Now you might think that buying shitloads of guitars is somewhat cooler than trainspotting in that the instruments of rock are intrinsically far less anorak, but consider this: trainspotting is at least a cheap option. Aforementioned rainproof clothing item, notebook, biro, horrible hairstyle and you’re ready to go. Alright, those thick glasses might set you back a bit, but it’s still going to be cheaper than the $8,000 plus I’ve forked out over the last year for musical bits ‘n’ pieces.

Here’s the latest addition to the ardle collection, grabbed today from the Yamaha store:

Yep, it’s the Fender Jazz I’ve had my eye on for a while. Varnished maple fretboard and gorgeous amber transparent finish to the body - what a stunner!

Now all this acquisition of gear with ‘jazz‘ in the title by no means corresponds to a shift on behalf of your narrator into the beardy world of free improvisation and beats you can’t dance to, oh no. It’s just that Fender totally misnamed their instruments. The Jazzmaster guitar I bought last week in Osaka eneded up being the axe of choice for grungers and alt.rock stars the world over, and likewise, the Jazz bass is actually a brighter and punchier beast that its ostensibly rockier counterpart the Precision.

So no, I won’t be sucking on cheroots in dark basements, I will be ploughing the post-punk furrow as earnestly as I ever did.

And yes, this little purchase does mark the end of the line as far as acquiring new instruments goes.

Until I see something else that is ‘vital’ to my sound, that is…

And the worst of it is - a local Hiroshima store has a sexy Fender Jazz bass going for a song…..can I resist?????

Amazingly, although I’ve been to Kyoto dozens of times and even lived there for a while, I still found numerous new bits to explore, and the photographic proofs will be up on ardle.net just as soon as I can be arsed.

And again I find that I rather like Osaka, most probably because (a) nobody knows me there, (b) I know a secret ‘Starbucks‘ where you can always sink into a nice deep brown sofa, and (c) it has shitloads of well-stocked guitar shops.

‘Twas in the latter that I had another little wallet-emptying incident. Well, I was in the market for one of the following: a Rickenbacker 330 or 620, a semi-acoustic or something with a tremolo. No Rickenbackers showed up, which was kind of a relief in a way, since the loss of ¥220,000 tends to offend.

Next, I clapped my peepers on a browny Epiphone Casino semi-acoustic with a rare add-on Bigsby tremolo. Aha! Kill two birds with one plectrum, eh? I didn’t like the shitty colour much, but I plucked the little fellow off the stand and plugged it into a huge amp. Hmm. None too impressive tone-wise, crappy action, and the Bigsby was a big ungainly monster which quite frankly, blew.

I then noticed a red Fender Jazzmaster. Now I’m no stranger to these puppies - I’d actually used one in a real recording studio in Berlin circa 1991. It has a tremolo. It has that cool twangy Fender sound, and yet is not a cliched crappy-looking Stratocaster. It has underground music kudos, being the axe of choice of folks like J.Mascis out of Dinosaur Jnr. Only one problem - I hate those dark-wood Fender fingerboards. Now your Strat and your Tele have light varnished maple alternatives, but not your Jazzmeister.

Casting my misgivings aside, I plugged in and ran through a few licks, and blow me if I wasn’t blown away, not only by the cool grungy sounds, but by the slick and speedy neck and fingerboard! Of course I bought the darn thing immediately, dragged it to my secret Starbucks, and sat there nonchalantly sipping a Coffee Jelly Frapuccino while a whole succession of birds eyed my red instrument appreciatively.

I am speaking, of course, of the venerable old Chinese game of Go. For those of you not in the Know about Go, I will elucidate. It is a contest between two sides, viz thems that haveth the black bits and thems that don’teth. They have white. Black’s job is to try to defeat white by means of placing his bits in annoying locations on the square board, which is made up largely of squares and some empty space in between. White must try to do exactly the same, except that his bits are of a different colour. Obviously.

