My World Music Blog : July 2007

On Sunday M and I went and saw The Devil Goat Family String Band CD launch at the East Brunswick Club. We also took along my son who hates Banjo and hasn't really heard any Bluegrass music before, but he didn't seem to mind it too much in the end!

They were good fun and played an excellent selection of traditional Bluegrass pieces including some classic Bill Munroe.

The highlight of the gig (for me) was when they played a 7/8 Greek piece called Laziko. I absolutely loved it, but according to them, it "tends to alienate some of the hardcore bluegrass fans, but maybe that's not a bad thing a times".

Damned straight as far as I'm concerned :-)

Bizerka finally rehearsed as a full band tonight, having added percussion to the mix. All the pieces that were just plain fast are now insanely fast, but with a really good energy. And all the quiet bits where we kept slowing down are now a consistent tempo.

Our drummer is pretty competent in all hand percussion and picked up everything on just 1 or 2 runthroughs, including a crazy piece of mine which is a mixture of 7/8 and 6/8.

Now we just need to do another demo with him involved and get off our backsides to organise some gigs!!!

Recently a friend of mine introduced me to Unza Unza Time by Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra. Kusturica is best known for his music on Underground and Black Cat, White Cat.

They're one of the craziest, bizarre bands I've heard in a long, long time! Think drunk, punk Gypsy meets Tom Waits meets a bunch of Romanian villagers on speed.

I really recommend checking out Unza Unza Time if you like your music quirky and gypsy all rolled into one!

Bizerka recorded again on Sunday. It's just another loungeroom recording, but we hired a good quality, powered stereo mic which picked up the softer passages and gave a lot better sound overall.

We also went down to St Kilda Beach and took some photos of the band.

We had to get my son to take the group shots, but after some coaching he didn't do too badly (after we explained it was necessary to include our faces in the shots).

We're pretty pleased with the recording for what it is, and ended up recording the rest of the rehearsal - including a piece called Itele in which we sound like we've had waaaay to much to drink. It's deliberately played out of time and my son (who plays Cello and Piano) said "it should be easy to play out of time", but funnily enough, it's actually reall difficult to play out of time on purpose! People sliip time by accident, but to ignore everything everyone else is doing is really hard!

You can hear the new pieces below:

• Murguletul / Briul pe Sase
• Cadaneasca / Briul pe opt
• Hasapiksos Horos / Biserka

On a different note, we're all off to hear the Devil Goat Family String Band this Sunday. I haven't heard them before, but they sound like good fun so we're all looking forward to hearing them.

Well, we finally have a demo tape of sorts for Bizerka! The sound quality is pretty bad as it's a loungeroom recording with 1 mic suspended from a chandelier of all places! But we figured it might work like a boom mic!

It was also recorded onto my old 4-track tape recorder which was fun due to the tape running out during a really good take and then me forgetting to switch it back to record mode on another pretty good take!

But still, it's done and we can get an idea of what we sound like which is pretty important.

You can hear 2 extracts from last night below, but be warned that the sound quality is quite bad (and some of the notes we play aren't far behind).

• Murguletul / Briul pe opt

• Biserka

We're rehearsing again this Sunday and also considering either buying a good quality microphone to do regular loungeroom recordings or finding a cheap studio to go into and do some live takes once we're a bit tighter (after all, we've only had our Cellist and Violinist for 3 weeks).