Last night I succumbed to laziness after I’d done a few things on my endless to-do and watched a couple of comedy programmes – a woman’s show on BBC1 whose name escapes me but which I really enjoyed, and a thing called Absolute Power with Stephen Fry which was also great.
Tonight I realised I have to practise hard for my WaveForms gig at St John’s Church on Monday. After a frustrating time when it was getting less and less like music and more and more like aimless noodling over random noises, I realised the reason I wasn’t getting much response from my delay pedal was that the power cable had fallen out and it was operating on batteries. When I plugged it in, by a pure fluke combination of the delay setting, the guitar effects setting and the guitar synth voice I was using, I found something that so closely resembled the original two-Revox Frippertronics from 1978/9 that I was almost in tears. That’s how long I’ve been wanting to play this kind of music. Single notes that combine into gently fading waves that echo into the distance. Such beauty. Can I ever find it again? I’ve written down the settings but that doesn’t always guarantee success. If I can recreate it tomorrow I’ll know that I can use it for a little part of Monday’s candlelight performance.
‘Absolute Power’ is excellent – at least the first series was. One of the few occasions when S Fry doesn’t irritate me beyond belief. He’s actually very good in this.