HW: Alan Davey Interview

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 12:05:54PM +0100, Carl Edlund Anderson typed out:
> Huh, I'd somehow spaced till now on Alan's (and Huw's!) contributions to 
> the Meads of Asphodel (me not being a _huge_ black/death metal fan). 
> I'll have to give it another listen :)

	I borrowed a copy very briefly, and wasn't sure about it. The 
songs with Huw sound like very muddy black-painted covers of Hawkwind, 
without the actual style having changed so much as the production. The 
Amorphis version of `Levitation' is the same kind of deal. The songs 
with Alan on, which on recent albums has been pretty much all of them 
hasn't it? are mainly worthwhile for showing how versatile a bass-player 
he is. I suppose I found it a lot more accessible than I do most black 
metal, that really not being my favourite genre, but I still wouldn't 
say I'd ever *want* to listen to it. I can appreciate the aesthetic of a 
kind of botched and scarred musicality but it doesn't appeal to me 
personally. Whether Meads of Asphodel are actually near the cusp at 
which a band is so good that they break out of genre, therefore, or 
whether they're just more `commercial' than, say, Mayhem (some of whose 
stuff I have liked better, and I would say is in the former category), 
is a tough one to call, especially when you don't like them enough to 
listen twice.

> Fun to hear about Alan's ideas to revive Gunslinger, swapping WAVs back 
> and forth.  I think that's a good technique also for us 
> less-than-professional would-be rock stars; we can kick out the jams 
> without leaving the house (or, more accurately, leaving our day jobs! ;)

	Kathryn a while ago bought me an album by a group called Bone, 
because she'd heard one track on the web, liked it and found out more 
about the band and then realised it was probably my area. What it is, is 
a project with a very full-of-himself but cheerful guitarist and a 
drummer from the US, who've worked together before, and Hugh Hopper of 
Soft Machine in the UK, and the band never met during the recording, it 
was all done by e-mail. I was dubious that that could work but the album 
more or less proves me wrong. It still sounds a bit bedroom in terms of 
composition, the tracks haven't had their awkward joins or surplus 
cleverness bashed off by rehearsal in a way that sometimes might have 
helped, but there's some good stuff there. It does manage to sound as if 
it came out of band improvisations, and I suppose it did, it's just that 
they were done in stages. Anyway. It's called _Uses Wrist Grab_ and it 
would seem to justify your and Alan's proposed method :-) Yours,
								 Jon


P. S. Though the guitarist appears to be enough of a geek to design his 
own `virtual software instruments' and use them in a few places and for 
all the difference it makes he really needn't have. It is all a bit 
ostentatiously clever.
-- 
"When fortune wanes, of what assistance are quantities of elephants?"
	    (Juvaini, Afghan Muslim chronicler, c. 1206)
 Jon Jarrett, Fitzwilliam Museum, jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk