The advertising and selling of tickets has been a phenomenal success. We very quickly sold out all the tickets we put on sale, and people are clamouring for the final batch (to be released on Sunday morning). As for the show itself… well, we won’t know until it happens (15-17 October, the Horse Hospital, London), but I’d say it’s shaping up pretty well.

If you haven’t been able to get tickets to see the show, don’t worry – we’ll be performing more in the future, as well as recording a full album early in the new year and, just possibly, releasing a video of the show online. If you are coming to see the show, you might be wondering quite what to expect. Well, here’s the best I can do:

If you come expecting to see a band play a gig you’re in for a shock. Yes, there’s going to be a group of musicians standing in front of you. Yes, much of the time they will be playing songs. Yes, you’ll be able to buy drinks, sing along and clap if you want to. But we’re aiming to deliver something far more involved than a mere gig, to immerse you fully in the world we’ve created, to give you spectacle, to give you surprises. To give you the creeps.

If you come expecting to see a piece of musical theatre you’re also in for a shock. Yes, there are stories to be told. Yes, there are characters to be portrayed. Yes, we’ve put serious time and money into creating something visually compelling, with an outlandish selection of props, and costumes. But jazz hands there are not, rousing chorus numbers are not to be found, and no-one will be trying to convince you that it’s all good fun.

What is the show? The show is stories. The show is music. The show is the bastard love-child of an insane producer, a terminally morbid songwriter and a motley ensemble of musicians, actors, artists and layabouts, squeezed mercilessly into this world over the course of a gruelling, remarkable year, now tottering to its feet and vomiting out its antenatal nightmares into a basement where you can still see the stains of century-old horse blood.

Welcome to the show…

A most perfect invention that still kept immaculate time...

For the illustrations that show things happening directly on the train with the characters, we do shoots to make it easier on Lara. These are always great fun! One of our unreleased songs is called “The Case Of The Withering Eyes”, in which The Scientist asks The Doctor to give his eyes a quick checkup:

I stood in for The Doctor in this shoot...

...turned out okay though I think!

Use headphones or a giant soundsystem for full effect!

MP3

However, Book Of Sand 0.6 has now seen the light of day in the guise of the Clockwork Quartet forum.

A quick reminder of what the Book of Sand is: It’s a big old conversation tree that lets anyone create new nodes/posts/lines/branches (one of the hardest things has been finding and maintaining a consistent terminology) and allows you to traverse the tree following any conversation that takes your fancy, using indicators such as node popularity and creation date to help you decide which nodes to follow. Ed, from whose fertile imagination the concept sprang, describes it as an answer to the question: How can a million people have a conversation?

Simple, right? Well, it was in version 0.1. However, in the subsequent revisions we’ve added bookmarking, searching, a two-step captcha-ing registration process, spam- flags and an RSS feed, as well as several visual re-designs to optimise the way each node and its accompanying statistics are laid out on the page.

The potential applications of the BoS engine are pretty varied. It could be used for collaborative fiction, interactive fiction, user guides, info-bases (we use the site as its own bug report repository) and, well, anything that puts information into your standard hierarchical/taxonomic structure. Which was, until the introduction of tag clouds, pretty much how all knowledge was stored and how the world was analysed since the time of Aristotle (the ever-insightful Sinead Doyle pointed this out to me, and I’m sure would elaborate further on her related theory of knowledge if asked nicely).

However, in the first instance we’re using BoS as a forum. Why? Partially out of convenience – this idea came to fruition at roughly the same time as we started thinking “Wouldn’t it be nice if the band had a forum?”. But also because while BoS is still in its infancy we want to try it out with some sympathetic users who’re prepared to take an idea and play with it. Our experience of CQ fans so far is that they’re generally open to new ideas and won’t reject the whole concept just because it requires slightly more thought than a boring normal forum to start off with.

(Of course, having said that I’m almost inviting a bunch of angry, lazy CQ fans to fill up the site with casual abuse before hacking the site and using it to push evil viruses onto everyone new who visits.)

Anyway, the first Book is up. It’s not perfect. There are a few bugs we know about already, and probably several more that we don’t. We’re hoping that people will take the time to tell us about any that they find, as well as suggesting any bright ideas they have about how to make the forum better. But it’s working, and it’s there to be played with. So consider this an open invitation:

Come play in the sand.

The Steamdrone (& friends)

It is to our great chagrin that the beast that is the steamdrone is powered on the inside by electronics. It was long the intention that it be actually coal powered, but producing a reliable, let alone useful sound proved elusive, so we shelved that particular avenue of research for a while.

For those of you that haven’t had the fortune to hear the cursed thing, let me describe what it sounds like. The sound of the Steamdrone is a cross between…

The pedals on a Wurlitzer organ...

A harmonium...

A hurdy gurdy...

And me playing a bugle...

...at the bottom of a long staircase!

These sounds are all magically combined via Ableton Live, and brought forth on command via one of these:

The Sacred Alesis, touched only by The Engineer and his apprentice

And I was going to post an MP3 of how it sounds, but The Engineer appears to have gone to bed without sending it to me, so you shall have to wait until tomorrow for that.