The great thing about Go is that there are no rules. A player may thus place his bits anywhere: on the corner, in the middle, under the table, or deep inside a large soup tureen. Bear in mind, though, that some of these moves may be disadvantageous or illegal.

A game begins with a heated debate over who gets black, since black goes first. After all acrimony regarding the outcome of these delicate negotiations has died down, black slaps down his first bit. There then follows an enormously tedious stretch of alternate bit-putting-down which ends only when it is agreed by consensus that the game can go no further or the cafe closes and forces the warring factions out onto the street.

Much has been written concerning game mechanics, but I will only mention her that the general strategy is to get one’s bits into such a configuration that they are encircling the enemy bits, although it must always be born in mind that just one twattish misplacement can result in the entire edifice upending itself so that the hunter has becomes the hunted, and it is your very own bits that are now ‘in the bag.’

At the tactical level, there are only a few basic moves: the ‘round the back‘ placement, which is very annoying, and has no known antidote; the ‘Western Front Trench Foot Deployment‘, which is only used by idiots and people who think that Go is the same game as Othello; the ‘Flip-Flop‘, which occurs when one player has not been paying much attention to the situation.

Much of this will not make sense to the non-player, I am well aware, but to bring in an analogy, try to imagine a crossword puzzle in which there are no clues and you can put any letter down anywhere. Gibberish ensues, but then suddenly you notice than you can form the word ‘discombobulate‘ across the centre. This is almost completely nothing like a game of Go.

A game of Go usually ends when it is over. There are two recognised ways of judging when this has happened: first, the gentleman’s agreement. Here, the two expert players can tell at a glance that white hasn’t got a cat in hell’s chance, usually because he has only three bits left on the board, compared to his opponent’s two hundred and thirty-seven. However, if things appear to be a bit more even, and the bits are all in strange snake-like coils, then another method is utilised. Here the two players harangue each other verbally or beat each other with rolled-up newspapers until one backs down and the other proclaims a dubious victory.

Well, the first game of the season between myself and O’Hurley resulted in the flopping out of a mildly non-victorious endgame in which a personage other than myself might possible have just scraped over the finishing line a tad sooner than me, as it were.

Last Saturday, however, an entirely different stripe of game ensued. Judge for yourself, dear reader, as you peruse the pictograph below. I am playing for the red team, and that terrible countenance bulging into view is none other than O’Hurley himself:

Yes, a clear case of victoryness for my good self, achieved by sheer bravado, three double espressos and a kamikaze attack along the Ypres salient.

Another, and slightly divergent and most certainly heretical, account of this epic battle can be found elsewhere.

Oh, and I hate Japanese gardeners. They suck. They are stinking crusty old gangs of farting coffin-dodgers who wreck everything they touch and charge you huge amounts of money for the privilege.

A few years ago I had a garden full of big beautiful trees whose name I can’t remember. Enter the gardeners. Their idea of pruning was to just lop the top off all of them. Hey! - instant ugliness and half of them died a few months later. For this great work they were paid $1000 (not by me, I hasten to add).

Last summer the shitheads return, not at my behest, of course. While I’m away in France they go about their dastardly work and once more hack up half of the trees. I am incensed upon my return. Beautiful lush trees have been pruned back to ugly stumps. “Don’t worry“, I’m told, “they will grow back.” Then why prune them?!!!!

And now guess what - not only have they not grown back, I discover that seven trees have actually died, and many others are diseased and on the way out. So I do a little research on the Interweb and find that the practice of “topping” (hacking off the top) is nowadays only the preserve of barbarians and filthy illiterate peasants, like the morons in stupid hats who butchered my botanics. It permanently disfigures trees, and sends them into shock. If they survive this, they grow abnormally and faster than ever to compensate. They also become more susceptible to disease and death. Real pruning techniques involve only thinning out the tree whilst maintaining its natural shape. Those dumb-arsed retards!

