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Friday Morning Everywhere

by Phil Hargreaves & Glenn Weyant

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1.
Do Not Sing 05:22
Do not sing Do not sing to me Yes, my window is open But it is to admit the cool night air Not your lying songs of love. Your voice is firm and not unattractive Your horse is strong between your legs But my father sleeps with a gun at his side. Would you sing in daylight, without your dishonest friend, the moon? Would you face my father's gun, should he awake? I thought not. So, if I listen at my window, It is for the gentle breeze, and for the song alone.
2.
A Door is Open A door is open A door that should have been closed Yesterday, in daylight, you were safe Today there is an open door. To the superficial eye, nothing has changed Objects hold their positions And the door - the door can be closed again. But in reality, the night has flowed in and around them And nothing can ever be quite the same again.
3.
4.
Dudu 05:25
5.
Sorry 03:57
I am sitting on the bus and listening to her apologise. I do not know who she is, but she is sorry. Sorry, she says. Sorry. Sorry.
6.
And is that all you can do? Sing? The world has more pressing needs, And more than enough songs already. Do your songs feed the hungry? Is injustice corrected thereby? In an economy of dreams, you mistake songs for a viable currency. If we could eat songs, you would be forgiven. As it is, you might just as well leave the air undisturbed. ---------------------- Sometimes, yes, all I can do is sing. Only the dead leave the air undisturbed. A world without songs would collapse, rotten, into itself. In the face of corruption, of crime described as virtue As the loathsome ascend the throne At least I have my song To proclaim that hope survives.
7.
8.
He Did 04:09
9.
10.
Summer Again 04:27
Are you sad? Sad at the ending of Summer? If you are still, if you sit here long enough, It will be Summer again. Grass will cover your feet Bindweed will enfold your body You can watch the snow melt and the bulbs flower. And yes, at last, the sun will shine. On brown, bare legs as they enjoy Summer For the first time. Fresh-minted for them.
11.
OILAL 04:22
12.
- When did the War start? Do you need to ask? You have always know us? That should tell you what you need to know. -What is the currency of War? We will use whatever is there. It was inevitable that one day we would use geometry. - Are there casualties? Of course there are casualties. The War will discard those it cannot use. -What of Peace? The enemy is implacable and ubiquitous. Understand this earlier, and your life will improve. - Who are the enemy? This you do not need to know. Merely ensure that you do not become one of them. - What can I do? You can no longer go to war. If the War does not need you, be grateful that it is there. When the War has need of you, you will be told.
13.
I Will Move 02:25
We are lying in a graveyard Caressed by the sun, the quick among the dead. The whole world becomes still And turns until we are at its centre. Soon I will move, and spoil the moment.

about

Phil Hargreaves, Glenn Weyant — “Friday Morning Everywhere” — Here’s one you can even download for free. I’ll admit, I didn’t really take into account netlabel releases in this list– if they’re free, you should just be checking them all out, right? Lucky for you, “Friday Morning Everywhere” squeaked in when Phil Hargreaves mailed me a copy. I guess he knew my printer was out of ink, cause I got the full pdf-cover workup and everything. Both Hargreaves and Weyant have joined my short list of incredible musicians this year (Hargreaves work with Caroline Kraabel on “Where We Were,” and Weyant’s “Sonic Anta” series are essential listening) so having them both on one disc is fantastic. While you’re ordering the other 13 releases here, why don’t you put on your new download of this?

Startling Moniker-----------------------------------------------------------------------

PHIL HARGREAVES/GLENN WEYANT – FRIDAY MORNING EVERYWHERE



Label: Whi-Music

Release Date: 2007

Tracklist: Do not Sing; A Door is Open; Force of Circumstance; Dudu; Sorry; To the Singer; The Lost City; He Did; Neighbourhood; Summer Again; Oilal; Questions for the War; I Will Move

Personnel: Phil Hargreaves: voice, flute, cello, programming, found sounds; Glenn Weyant: Kestrel 920, prepared guitar, piano, found sounds.
Additional Information: Available as a free digital download (MP3 or FLAC format) from the website of Phil Hargreaves’ Whi-Music label (www.whi-music.co.uk/fme/index.html), or as a CD by request (fme@whi-music.co.uk).



Phil Hargreaves is a saxophonist/flautist/vocalist/cellist/composer, active on Liverpool’s improvised music scene, who has played with the Frakture Big Band and Simon H. Fell, and has made a fascinating CD with saxophonist Caroline Kraabel (‘Where we Were: Shadows of Liverpool’, on Leo Records), where improvisations recorded over a couple of years in various resonant acoustic locations around the city (town and concert halls, domes, churches, libraries, pubs, and even under bridges and in road tunnels) are edited into a single soundscape, in which the environment seems to play just as much of a role in dictating the nature of the music as the proclivities of the two musicians.