Fear not though, coal boiler experiments ARE continuing, and one day we’ll have a fully functioning acoustic steamdrone for your delight and delectation…

In my first meeting with Ed we discussed the sorts of instruments we wanted to use. We were both clear that we wanted plenty of percussion, but that it should be unusual stuff – i.e. no drums, cymbals or the like. Joe Schermoly has been hard at work putting together an “alternative” kit for us out of scrap metal. Then accordions were an obvious choice, and Ed convinced me that plenty of banjos were the way forward. I was initially keen on a trombone or equivalent, as brass and steampunk go together like, well, steampunk and brass. However, we realised that finding a trombonist might be tricky, and it’s not quite as versatile an instrument as we needed (unless it’s played really really well), so we compromised by including the Steam Drone.

But aside from the actual instruments the show is written for, it’s easier to talk about what we don’t sound like than what we do.

Despite my original intention was to write something that was primarily a standalone narrative show, it was never my intention that it sound like a piece of musical theatre. In fact the whole point of the project for me was to find a way of telling stories over the course of a series of songs without resorting to a set of tired theatrical clichés.

Neither did we want to sound like other bands that have dubbed themselves “steampunk”. While there are a few such bands out there, they tend to resort to sampled beats and synths, embracing the “future” element of retro-futurism rather more than the “retro”. Which, while some of these bands to their thing very well, doesn’t sound different enough to mainstream music to excite us. (Apologies to the several smaller non-electro steampunk bands out there – I am basing my assessment of the current steampunk music “scene” on what Wikipedia tells me are the largest bands. Trend-buckers are noted and admired).

Which isn’t to say our goal is to faithfully re-create the sounds that 19th century Londoners were moshing to. I have no desire whatsoever to reproduce the 1850 – 1930 music hall style, despite its narrative traditions and emphasis (before recording as a technology even existed) on live performance.

So what are we trying to sound like? Well, there are several goals. The first is to make songs that are singable. We want people who listen to our songs to find themselves humming them later. This is easy enough to do by itself (c.f. pop music in the 20th century), but made harder by the attempt to tell complete stories over the course of a few songs. More story = more lyrics = more complex tunes = harder on the ear. But it’s a balance we’re attempting to strike. So, for example, in The Watchmaker’s Apprentice there’s a standard verse/chorus structure, but the lyrics for each chorus are completely different, because we wouldn’t have fitted the whole tale into the song had we wasted time repeating words.

The second is to engage our listeners emotionally/emotively through the music as well as the lyrics. At the most basic level we use a lot of percussion, because human beings respond profoundly and instinctively to a beat. The songs move beyond (dull) four-chord repetitions, but there are repeated chordal structures, because something you can recognise is something you can relate to. The textures are as full as I can make them with the instruments available, and I try to write the arrangements so that, for example, if we suddenly modulate to a minor key you really feel it. You’ll have to wait for the next online releases/live shows to decide whether or not I succeeded.

The final goal is to unsettle our audience. Not alienate them, not hurt them, just take them slightly outside what they are used to, enough that they sit forward in their seats rather than back. So for example, a song we’re rehearsing at the moment, called “The Ineluctable Progress of Medical Science”, switches between 5 and 3-time, so that the occasional bar catches you off guard. Likewise, “Withering Eyes” (for which we are recording the last tracks on Monday) has a 16-bar “verse” section that keeps threatening to change to four different keys, while over the top the accordion and violin play melodies that are usually only a semi-tone apart (but it’s all tied together by a really singable melody over the top.

Perhaps that’s not a very clear description of the noise that we collectively make. But it shouldn’t be. If you could fully experience music just by reading about it, what would be the point of ears?

Have patience, good readers. More music will be released online soon, and our first run of shows in September will be announced in the near future. Until then, watch this. And subscribe to our mailing list.

If you look at the about page of our website you’ll see that the show’s band comprises musicians with a bunch of different backgrounds. Some cut their teeth playing in all manner of other bands, some are classically trained freelance professionals, and some have come from a history in musical theatre. But differences apart, they are all pretty damn good at what they do, and bringing all their influences and experiences together in rehearsals has been leading to some powerful results.

The Three Banjoliers

I typically distribute the parts to each new song a couple of weeks before we plan to rehearse it, in one of our regular intensive 6-hour sessions at Ed’s place in east London. Everyone does what they need to to prep their part, so that we can put the song together and get it on its feet quickly, and then spend time making it more than just the sum of the notes on the pages.

My job during rehearsals is simple: I stand at the front with a big stick that I waggle (the “Fearsome Baton of Authority” was made by Will Segerman out of solid brass, and wielding that thing is doing wonders for my left bicep), and I say to each member of the band variations on: “Great! Now again, but better!” Generally I’m only happy with a song once it’s ready not only to play live (meaning all the parts have to flow together) but also to record (meaning each part has to be completely tight by itself). Once we’ve nailed a song we put it on the list of things to take to the studio and I hand out another set of parts.

