Chin38: Dwoogie with @Pani_Bufetowa, @The3rdGirl, @TheLastHatGirl: "Texticals Allowed Vol 1"

Dwoogie is a gentleman of the highest order. Described by Pete Um as the "ever tumescent honorary Pole", I was fortunate to spend a decadent few days supping Vodka Zolodzkowa Gorzka in Warsaw, discussing, amongst a myriad other delights, the insertion of chairlegs into the desiring bum-bums of aged avant-gardists, and Alvin Lucier going to the supermarket in a thong.

Not so long ago, possibly during my sojourn in Warsaw, he mentioned to me his project-in-progress working with the voices of lovely lady friends via Twitter. 

This is that project, and that is this project. "Texticals Allowed Vol 1" is an hallucinogenic love letter to the female voice, filtered through layers of memory, explosions of terror, half-awake dreams, and half asleep waking. Like a message at the end of the universe sent from a space station in an erotic abyss.

Listen to it.

We'll let Sir Dwoogie of the Never Fading Banana explain further....

The idea: About a year ago, I had the idea of using women's voices in a project. They were to be speaking voices, reading whatever they wanted to read, as long as it wasn't poetry. Poetry and music have been done. To death, some might say. I thought I would do some cutups and some weird music. So, I asked a few Twitter friends who happen to be women if they were interested. Some were, and sent me recordings.

The execution: For a long time, nothing happened, but I did finally start working with what I was sent. These are the first complete results. I was, and am, impressed by how beautiful the voices are, and my initial concept changed as a result. I decided to keep the recordings whole and present the voices more or less as they came to me. Mostly more. I hope the voice artists aren't disappointed with what I've done. There are more to come!

Thanks: At this moment, I'd very much like to thank @Pani_Bufetowa, @The3rdGirl, and @TheLastHatGirl for making these tracks possible. I will, of course, give the other contributors their dues when I've, ahem, finished with them. And I'd also like to thank my GREAT friend @ergophizmiz for releasing my dabblings.

Dwoogie is on Twitter as @neverfadingwood. 

Artwork by @Pani_Bufetowa

Chin37: The Orb Remixes by The Superfools

Sound-collage maestro James Melendrez aka The Superfools spent months researching and sourcing the sound sources of The Orb's sample works, then proceeded, using these original sources, to reconstruct the music of The Orb in his own image. This is the result.

In the words of Mr Melendrez...

This album has very little Orb samples. It was put together from the samples they used to make "Adventures Beyond the Ultra World". I wanted to use what they used and it took me time to get all the original samples - I had to research the hell out of it online. The little fluffy sample is from an album box set from Ricki Lee Jones but only a promo box set and only about 200 were ever made. It came out in the 80s. I got it on eBay. The Hippy and the Redneck was a little album I bought on Amazon. Also I sampled DVDs all over the place, "West World", Woody Allen's "Sleeper",  "Flash Gordon", "Once Upon a Time in the West". Dub was King Tubby and Scientist. A little "Snow White" and "Alice in Wonderland". Also songs from Grace Jones, Dee Lite, and Monty Python. Smashed with sound effects. And there you have it.

And just because we couldn't resist, here's a picture of The Superfools with the great John Waters.

Elvin Again............ It doesn't get much better

If you ever want a masterclass in true rhythmic polyrhythmic complexity allied to one of the best ever swing grooves, have a listen to Elvin's playing on 'Transition' - if you have a proper stereo system, as opposed to an iPod player, use the stereo balance to just listen to Elvin - the separation is so extreme you can hear everything Elvin is playing, it's like standing beside him. Then listen to the whole track again with the full band, and hear the full context of what Elvin is playing and how he's responding to, and playing with Trane, McCoy and Garrison. Then lie down with a cold towel on your forehead....


Jazz drumming doesn't get any better than this......... Music doesn't get much better than this........

Ron Carter - The Master

Ron Carter turned 75 recently. It's amazing that, in a music with an incredibly high mortality rate, (especially among Carter's generation), that he's still around and that he's still active and playing. Like Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, his bandmates in the legendary Miles Quintet of the 60s, he seems ageless - it seems impossible that there will come a time when he, (and they), will not be around. Carter has been on the scene since the very late 50s, and is apparently the most recorded bassist in history. He's certainly someone I've been aware of since I first started listening to and being aware of jazz in the early 70s, and as a bassist, he has had a profound influence on me.

