I was very pleased to see that my Compulsive Reader review of David Barnes’ Prayers waiting for God has been reprinted on the Mulla Mulla website. Anything which helps to promote David’s work is ok by me.

If you missed it earlier, it’s HERE.

I don’t know much about onlymeith. I know his real name is Carlos Clemente and he comes from Madrid.

His production of my poem crying at the poetry reading is beautiful in its simplicity – the lone cello, beautiful use of pauses for emphasis, the blended piano and strings which give the listener time to reflect on the words without schmaltziness. It’s always rewarding to see your own work taken one level higher by someone else. I couldn’t hope for better.

Onlymeith’s other mixes of my work are Twins and The aching eyes.

See more of his other compositions on ccmixter here.

Press > (“play”) below to hear it.

The other part of the ccmixter Leap of the Heart challenge was for me to remix someone else’s work. I was allocated coffeeeurope / Hektor Thillet whose work I didn’t know. The first few tracks I listened to were pretty funky – but didn’t really suit any of my uploaded samples. Then I came across Hektor’s beautiful and moving “Silence, I’m failing” sung in a husky voice to DoKashiteru’s piano piece “Aimée.” It was the obvious choice to mix with my poem to my Dad “Transcendence.” I downloaded all the samples while we were holidaying in Hokkaido and actually mixed them on the laptop and headphones during the day-long bus trip from the east coast back to Sapporo. So memories of Jack are now intertwined with Hektor’s voice, DoKashiteru’s amazing piano melody and mile after mile of a snow-covered, prairie-like Hokkaido in winter. I think there may be another poem in that one day.

Thanks to rocavaco for a brilliant remix of my Horrorscope poem re-badged as Don’t Buy Any Green Bananas. It was all a part of ccmixter’s Leap of The Heart secret mixter project where your name goes into a virtual hat and someone else mixes your work and you mix someone else’s. Green Bananas is a very smooth production with a quirky – if eerie – musical composition in 5/4. The mystical production has also impressed the editors and reviewers.

The great thing about these mix-ups is that you never know where it will take your work or who will listen to it.

It’s an honour to work with people who just want to be creative and aren’t in it for the money!

If you were to turn up at the Wheaty to see Max_Mo and you were 24 hours early (or late) you’d be treated to Adelaide’s most innovative string quartet Zephyr.

The Zephyr Quartet ladies  (Belinda Gehlert, Violin; Lillian-Terri Dahlenburg, violin, Emily Tulloch, viola/violin; Anna Webb, Viola; Hilary Kleinig, ‘Cello – yes, I realize that’s five) have performed original, world-music influenced works, contemporary classical and traditional folk music with passion across Australia and around the world.

I first met them when they performed a MusicaViva concert at Woodcroft Primary School. I invited my friend poet Yahia al-Samawy to hear them play a middle-eastern melody. The meeting grew into a brief collaboration with me performing my Dunes – Perlubie Beach (from micromacro, 2006), Zephyr premiering Dunes (composed by Belinda Gehlert) and Yahia reading work in Arabic.

Zephyr’s new work is microMACRO, “A site-specific three-way conversation between sound, vision and space – an organic collision of the unexpected and surreal, the beautiful and absurd. In a world where the refined, absolute and ordered are at the forefront of our existence, it offers a glimpse into the evolving, organic nature of life with a show that is utterly unique every time it’s performed.

Zephyr teams up with the excitingly unpredictable visual/performance artist Jo Kerlogue …  a new music and live improvised visual art performance, guaranteed to elicit a powerful emotional response from audiences.

” More here.

It sounds exciting. If I could be there I would. I hope it’s a huge success.

Bookings & dates here.