A pox on all Japanese gardeners. May they all be found strangled to death by Ents, gormless mouths stuffed full of mulch, limbs hacked off into ugly stumps.

Oh, and please take a look at my nice new pictures from my holidays over at the ‘Photos‘ section. Here’s a sneaky little preview. Have a nice day! (unless you are a Japanese gardener).

Currently watching: Season 2 of ‘Black Books‘ on DVD - very good indeed Brit/Irish sitcom of the early 2000’s set in…er….a book shop.

Currently playing: Rudimentary Peni’s ‘Pope Adrian 37th Psychristiatric‘ - bizarre album by a bizarre band. Allegedly recorded shortly after the vocalist had been incarcerated in a mental institution at her Majesty’s pleasure. Perfect soundtrack for the collywobbles! Sample song titles: “Muse Sick (Sic)“, “Regicide Chaz III“, “Pogo Pope.” Sheer madness!

Currently reading: Thomas Pynchon’s latest monster “Against the Day“. Thoroughly enjoying it, and nearly at the end of its 1100 pages. Only criticism - it’s bloody hard to hold up such a large hardback while reading in bed. (Note to self - wait for the paperback next time).

And so off to Kanazawa on Monday, hoping I’m not followed there by the ‘wobbles….

Yes, I’m talking about the soon-to-be-released STAVKA album “Heavy Casualties in the Charm Offensive“, which has been in the ‘soon-to-be-released‘ status for about a year and half now. Why? Because of fuggen modern technology, that’s why. Now let’s get all technical here. The nerds can stay, and the rest of you ‘straights‘ can go and read the latest scuttlebut about Amy Winehouse or Lily Allen someplace else. Right, now that we’ve cleared out the chaff we can begin.

So, like, I’ve been using the very wonderful Roland VS-1680 16 digital hard-drive recorder to capture my songs for the last ten years, and it’s been a pretty darn good chunk o’ technology, give or take a couple of minor quirks (one of which will be discussed below). This is what the little puppy looks like. Cute, huh?

Well, it was a pricey number weighing in at around ¥250,000, but that’s pretty good for a decade’s hassle-free use. Hassle-free until a year or so ago, that is. That it suddenly became hobbled since its external CD burner conked out, and being an elderly beast utilising weird out-moded 19th century SCSI cables, no replacement or fix could be found. Why was this such a show-stopping problem, since the main unit itself was fine? Well, the CD was used for two vital purposes, namely (1) backing up the data so that songs could be imported and remixed at a later date, and (2) for producing the master CD for my albums which could then be duplicated elsewhere.

Now luckily I’d already mixed down and burned to CD eleven songs for the new album, but alas, a further four were stuck inside the machine, trapped for all eternity in binary limbo, seemingly unable to ever escape from within their electronic cell and see the sonic light of day, as it were. Bummer!

But soon I bounced back from despondency and hatched a cunning plot. All that I had to do was to pull out my wallet and pour a huge river of roubles into the hands of some music gear vendor and all would be well. Yes, folks, it was time to buy a new recording device, and to that new device I could connect the old one by means of a digital cable and thus ferry the scared, frightened little songs across into a bright and shiny new home from whence they could rejoin their brothers in wave file harmony!

I scouted out the territory, and discovered that stand-alone digital recorders are on the wane somewhat, giving way to computer-based recording software. Well, bugger that, I thought. I like to twiddle real knobs, not use a wayward mouse to manipulate fake virtual ones. And so it was that I purchased what I thought was the best of the remaining hard-drive recorders, the meaty-looking Yamaha AW2400 for a mere ¥200,000. Oh yeah, baby, an upgrade from 16 to full 24-track functionality, and a whole slew of new knobs and LEDs the meaning of which I did not know.

Problems solved, I thought. Soon be mastering the new album and pumping out a whole host of new ditties to boot. But here we are, nearly a year after buying the new beast, and no album, and no new songs.

