Vialka will be back here in the studio tomorrow for a couple of days, recording another song or two for their next album.

Now, however, I plan to relax for the evening and watch some corny old movies whilst playing the guitar. See you next year.

The day after Brown Vs Brown left, Vialka arrived and we recorded a batch of songs for the next album. I think they'll be back early next year to record one or two more, then I'll get to mixing it in February or thereabouts.

Concurrently I continue working on songs for my next solo album which I still intend to start recording in late Summer 2009. Well I guess that's it for the moment, gonna enjoy my day off and play the guitar for a while now whilst regarding a few episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. See you next time?

Here are a few videos made by my brother Dave at the first gig of the tour: the tractor shed in Watseka Illinois: Trashcan of Love. Move The King. Charge. I'll update the list as more videos appear, from this show and hopefully some of the later gigs as well.

The Baltimore show at Orion Studios was recorded on 24 tracks, once I get the files I'll have a listen and perhaps post some thrilling bits.

Below are a couple of photos from the tour. At the left: along the way from Waterbury CT to Schenectady NY we stopped for a pause in - where else - a nice New England cemetery. Below right: at the home of Deb and Paul Sears in Baltimore MD. Click pics for closer view.

With the tour at the cusp of commencement, it should come as no great shock that I'm spending the next two days making sure I've been a good tour organiser and haven't neglected any little details such as no chocolate M and M's in the lounge, only flourescent yellow shag carpeting in our deluxe penthouse suites, training our personal stagehands to properly towel us off after each particularly strenuous musical passage, and that the owners of the homes in which we will be performing our livingroom shows have correctly re-modeled their properties and re-built their domiciles according to our strict requirements.

In other exciting news, Chris Cutler is here and we've been making some final little changes of track order to the Henry Cow Anniversary box set . I'll give Chris a copy of the whole thing which he will ponder whilst I'm doing my tour, and when I return in late October I'll make any final changes and send the whole thing off to the CD factory.

That's it for now, next update will be from somewhere on the road in the USA!

See you next Saturday in Toulouse????

Since the last update I've mostly been continuing work on the Henry Cow Anniversary box set (info here) which has been quite an interesting mastering project to say the least. I promise to post some stories about it soon, with a couple of "before and after" snippets perhaps. I'll be finished with it in a matter of days, hard to believe because I've been working on it on and off for several years now, and this spring and summer alone have put well over 1000 hours into it.

I did a 60-second tune for this project.

In the studio later this month Peter Blegvad, John Greaves, Chris Cutler and meself will be recording a new album of Blegvad tunes.

I'm sure there was something else I wanted to say but as usual can't think of it right now. Maybe next time!

Being a livingroom show, space is extremely limited: we can allow 20 people. The cost is $20, we'll even provide chip-like snacks for all! You're welcome to bring your own beverages etc as well.

I've also been working on song ideas for my next solo album, filing them away in some spare compartment of my memory until next summer when I plan to start recording them. The basic idea for this next album is longer songs (as in 3-4 minutes) with parts that repeat (not surprising after my previous album I reckon) hopefully very melodic, a fairly spare production, all performed by myself as usual, letting things groove a bit more than I have lately, letting the rhythm section do things in a more "traditional" pop/rock manner in my own sort of way. I suppose you could say it's taking a little bit more of the approach I took on my first album, except hopefully with the benefit of the intervening 17 years of playing/singing/songwriting/production experience! If all goes as roughly planned I'll start recording in summer 2009, for a release in 2010. That might seem a long ways off now but it really isn't...

Last but not least, on July 16, an unexpected visitor showed up at the at the marché nocturne in Mirepoix...

