Real-time improvisation; no edits, no dubs, recorded on the morning of Thursday 14th of October 2021 to give me something to listen to whilst editing pictures taken at Wells Cathedral on 23rd September 2021 (see image).

OCTOBRIS XV 14.10.2021

As a kid a major delight was learning the bass lines on my favourite Gong LPs on my Columbus Fender Jazz copy & playing along as best I could.  Times I would record a bass figure over and over on cassette and improvise over it on the guitar, glissando style.  Happy days!  Here in my dotage I've played Christian Tritsch's sublime bass part for 'I am your Fantasy' from Camembert Electrique on my Squier Bass VI and looped it for a real-time communion with my Moog Grandmother & diverse FX.  The boy in my heart smiles down the years, much as he did when he caught the sun shining through the stained glass of York Minster a few days later.  Happy days indeed.

Tritsch Fantasy

Born August 1961, culturally astray pretty much ever since.

Aged 12, messing with cosmic vibrations via EMS Synthi AKS in local arts centre whilst simultaneously seduced by folk and medieval musics culminating in flirtations with free improvisation & sessions with Lol Coxhill, Hugh Davies and John Stevens until drawn back into tertius auris feral field-work of hurdy-gurdy drones, bamboo flutes & gongs of The Stones & Trees of the Small Palace, the post-industrial rites & riots of Metgumberbone and the recording of the Masstishaddhu / Shekinah LP for United Dairies in 1988 with Richard Rupenus.

He had his solo work featured on BBC Radio Three's Mixing It and formed the Millennial partnership with his wife Rachel to become Venereum Arvum / Rapunzel & Sedayne with innumerable CD appearances hither & yon, culminating in SONGS FROM THE BARLEY TEMPLE in 2011 ('…the perfect October album…' - Stewart Lee, Sunday Times) with features on Radio 3 & 4 and in various magazines including Folk Roots.

His music is the product of his mutual fascinations with Medieval & Experimental idioms all down the years.  Medieval in the sense of it being modal, drone based, involving sparse organum harmony, ostinato and ambient aesthetic born from spending too long photographing the foliate horrors of churches and cathedrals to the ambient accompaniment of organ tuning, choir practise and hourly prayer.  Experimental in the sense of it being 100% improvised in real time, organic, unedited, using spontaneously generated loops, analogue electronic sources and a primary aesthetic derived from random sound serendipity eschewing virtuosity and the usual tropes of atonality and noise.

He has nothing to prove either way - and nothing to declare other than to say he is alive, for the now, enduring, somehow, and quite happily so.  'Keith Jarrett once said the synthesiser music for the moon is so much progress filibustering but it becomes a prayer to me to seek such communion by the light of the silvery one - no shame in that - not wanting the music to be about something but part of the same vibration, anciently, immediately, momentarily, fleetingly as the one thing becomes another.'

Sean Breadin

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