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Archivalia
Following swiftly on from Pastoralia is another related release, the “Archivalia” EP. Together with Pastoralia and also the first EP in this series, Marginalia, Archivalia explores instrumental guitar music in a different tuning. For Archivalia, the tuning I’ve used is “Open D” where the guitar’s open strings are tuned to a full D major chord.…
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Pastoralia
I recently released a short EP titled “Marginalia“. This featured some simple and short pieces written for guitar tuned to ‘Open E’. It is intended to be one of a series of such releases, each exploring a different tuning. The latest is “Pastoralia”, a collection of music tuned to DADGAD, or so-called ‘Celtic’ tuning. These…
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Dictaphone Demos
About twenty years ago, I purchased a digital recorder. The Olympus Digital Voice Recorder WS-110 went on to record many things over the years. Spontaneous compositions, sudden improvisations, field recordings, conversations, family holidays, and random sounds have all been picked up over the years by that handy little device. Some of the many recordings go…
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Marginalia
Announcing a short EP of instrumental tunes which I’ve made available on Bandcamp for free download. Most of these pieces were written and recorded when staying in a friend’s house in the Peak District last year. Distinctive to this music is that they were all written in open E tuning, not a tuning I’d particularly…
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Christmas Music
“Merry Gentle Men” is Carnoe’s Mummingbirds’ latest Christmas-themed release, out now on Bandcamp! Back in December 1999, I hit upon the idea of bringing some musical ideas to life as a kind of vaguely collection to hand out as a dubious-but-well-intentioned Christmas gift to bandmates and friends who might be interested. The result was the…
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Guitars and Machines
Granny Takes a Trip, a band first formed well over 30 years ago and of which I am a founding member, has just had a new EP released! The four instrumentals on this collection see me take care of all guitar duties while my friend and colleague Stuart occupies himself with bass guitar and programming.…
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The Lindridge Recordings
Last month I released an album length collection of music which I called “The Lindridge Recordings“. This refers to a local area which I walk around frequently, being a largely rural location consisting of woods and fields. The album cover is a photo of me walking past the site of Lindridge Hall, taken a few…
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Hares and Halibuts
It’s been a few months since my last post, announcing the issue of a three EP collection of unreleased material from my band Granny Takes a Trip. Since then, I’ve been working on occasional new material for both ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ and this solo project ‘Carnoe’s Mummingbirds’. Of the latter, I’ve been writing music…
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The Granny Takes a Trip “What Works” EP Collection
In February last year, my band Granny Takes a Trip released its first music for over 20 years on the New Leaf Recordings label. “What Works” was an album which had begun back in the early 2000s but which had stalled by 2006. Picking up the pieces of recordings in 2022/23, we remixed and remastered…
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Silent Soundtracks Released!
A news flash: all the Carnoe’s Mummingbirds soundtracks to Edison’s and Lumiere’s old silent films has been released on Bandcamp. It can be streamed there or downloaded for a small charge. I’m really pleased with this release, perhaps more than anything else I’ve recorded as Carnoe’s Mummingbirds before. I’m left wondering what the next CM…
Carnoe's Mummingbirds 