The Key To The Secret Garden: Working In Banff National Park - 2010-01-26 07:44:39
It’s a rare thing indeed to be granted access to work inside the Banff National Park – I feel very honoured. I have been in meetings for hours – these days I seem to spend more time on logistics and far less on creation. I have come to accept that in order to tread new ground, sometimes there are certain protocols to be observed. Yes – the guerrilla route is always an option, but although it takes longer to convince the powers that be, I can achieve a lot more by being up front about my intentions. I now have permission to create work within a protected area – there is already talk of frozen waterfalls, natural amphitheatres and abandoned towns. Exciting stuff.
updated by andy
Extremes - Experiencing a Temperature Inversion in Frozen Sulphur - 2010-01-24 12:51:41
I have never felt cold like this. The air is almost viscous, like walking inside cooling glass. My eyelids froze together, the moisture inside my nose froze making it harder to breathe, my hair turned white with ice crystals. I was at a place called Basin, where hot springs were discovered in the 19th Century – the irony did not escape me. I lost the use of my hands for a while – my fingers were crushed in a huge door when I was a child and now the cold drains out the life, leaving my right hand brittle and rigid.
I was in a temperature inversion – where mountain air becomes so cold and heavy that it sinks, flipping the warmer air on top so places at lower altitudes experience bitter weather. I eventually found the cave I was looking for. The warm springs inside were very welcome but it was twenty minutes before I could move my hand again. Outside the place was magical – sulphur steam had clung to the vegetation as frost, making for a surreal landscape – part Narnia, part Singing Ringing Tree.
updated by andy
The Land That Slumbers - 2010-01-24 12:47:59
There seems to be a recurring topic of conversation at Banff that I overhear at virtually every mealtime – sleep or the lack of it. I thought it was just a combination of altitude and jet lag to begin with but as the days go by more and more people (even after settling in at the centre) have been announcing vivid dreams, lucid dreaming, shared imagery, nightmares etc. This area has held a fascination for me for some time so I started attending talks on the locale, researching at the library and asking everyone I met about their experiences to see if there was some pattern to these oddities.
I discovered that the site the Banff Centre is built on (Tunnel Mountain) was originally called Sleeping Buffalo. This was sacred turf for the first nations Stoney people. They had recognised this area as special centuries ago and came to the mountain on vision quests although no-one actually settled on the mountain to live despite the place being ideal hunting ground. This sleep phenomenon has apparently been recognised and speculated over before. Various theories have been put forward such as the meeting of underground rivers causing strong magnetic currents or the bowl shape of the valley acting as a sort of satellite dish. Whatever the cause is - there is something going on here that is affecting a great number of artists on residency at the Banff Centre.
updated by andy
Optics, Tangents And The Turn of The Century - 2010-01-24 12:42:40
I love the very idea of photography – suspended moments that I stare at for so long I could almost climb inside them. Longhand non-digital processes that incite change before your eyes, it borders on the alchemical. Digital has changed the process but for me it still stirs the blood, there is a sense of lineage. If I were to choose any period in history to experience at first-hand it would be the so-called Fin de Siècle/La Belle Epoch of the cusp between centuries. The Brothers Lumière, Tesla, Bell, Marconi, Freud, Debussy, Einstein - the list goes on. For some reason, photography captures the essence of this age for me. Spawned in the 19th Century and herald for the moving image, it is science, archive and art form all in one.
