Tag Archives: music writing

MUSIC FOR CAT & FIDDLE 3: Catherine Graindorge & Iggy Pop

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CATHERINE GRAINDORGE – THE DICTATOR EP

Storm Darragh made this drive a wild one. Moors and skies packed with portent – a glove-like fit for The Dictator.

Everyone knows Iggy has a voice for the spoken word. You hear it with Death in Vegas on Aisha. You hear it on Avenue B with She Called Me Daddy. You hear it every week on BBC 6 Music, grizzled as hell but warm as hell too, inviting you in hearth-side for anecdotes and insights on music. It’s a voice to sink into. And here, set to music that follows the contours of the peaks outside, it’s a voice to feed your imagination.

The music is far from Iggy’s riotous past, though not unexpected given his later output. Belgian violinist and composer Catherine Graindorge is the visionary, crafting four tracks of string-driven moods, shimmering electronics and haunting atmospherics. No percussion, no signposted beats – just surges, pulses, drifts and searing trails of light. Iggy relays poetic warnings in The Dictator, then takes an introspective turn on Mud I and Mud II:

I walk along the river
in a thick fog.
You tell me about a book your father once gave you.
In my head turns this melody – no words.
And you read me a princess story
from a distance.

Pop’s words with Graindorge’s soundscapes? WIN. The instrumental last track of the EP, named Iggy in honour of the voice, echoes the violin-bow taps Jimmy Page did on Dazed and Confused live but here the mood is ethereal, not theatrical … a foundation for a symphonic swell which, like everything else, matches the land and the season.

Storm Darragh meets The Dictator

Try it. Add this EP to your cold weather listens, maybe even pair it up with Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack – and not just for the Pop connection. There’s a rustic, earthy spirit running through both.

More Music for Cat and Fiddle

MUSIC FOR CAT & FIDDLE 1: Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

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PLANT | KRAUSS – Raise the Roof

Entry #1 of Music for Cat and Fiddle scenic soundtracks … and there’s something about the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss pairing, and Raise the Roof especially, that really lifts in this kind of space.

Which is no surprise given the general love/unfettered worship of all things Plant that I’ve been carrying forever, but even allowing for such fanatical tendencies, there are times of year when his music touches even higher levels. The Carry Fire album begs for a misty autumn or winter morning – play it one day when you’re up before the rest of the world awakes and tell me it doesn’t belong right there in that cool, quiet, open-to-reflection moment. Raise the Roof carries a similar torch for dawns and dusks and half lights, to my mind. Darker in tone than the also excellent Raising Sand, it’s tailored for the barren beauty of the Cat and Fiddle road drive

even when you can’t see shit:

Cat and Fiddle fog all around

And it’s those opening two tracks that do the business here. The gentle desert shuffle of Quattro (World Drifts In) reveals an existential reckoning while The Price of Love slows the beat to countrified lilt dripping with lyrical truths of love ended. You don’t need to know the Calexico and Everly Brothers originals to feel something but, as we said with Midwife, dusty Americana works in conditions that elevate the remote. It’s the very opposite of urban. And in the hands of Plant and Krauss, these songs touch on the devotional. They did for this drive.

But I guess I would say that.

[if you missed the link above or are just confused by the music words and fog picture combo you fell into, here’s the background to this music-as-soundtrack thread]

MUSIC FOR CAT AND FIDDLE

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WINTER SOUNDS FOR PEAK DISTRICT DRIVES

What do you do when a new 30-minute drive to work takes you through scenery so epic, vast, bleak and beautiful that it threatens to melt your opticals and steal your oxygen?

Try not to career off the road on a hairpin bend is the first thing, I guess – ultimate life-preserver move.

But before long, you get to thinking: what music could be the soundtrack to this?

It’s got to be more than something you like. It’s got to be something you love AND it’s got to fit – it has to be deserving of the jaw-drop views from behind this widescreen windscreen lens. Anything less would be a disservice to the gift outside.

This has been my nicely indulgent task on a new but short term drive to work. Having just moved to Buxton and got a temp role through December, my drives took me on Macclesfield Road, aka the Cat and Fiddle road.

It is spectacular. The road climbs into the official Peak District and splits the moors 1,689 feet above sea level by the Cat and Fiddle Inn, a former pub that’s the second highest in the UK. The highest is Tan Hill Inn in North Yorkshire who, at the time of writing, was caught in a snow-in.

The road then carves a winding, hair-pinning zig-zag descent to Macclesfield on the other side. The moors are vast in their brown-purple haze. Dense fog is common, even when it’s clear down below. When adverse weather moves in, the road quickly becomes impassable. It’s been closed across the last three days since snow moved in on January 4th.

Fortunately, my drives didn’t encounter any snow beyond an occasional light flurry but joining that road at 5.20 am in the pitch black dark is a little bit of a test. All you can do is lean forward, follow the dots and block out the drops to the side. When there’s fog, it’s milk. Tunnel vision. For this, there is no music. Got to focus.

But the return journey a few hours later is different. Music becomes a possibility so … what’s it going to be? Melvins and Metallica might well be massive favourites but such riff-heavy, beat-driven manna is not going to be on the cards, not for this – not yet, anyway. The newness of the views and shifting natural lights is too fresh. We’re looking for an emotional, more than a physical, response from our tunes. Something to swell hearts.

It’s a time/place thing, too. If you’ve ever chosen not to play, say, David Bowie’s Low because it’s the wrong time of the day or the wrong time of the year then you know what we’re talking about here. Some music has conditions attached, even if you’ve made them up yourself. And some environments have conditions too. This is one of them.

So, the next few posts are short rambles about music that matches up to the mother of mid-winter views. See what you think of their seasonal potential.

A clear view – but for how long?