Posts Tagged ‘music’

One of the things that I thought I might miss was the easy access to new music. Given that we don’t have internet in the house (in Spanish, it’s just internet, not the internet, which is the opposite of most cases). Well, I needn’t have worried on that score. I’ve been listening to Where’s the Skill in That on Resonance fm (it’s the current home of the presenters of Mixing it from radio 3) and there are old shows available for download. I listen to the shows as I walk up to the hospital (to teach the doctors) and later on go to eMusic to download albums from groups I like the sound of (which I pay for). At the moment I’m listening to an album by AU, and it’s dreamy Portland collectivist fun. The Spanish radio stations are a little too top forty for me, with the exception of radio 3 (who’d have guessed?) which often demonstrates a satisfyingly ecclectic taste.

As well as the music, the BBC’s current podcast range is very welcome, including the world service documentaries. It seems that with all that, and the guardian weekly, we manage to get all the news and music that we want without having to wade through and filter out all the celebrity dross.

Which is nice.

Pipe that! Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

On my way to work in the mornings I pass a chap handing out a free paper called 20 Minutos, it’s a good little rag, short articles which help with the Spanish and a few bits and pieces of what’s on. We saw that this weekend the interceltic festival¹ was starting in Avilés² . We’d driven past Avilés before. It’s an industrial town and port, still full of heavy industry and the remains of heavy industry. We hadn’t been to the centre though, and the draw of live music meant we thought it was worth a trip. We’ll have to go back, because the centre of the city is charming. Its historic centre is much more extensive than Oviedo’s, small streets and restaurants that were packed, lots of old squares and churches. We found where the concert was and wandered into a little place round the corner for a wine and tapa which, when it came was a mini fried breakfast: fried quail’s egg and a slice of chorizo on some soft home made crisps all mounted on a slice of bread. We followed that with some smoked anchovies with really good cheese.

Then on to the music. The festival lasts all week, and features musicians from all over the celtic fringe³. Tonight was Scottish, kicking off with Fred Morrison, who was introduced as ‘possibly the best piper in the world’. They weren’t kidding, he was phenomenal. He looked like James May’s dumpier brother (he of Top Gear), and played a couple of different pipes, both Irish and Scottish. But blimey he could pipe… it was like watching Jimi Hendrix do new and interesting things to the electric guitar, or that scene from Bird where Charlie Parker brings the rest of the band to a standstill. He was accompanied by a guitarist who looked all of sixteen, who occasionally looked a little desperate as Fred would pick up the pace of some fiendish stompy reel and smile and laugh as he played faster and faster. Mr Guitar kept up though, and provided some fine rhythm. I’ve seen some tunes knocked out with the inside of mammals but this guy really blew the guts out of it. After that the stage was invaded by the Red Hot Chili Pipers. Three pipers (ex army from the look of them), a guitarist, drummer, pianist and two additional drummers (one being a two time world champion snare drummer). They were a party band (I imagine they go down a storm at just about any festival, celtic or not), lots of mixtures of rock tropes and pipes, pipe battles, pipe v guitar, drum battles, coldplay (shudder) songs, Hills of Argyll where they were joined on stage by a massed band of pipers also over for the festival. Great fun. If you ever get the chance, they’re worth seeing. We nipped away just in time to catch the 2am bus back to Oviedo, the buses run through the night in summer so the Ovetense can enjoy the bright lights of the coastal cities.

¹The first c in celtica, the Spanish version of celtic, is an ‘s’ which really puts me on the wrong foot… ‘seltic’ are the football team, we’re Celts, with a hard C, oh yes… I was Irish today ²pronounced abbey-less rather than a-viles or ahveelez ³which is not the haircut Big Country used to sport

He who pays the piper calls the tunes Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

They’re called Gaitas, they only have one drone, unlike the scottish bagpipes which have three, and the tuning is different to the Galician pipes, in that you can lift any finger, not just uncover the holes in order. Well that’s about all I know about the pipes, and that small amount is thanks to this man who very kindly chatted for a while after I asked him if I could take his picture. I also asked him if they do this every week. He said something to the effect that it’s a part of some church celebrations, for some reason it’s a sacred year (the university is 400 this year but I’m not sure it’s related). This chap is a part of La Banda de Gaitas del Centro Asturiano de Oviedo. He said there are four bands and each Saturday (I’m not sure if it’s all year, there are easily reached limits to my Spanish) they get dropped at one end of the old centre of the city and they play, then walk to another spot, play a bit more, walk to a bar for a cider and so on. He was keen to point out the procession of priests and altar boys between the Iglesia de San Isidro to the Catedral (he actually said there were monks and nuns and all they were missing were women in burqas; a little secular our piper fella I feel). I have to do a bit more digging to find out exactly what’s going on.

Anyway, the pipes. They sounded pretty similar to a band of scots pipers, the drone’s a little higher pitched, and they had drummers and it was all very bagpipey… mostly played for walking, it’s not nearly martial enough to be marching music. They did play one tune that sounded like the start of ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ and then went weird. I followed the band after they started playing and I noticed members of other groups who had played earlier. They’d finished and were taking advantage of being in the market to do their shopping. After a couple of minutes it seemed totally normal to see traditionally garbed Asturians, bagpipe tossed casually over one shoulder, picking out their lettuce. Of course, no one else seemed to notice anything strange at all.

When I arrived back here, one of the things I was looking forward to was the late night selection on Radio 3. In the past that would have been Late Junction (World and New music) on Monday to Thursday 10:15 to midnight, Mixing It (New music and weird stuff) and Andy Kershaw on Sundays at the same time.

I didn’t expect to have to hunt for them. It turns out Andy is now on Monday nights and Late Junction is on Tuesday to Thursday, but both at 11:15 to 1am. Not ideal if you have to get up the next morning. Mixing it has disappeared. It took a little digging to find out what happened to it. The BBC controler just let it go quietly, the presenters weren’t allowed to say anything other than ‘that’s it, goodbye.’

Following a lot of emails, they have decided to resurrect the show on resonance FM on Wednesday nights… yay!

In the meantime I’ll keep listening to wfmu for continual audio surprises