The Yamaha AW2400 turned out to be a perplexing and infuriating machine which just would not yield good results, no matter what I tried. I dutifully sent over the songs trapped on the VS-1680 by digital cable, and they sounded fine on the AW2400, but for some bizarre reason when mastered to a CD on that shiny new device, the results were pitiful. The migrated songs sounded like poo. Weedy, dull, and at a microscopic volume compared to the songs mastered on the old machine. All manner of sonic manipulation was attempted, but nothing could make the two disparate groups of recordings sound the same or even come out at the same volume. No, the AW2400 is a flawed beast indeed, with what I believe those in the trade would call ‘low headroom‘, and compressors so gay they couldn’t squash a fly. Well, now is the not the time nor the place for an in depth discussion on such notoriously difficult areas such as compression, a strange audio property the correct attainment of which has been known to cause grown men to bite their own heads off.

Stymied, I even tried sending all of the stuff from the various sources onto Cubase, a well-known make of PC music production software. The results? A foul sonic slurry the likes of which I wouldn’t play at my worst enemies.

Thus thwarted, I abandoned the album and recording in general, and spent a year doing the unthinkable: practicing my instruments. Yes, that’s right - actually concentrating on improving my virtuosity. My chops improvement (although I’m a vegetarian), but still I felt down and miserable at not being able to fully realise my musical creations, not to mention having shelled out a fortune for a seemingly useless heap of junk.

Then last December came the new iMac, and I wondered if I might just have one last try to sort the whole unsatisfying pile of sonic poo before throwing the AW2400 out of the window and urinating on it, and drowning my sorrows in absinthe. Now the wonderful Mac operating system Leopard comes pre-installed with a pretty good audio creation programme in the shape of Garageband, but I opted to shell out a bit extra for the more substantial Logic Express 8.

And so, was this new device the solution to all my woes? Was it buggery! The trail merely became even more hazardous to my mental well-being, at least int he short term. See, these audio programmes are sheer hell to learn how to use. Basically, the only way to get to grips with them is to use them, and that takes time and a hell of a lot of patience. Manuals are typically useless, having been written by nerds for nerds, leaving the rest of use to flounder in misunderstanding and bewilderment. Let’s say you were faced with my particular problem, that some of your songs were loud and pumped up, but others were thin and weedy. Could you find an entry on how to rectify this in a recording device’s manual? Of course you couldn’t. Take the Logic Express manual - it’s about 750 pages long, and contains entry after entry telling you how each knob, button, command or feature works, but omits to tell you what you would use it for. Hey, wow, this button here toggles the meter displays from ‘pre-fader‘ to ‘post-fader‘ - great, now in God’s toilet would I want to do that?

Well, I’ve learned these things before, and I could do it again. After all, I mastered Cubase through the necessity of having to use it every week to record the long-gone A-Bomb City Podcast.

OK, so I brewed a really hot cup of tea, rolled up my sleeves, and sat down in front of the iMac, ready to do battle. First job - import the eleven songs from the CD made before the demise of the VS-1680, and dump each one onto a separate stereo track. Done! Connect the VS-1680 to the iMac by way of optical cable via an Edirol UA-25 and import the four trapped songs. Done! Connect the AW2400 to the iMac by USB and transfer over the one song I’d actually recorded on the new machine. Done! OK, put all sixteen tracks into the correct order, space them out one after the other, and that’s step one complete.

But guess what - I suddenly noticed that all eleven of the tracks from the VS-1680 CD were flawed. See, one of the quirks from that old girl was that the markers denoting the beginnings of songs would always end up slightly off, so that a tiny portion of the beginning of each song would be shaved off and appended to the end of the previous one. Bummer!

So, I had to reconstruct the entire CD and learn the hard way how to re-cut all the tracks and then export then out and back in to the new album master. A real pain in the arse, which took a couple of weeks to figure how to achieve.