I work in a very visual way. Create a scene, live in it, work with the emotions that are generated there. On many occasions I have worked with visual media before turning my attentions to music. Photography and film have often acted as catalysts for my music and as such they are incidental – not this time. I have been immersed in a feeling here and have been exploring this with image to the extent that I can’t separate it from the music – they are inextricably linked. Moreover, this has developed to incorporate a third element. I haven’t written poetry since I was a child. Songs yes but not poetry – but here I am, words burning in my head. I have never worked in this way before – this thing is appearing and changing before my eyes. But the thing that feeds you is the thing that feeds you, so I’m happy to follow wherever it may lead.
updated by andy
Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind (Part 3) - 2010-01-20 18:49:20
There is a point to all of this – I assure you. My apologies for not posting this grand finale sooner. If you recall, I was down at the river-bed when I heard a noise which came from the direction of the tracks in the snow. Ok - here we go…
I froze and said out loud to the noise “ ok…er…obviously you don’t want me to be here so I’m just going to get back on the trail” at which point I retraced my steps back to the path and promptly found the biggest stick I could and a fit-in-your-palm rock that I could hurl Braveheart style with pin-point accuracy to hit any Beastie who was looking for a scrap right between the eyes. The fact that I have double-jointed elbows so when I play darts and aim at the bullseye I end up having to retrieve it from the temple of the person standing on my right had absolutely no bearing on my decision – I was going to go down fighting.
So – with a rock in my pocket and half a tree as my arsenal I kept an eye on the surroundings and headed on up the trail. I had started to climb now - over an hour into the forest and still not a soul about. A beautiful green/blue frozen river snaked below me and with nothing stirring it was all quite surreal - I felt like I was in a Bruegel painting. I kept on the trail climbing all the time for about another hour - I still didn’t see another soul but I was in good spirits. Then the same tracks appeared that were down by the river. Oh great, I think – it’s circled round and got ahead of me. So I carry on for another 20 minutes or so during which I had turned into some sort of mad tracker, always mindful of the markings in the snow. Suddenly they veer left and head on up the mountain – hoorah! I strike out on the trail and after another 10 minutes or so I hear engines, big diesel ones.
I burst out of the forest to a wildly contrasting scene. There are trucks and diggers everywhere – some sort of land clearing operation. I felt jarred and comforted at the same time, this was my first encounter with human traffic for hours. I felt triumphant – I had faced my fear and got to the end of the trail. I mentioned previously about roads being man-made and therefore a symbol of safety in the wilderness. I decided I’d had enough excitement for one day and followed a trail back toward the Banff centre that ran parallel to the road. I felt great and laughed to myself when I actually came across the tracks yet again. I had stumbled on the exit point from when they had headed up the mountain slope. Here – they emerged from the bush and stopped at the road before turning off at 90° in the opposite direction to where I was heading – bye! (after much consulting in books and on various websites – this was most likely a wolf).
I go through a couple of holiday villages on my way back and at the second one there’s a fork in the road. One said “To Banff”, the other one was barricaded but looked to follow the contour of the mountain. It looked beautiful – banned to vehicles and deep snow on the road. So I take the latter – again not a soul around but there were tracks everywhere. Again, I spotted coyote, deer and rabbit. There was a sheer cliff on one side of the road and a near vertical drop on the other and yet cascading down the mountainside was a herd of deer. They tumbled onto the road just ahead of me and straight down the drop. I couldn’t see the Stag so I peered over the edge and there he was waiting for his harem to catch up. I’d never seen deer this close – it was wonderful, a young happy male with his catch.
Still thinking on this I carry on round a blind bend and almost walk into a very unhappy old male with absolutely no other deer with him. I’m less than 10 feet away and this stag stands as tall as me at the shoulder with what looks like Liberace’s candelabra cast-offs screwed into the side of its head. This stag is massive – in fact it’s so big it almost blocked the entire road. It is also totally pissed off. It’s the end of the rutting season and the stags are still pumped to the gills with testosterone – it has no harem and is not glad about it in the slightest. Still I manage to hope that I can pass without incident and pray that it doesn’t start pawing the ground and lowering its head…it starts pawing the ground and lowering its head.