Carter is for my money, the greatest walking bassist in the history of jazz. Big words, I know - and describing somebody in music as being 'the best' is a risky proposition, since it is ultimately unprovable,  and probably undesirable as well - music is after all, not a competitive sport. Maybe it would be more appropriate for me to say that as a walking bassist, nobody satisfies me on so many levels as Carter. Others have had an extraordinarily powerful beat (Ray Brown, Leroy Vinnegar), and some have a relentlessly creative mind when it comes to note-choices for bass lines (Scott LaFaro, Eddie Gomez), but none of combined these two elements in the way that Carter has.

Carter's ability to dictate the direction of the band through both rhythmic and harmonic means is unparalleled by any other bassist. Harmonically he seems to have a lexicon of possibilities to apply to even the most mundane tunes, and pieces that he must have played thousands of times. To hear Ron Carter play a blues is to hear the apogee of endless variation of a simple harmonic form. If you are an aspiring bassist and you want to learn how to play great walking bass lines on a blues or Rhythm Changes, just take virtually any RC recording and transcribe what he plays - everything you need is there.

Carter's bass lines come into the 'why didn't I think of that!?' category. They're not that complex in themselves, but they're so relentlessly creative - always shifting, always finding the perfect note, always outlining the harmony but in a way that follows an inexorable voice-leading logic. Carter bass lines are like voice-leading études - as perfect in this regard as any line from a Baroque composer. And they're always logical - hence the 'why didn't I think of that?' feeling you get as a bassist when you listen to Carter's lines. Of course the reason that you didn't think of that is because you (and by you I mean me!) are not as good as Ron Carter at this stuff! In fact in my opinion, nobody is as good as him at this voice-leading aspect of the music. Carter practices Bach a lot and you can hear this kind of contrapuntal intelligence in his lines.

And then there is the rhythmic creativity - Carter has the ability to fundamentally change the perception of the listener with just a slight shifting of where he is in the bar, or even in the beat. He will take a phrase and shift it backwards or forwards by a tiny amount, and the whole landscape changes. You can be suddenly taken outside your comfort zone by one one of these little rhythmic tweaks and kept out there until such time as he decides to, (almost always majestically, and at the perfect moment), resolve it and bring everyone home safely. He is a master of this, and I think his contribution to the Miles Quintet is extremely underrated. Yes Herbie, Tony and Wayne were amazing - but this band couldn't have achieved what they did with any other bassist.

His time feel is a wonder in itself, slightly to the front of the beat but rock solid, with an inner-sprung bounciness that's different to other great walking bassists. It has a more pliable feel than for example Ray Brown's big-as-an-oak-tree quarter note, and is more unpredictable rhythmically than either Brown's or Paul Chambers. He has his own lexicon of crafty embellishments  - triplets, pull-offs to the the open strings, leaps to the open string harmonics - which he varies endlessly and beautifully.

Here's a classic example - the amazing walking bass on Invitation from Joe Henderson's great 'Tetragon' album. Everything that's great about Carter's bass playing is on display here - if you want to know how to play so much C minor and yet never repeat yourself, then you need to check this out. The bass is a little over-recorded and the sound a little too early Barcus-Berry pick up (for my taste anyway), but the way Carter bosses this track is just extraordinary. And he and DeJohnette sound so good together.......



I studied this recording so much and blatantly copped a lot of Carter's methods of getting around cycle of 5ths progressions and ways of making extended minor key passages interesting.

Carter is of course best known for his time with Miles and playing with Tony Williams, but there's so much other good stuff out there. I particularly like his playing with drummers who have a broader cymbal beat than Tony had - particularly when he played with Elvin on such celebrated albums as 'Speak No Evil',  'The Real McCoy' and 'Trident'. I've heard anecdotally that Elvin and Ron didn't get on well on a personal level, which may explain why their recordings together are not extensive (I can't think of any live albums of them together - maybe someone can put me straight?), but any time they played together the feel is just great - Elvin's turbulent yet laid back forward motion works so well with Ron's springy certainty.

Another drummer that Carter sounds great with is Mel Lewis - Lewis also had a broad cymbal beat which  dovetailed beautifully with Carter's time feel. They recorded together a few times and one of my favorites is on Thad Jones and Pepper Adams' little-known gem of an album 'Mean What You Say'. Duke Pearson played piano on this recording which features some fantastic arranging from Jones, (a masterclass in small group arranging) and gives Carter lots of space to show the full range of his skills. Like here on 'H and T Blues' -

Again, Carter's creativity on the blues - a form he must have played literally thousands of times - is wonder to behold.

