty of worse things in the world than a bleary eye and a twinge of lower back ache. I turned a king-size mattress on my own yesterday, and I can still pull a twelve-foot tree out by its roots. Wrote something in the region of 70 pages of script last month, not counting other documents. I have a lot still to do, and that’s good.
Just discovered this via Night Tracks. It’s a good and lively start to the day.