There is no escape route – I have a cliff on one side of me and sheer drop on the other. If I turn and run I’m going to get skewered in the back. I notice another stick in the snow by me and I gingerly bend down and pick it up. So I have these two sticks and my heart is in my mouth. Suddenly (and I still can’t believe I did this) I find myself screaming obscenities at the stag. It looks at me as if I’m demented but for some reason it actually stopped getting ready to charge and we ended up doing this sort of little dance round each other till we passed and the stag, still looking at me as if I was barking, sauntered round the corner. I got round the bend and I didn’t stop – my pulse was banging in my ears.
An hour or so later I got back to the Banff Centre without anything else happening. Glad to be alive and also changed somehow. I’m not suggesting for a minute that one picks a fight with a stag - I was very lucky. Neither am I attempting to be preachy. What I am saying is that in facing the unknown or experiencing the unexperienced, there is an element of myself I have to deal with in order to gain a little ground and this was a very direct way, a plunge pool if you like, of engaging with that. I am no thrill seeker, adrenaline junkie or extreme sportsman. But I did come to Banff to embrace new experiences whilst also recognising that I have found something I want to keep in my music. People’s imagination can reach beyond the stars but I increasingly like to work raw experience, raw feeling into my own imaginings and for me it’s a way of giving some substance to the intangible. Artists can spend months at the Banff Centre and never go beyond its borders. That’s absolutely fine – but for me I need to connect with the essence of a place and drag something of that connection back with me to fuel the forge. This is the stuff that makes the mysteries take shape in the blasts of snow against the window or in the last sips of a single malt and appear to me, if I’m granted brief respite from my insomnia, in the flurries of a dream.
updated by andy
Close Encounters of The Furred Kind Part 2 - 2009-12-20 11:40:08
It’s a funny thing, fear. It comes in many shapes and sizes and depending on the way you react to it, fear can either help or hinder you. One can be paralyzed with fear but fear can also be the catalyst that galvanises you into action. One thing you can be sure of though – fear affects everyone.
Me – I have an over-active imagination. It’s the generator of ideas, the maker of connections, the insight that gives the revelations for me to act on. But I can never ever switch it off, so sometimes it works against me big time and I have to challenge myself to break whatever notion is forming in order to move forward otherwise it becomes a block and I procrastinate.
Procrastination is not only the vehicle by which people avoid things they don’t want to do – it’s also an excellent means of not confronting fear. We become experts in fact at avoiding far by way of procrastination.
In this case I found myself avoiding going for walks. I had sought advice and had been told everything from a) don’t go at all, b) yes but travel in groups that make a lot of noise to c) yes you can go but it’s a risk you have to be ok with and finally d) yes go on your own but buy some anti-bear spray.
Now – fear can stop you in your tracks from doing anything new in life (as in music). I therefore consider my options and think c) and d) are the way to go. Besides option d) conjured up visions of Batman dangling from a helicopter over the sea by a ladder with a shark on his leg desperately try to reach for his Bat Anti-Shark Spray (that episode scarred me for life). Which prompted further investigation.
Anti-Bear Spray is like Bear mace (pepper gas). I ask how you use it and was told it’s a last resort – if you’re at extremely close quarters you can spray this in the bear’s face and it will give you enough time to get away. Spray…this…in…the …bear’s…face. Standing on their hind legs a bear can be anything between 8 – 10ft tall. I decide that the spray probably doubles as a breath freshener – if it’s sprayed in the back of the bear’s throat just as it’s jaws are closing over your head, the last thing you’ll smell is minty goodness instead of decaying Salmon.
Fear can also instil a healthy respect for a situation – and you have to respect the countryside out here. Disregard this respect at your peril…
So I am at the entrance to the forest having gone for option c) plus a healthy respect for the bush. Having already spied a Coyote at close quarters heading off in the same direction as me – I go in to face my fears.
I descend towards the river. The path winds through snow-covered pine trees and there is no sound - no birds, no wind – nothing. I pick up the Coyote tracks again and I’m pleased to be able to distinguish them from domestic dogs. I also see deer and rabbit tracks – snow is great for archiving who’s been around.