For the last week I've been concentrating on finishing up the last few tracks for the new Vril album which we recorded mostly last summer. I'll be working on that right up till the end of June. As always I'm continually learning about recording, playing and production, always hoping to improve my craft(s), and I'm quite pleased and proud of how this new album is turning out. The sound is really good and the band was much better with the addition of Pierre Omer on guitar. The basic quartet (Chris Cutler on drums, me on bass, Lukas Simonis and Pierre Omer on guitars) was recorded "live" in the studio; sometimes that's all you hear on the record, other times Lukas and I overdubbed some guitars, and now I'm happily playing around and doing whatever needs to be done (the occasional wacky orchestration, you know.) If all goes well it will be released in Autumn 2009 on ReR.

I've also been working steadily on songs for my next solo album, and getting pretty excited about that. I still plan to wait until I have enough more or less complete song ideas for the whole album (for me that means around 40 minutes of material) before I start recording it. I'm really taking my time developing this one and letting the song ideas ferment a while in my head. Once it's finished (2009? 20010??) I plan to make it available directly from me on DVD-R 96k 24bit for those of you who want the best possible replication of the final result, as well as of course standard audio CD from ReR (assuming Chris will want to release it that is!)

I've finally started putting together my discography. I'll include my comments about the albums, and a link to the artist or record if possible. Still in progress but have a look anyway!

Then I'll get on to mastering the 4-CD ReR Sampler.

The past few weeks have been taken up mostly with a new burst of building work here at the house, trying to get the "guest suite" finished in the next month or so. This is a new set of rooms for our visiting friends or band members who stay here during recording sessions. It's completely seperated from the rest of the house which will give both us and the bands some needed privacy and quiet after a long day's work.

Here's the exciting photo gallery from Maggie's and my trip to the USA trip last January.

Here's my Exciting New Video Page, featuring lots of 320 X 240 avi videos. As I worked on the page I realized all of the videos seem to include water and/or fire in some form or another. Isn't that thrilling? No? Well in case that's not thrilling enough, head on over to the Bob Drake's Cabinet of Curiosities page and watch some videos of us live at the Mercury Cafe in Denver Colorado, recorded on January 19 2008. If that still isn't enough thrills for one day, I do not know what to suggest.

After the gigs Maggie and I headed southwest, exploring some hot springs and national parks in Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and California.
Death Valley was especially fantastic, here's one of many photos I took there (click the pic for a bigger view); a vast expanse of mineral salts in the foreground, with the Panamint range in the distance. I had vaguely hoped to spend a night in the peculiarly inviting and allegedly haunted Aramagosa Hotel there in Death Valley, but alas, time was running a bit short and various road closures due to abnormally snowy conditions were not exactly helping.

Upon arriving in San Jose, I spent 4 days at Further Confusion, frolicking with other furry folks. Can you spot me in this pic from the saturday night dance???.

Well...then Maggie and I drove back to Denver and flew back to France, where I now type this from my attic lair for your thrills and entertainment. First thing I did upon arriving home was finish up the Brainville mastering. It's a band consisting of Daevid Allen, Chris Cutler and Hugh Hopper. Here"s a video of the group. The recordings are all two-track stereo of varying quality; my job, as Mr. Cutler likes to put it, was to "make them sound fabulous", which I did to the best of my abilities; a bit of a challenge when dealing with two-track recordings of wildly differing audio properties and no possibility to change the mix. Next was finishing up the mix and mastering of the Chris Cutler - Fred Frith - Tim Hodgkinson shows recorded at The Stone in New York City back in 2006. Both this and Brainville should be released on cd sometime later this year I reckon. Next thing was to finish up the mixes for the 3rd What's Wrong With Us album. I'm awaiting the band's decision about the song sequence and then that'll be done. Next I'll start mixing the new Vril album which we recorded late last summer. After that, who can say; except that there is a plethora of exciting and thrilling things coming up, and of course, as always, you, the reader of this exciting news page, will be the very first to know. Or the very second anyway.

