Thursday 30 July 2009

Biting Tongues: New Live Recordings on MySpace


Graham Massey has been busy mixing the multichannel recording made of Biting Tongues’ closing performance at the Moon Landing Party on July 19 and has now posted three tracks on the Tongues MySpace page. These were taken from the early part of the set and include new opener ‘Glorious Stranger’ as well as live standards ‘Where the Bird Lands’ and ‘Evening State’. ‘Glorious Stranger’ was a special one-off piece to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Apollo XI’s landing in the Sea of Tranquility: it features a reworked version of a text I originally wrote for the Dutch composer Huib Emmer back in 1999 for a televised concert that took place at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. On that occasion the text was delivered by Doug Wimbish: an experience not unlike having Jimi Hendrix start talking to you in your sleep. The choice of title was Huib’s: I hope he doesn’t mind our retaining it. ‘Where the Bird Lands’ has been a regular feature in recent Biting Tongues sets but was one of those pieces that never made it into the studio. There are, by contrast, at least two recorded versions of ‘Evening State’, one of which is an extended 12” version that can be found on After the Click, the Tongues retrospective CD available from LTM. There was also, so I’ve been reliably informed, a hard-core Techno mix of ‘Evening State’ put out by Antler Records in the Benelux countries, but I’ve yet to hear it. One day maybe...

Top image: KH and Eddie Sherwood during a break in rehearsals July 18, 2009 – photo by Graham V Massey

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