Worra lorra tunes…….
Every so often, whilst rifling fruitlessly through backup hard drives for something else entirely, I would stumble across ideas for tunes and audio experiments that had been shelved awaiting either ‘further development’ or a suitable home ‘somewhere’. (As WH Auden, paraphrasing Paul Valéry, observed; ‘a poem is never finished, only abandoned’).
Over time, I shovelled these numerous unpolished nuggets together into an ‘ideas’ playlist. But after a while, I found that every time I went into the studio, I could sense a terrible keening from the depths of the ‘ideas’ playlist; ‘finish us’, it called, ‘f-i-i-i-n-n-n-i-s-h u-u-u-s-s-s’!
Finally unable to withstand these Jacob Marley-like lamentations and rattlings of chains any longer, I decided to sit down, finish the tunes and liberate them to a happier place. ‘it am what it are’ is the result.
There are twenty nine tracks on the album, which has a running time of ninety minutes. The shortest tune is eighteen seconds long, the longest, seven minutes, twenty six. The tunes are probably as varied in style as their running times are in length, and range from those using some of the outer fringes of contemporary compositional techniques, (such as iawia 7), to a 32-bar AABA ‘standards’ tune that I wrote as a demonstration of the method (iawai 22). I stuggle to decide which of those I think is the weirder…..
I tried various sequencing ploys for the running order of the tunes, but in the end gave up and settled on a loose alternation of ‘pop’ and ‘non-pop’ tracks. ‘Pop’ here, by the way, simply designates things that you can probably whistle on your early morning milk-round. ‘Non-pop’, on the other hand, designates things that I bet you can’t.
The tunes were finished and re-mixed over the course of 2023/4, briefly interrupted by a stretch I served as MD for a live performance at the Barbican of ‘the Wicker Man’ soundtrack (more on this anon., perhaps, one day).
I quickly abandoned any hope of inventing twenty nine titles – I mean, ye Gods – twenty nine! – and settled instead on titling the tunes ‘iawia’s 1 – 29, each with a brief summary of the instruments and engines used in a track’s construction.
As for the album title, ‘it am what it are’; it’s a pleasingly nonsensical grammatical mash-up, for which you have to thank my penchant for corrupting existing, or coining new, nonsense folksy aphorisms.
The back cover of the album includes a detail of a block-print of me wielding my trusty Keilwerth tenor. The print was created by Graham Burnett – a very old friend from Southend-on-Sea and the halcyon days of Red Square – and is based on a photograph taken by Gary Franklin during a gig at the much-missed Railway Hotel in Southend. The full print looks like this;
‘it am what it are’ is available as a free or pay-what-you-like download from Bandcamp, and as a very modestly priced signed CDr from Bandcamp and Discogs.
Jon Seagroatt 