The Cabinet of Curiosities show in Denver which took place January 19th was lots of fun, it was the second show we've done so far, the first full-length show, and it seemed everyone had a nice time. We also added a new full-time member: Jason DuMars on sax. Jason played the sax on the album version of Concrete Husky (from 13 Songs and a Thing) and when I learned he was coming to Denver to see the show I asked him to sit in on that tune. During the rehearsals he ended up playing on several others as well, and playing a few keyboard bits too. It just seemed to happen naturally and sounded great...and like the rest of us he's willing to travel and work hard basically for the fun of it...so he's in.

That's all for tonight. I'll try and post a few photos from this trip in the next few days.

Back in Summer of 2006 What's Wrong With Us were here to record their new album, which I mixed early in 2007 (or was it late 2006? shocking the way time flies eh?) They weren't completely happy with the album from a musical standpoint and decided to replace a couple of songs with new ones. (I agreed it was a good idea too.) After many failed attempts at co-ordinating a time to come back to my place, they finally recorded the new songs at a studio in their hometown of Geneva and sent me the tracks, which I'll be mixing next week.

After the Denver extravaganza, Maggie and will drive across the Rocky Mountains and the lovely deserts to the bay area where I'll be attending Further Confusion. While we're on the furry topic: I suppose if you had asked me to imagine the last place I'd expect one of my drawings to crop up, I might have answered something like: "on an educational website about the Chumash Indian language"...but lo and behold...my fat little wolf is being used to illustrate the Chumash word for "full"!

OK that's all for now, I think there was something else I wanted to say but I can't think of it. Maybe next time!

I took this pic of Chris in the studio today, he's sorting through some of the dozens of live Henry Cow recordings. The console there with all the knobs is part of the home-made mixing desk built by Maggie Thomas, with which I used to make headphone mixes for band members during tracking sessions. We built this back in the pre-computer days when I was still recording on ADATs; I could make 2 stereo or 4 mono cue mixes with it. In recent years I do it right in the recording software (Samplitude Professional 9.1), where one can make up to 999 live stereo cue mixes...which ought to pretty much cover the needs of most of the kinds of groups I work with, except in the unlikely event some band member decides they want 1000 seperate headphone mixes at once..."sorry I can only give you 999 at once, will that do?" and then they'd have to pay us to build the other 989 headphone amps and buy another 980-something headsets, so that's not likely to occur anytime real soon, do you think?

Oh ok one more thing: I'll be 50 years old tomorrow...half a century seems as if it ought to be significant somehow but I guess it isn't other than it sounds like a long time!

I've finally started updating my horribly out-of-date links page. It's a never-ending job, as you know, trying to keep up with your friend's websites but things do seem to be settling down a bit. Also added some new photos to the cemetery photos section, in the France and Portugal pages.

While working on the above website updates, I listened to a couple of albums I worked on during 2005 and 2006, and enjoyed them so much thought they ought to be mentioned here again: "Sookie Jump" by The Rude Staircase, and "...and though we're told we've got it all, the all we've got is freezing cold" by Condor Moments. Both were released late this year by What Delicate Recordings. To my ears these are both pretty exceptional and original albums in the rock/pop-ish vein and recommend them to those of you who enjoy a good, fresh, well-written and produced rock/pop (?) song that doesn't attempt to sound like anyone else or to emulate the sound-'o-today. OK I'm tried of looking for adjectives now (and just plain tired too) so see you next time!

Some years ago, I had the idea of trying to set up a central website or organisation of artists and recording engineers who were opposed to having their work ruined by volume war mastering, even down to a logo we might put on the CDs and a little text explaining there is nothing "wrong" with this CD because it's not "as loud as" other CDs, you just have to put the volume back up a notch or two. I brought up the idea on a popular internet mastering forum where, to my surprise, I was promptly laughed off the page by cynical, sarcastic engineers. I just carried on in my personal anti-volume war campaign, and in the meantime somebody else (nothing to do with me) managed to create an organisation similar to the one I'd imagined, it's called Turnmeup.org. So have a look if you're interested in the main reason why so many modern recordings sound flat, mushy and harsh. (but HEY you can leave the volume control on 1 instead of 3, so it MUST be BETTER!!!)