I must admit I've never been crazy about Carter as a soloist, though it is individualistic. Having said that, Carter did record one of my all-time favorite bass solos with the Great Jazz Trio, (Hank Jones, Carter, Williams) live at the Village Vanguard, where on 'Naima' Carter plays an extraordinary solo which is almost solely based on rhythm. By rhythmically manipulating the two pedal tones, he creates a riveting solo which should be mandatory study for all jazz bassists on how to make the most out of simple material by using rhythmic means alone. But in general, I've never felt that his soloing is on a level with his accompaniment and I've also never liked his own two-bass bands. But these are small personal cavils - nobody can be great at everything, and I do think he's a very interesting composer, writing little contrapuntal gems which are very individualistic. I particularly love a little-known album called 'Etudes' (with Tony Williams, Bill Evans and Art Farmer), that features some wonderful compositions - gems like 'Arboretum' and 'Rufus' which really should be better known. Carter actually has quite a distinguished history as a composer on classic recordings, such as 'RJ' with Miles and 'First Trip' from Herbie's classic 'Speak Like a Child' album. 

But it will be mainly as an accompanist that Carter will be known - and rightly so, since this is ultimately the role of the bass, no matter how much chops and harmonic information we may have acquired over the decades. If we're talking about accompaniment and the role of the bass in jazz, as far as I'm concerned, there's Ron Carter and then there's everyone else.........

Happy 75th Mr. Carter and thank you for the great music and inspiration

Postscript: Having said that Carter and Elvin never recorded live together, I found a clip of them playing together on Youtube. It's an All-Star conglomeration recorded at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982, and despite some cretinous editing, (and footage of people who indisputably prove that man is definitely not evolution's last word), there's some pretty burning music here

x`

Family Business

This Sunday sees the debut of 3G – a trio consisting of myself, my brother Conor, and my son Chris. Strictly speaking this isn’t the first gig for this trio, we made our actual debut about 8 years ago, at  the 50^th anniversary concert of Chris’ secondary school – one of those celebratory school concerts featuring amusing anecdotes concerning teachers and pupils of bygone days, earnest speeches and excerpts from musicals. We were on the bill because both Conor and I were also past pupils of the school, and featuring this trio of current and ex-students on the concert probably seemed like a good idea to the school authorities. They may have altered that opinion when we came onto the stage of the National Concert Hall, played completely free for a while and then played ‘Left End’ - a gnarly rock-influenced nugget written by Rick Peckham. Chris’ schoolmates loved us, but there were many raised eyebrows among the assorted bishops, parents and school dignitaries – true subversive fun.

And the subversive fun will continue on Sunday when we get together to play our first gig as a trio. We’ve been saying that this group will be the subject of future jazz trivia quizzes, as in

‘What band consists of two brothers, a father and son, and an uncle and nephew yet is only a trio?’

We’ve been rehearsing regularly for the past few months and it’s been a lot of fun. There’s a very nice dynamic in the group – obviously Conor and I would be a lot more experienced, but Chris has been around music in general, and this kind of music in particular, all his life, so he knows what the general vibe is and the way we think about a lot of stuff. He came through the Newpark Music Centre BA in jazz performance programme that we both teach at, but I did very little direct teaching of him while he was there – firstly because he probably got more than enough of my opinions at home, and secondly I felt it was good for him to be exposed to the techniques and opinions of other teachers and musicians. He’s also followed his own way outside of the jazz world, playing in various punk bands from an early age.  

But of course he grew up in a completely musical environment, and a mostly jazz environment, so when it came to the time to put this group together, there’s little for us to talk about in conceptual terms – we’re all broadly in agreement of how the music should go.

And the music we’re playing?

Well, in a way some of it is a throw-back to the Guilfoyle/Nielsen Trio days – lots of odd metre stuff, a love of intensity, extremes of tempo, virtuosity, rhythmic complexity, lots of swinging, standards and originals approached from a similar vantage point – a desire to burn!  In this group we’re consciously espousing the more physical aspects of contemporary jazz – there is very little ‘in the middle’ kind of stuff, it’s  all or nothing – no wishy-washy-ism allowed. It’s definitely connected to the old GNT way of playing, but it’s different too – Chris is a different guitarist to Mike Nielsen, and Conor and I  are further down the road of our own musical development since those heady days  of rhythmic discovery twenty years ago.

