Krasa

KRASA ~ a name made from the Slavic roots of words for beautiful, the colour red, delight, fiery, alive, dazzling... (and which possibly ever so slightly brings to mind a certain anarcho-punk band?!). 

This is the new little trio that I'm playing in (and our business card, which I've just designed). You might find us these days on Devon street corners in red outfits busking for coins in the cold December sun. We'll be performing alongside esteemed musical comrades at the Feast of Fools, of course, but you can come and see us play for free next Thursday December 13th at the Sandy Park Inn, from 7.30pm. 

Here we are playing at a party last week... we all look rather serious and engrossed in getting the notes right, and there are people talking in the background (about accordions and morris minors and drinking too much, amongst other things!), but it gives you a taste.

These are two Klezmer tunes: Freilechs noch der Khupe & Papirossen.

Lisa Rowe is on fiddle, Tim Heming is on clarinet and bass, and that's me on accordion. Thanks to Pete Montanez for the video.

I'm still battling the excruciating performance nerves; it's a strange combination of wholeheartedly loving and wanting to play this music and simultaneously finding doing it in front of people terrifying. Strangely this is only when it's an "official" gig - I feel quite at home playing round a fire and thoroughly enjoy busking; perhaps I shall always remain a vagabond. But I forge on through the fear nonetheless, so come along to the pub and cheer us on if you're free next Thursday and live nearby.

The Bagpipe Society

"Pan is the son of Mercury; His head and body form the sign of mercury of the Philosophers, 
at once solar and lunar. The star on the right is the hieroglyph for harmoniac salt, 
the third component of the Art (which is often called the Art of Music). 
Anon., 14th century, Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana, Florence. Ms Ashburn 1166, f.18."
~ from Alchemy - The Secret Art - Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Thames & Hudson 1973.

IN THIS ALCHEMICAL DRAWING from an anonymous 14th century manuscript in Florence, Pan, god of the wilds and of rustic music, plays a set of bagpipes.
A strange and earthy, wild and raucous instrument, the bagpipes evoke such old yearnings in us. In the words of bagpiper Andy Letcher:

"The bagpipe is an extraordinary instrument - half plant, half animal, a swine to play 
but will sing like a bird - and it's this old, nearly forgotten, rumpled magic 
of the thing that I want to share with the world."

Andy (my friend of Telling the Bees fame) works as part of The Bagpipe Society to rekindle in people a hearty love for this wonderful instrument. As part of this process, The Bagpipe Society has had a lick of paint here and there, and I was responsible for the decorations.
The initial request was for me to design a logo for the society which showed someone playing the bagpipes and the words The Bagpipe Society. So that's what I did...

They were pleased with it apart from a small request to make him a little more cheerful! So here's the final logo complete with (very slightly) turned up corners of the mouth:

And here's the whole page of my very rough sketch-workings:

I found inspiration from books of old illustrations and engravings...

All above illustrations from The Encyclopaedia of Illustration - Studio Editions 1990

There were also a few pennies left in the pot for me to create something extra for the website, and so with inspiration spewing from the mouth of a marginal foliate head...

Title page designed by Daniel Hopfer, Augsburg 1515
~ from Alphabets & Ornaments by Ernst Lehner, Dover 1968

... I created this:

A quite unexpected and penetrating-gazed Green Man Bagpiper, now piping his green song from the pages of the website. You can buy him and the Bagpipe Society logo printed onto various Items Of Usefulness from their merchandise page, or as prints from my shop.

Next year, March the 10th is set to be International Bagpipe Day, where everyone is encouraged to get involved and organise local grassroots bagpiping events. The Bagpipe Society also publish a quarterly journal called Chanter, which you get if you become a member. Do have a good peruse of the site, there's videos of all sorts of different pipes being played, and information of the yearly bagpipe festival Blowout.

I leave you with a video of Andy playing his English Border Pipes with Cliff Stapleton on hurdy-gurdy. The tune is one of Andy's and is called Asclepius (the Greek god of healing and an obscure hermetic text....)

