The Dylan Storey Story

The first I heard of Dylan Storey was about six years or so ago, when my flatmate gave me a three-track promotional CD and said 'hey, check this out, I bet you'll like this.'  I had recently moved to Auckland at this point and maybe I was a little bit lonely, becuase I remember that I put the CD on and thought 'man, that's a really amazing guitar sound.  I wonder if this Dylan Storey wants to be friends with me?'  In those days, of course, we didn't have the Internet beamed directly into our brains yet, so if you wanted to be 'friends' with somebody, you had to go and meet them in real life.  This is actually a bit easier for musicians than it is for real people though, because whereas if non-musicians want to cultivate a friendship with somebody they have to try to think of interesting things to have opinions about, musicians can just invite each other around to their houses to play with their toys.

Dylan always says he doesn't like cats.  You decide.

I seem to recall that shortly after hearing this three-track promotional CD, I went along to the Odeon lounge to see the release show for 'Up  in the Rough,' Dylan's first album, and I became a fan.  This is probably a rare example of one of those little promo CDs actually achieving its desired effect, although the fact that I don't run a record label or a powerful music publication concern has probably limited the positive impact I have been able to have on Dylan's career to date.  What I did do, though, was ask him to join my band.  I may have at the time implied that we would shortly be making heaps of money or something to that effect, because he said yeah, OK, and suddenly I had a band.  The other person in the band was Ms. Kate Whelen, who is now the mother superior of the Sisters of Saint Rupertsberg, who I gather are a force to be reckoned with. It wasn't too long before we were loading everything into the back of Kate's van and heading off on this ridiculously error-prone tour around New Zealand in the dead of winter, during the course of which we dealt with snowstorms, landslides, lost wallets, empty gastanks and storms at sea, and all this before the second night when we got Christchurch to discover that we'd been double-booked with The Feelers.  Fortunately, we had Reb Fountain along, who is pretty good at driving in snow, and she also saved the day by finding us a better place to play that night, which incidentally is how we met The Eastern.

The other thing Reb did, though, was steal my band.  I am not bitter about this, because while having a band is quite good for things like getting out of the house and having regular contact with other humans, it does necessitate getting out of the house and having regular contact with other humans.  Also you have to organise things and it's sort of your fault when you book a tour that turns out to be riddled with snowstorms, landslides, storms at sea and The Feelers.  As well, since I was part of the band that she stole, I got to keep on playing in a band with Dylan Storey, it just wasn't my band any more.  That was actually pretty good, because a) I didn't have to organise anything much, and b) we got Simon Gooding in to play guitar too, so he and Dylan could play these really nerdy harmony solos and crack each other up on stage. 

Dylan explaining how glaciers work

So basically, I've been playing in bands with Dylan for about five years or so, and we've spent quite a bit of time hanging out in vans together.  He knows the names of all the birds and most of the stars, and he likes to play Led Zeppelin songs at soundcheck.  His song 'the water' was to my knowledge the only bFM #1 hit single ever to have both a 5/4 time signature and a flute solo, and he writes songs about awesome things like space.  He's got this way of playing guitar solos that pretty reliably makes me grin like a dog at a duckpond, and he knows all the words to 'Up On Cripple Creek' by The Band, even though they don't make a lot of sense.  Since I've know him, he's released two more albums, both of which are amazing, especially 'Out Of The Soup.'  I had a lot of fun while I was overseas playing that album to people, who would invariably say things like 'what?  Who's this guy?  This is awesome!  He's from New Zealand?'

Anyway, the reason I mention all this is that last Friday, Dylan released a new EP of some stuff he's been working on lately.  It's called 'the power of suggestion,' and I suggest that you will like it.  He's doing that thing where it's free to download, so obviously he's figured out something about economics that I don't understand or maybe he reads those blogs about the future of music distribution or something.  Anyway, what I'm saying is, it's really good, and you can have it for the price of a glass of water, so go get it from here.   It's got harmony guitar solos.

Multimedia Millicent

Last week Ms Millicent Crow and myself went to the opening of Sophie Oiseau's exhibition Ghoul Friends at the High Seas Gallery, and now I am the proud owner of half an artwork.  It's a screenprint that depicts Millicent herself, overcome by postprandial somnolence, having just devoured either a person or one of the higher apes.  People tend to think that she's a vegetarian, and mostly she is.  I suppose that sometimes she must devour her victims though, otherwise Sophie would be lying to us through art, which is a thing she would never do.  A lot of her other work, for example, is about animals that most people don't believe in but nevertheless probably exist. 

 

You're probably wondering what a lot of people are wondering: Are Millicent Crow's feet that pointy in real life?  The answer is no, dear reader, they're not.  In real life, her feet are less pointy than that.

I'm not much in the habit of buying art, not because I don't like it, but because I have a nerdy habit of paying my rent each week.  At the moment, that doesn't leave a lot left over to put in the art jar.  That will change of course once either a) we move to Whanganui, or b) I figure out a way to monetize my turtle.  Then I will have the means to buy so much art that I will be able to eat my dinner off it.  In case you were wondering, I do have some preliminary ideas for getting rich off my turtle, but at the moment they hinge on me owning a zeppelin and the turtle being able to fly it, so they're still very much in development.  It's having ideas like this, I suppose, that explains why I have not yet become rich through the natural course of events.

Ms. Millicent Crow is popping up all over the place at the moment.  When she's not devouring people or featuring in artworks lately, she's getting hounded by the press.  You could probably not find nicer press to be hounded by than the good people at Extra Curricular Magazine, though, so really it's not that big of a problem.  They were around here the other day taking photos of the cat and chatting about craft and the Nature of Art and so on, and now they've run a story on Ms. Crow's gocco prints in their latest edition.  It's a cracking read, and it's available from many reputable dealers (including the High Seas Gallery, in fact), so if your turtle has been paying dividends I urge you to rush out and buy a copy immediately.  As if that wasn't enough, there is also an interview with Millicent over on the Craft Country Wairarapa blog, in which she reveals why we're probably not going to get our bond back when we eventually do move to Whanganui.  I'm a tiny bit jealous of all this actually; nobody has put me in a screenprint for ages, and I certainly don't have anybody soliciting my opinion on the Nature of Art.  Fortunately, though, I have a blog, so my opinions are available unsolicited.

Analogue Starlings

An important development since last week is that now I have access to two analogue synthesisers.  I'm not really one of those people who can wax lyrical about the difference between analogue stuff and digital stuff, but I do get a strong impression that as a general rule, analogue stuff is more hip.  Having analogue synths on your record is a bit like buying locally grown produce from the market, or going to see a proper shrink instead of hooking down antidepressants and vodka - the effect is more or less the same as the bogan alternative, but it gives you something to talk about at dinner parties.  Ordinarily I'm more of a supermarkets and fluoxitine kind of guy, but the presence of analogue synths makes my studio look a little bit more like the bridge of a spaceship so I'm all for them.

Here is a picture of my studio, looking about thirteen percent more like the bridge of a spaceship than it used to.  It probably isn't the sort of spaceship you would want to take into hyperspace or rely upon to ensure the survival of humanity or anything, but I'm pretty happy with some of the sounds it's been making.  A couple of months ago, though, two pairs of starlings built their nests in the roof, and their chicks have just hatched.  That means that everything I record at the moment includes a sort of ambient chirping at around four kHz, which isn't really ideal.  In the nineteenth century, I would have solved a problem like this with a ferret; in the sixties I would have been able to purchase some sort of DDT-based bird repellent from my local hardware store.  In 2010, I can blog about it and download a parametric EQ to notch out four thousand Hz, which is good because I'm quite fond of starlings.