Of course on a personal level it’s great to be playing with my son – but it’s great on a musical level too, because Chris will really contribute something individual to the band and get something  different out of Conor and I. This will be the first of many trio excursions, as we’re determined to develop the music and the band over the coming months.

If you’re in Dublin tomorrow night (April 29^th) come on down to JJ’s and check it out. If you like committed, swinging, virtuosic and creative music, then this is for you.

Here’s a taste of what we’re going to get up to………..

A Week in India with George and Carlos

An account of our recent trip to Mumbai and Delhi and some thoughts thereon

Being awoken by the Muezzin’s call to prayer at 5.30 am suggests to my sleep-drugged mind that I’m in a different place. Waking up several hours later to see a hawk fly past my window in the hot sunlight confirms it. I’m in Mumbai, for the first time in fifteen years, with my good friends and great musicians George Kontrafouris and Carlos Ezequiel. This my sixth time in India, and it’s one of my favourite places on earth – the food, the people, the colour, the intensity, the sheer difference of it, make it an extraordinary place to visit, and I’m always glad to be back.

Apart from anything else, India always affords one the kind of good natured, yet baffling conversations that a seemingly simple request can generate. Like this morning when I went into the hotel coffee shop to get a coffee and something sweet.

Waiter: Good morning sir

Me: Good morning – could I have a coffee and something sweet – anything.

Waiter: A coffee sir?

Me: Yes, a coffee – and something sweet to go with it

Waiter: A sweet coffee sir?

Me: No, a coffee, and something like a biscuit or a cake or something

Waiter: Ah – a coffee with sugar sir!

Me: No, a coffee and something sweet to go with it

Waiter: Just a moment sir – (consulting a folder) what is your room number?

Me: 405

Waiter: But there is no booking for lunch for 405 sir

Me: I don’t want lunch, just a coffee and something sweet to go with it

Waiter: (With a baffled expression….) Just a moment sir.

He goes off and comes back with three more people, all consult in Hindi while looking at booking folder

2nd Waiter: You want lunch sir?

And off we go again…………

Eventually it gets sorted out and a coffee and some biscuits are produced, but every time I’ve been in India I get involved in these kinds of conversations regarding seemingly simple things, but in which both sided become increasingly baffled.

Having all made long journeys to get here, we take it easy on the first day, rest a lot and then go and see the Gateway of India, Mumbai’s famous monument and tourist trap, braving the touts, admiring the sea view and watching the throngs of happy Indians enjoying their Sunday off. The day finishes satisfactorily with a visit to a renowned North Indian restaurant for expensive, (by Indian standards), but delicious food.



The next day’s plan to head out on a trio excursion is stymied by George being sick. Not very sick but sick enough to make him a non-starter for the trip so Carlos and I go on a truncated version, starting with the extraordinary Mumbai Railway Station, built by the British and showing every sign of Victorian confidence in Queen and Empire. It’s a large building, and inside, a fascinating throng move endlessly through the station, each person intent on their own mission, but the whole looking like some giant organism, eddying and flowing to and fro. All main railways stations are hives of activity, but Indian ones are even more so – India Rail employs 1.3 million employees making them the one of the largest employers of human beings in the world. Whole support systems spring up around the stations, including families who live there. It’s an extraordinary scene – chaotic yet ordered.

To walk around the city is to be reminded again and again that the words ‘health and safety’ do not mean much to Indian society at large. Walking out on the street you can witness dozens of acts of hair-raising recklessness within minutes. Cars make U-turns with no warning, bicycles dash between buses and trucks, pedestrians walk straight into oncoming traffic, pillion passengers on motor scooters carry huge unsafe loads, families of 5 squeeze onto a Honda 50, people in cars balance two children on their knees in the front seat. To witness street life in Mumbai, (or pretty much any Indian city) is to watch a seething maelstrom of potential accidents.

And accidents DO happen – all the time. Yet the newspapers seem much more interested in the antics of teenagers, and the machinations of the Pakistanis than they do on the everyday carnage on the streets. For example, while I was in Mumbai the papers were full of an incident in which 6 teenagers crashed their car and one was killed. There followed four days of newspaper articles, much hand-wringing over the state of the nation’s youth, police promises to crackdown on bars selling alcohol etc. – yet in the same newspaper there was an article about the railways in which it was casually mentioned that 195 people had been killed on Mumbai’s railway network in January and February. 195 people killed in 8 weeks! That’s three per day…….