‘Friday Morning Everywhere’ is a similar project, at least conceptually (it actually sounds quite different). Hargreaves and Glenn Weyant (a sound-sculptor based in Tuscon, Arizona) have been in online contact for a number of years through the freejazz.org discussion forum, and decided to collaborate, even though they have never actually met each other in person. Instead, they sent each other recordings, which were then edited, looped and layered. This might suggest the Cage-ian randomness of ‘sight’, an album by Keith Rowe’s MIMEO (Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra), in which eleven musicians, spread across Europe, placed 5 minutes of sound anywhere those chose onto a blank CD-R; the 11 discs were then superimposed onto a single disc, which was released without any of them having heard the others’ music. However, Hargreaves and Weyant opt for a more controlled approach.

Probably the best person to explain more is Hargreaves himself, in a short explanation he has provided on the whi-music website: “the MO for this was that we each sent the other some solo/seed recordings including environmental recordings of our two locations. We then played along with them, manipulated them and generally do the things that people of our ilk are prone to do, and then posted them around and back till we felt we’d finished. In this event, I got to do the finishing off; the voices went on near the end of each track, and it was my decision to go for shorter pieces…Even though it was recorded, we’re improvisers, and as such I (and I think we, as well) tried to keep to the spirit of improvisation, by respecting earlier decisions, and not over-interfering with the flow, letting the sound dictate the direction. Hopefully, as a result, it’s a record of the time it was created in, and the people who lived in those times.”

Though the pieces are short, and a great deal of work has obviously gone into putting them together, that spontaneous feeling is there, something found in the best free improv: a mixture of craft and abandon, exploration and consolidation, innovation and tradition. That said, there aren’t really any obvious frames of reference – this is pretty much unique, and quite hard to describe. Hargreaves puts in much plucking and scraping on the cello, and adds the occasional flute, while Weyant uses prepared guitar and piano, but most noticeable in the texture is the Kestrel 920, a self-designed sound-sculpture/instrument which he built from junk in his garage when his free jazz saxophone playing was disrupted by the arrival of a baby daughter. It has an extremely complicated working mechanism, which I won’t go into now – suffice to say that it is primarily a percussion instrument, operated through strikes, strokes, and blows.

It imparts quite a spacey feel, considerably bulking out the sound, and giving it almost orchestral proportions. Indeed, one thing this album has in abundance is atmosphere: layers are built up in complex, intertwining ways – the two-year period taken to make this is understandable on that basis. These pieces, though they have the feel and elements of improvised music (and Hargreaves has said he wanted to preserve this feel), are carefully crafted in ways that would not be possible in a live real-time performing environment, with just two people, and that says something about the wonders of modern technology.

Nevertheless, there are problems, apparent most obviously in the first track, ‘Do Not Sing’, which seems unsure as to exactly what it wants to be: with its moody, repeated pattern (which, on the surface, seems simple, but, if you listen closely, is actually built up of several subtly intertwining layers, probably deriving from the Kestrel 920), it sets itself up as a sophisticated pop song, and the fact that this is overlaid with vocals would seem to confirm that impression. However, these vocals are delivered in what one must presume is a deliberately bizarre way – for ‘naive’, or ironic effect? They don’t really follow any melodic line, and they’re not quite speech, not quite song (but not Schoenbergian sprechstime either). They would seem to indicate a deliberate ‘weirdness’, a deliberate ‘experimentalism’, yet this doesn’t really fit with the ‘backing track.’ Perhaps the aim is to combine a more primitive, folky ethos with modernity; whatever the case, in the end, the piece is caught between two poles, and falls short of what it could have been.

The most obvious function of the vocals is to give the tracks some focus, to reconcile them with traditional ‘song’ form, and to provide some sort of thematic and lyrical thread (although the subject matter of the poems that Hargreaves sings are pretty disparate, from love to war to singing itself). However, I’m not sure that this really works – he admits that they were added late on, and it might have been wiser to let the textures unfold more gradually, to reveal their details over a longer period.

Consequently, the most successful tracks are generally the instrumental ones, such as the mysterious ‘Lost City.’ I realize that I shouldn’t judge the vocals in terms of conventional standards (if we did this, Captain Beefheart would be dismissed out-of-hand), but I do still yearn for something slightly more melodic (though the style is admittedly effective, as Hargreaves’ voice takes on particularly biting, gruff and harsh overtones when he assumes the persona of an unnamed warmonger on ‘Questions for the War’). Still, even if the album is not entirely a success, it does conclude with an attractive piece, a quiet reverie that suggests resolution, as Weyant’s Debussyian piano accompanies Hargreaves’ poem about a peaceful moment lying in, of all places, a graveyard. There is definitely potential here for future collaborations, and I look forward with interest to what these men will do next.

David Grundy, Eartrip---------------------------------------------------------------

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released January 4, 2007

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