The Mercury Rev gig was GREAT.  The night was an unadulterated JOY.  The atmosphere backstage was generous, super friendly, focussed.  Ben Frost had six bass stacks behind him on full pelt, two drummers either side including the great Shahzad Ismaily, shaking Koko with volume so hard that you knew where the nearest steel girder was wherever you were in the building.  Then we came on and did our improvised thing - a live soundtrack to The Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse:

... as filmed by someone in the audience with forearms of steel.... (that's Grasshopper we see doing his thing - I'm way off on the left with theremin, zither, electronics and pedals)  And then SWANS came on... and just took off.  The music was mesmeric.  Yes, it was unbelievably loud, but it was exquisitely loud, like a vast wave lifting you up and surging through you without breaking.  It actually took my breath away. Unforgettable, beautiful.

Thank you, Grasshopper and Jonathan for asking me along... a special night. X

Next Thursday 4th April 2013, I'm joining up with Mercury Rev's Cinematic Silent Sound Tettix Wave Ensemble for a gig at Koko in Camden, North London.  We're being joined by drummer / percussionist Martin Smith of Tuung, so the full name of the band is Mercury Rev's Cinematic Silent Sound Tettix Wave Ensemble Featuring Nick Franglen and Martin Smth, or MRCSSTWEFNFAMS for short. 

This festival evening - Mouth to Mouth - is being curated by Michael Gira of Swans:  Ben Frost, Xiu Xiu and Grouper in support, then us, and Swans headline the show.  It's a great lineup.  If you've not seen Swans before, they'll blow your fucking socks off, incredible - see below.  Here's an excellent interview with Swans drummer Thor on The Quietus site.  We of MRCSSTWEFNFAMS will be creating a live soundtrack to a film, and it's going to be special and unrepeatable.  Click here for more details and tickets.

Also it's the first time I'll have played at Koko, which is a big deal for me. It was my haunt for my teenage years when it was the Music Machine -  saw The Clash, Siouxsie etc there, and was there on the opening night after Steve Strange and Rusty Egan had dolled it up and reopened it as the what-the-fuck-have-they-done-to-it Camden Palace. They kept the old bouncers though, just so the transition wasn't too abrupt.  Maybe they're still there, with their single leather gloves and cheery disposition.

...there's only one great Cowell in music.  Henry Cowell - The Banshee for solo piano, 1925.

I'm prepping for the Nico show on the 16th, getting sounds together and stuff.  And girding my loins for the nightmare polka we always dance at the airport to get my gear through.  Some people can travel light.  Not me.

Love this song.  Shibuya, 1986.

Here's a new track I made last night by mistake - bit early to be getting in the mood but...

I've written a piece for ClashMusic about Mark Fry and the show we're doing next Thursday 19th at Village Underground in London.  This week we've been rehearsing together as a band for the first time and it's been fantastic.

Slightly Amazing Moment Number One:  Once we'd played through Mandolin Man for the first time in the rehearsal room, Mark said that was the very first time the song had been played since he recorded it in 1971.  Woah.

Slightly Less Amazing Moment Number Two:  Billy Bragg lost his jacket in the cafe next to the rehearsal rooms.  I hope he found it again.  Everyone seemed pretty confident it would turn out right in the end.  Phew.

This is going to be an exciting show, and I'm really looking forward to it.  Any trepidation I felt about what it would actually sound like went in the first ten minutes in the rehearsal room - we make a cracking band.  Grasshopper out of Mercury Rev doesn't fly in until early next week, but even without him the rest of us - Mark and me out of Lemon Jelly, Guto out of Super Furry Animals, Martin out of Tunng and Nick out of The A.Lords made such a glorious noise.  It's going to be out of this world.  Like I say at the end of the ClashMusic piece, Bring It On....

Come along and say both Hi and Wow - probably not at the same time, that doesn't really work.  I've just seen some special offer tickets here - not sure how long they'll be up there for.  See you in a gently spaced out Shoreditch.

Hive has taken place, and I enjoyed it.  A profound experience.

While nothing will be quite like listening to the piece live in the Dome itself, you can still hear the whole of the piece as streamed at Mixlr by clicking here.

Well, almost all of it - the generator ran out of juice 15 minutes before 11am on Sunday, and refilling it and then resetting the computer and interface took quite a while, so I missed the one minute silence on Remembrance Sunday.  It was quite fitting in a way for the broadcast to be silent just then.  Strange how these things work.  

Click here to hear from 11am to 2pm - this recording starts with the bugler at the Cenotaph.  The Mixlr recordings are scrollable, so you can be impatient and go straight to the top of the hours to see how the multiplied news sounds, and check how different it feels at different times of day and night.  Some hours felt very impatient to me, others like the radios just weren't bothering.  Always shifting though.  Some of the audio overlaps were astonishing.

I had a backup recorder running, so hopefully I'll be able to post up the actual 11am silence moment at some point.  Of course not all the radios were silent, but the mood changed instantly.  I have recorded all of the 24 hours of Hive at higher resolution for use in a further representations of the piece.

I was very pleased with the response to the installation.  Thanks to everyone who came by in person, particularly those that made the long trip to the North Norfolk coast, and to everyone who listened live and communicated with me while it happened.  Thanks to Sound and Music for their support with Hive, and to Henry Labouchere for giving me my personal flypast in his 1930 biplane, such a thrill I almost dropped my iPhone.  Thanks once again to Bevis Bowden for another 24 hours.  And most of all many thanks to Patrick Allen, the Friends of Langham Dome and the North Norfolk Historic Buildings Trust for making me so welcome and permitting me to install Hive in their remarkable building.

Click here to go to the live audio stream of Hive - this will run until 2pm on Sunday 13th November.  Occasional video too.  It's working, which is a relief.  The audio stream sounds quite mad, but in a good way - in the Dome it's much more comprehensible.

Click here to go to the page which explains more fully what I'm doing this coming weekend at Langham Dome.  And what Langham Dome actually is.

Hive is my latest sound project, taking place in Norfolk on the weekend of 12th / 13th November 2011.  I am very pleased to be working with Sound And Music to present this installation, and rather than trying to think of a slightly different way of saying exactly the same thing, here is the blurb from the Sound And Music website:

"Following his 24-hour Theremin marathon on The Manhattan Bridge this summer, Nick Franglen’s latest sound installation will see the experimental musician holed up for 24 hours in a remote WW2 concrete gunnery dome in the company of fifty radios, each tuned to a different station.

Franglen is inspired by the urban landscape and other found spaces, from London and Manhattan Bridges to a submarine, a mine and jet engine test bed. His work contextualises its environment, providing an often spontaneous, improvised reaction to time and place. Sound and Music is delighted to support this latest work at Langham Dome. On Armistice weekend he uses this WWII anti-aircraft training dome as a unique place for his installation and testing site for his concept: ‘Hive’."

Hive is an open event in an unusual location, so the curious are more than welcome to attend to experience this piece for themselves.  Click here for location and times.  I will be recording the audio inside the Dome using moving microphones, and I'm going to stream some of that audio live so those that can't make the journey will be able to hear what is happening inside a concrete dome in North Norfolk.

Coming to this site very shortly is a full explanation of what I plan to do, and why.  It's all about filtering information.