Over 1500 people were killed on Mumbai’s railways last year (mostly run over on the tracks), and yet the media were much more interested in this one car crash in which one person had been killed. Why? Probably because most of the people who died on the railways were poor and the teenagers were from the burgeoning middle class. But any society that accepts that level of carnage on its rail networks is one in which the idea of personal safety is not a priority.

I must admit that on one level I enjoy the madness on the streets – it’s street theatre writ large, you can stand on any street corner and see something amazing, startling and visibly arresting at any time. On the other hand there’s no doubt that this chaotic panorama that give Indian cities their unique visual impact, does come at a great cost to many people.

Carlos and I leave the railway station, take a wrong turn and instead of gazing at Mumbai’s Victorian architectural heritage, end up instead in a seething street market in Mohammed Ali Road, a Muslim area of the city. Although it presents us with another amazing tableau of Indian city life, the cacophony of car horns, dust, 35 degree heat, and sheer press of humanity drives us to seek air-conditioned shelter in a local restaurant where I have a refreshing dish of Khir (cold rice pudding), washed down with a Coke. We then take a taxi down to the Victorian section of the city, have a look around have a brief lunch and head back to the hotel. Fortunately George has now recovered and we eat in an excellent Hyderabadi restaurant attached to the hotel. Hyderabadi food should be much better known in the west than it is. In Europe and the US Indian restaurants are dominated by the same North Indian staples, which though good, don’t come close to representing the culinary diversity of India. Hyderabadi food is rich, but generally spicier than North Indian food, and with all kinds of different dishes which were developed during the Nizam period.

The next day, after a morning trip to Chowpatty Beach, we undertake the first performance at the Blue Frog. The Blue Frog is a very modern club that is breaking new musical ground in India – it’s very well equipped and has a lot of western music - mostly various offshoots of modern pop music, hip-hop, electronica etc. – 7 nights a week. Emmanuelle, the artistic director, once worked in Dublin for the Improvised Music Company, and I’d used that contact to make the initial connection. Emmanuelle made it clear to me at the beginning of our discussions that there was no point in playing acoustic jazz for a quiet listening audience there, since this audience didn’t really exist in India. So we arranged a programme of more funk oriented music which was still fun to play, but which we hoped would appeal more to local tastes.


(The Blue Frog, Mumbai)

The gear was fine, though Carlos had to re-skin the drums, and the sound guys were very good – they got a good sound very quickly, if only all sound engineers were like that……..


So, decent gear, good sound, appropriate music everything was set for a fun gig that night, but…………. Unfortunately the audience was terrible! There was a decent crowd of people in, but they had absolutely no interest in the music whatsoever, treated the whole event as a social evening, played with their iPhones, talked incessantly and some even stood with their backs to us. Each piece was greeted with lukewarm applause, some people seemed startled by the applause, and looked over their shoulders to see what was being applauded, as if surprised that the music wasn’t just coming from a hi-fi system.

I hadn’t expected much in the way of audience appreciation – I know jazz is an unknown quantity in India – but I must admit to feeling irritated by the audience. They’d paid a lot of money by Indian standards to come into the gig and no doubt felt they were cool and hip people by virtue of being in a place like the Blue Frog, but in the end their complete lack of appreciation for the music belied their self-bestowed hipness. I’m not saying that anyone who doesn’t like our music is unhip per se, but what bothered me wasn’t that they didn’t like the music, it was because they clearly had no interest in ANY music – it fulfilled that dreaded ‘lifestyle’ category, along with the iPhones and designer sunglasses and designer clothes. Anybody could have been up there on the stage – good or bad they would have all got the same reaction, whether they played well or not.

But we had fun playing for ourselves at least, and the Blue Frog people looked after us very well and that’s always nice. The next morning we set off for Delhi, for the second gig.


(At the Blue Frog, Delhi)

Delhi’s traffic seems almost worse than Mumbai’s , hard though that is to believe, and the hotel was on the edge of a busy road with traffic roaring past. But the hotel itself was very nice, rooms were great and the food in it was great. I really thought we’d found a gem of a place and made a mental note of it for future reference and trips to Delhi. I was later to be sadly disillusioned about the place, but for now we were very happy to be there.