Fifteen minutes in and I’m really enjoying myself – descending all the time to the river. That is until I came across some other tracks. These were as big as my palm and headed the way I was going. Claw marks were present so it wasn’t a Cougar and again these were purposeful, straight and independent of human footprints. There were also the brush marks of a large tail in the snow. The tracks had come out of the bush in a straight line and were now following the main trail.
The thing about domestic dogs is that they meander all over the place, trotting happily here and there and so their tracks do the same. Wild tracks don’t – perhaps it’s something to do with conserving energy, perhaps it’s a stealth tactic but wild tracks always seem purposeful – these tracks were exactly that. They went all the way to the river then veered off. The animal had padded across virgin snow that had settled on the frozen waters towards the opposite bank.
Fine I thought, whatever it was – it’s gone. This was a great spot to take photographs for the next project and so I stepped out on to the river bed to erect a tripod. At that moment I heard what can only be described as a low sounding rattle-snake mixed with a growl and it was coming from the direction of the tracks.
More to follow…
updated by andy
Close Encounters Of The Furred Kind.. Garbi Goes Ferrell - 2009-12-08 19:08:00
Gawd bless Clarks Commandos – that’s what I say. Does anybody remember them? They were shoes that came in a military green box and had a Clarks Commando Survival handbook and…they had a compass in the heel of the shoe – how cool is that? For a 6-year old these shoes granted instant stealth, super powers and if you read the handbook (which I did regularly by torchlight because that’s what Commandos do) – tracker ability
So I go for a walk this weekend – I’d like to find some location shots for the next album. I go out of the Banff centre to look for the start of the Hoodoo Trail. I’ve been on this part way before but everything changes in the snow. I’m at the side of the road and I notice some animal tracks. Call it instinct or call it bestowed wisdom from the Clarks Commando Survival Guide but I figure that these tracks belong to a Coyote. There are no human footprints alongside so it wasn’t a domestic dog, the claw marks were visible so it wasn’t any kind of big cat and something about the placement – they were ordered, purposeful and straight.
So I take a photograph and move on. The tracks disappear and then re-appear at further down the road. I start to follow them – it’s stopped here, moved into the undergrowth there, broke into a faster gait at this point then they disappear again. I stop and crouch to take some more photos of the tracks, straighten up and there, standing on a snow covered rock just to my left is the owner of the tracks – a Coyote.
I hold my breath and slowly turn towards it. The Coyote is Grey / Brown with a bushy tail – it’s big, could pass for a young female Wolf but I’ve danced with wolves, well walked with them anyway and this isn’t one. It regards me then trots off and melts into the trees.
This was a wonderous and spectacular sight to behold. I was also pretty damn chuffed with myself for getting the tracks right, my rigorous Clarks Commando training by torchlight had paid off (I bet this is how Ray Mears started too). But then I realise it headed off in the same direction I was planning to go. I was still standing on the road I so I felt OK – now I was going to head into the trees too and suddenly the illusion of safety that roads give evaporates. There is no invisible force-field of protection that is proffered just because something is man-made. The same goes for trails through forests. Just because a swathe is cut through the trees as a designated path this does not grant you immunity from anything apart from when you see other people. But it’s well below -20 degrees today and only mad wolves and Englishmen go out in the morning sun. There is absolutely no-one about and the snow has stolen sound – it is silent. I look into the trees and trail descends before me towards the Bow river. I step on to the trail. That decision was the start of a 4 hour adventure – my encounters with the wild things of the forest were about to get much much closer…. More to follow…
updated by andy
Wild Thing...You Make Ma Heart Sing - 2009-12-04 21:00:52
Strange one this…where does “civilization” end and “nature” begin? When the street lights end? Or where the tarmac turns into a dirt track? Being here it feels like civilisation is an extremely fragile and transitory thing. In the UK it’s hard to get away from the impact of industrialisation – even the countryside as we know it – most of it has been shaped to accommodate human existence. So even if we think of nature as being ‘out there’, the rural idyll we hold in our hearts has been shaped by human influence.
