The Bridge – Squatting in Rotterdam

My sister Kelly was squatting in Rotterdam a few years ago. I went to visit her with this music project I wanted to make, inspired by the city, that would be based on making music from pictures of it’s buildings and places.

She had it pretty cushdy over there at the time. Squatting was pretty exceptable in Holland and it was legal as well so, if you were lucky, you could set yourself up with a pretty decent home and not have to leave for a while. Kelly had two! Never one to do things in half measures, she was making video work and her boyfriend at the time was a musician so they used one to live in and the other as a studio space. Kelly’s boyfriend was quite nice, but a bit mad. He thought he was mix between Sid Vicious and Clint Eastwood. Never left the house without his wallet, his speed and his razor (which he kept in his cowboy boots). He got caught speeding once, drunk with half a gram of coke, a gram of speed and a eighth of weed; he had his knife in in his boot and about four wasted friends crammed into the back of his van. The policeman couldn’t believe his eyes, he burst out laughing and let them go! He was stunned by the audacity of it and said there would have been too much paperwork anyway.

I spent a month there, got a bike and cycled around the city taking pictures of the architecture – which is pretty stunning, Rotterdam is like an architects playground – as well as the industrial estate, which stretches around 40 miles long. The idea was to contrast two very different visual elements and then put that into music. I chose to focus on the Erasmus Bridge, which connects north and south Rotterdam, and made each different song based on a picture from a different view of the bridge.

The music I came out with there was quite experimental, and it was the first time I’d began to use real recordings rather than samples and virtual instruments. This led on to forming Tumbling Squares.

Dance Rants – Older Brother

So, as I was saying before, I started reading Naked Lunch a few years ago and got really into it. It’s written by William S Burroughs who’s a part of the Beat movement in the 1940’s, although Burroughs is an entity all of his own.

I was working in this office at the time where I was employed to answer the phone, maybe, once a shift. I kid you not. It was the most specific type of phone call from someone who worked for the same company as me. When I did get the call I wasn’t actually given the information or the tools to deal with the problem – which was something to do with fitting a BT internet cable – so I was told to just transfer them to a different department! Bloody madness. They employed four people for that job! To cover shift changes and lunch breaks. The guy on my shift had been doing it for about three months and was so boring I filled the time writing angry rants about anything that popped into my head.

Me and Craz – the guitarist from Tumbling Squares – got together and wrote this tune at the time…

Never See Through

Tumbling Squares is the band I formed while I was last in Bristol. This is around 2007 to 2009. We made RaveYard music, some horror inspired punk dance, with Andrew Crother (aka Craz/The Twang Man) on guitar and Billy Burris (aka Electric Bill) on saxamaphone.

I broke them up like an idiot in 2009 and decided to make some spoken word William S Burroughs inspired dance rants – a couple of which were pretty good actually.

Now I’m back in Bristol me and Craz are working together on a new project called Touch It, which I’ll tell you more about later on.

Here’s a tune called Never See Through that Tumbling Squares wrote in 2008.