We’ve not released anything online in a while, because the venerable Ash is taking the time to get mastering perfect, but today we just finished recording songs 5 and 6 (called “Closer” and “Withering Eyes”, which introduce The Scientist as a character), and there are several more that are ready for the studio. By the end of June we’ll have got all 13 songs in the show/album rehearsed and ready to play, record, and unleash on the world. But of course, the songs are just the beginning…

Part 2:

But its not as simple as it sounds. Representing any type of music over speakers is a whole world of mystical voodoo. Variables that can not be planned for that will lead to major difference between what I hear coming through my speakers to what you will hear when the sound reaches your speakers, your ears, and finally your brain and accounting for those before hand is an immense job. Lot of these variables that are technical, the quality of mp3, and type of speaker you use will each impact how you end up experiencing the music. As these are all technical they can be attacked in such a way. But there are other variables that are more difficult to account for. For instance mood, time of day, fuck even season and lighting will unconsiously influence your ultimate decision of ‘I like this vs I dont like this, “this is interesting” and not “hmmm … next’. So with all this uncertainly around I guess my job title should be something more like SHAMAN, as Im wielding powers I dont quite fully understand.

some photos from the weekends recording session

in other news : the music for the millions long … stop start animation project that Ed is sculpting has begun phase one. the music will mainly be repetitive percussive sounds at the tempo 76 that will change instruments as time progresses from earths creation through to a not too distant future. melodically the piece will start in f# and move only once during the sunset sequence. to give an idea of the instrumentation the ending theme which will play during the sunset squence has been composed on the Tenori-On and the opening when the earth is forming will be played with hands in Macaroni and Cheese (slowed down to suitably squelchier rumblings). there will be tuned bamboo percussion and vibraphones some where in the middle, single pipe horns might appear during medieval times aswell.

also the hydrophone which I found on ebay from this guy ( http://engravedglass.blogspot.com/ ) arrived last week was used on all cellos, organs, violins and also on the floor tom for Closer and Withering Eyes

The Steamdrone that forms the central set piece of the band’s stage show is a little bigger now and is reaching it’s capacity for pipes and horns and things.  The next phase will be to wire it up which will involve installing pipes to run smoke from a smoke-machine out of the horns and installing lights in the main horns and in the main box of the drone so that we can light it up through the smoke in different patterns. I haven’t figured out what lights will be best to use because I need strong directional lights that are small enough to fit in the the trombone horns (so small than GU10 birdie bulbs).  Suggestions welcome.

The next Quartet project is building the drum kit.  Ed and I went out with a friend, Peter, and scoured a couple of junk lots and metal scrap yards for some appropriately bangin’ junk which will make up about half of the percussion kit.  The other half is made up more conventional percussion instruments like triangles, clapsticks, a floor tom and such.  The bass of the kit will be provided by an old copper boiler which has a really nice boom to it.

So the challenge is to figure out how to organize about 30 different percussion objects so that two people can play at once and then have the ability to move it fairly easily.  I have a feeling that I’m going to need to build a rolling case for most of the instrument parts themselves, but the stand that they are on will be kind of like a clothes-drying rack idea with lots of hooks for hanging things, sitting on top of a table for storing flat objects with the boiler underneath.  The table is now built and looks kind of like a nice coffee table (or will once I paint it).  We found four Victorian carved mahogany coffee table legs at  a junk yard and used them for the base of the table to give it some weight and character.  I think it looks good.  Now I just need to build the rack and make it light enough and strong enough for transport and play, without access to a metal shop.  Welding the rack would be best but without a welder I’m trying to use harder/better quality wood stocks and good joinery techniques to make a lasting piece.

Ed approached me with the concept at one of his parties and, as I felt like being rather drunkenly enthusiastic at the time, I agreed to be a part of the project.

The Concept

In this day and age there is no longer the need to physically purchase a CD to get hold of the musical content, photographs or lyrics of the bands we love (the internet rules w00t!), but I for one still miss having that undiscovered precious something to open up and flick through when I visit iTunes or Spotify to get my musical thrills.

With the release of their first batch of songs, the Clockwork Quartet will also be publishing a limited edition, carefully illustrated pocketbook of lyrics, with the wish to fill this void left by those horrible cardboard limited addition box sets, all whilst fulfilling the curious obsession of Steampunk fanatics with beautifully made, tactile and aesthetically pleasing objects.

There’s a lot of storytelling that goes on within the songs of the Clockwork Quartet and so, in my book, releasing such an object seemed a fairly apt and genial idea from Master Saperia in my book (See what I did there?).

The Content

So, what will be in it exactly?

If you don’t know already the Clockwork Quartet (in character) are a band of travelling musicians who entertain the passengers aboard a train that travels back and forth between London and Dover. It is the individual stories of passengers they meet that the Quartet bring to life in song form.

Each of these songs will feature in the book, much like chapters, with their own title pages, lyrics and illustrations, showing the characters in situ on the train and scenes from the story. The lyrics will be annotated by the conductor with chords and music, so a reader can recreate the songs their self.

Why a pocket book?

What else would people carry with them on a short journey from London to Dover?

The Aesthetic

In line with Steampunk tradition we aim to create a high quality object, bound, embossed, litho printed and of a good weight. Pocket books of the late Victorian period and their methods of manufacture are being studied…