OK, one obstacle overcome, now the biggie. What to do with the four weedy sounding tracks with respect to their big ‘n’ beefy counterparts. Well, you might think you could just raise the volume of the former and reduce the volume of the latter, and all would be OK, but no! I tried it, and it resulted in a very low-level CD. Trying to increase the overall volume just led to clipping and distortion, and so there was nothing else for it - to dive into the murky world of compression! Aaarrrghh!!

To cut a long story longish, I twiddled knobs feverishly for a couple of weeks and eventually managed to accomplish the unthinkable, the very thing the machinery seemed to want to prevent, a decent-sounding album. It’s not perfect, the are a couple of ‘issues‘, but probably nothing that the average cloth-eared MP3-consuming idiot would notice.

Ah, done!

But no! What about the artwork for the album? Gack!!

Now remember at the top of this interminable post I mentioned that the Gods were conspiring against me? Well, they have just thrown one further 152mm howitzer shell my way, right here, right now, as we were so close to completing the project.

Get this, I prepare all the pictures for the artwork, solve a couple of annoying hold-ups, and then find that the ‘inkbleed‘ font I use for the STAVKA logo is the only font which mysteriously fails to appear in the text tab for the GIMP imaging software that I use. That’s right, folks, as of now I’m blocked at the post by the inexplicable non-appearance of a fuggen font! Ugh!!!

So, the ‘soon-to-be-released‘ appellation continues…

Ian Curtis, for all of you under 40, was the troubled singer of Manchester’s acclaimed and highly influential band Joy Division, who later morphed into the better-known and altogether less-worthwhile New Order.

Being a great fan of Joy Division’s tiny but meaningful output (2 albums and a bunch of outtakes), I knew the intimate details of the now legendary story like the back of my hand, but was still curious to see what Corbijn, a Dutch photographer who had snapped the band in 1979/80, would make of it.

In the end the film had a highly disturbing effect on me. Concentrating more on Curtis‘ personal life - wife/girlfriend triangle and debilitating epilepsy - rather than the career of the band, the denouement left me practically in tears and also with an intense feeling of suffocation. I wanted to scream.

I don’t recall any film ever having make such an impact on me, which is all the more strange since I knew full well the miserable ending of the tale beforehand.

Such was the emotional response, it is actually difficult to say whether the film is any good or not. Certainly one could criticise it for rendering Curtis‘ bandmates as rather invisible, not to mention no insights into the creative processes that led to such amazing and innovative music.

Still, it is the many on-stage scenes of the band that make this something special. Instead of miming to the real recordings, the actors actually played them live, with a stunning degree of accuracy. Of special mention in this regard is the performance of Sam Riley, who has Curtis‘ voice and mannerisms down pat. Truly mesmerising and somewhat eerie to behold.

However, one wonders what people unfamiliar with the band would make of all this. Would the human drama of Curtis‘ screwed-up relationships and inner turmoil be enough to sustain it without having any pre-existing connection to the music? Difficult to say….

For a while there it looked as though this album was going to go the Zen route after several years of infuriating tussles with various bits of machinery (to be documented in a future post), all of which seemed hell-bent on blocking my creative endeavours and preventing them from coming to fruition. The Zen route does have its attractions, mind: finish an album and then never make any copies of it at all, because it’s all about the journey, not the arriving. Of course, the hardcore among you might go one step further and say, “Hey Mr.Stavka, why don’t you go the whole way and not even bother to record the album at all, and just keep it as an idea?” I must admit that I have been tempted down that particular alley more than once, but no, once the hell that is production is over and a few intervening years have er….intervened, it’s great to be able to sit back, throw the CD on and marvel at how I was ever able to come up with all that power pop goodness.

Mind you, I have scaled down considerably on the distribution front with regard to my musical outpourings. Back in 1998 when I first acquired the means to pump out my own fully-formed CD albums, I foolishly allowed my youthful enthusiasm to obscure reality, and proudly dished out copies of my latest to all and sundry: family, friends, Rabbis, insurance salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, window cleaners, passers-by, homeless urchins and stray dogs. Only slowly did I come to realise that others might not be sharing my joy: noticing my CDs used as coasters, oversized necklaces or shiny rotating devices to scare off crows, I began to get the hint.

