I spent a great seven days in Japan last week. With my band along for the ride we played four shows - two in Tokyo, one each in Osaka and Kyoto. The crowds were warm-hearted and passionate. We played songs from Fever Dream and Hendra, and I slipped in four from North Marine Drive. We also did versions of EBTG's Rollercoaster and 25th December. The hospitality and food was fantastic. Typhoon season meant it was humid and rainy much of the time, but we got to spent time in and around Shibuya and found a couple of hours to visit Nijo Castle in Kyoto - an inspiring feudal castle, all lateral empty space and long creaking wooden corridors. Here are some photos from the trip.
News — In Full
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SpinCycle - My Infinite Playlist
For the past two years I have been compiling a Spotify playlist of my ongoing listening. It is now over 200 songs and fourteen hours long: new, old, rare cuts; a different kind of crate-digging with 2.4k followers. I have just added another ten songs, including rare Beefheart, McCartney, Dorothy Ashby (pictured), Methyl Ethel. Press play and subscribe. Enjoy it!
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Video: Live New York WFUV Session
During my recent North American tour I found time to drop by WFUV's studio in the Bronx and record an interview and two songs with my ace band featuring Bernard Butler, Cameron Ralston and Pinson Chanselle. Two days prior to this session I had begun the tour with laryngitis. I'm still recovering on these recordings and my voice sound's pretty husky in places, but I like the spirit.
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American Interviews, Summer 2016
Here are some links to some American interviews I did surrouding my recent North American tour. They include a chat with Maura Johnston for the Boston Globe, Robert Ham for the Seattle Stranger and Downtown NYC magazine.
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Deep Folk Mixtape 6
I have just finished my latest mixtape, I Am Here After All - Deep Folk Mixtape 6. It was premiered at last week at one of my favourite music blogs, Aquarium Drunkard.
I began my Deep Folk Mixtape series about three years ago. I had recently pressed the pause button on my DJ life. After EBTG went on hiatus in 2000 I spent the next twelve years immersed in underground electronic music, which had had hit me as a new way of hearing and playing music to me after years writing in a similar way – like a long-term painter being introduced to collage. The urge to return to my songwriting roots then bubbled again up a few years ago. I began writing songs again – and it has led to my two recent solo albums Hendra and Fever Dream – but the urge to DJ never fully subsided, so I began to wonder what would happen if I applied the same principles I had applied to mixing deep house to folk and folk-rock and American Primitive and ambient electronic music; thinking about segues, matching keys and tempo, space echo, overlays of spoken word. And so the Deep Folk Mixtape series was born.
I don’t really plan them. As the weeks pass I keep a notebook of music I stumble across that I think might fit, then an evening comes around when I go down into my studio and plug up a few FX, and start tinkering around until I get the first couple of mixes and crossovers planned; then it just flows. I do some mixes live through an old Rane mixer, some using software – both have their uses. I’m not a purist. I use Freesound.org for a lot of the field recordings to add texture; there are some beautiful recordings up there; there is a guy I follow who specializes in long slow recordings of the creaking of trees in the wind.
I found the photograph I used for the artwork in a box of my grandmother’s old souvenirs. It is my grandfather William Watt in full deep folk mixtape mode.