In Canada it seems different – I’ve sensed this in other places to such as Iceland. It doesn’t matter how big or how advanced cities become – here civilization barely clings to the landscape. I don’t mean that in a negative way at all, what I mean is that this really is the largest land mass as a single country on the planet and for all it’s advances, all any society can do in a place as vast as this is cling on. Civilization barely scratches the surface.
I’m talking to someone from the music department outside my hut. It’s snowing and there’s also bark falling to the floor from the tree we’re standing next to. I look up and there’s a woodpecker about 3ft from our heads hammering away looking for insects under the bark. It couldn’t care less that we were there. Same day I see builders shooing four deer out of a construction site. Last week I went for a walk and two minutes outside of the Banff Centre I run smack into a herd of Elk. I won’t confuse Deer with Elk a second time – these are HUGE! Pumas live on the same mountain as the Banff Centre. None of them could give a toss that we are here. They’re not tame – far from it, it’s just that I don’t think anyone told them that a centre for inspiring creativity was going to be happening where they live. Even a centre dedicated to innovation and advancement such as this can do nothing more than cling on. There is no demarcation of where urbanisation ends and nature begins. Wilderness is all around us, through us and will not even mark the passing of human kind when we have finally consumed all that we can – and then go pop!
updated by andy
They Say First Impressions Last... - 2009-11-24 12:20:21
This is the view that hits you from the dining room! There's a connecting gantry from the halls of residence to the Vistas restaurant. The first time I saw the mountains, I just stopped dead on this bridge between buildings and gawped. A week on and I still can't tear myself away from what I see.
I have taken to breakfasting alone so I can collect my thoughts for the day. I grab a table right next to the window. It's my favourite time just writing notes in my black book which serves to mop up the overspill of thoughts and shards of ideas that are hurriedly scrawled down before I resume slurping coffee and staring at the waking world.
I am really jet lagged and I'm having trouble adjusting to the timezone shift but the strange thing is that a lot of people who are resident here can't sleep either Whether they have flown over from Europe or somewhere more local it doesn't seem to make any difference...very odd. In fact it seems to dominate conversation at the inner table sometimes - I wonder if its something to do with the altitude?
updated by andy
Banff Residency Week 1 - 2009-11-20 07:19:57
And so it begins...
A daytime flight and a window seat is all it takes for me to be occupied - 9 hours and I'm looking out, when I can to peer beyond the canopy to the map below. We cross the arctic and I am mesmerised by white mountains - beautiful and desolate - I've never seen anything like it before. I found myself straining, searching for life but there was none that I could see.
We crossed Baffin Island - talc white snow dunes shaped by the terrific force of the wind and ice flows making a web of "canals". The cabin crew served ice cream at this point to mark our passing which was a nice touch even though I don't eat stuff like that.
Canada is vast...and I mean vast! We flew for hours overland before we reached Calgary. The landscape changed dramatically as we flew. Grey rock as far as the could see veined by a network of what I thought were roads but were actually fissures on the surface into which snow had been blown. This gave way to a sea of short brown grass - the Tundra, which in tern gave way to fields of gargantuan proportion - the crops had been gathered in such a way as to leave exquisite patterns, some following the contours of the land, others making defiant geometric shapes - like Hundertwasser had been let loose on thousands of square miles. The colours are shades of gold, rust, sand and tired grey/brown and I realise that I too am tired - beyond exhaustion in fact. My head is banging like crazy and there is pain in my left eye - a migraine approacheth...
And so I'm out of Calgary and on a monster snow bus. In the distance the mountains are purple against the sunset - it's late afternoon. I'm glad I caught the earlier bus - at least I can see some of the landscape, get my bearings. As we get closer the shapes loom overhead like a frozen wave. It still hasn't hit me that I'm here. I guess right now I'm just too tired to take it all in...
updated by andy