Day 3 – Technical glitches

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It’s been a slightly frustrating morning with microphone troubles but some new tunes have been borne from it.

While Sam, Alex and David were trying to make sense of the strange things happening with the contact mic on Alex’s contrabass clarinet, I wrote up and developed a couple of ideas that cropped up during yesterday’s improvisations. We also have a new cover – and not by an established doom act this time. I’ll be both surprised and delighted if anyone manages to identify it when we play it live…

The technical support department doing some emergency soldering

The technical support department doing some emergency soldering...

Day 1

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As mentioned in a previous blog post ORE are currently taking a week to explore ideas with contrabass clarinet player Alex Sramek, culminating in our performance together at The Cube Cinema in Bristol on Saturday the 25th.

We aim to keep putting snippets up here and there. Today, an excerpt from our dabblings with Seven Angels by Earth. This was only the second piece we have ever played together and also only the second time ORE have covered this tune. Our day with Alex started well though, with an EPIC fifty minute improvised set that included our new tune “Morton” along the way.

For those of you who can’t make the Bristol gig, keep the evening of Thursday the 23rd free for some improvised group drone in Birmingham. All will be revealed soon.

Tomorrow we are joined by David Morton, for some proper recording. Enjoy!

AUDIO: ORE – Demo, acoustic recording of Seven Angels by Earth(excerpt)

Stuart notating the piece for Alex:

Preview:
Richard by Sunn O)))

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Behold, a preview video of Stuart playing his multiphonic arrangement of Richard by Sunn O))). Sam has yet to learn his (also multiphonic) part but it’s pretty bloody clear is going to sound HEAVY!

[flv:http://www.soundofore.com/video/richard_multiphonic_tuba_ORE.flv http://www.soundofore.com/video/richard_multiphonic_tuba_ORE.jpg 550 330]

A week of exploration

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On the 25th of February, we have our third formal performance as ORE, featuring our special guest, Alex Sramek. We are so pleased to be playing in Bristol and at such a great venue as The Cube Cinema, an old favourite of ours.

In the run up to our gig we will be spending some time in the studio exploring our collaboration with Alex and his contrabass clarinet, the sound of which is something to behold. We will be developing some ideas for our performance, recording some bits and getting out and about to odd venues to explore the effect of our surroundings on our sound, and for some pop-up performances. These will mainly be around Birmingham and Worcester and might be over before you even get there…but if you want to be kept informed about what we are up to, please check our updates on Twitter.

We hope to see you at some point on this journey. We are very excited to have Alex over from the US to work with us. This is a rare combination and we hope you will come to hear / witness it in Bristol on the 25th February, or at least one of our pop-up performances beforehand.

Audio – “In Hungary They Used to Burn Bagpipers”

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We have made some audio available on the Downloads page – a rough demo of the tune “In Hungary They Used to Burn Bagpipers”.

The recording is now a few months old, and is of a version of the piece for three tubas, multi-tracked by me. Those of you who have followed this project from the beginning will recall that ORE was originally a trio before it settled into its final core of Sam and me.

The reference to Hungary in the title is two-fold: firstly, as you may already have guessed, it’s in tribute to Mayhem and Sunn O))) mainstay Attila Csihar, but also to Gyõrgy Kurtág, the great Hungarian composer of small-scale yet massive music, and Bela Bartók, whose piano music I enjoy playing.

I don’t remember why I had a vision of bagpipers being burned at the stake, but “dudasók” (bagpipes) is one of the few inoffensive words I know in the Hungarian language, which doubtless had something to do with it…

The whole thing is due for a revisit; this certainly isn’t the piece’s final form. I’m looking at adapting it for two tubas and contrabass clarinet for our collaboration with Alex Sramek in February.

Special guest

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We like to collaborate with like-minded musicians, which is why we were delighted when Alex Sramek got in touch with us towards the end of 2011. It was obvious from the first conversation that we should make some noise together. Alex plays contrabass clarinet and has been described by The Clarinet as “The world’s loudest clarinet player”. He also shares our love of long, low drones and improvisation.

Alex is coming to the UK in February for the SABRe (Sensor Augmented Bass clarinet Research) event at Keele University. It seemed like an obvious opportunity to get some stuff done together, culminating in a live performance together at The Cube Cinema in Bristol on the 25th – lovely poster below, designed by another Alex.

We are currently trying to organise something to take place in Birmingham while Alex is over, alongside some recording time, pop-up performances (well, not that pop-up with two tubas and a contrabass clarinet), playing in some odd spaces, etc. If you’d like to suggest something you want to see / hear us do during the last couple of weeks in February, please get in touch or post a comment below.

The music of ORE

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As a follow up to Stuart’s post “The live birth of ORE”, I’d just like to add that a crucial element in the success of our debut performance and sound in general, is Stuart’s ability to write original material for us to perform.

In our performance at Supersonic we played only one cover, our take on Earth’s “Ouroboros is Broken” from “Extra-Capsular Extraction”. All other material in our set was original and all written by Stuart.

Stuart is always writing and developing stuff, which means ORE will always be pushing forward!

Add to this that the structure of the pieces in any given performance are semi-improvised, with Stuart conducting proceedings according to what feels right on the night, and it should always guarantee a fresh experience for anyone witnessing ORE live.

(Select scores will be released through our Downloads section)

The live birth of ORE

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Well, we did it.

I’ve taken a fair few musical risks in my time, one of which involved learning to play jazz chords on tenor banjo in a matter of days. Don’t ask. None of these compares with the risks we took with ORE’s live debut at Supersonic 2011.

For a start, when we began working on this project in earnest in early 2011, Sam had only played a tuba once before, and then more as a noise source rather than by using any conventional techniques. The dedication and time required to develop the necessary stamina on an instrument like the tuba was enormous, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone make that sort of progress on a brass instrument before.

Add to that already massive undertaking the technical challenges involved in amplifying the instruments, and there’s an awful lot that could have gone wrong. Mercifully, nothing did.

Best of all, we’ve both enjoyed the experience enormously.

So, where next for ORE? Musically there is a lot of exploring to do – what can the genre of drone/doom encompass when its bedrock is bass brass instead of guitars and feedback? We don’t know, but we intend to find out. We know that there’s lots to explore with regard to our live sound too. Intensity is everything.

Thanks to everyone who came to see us at Supersonic, especially those who couldn’t get in! We hope to see you at the IKON gig in November.

– Stuart