But indifference eventually turned to outright abuse. Here’s a typical conversation from that period, reproduced verbatim:

Suffering Artist: “Hello, old friend. A while ago I gave you a copy of my latest long player, a forty-seven song cyclical diaphonic chant about entropy and angst. I spent the last eight years making it: a real labour of love and an actual part of my soul, my being. Pray, ply me with encouraging remarks and give me a warm gooey feeling inside with your loving support, even though I am fully aware that my kind of music is a tad different to your usual fare of bland banal commercial fodder.”
Alleged Friend: “It’s shite. I threw it out with the fish offal.”
Suffering Artist: “Thank you, good sir. May all your children be born without arseholes.”

So, over the years I have gradually reduced my distribution to the point where I only give out copies of my wares to people who actively express an interest, and that area of the CD booklet usually reserved for a list of names the artiste wishes to thank for help and support remains completely blank. It’s as if the whole thing has come full circle: I began creating music with a bunch of mates back in the late 70’s, writing and recording solely for our own amusement and pleasure with no thought or need of a wider audience at all. Now I’m right back there, although through the internet I have had something of a revelation of late. After airing my music each week on the late lamented A-Bomb City Podcast I was amazed at the number of positive comments I got from listeners, as well as having a few requests for my songs to be used by other broadcasters in their own shows. And a couple of folks even bought CDs from the STAVKA emporium! Wow, that’s my pension sorted!

Strange though, how support and vindication has to come from total strangers in other countries rather than friends and family.

Well, fuck ‘em, it looks like it’s me who gets the last larf, as I lie here in my Beverley Hills mansion snorting cocaine from the arse cracks of a coterie of curvaceous concubines, playing the role of rock star with consummate ease.

In keeping with last year I have consulted my financial guru and he has observed the birds in the sky, the tea-leaves in the cup and the configuration of a virgin’s intestines and tells me that I should forgo travel to foreign parts and instead take up my cane and sack and once more take the long road to somewhere domestic. He assures me this will save me at least £5, and so it is that on March 10th I will head north for a couple of weeks in the hitherto unexplored Chubu region of these here lands. When I say unexplored, dear reader, I mean unexplored with regard to my own feet, arse and lungs. Obviously a few other people have already been there, otherwise how are we to account for the vast number of beverage vending machines to be found there?

Now Chubu in Japanese breaks down into two Chinese characters, “Chu”, meaning ‘middle’, and “Bu”, meaning ‘bit’. Hence if we were to glance at a map of old Nippon, it would be after being that mountainous chunk in the centre between the two great urban slabs of Kansai (Osaka & Kyoto) and Kanto (Tokyo & Yokohama):

Well, I’m all agog with excitement, and have already planned out the trip in true nerdy fashion, with multiple copies of itineraries depicting schedules and timings, together with inventories detailing exact numbers of socks to be transported and where said foot-coverings are to be stowed once used and a-smellied.

Here’s the basic plan:

[1] Kanazawa - 3 nights. Old bits and gardeny things to gawp at. Possible side trip to venerable Eiheiji Temple if no Starbucks found.
[2] Takayama - 3 nights. Snowy mountains, olde worlde charm, cold turkey due to lack of Starbucks.
[3] Nagoya - 2 nights. A counterblast to the previous rusticity. Go to Starbucks. Look at big ugly city nobody likes.
[4] Matsumoto - 3 nights. More snowy mountains, old bits and a castle. Starbucks.
[5] Nagano - 3 nights. Snowy mountains, Starbucks.

A splendid plan indeed!

Hotels have been booked, railway timetables consulted - it’s all looking rather wonderful!

And as a tantalising taster of the visual delights that await, I do hereby solemnly reproduce here a nice photo of Matsumoto castle what I nicked off some other bugger’s site: