He's gonna fry your mittens, kitten.

Well, Pinochet is nearly dead. Hope the murdering, torturing bastard hangs on until his trial is over though.

Our musical project with Rhys is progressing steadily. I’m not sure if I have set it all out in the blog yet, but if I have please forgive me if I repeat myself. The plan is to make a talking book containing two of Rhys’ stories that will accompany his upcoming book, Sereia de Curitiba, which is going to be translated into Portugese and released all over the Portugese speaking world. We will be providing a musical backing to his storytelling on the CD and also as part of a live show. We will be performing the thing live in London, Lisbon and Porto, maybe with a warm up gig in Swansea. The recording will be done sometime before the Lisbon gig, which will be when the book and CD will be launched, I think. He did explain it to me but it did not stay in the brain.

I have come up with the basic theme for the first story “A False Dawn of Parrots”; a nicely syncopating 6/8 chord progression in D minor. It came out really easily once I sat down and had a think, so the first step has been taken. I’m planning to start the piece with two basses, Monica on fretted and me on fretless and then swap in the guitar a little later on. The mood will be somewhere between a boat on a gently rolling sea and an equally rolling walk in a strange city.

The second story is called “The Gala of Implausible Songs” which I thought of a piece of theme for on the way to work today. I’m thinking that the music should evoke the mood of the narrator as he walks around said Gala, rather than being a selection of musical oddities.

It is good to have made a start on it. Since Rhys is lodging with us at the moment (poor thing) it will be good to get him to do a read through so that we can get a sense of how he tells the story, which will influence what we do. My aim is to make the story even more vivid by enhancing the way Rhys tells it. We can’t make the music obscure the story but it can’t just be wallpaper either.

Now that we’re going to going “Abroad” I suppose we will need to get hard cases for the guitars. This is going to cost me, I can feel it. But, in a rare moment of accidental financial planning it so happens that I will have paid off the Council Tax by the 1st of January, leaving me Council Tax bill free for February and March. That means that I may well be purchasing three hard guitar cases in February, which seems ever so slightly strange to me, but I don’t know why. This is the kind of news that gets people reading, isn’t it? Council Tax and bags. Proust! Up yours!