Off to soundcheck at the Delhi branch of the Blue Frog, and it’s a similar looking place, with again very good equipment and nice and efficient people running the place. Carlos did a bit of surgery on the drums (as in taking the foam padding out of the bass drum so he could get a sound out of it), George figured out the idiosyncrasies of the keyboard, and I was very happy with a Markbass stack – I’d been using Markbass amps at home and to get one here was a great bonus.

The gig that night was a lot better, there were more musicians there and the audience was far more attentive, and consequently we played better too. We chatted afterwards to several musicians had a post-gig drink and went back to the hotel very satisfied with ourselves.


(George at the Red Fort)

We had a day off the next day and we filled it by paying a visit to the Red Fort – a Moghul Palace, still in great condition – a trip to Chandni Chowk, the extraordinary market in Old Delhi, and finally a visit to the Nizamuddin Dagar, a Sufi shrine.

The Red Fort was impressive, although I always find that once you’ve gaped at the huge and beautiful red sandstone walls, its a bit lifeless , and there’s not a lot more to see. Chandni Chowk on the other hand is bursting with things to see – cycle rickshaw guys carrying impossible loads, hawkers shouting and importuning, food sellers on the side of the street doing a roaring trade in Jallebis and Puris, shops selling everything from Pashminas to rifles, Sikh temples and mosque etc. etc. – all human life is there, and I always go to the Chowk every time I visit Delhi.

Here's a few minutes of footage from the Chowk, to give you a flavour of the scene......



We finish with a visit to the Nizamuddin Dargah, a famous shrine of a Sufi saint where the faithful come to pray and ask the saint to intercede on their behalf. On Thursdays, at sunset, the Qawallis – a group of singers and musicians who sing at these shrines, (the most famous of which would be the late great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) – sing their devotional songs beside the tomb of the saint and we were determined to see this. I’d seen Qawalli music before but always in concert halls, never in its proper setting.















(Qawalli Singers at the Nizamuddin Dargah)


The scene was extraordinary – thousands of people, many dressed in colourful garb, from many parts of the Muslim world, all worshipping at the shrine, but also buying food, buying offerings for the saint’s tomb, and surrounding the Qawalls as they sing their devotional songs. There’s a huge crush and constant movement. From a musical point of view (or at least my musical point of view) it’s a disappointment in that the noise of the crowd is so great, I can’t hear the musicians well at all. But although it’s disappointing musically, the scene itself is fantastic – it really felt like a privilege to see it.

Unfortunately the evening was to end on a sour note – I had my pocket picked on the way out and had my wallet taken…….. We were putting on our shoes and there was a small group of boys poking at us and begging, and it was in this melee that they managed to take the wallet. I realized immediately it was gone, but it was too late to do anything about it. We went back to the hotel to cancel my credit cards when we went back to the hotel to cancel the cards etc. the desk clerk wouldn't give me a key card to get back into my room until we paid him 300 rupees as a 'lost card charge'. The fact that I'd been robbed and had no money didn't make any difference to him, so I had to borrow the money just in order to get back into my room. That hotel is very nice, lovely rooms etc. - but I couldn't believe the lack of sympathy and customer service they showed in dealing with this. So beware this hotel – it looks good, but the management are a bunch of grasping sods. The name of the hotel is Saket27.

But although this was a bad way to end the trip, the whole thing was another great Indian adventure. India never lets you down – it’s always spectacular, and extreme, and intriguing, and annoying, and exasperating, and hilarious, and thought-provoking and many more things. This was my 6th time there – can’t wait for the 7th!


(The Last Supper!)

Chin36: Pitman's Gramophone Course of Typewriter Keyboard Instruction - Volume 2

Hoist your typewriter and raise the rallying cry of 

Carriage, Return!

Pitman's Gramophone Course of Typewriter Keyboard Instruction has returned for a second volume of minimalist, motorik takes on all your favourite light classical moments!

Brush up on your secretarial skills and bathe yourself in a sea of stern repetition, from 78s at varying levels of decay. Some are clean as a whistle, others sound like crumbling rock-faces. All will make you wish you own a typewriter. If you already own a typewriter, it'll make you wish you had another one, just for the sake of it. You could start a club. This is the power of Pitmans.

Download the first volume of Pitman's Gramophone Course here.

More about the Magus of Secretarial Skills, Sir Isaac Pitman, right here.

With thanks to the ever splendid Bryan the Intrepid Vinyl Explorer for his vast collection of found and reloved shellac.