The Wedding Dance by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1566 - source: Bagpipe iconography

An English Arcanum

A WHILE AGO I told you of three mysterious hares who shared between them just three ears and yet had two ears each. All over Dartmoor these hares can be seen, in the roof bosses of churches, on shop signs and plaques on buildings. And now they can be seen leaping around the second album from Oxford folk band Telling the Bees. You may remember my artwork for their debut Untie the Wind. And just one year later these four talented musicians have put together another exquisite collection of music. An English Arcanum is a mossy basketful of eleven sonic tales made with bagpipes and concertina and voices and mandolin and cello and a good deal of acorns, and it is just wonderful. I was delighted to be asked again by this lovely foursome to make the artwork for their music and this time I am even happier with the result. And so, I am pleased to say, are they. It is all rendered in fine fine pencil. An old one-toothed man, a wayfaring musician, walks out of the woods carrying a barrel organ / cabinet of curiosities which bears a compartment for each song. (The lone tooth was inspired by the one swinging gnasher of a rural farmer called Ivan who we met on a windy hilltop in Wales!) From under his hat poke oak leaves and he wears a pilgrim hat badge of a bee. If you look closely you'll find all sorts of little puzzling details which will make sense when you hear the songs.

(please click to enlarge)

Inside the three strange hares circle the CD deftly as the music plays...



Oak twigs entwine with lyrics...



Old riddles are unravelled by the four winds...

And the four musicians look on proudly...

The new album is already receiving deservedly glowing reviews and the official album launch is this Friday 27th November at the Queen of Clubs cabaret, Holywell Music Rooms, Oxford, if you should be in the vicinity. Otherwise you can have a listen and order a copy of the album for £12 from the band themselves here, or find news and buzzings on their blog.

For me there is something intrinsically right about combining music with imagery, if you listen to this beautifully crafted music whilst looking at the drawings I hope you can almost imagine the pencil strings thrumming.

An English Arcanum is exactly that - a beautiful evocation of an old and strange yet wildly familiar England.

Telling the Bees

A WEEK after the Sunday-of-Lost-Data I have a little honeyed tale for you. Yesterday the postman brought a thrilling package of CDs, all printed and proper... my first ever album artwork for the fabulous debut release by Telling the Bees ~ a band of four lovely Oxford based musicians who might describe their music as ...darkly crafted folk, classical, cinematic, prog, acoustic-chill, psychedelia!

Untie the Wind, as the album is called, is a wonderful conjuring of a darkly imagined England, and for me has a very strong flavour of something friendly yet strange, and it is this folkloric old and yet not old world that I have tried to conjure in my drawings for them.


I was inspired by the old folk custom that inspired the band's name: that in English villages back in the days of superstitions... it was very important to inform the beehives and their inhabitants of any news: changes of ownership, births, deaths and marriages, otherwise they would take umbrage and leave their hives en masse. The custom was for a newly bereaved widow or heir to go up to each hive, tap it three times with an iron key and then inform the bees that their master had died. Sometimes the hives were adorned with black ribbon to show that the bees were in mourning, or left a small piece of wedding cake to share in matrimonial celebrations.


Telling the Bees will be performing at gigs and festivals across the country and if they buzz through your corner of the woods, I urge you to go along and dance to their evocative mandolins and English border bagpipes, fiddles and cellos, concertinas and songs.

Do click on the pictures to enlarge them.


"A Bedfordshire woman was telling me the other day," says a writer in a Northern daily paper, "how her son had been stung all over by bees. 'And no wonder,' she said, 'he never told them he was going to put them in a new 'ome, and everybody knows that before you goes to put bees in a new 'ome, you must knock three times on the top of the 'ive and tell 'em, same as you must tell 'em when anyone dies in the 'ouse. Ef you don't, they'll be spiteful, for bees is understanding creatures, an' knows what you say to them."

Just the same as a month before,--

The house and the trees,

The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,--

Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,

Forward and back,

Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,

Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the summer sun

Had the chill of snow;

For I knew she was telling the bees of one

Gone on the journey we all must go!

Then I said to myself, "My Mary weeps

For the dead to-day:

Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps

The fret and the pain of his age away."

But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,

With his cane to his chin,

The old man sat; and the chore-girl still

Sung to the bees stealing out and in.

And the song she was singing ever since

In my ear sounds on:--

"Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!

Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"

some verses from TELLING THE BEES by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)