MOUNT BERMO TIMBO
(art, poetry and music albums ... free artworks for Creative Commons release)
PROPHET TROUSERED RECORDS
(Music Albums)
PROPHET TROUSERED POETRY
(A Book of Poetry)
PROPHET TROUSERED GALLERY
( Photo gallery)
Gallery Renovation and Expansion is completed. (See Site News Below)..
(This a final track added at the end of the Sea Song to a Phantom Fiddler Album)
The text has been validated with the Firefox HTML validator for improved general browser compatibility.]
[What you are free to do with the materials on this page: Creative Commons Non-Commercial Licence Readable Summary]
Facts You’ve Never Wanted to Know about Mount Bermo Timbo Web Site
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GALLERY RELAUNCH
- Redundant coding visible in Windows Explorer has been removed from Seasong to a Phantom Fiddler lyrics page.
- (Note again that the site is primarily designated for use in Mozilla Firefox. The pages are validated but not tested for other browsers.)
- The relaunch is
now completed, with more and better quality images and speed of
loading. More new galleries will appear this winter.
- The Moon Graph and Sparklers Gallery is now online. (30-03-09)
FOLK OFF!
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TIMBO JEERED BY FANS AS HE GOES ELECTRIC SHOCK!
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- Despite being severely climactically challenged this summer (2008), things have moved on in practical terms. The new mini-tipi enables me to extend the recording season from spring to autumn, which should give me a lot more recording time. After a long winter’s scrimping for Britain, the site and label’s finances are OK. The big bills of the summer are a now but a black hole in my memory and my wallet. (But as I speak, the demon credit crunches my savings. Does the paper tiger of capitalism really have to fold, just as I've got some dosh together for the project?)
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- Mount Bermo Timbo’s Lament was the first track I have done on a new 8-track recorder. This offers better quality and a lot more scope for imaginative mixes. I plan to upgrade mikes next season in 2009.
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- Once again, I struggle to make the time to promote this damn web thing! Can I be your friend, humanity?
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- Am hoping to fit in a banjo and poetry album if the weather relents. 2008-9 is so far the coldest UK winter in 30 years. Rain on my parade why don’t you, ye malignant Gods! Then I have one more album of songs to record, before I have to write an album of new stuff, should I survive that long.
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- Finally I am loading up more mini-albums into Prophet Trousered Gallery in the New Year of 2009. I have hundreds waiting for exhibition. The best laid plans......................
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Facts You’ve Never Wanted to Know about Mount Bermo Timbo Web Site
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(The antidote to FAQ’s, I don't wish to know that!)
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'Will all this reading be good for your worship's eyes?'
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In General
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- The site is designed and created with all original works by Mount Bermo Timbo (T. E. Davies), as a solo arts project. This overreaching ancient does it all himself, without so much as a modest nurse to mop his aged brow. Timbo is a grass roots artist and shambles out of the undergrowth without grant assistance or establishment patronage. (Amateur doesn’t mean “crap”, ideally it means “served up for love not money” like a good meal. Sometimes voluntary service is a life sentence). The site is funded entirely by the artist’s minimum UK state Pension Credit. Gear for the project is usually haggled for on auction sites.
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- The site is strictly non-commercial, and all work may be legally distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons non-commercial licence (quoted elsewhere).
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The Photos (Prophet Trousered Gallery)
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I’ve used Kodachrome slide
film since the late1950’s. I usually sandwiched one slide
onto another slide and printed them together to form a new, and
often-surrealike image. Sometimes I used to combination print
one image onto another image on the same sheet of Cibachrome slide
paper.
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Recently, although still working with film cameras, I have digitally scanned sandwiches and slides. I then manipulate the images with the basic Adobe Elements software bundled with the slide scanner. This has replaced darkroom projector printing in my practice. The digital manipulations have extended the expressive range of the photos infinitely, and suddenly unattainable dreams can be made concrete without a magic dream mixer (rare on eBay).
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For the satisfaction of equipment fetishists or blokes as they are known in the trade, I work with three cameras at present. All use Kodachrome 35mm film. (I don’t possess a digital camera yet):
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· Trusty Olympus OM2 with basic set of interchangeable lenses, used since the mid 1980’s.
- · Fixed
Lens Olympus compact for dusty pocket grab shots (eBay
£10).
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Classic old Yashica compact rangefinder (superb metal body
camera, eBay
£20)
- A £10 tabletop tripod. (I often lie on the floor, to use the tripod with a cable release, & not a few times on my stomach in snow, ice or the wet). Never got round to upgrading it over a thirty year period, but it’s never blurred a shot!
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Timbo’s Story of the Music: Prophet Trousered Records
more information than you think you need
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Like many flat musicians (I am of course really round, but live in a second floor domestic box), I cannot play and record 24 hours a day without driving the neighbours crazy. (They don’t need a driver; they’re already half way there!). I live in Barmouth or Bermo, on the coast of North West Wales, with an estuary, seashores and mountains fit for earthly paradise. I decided to start recording outdoors in the peaceful mountains, free of neighbours from heaven and hell. A good plan in theory!
So five years ago I got a little portable four-track off an auction site. Firstly, I did a demo album five years ago. My charitable label Ragged Trousered Records distributed this in aid of Tsunami victims. I then started the non-profit making Prophet Trousered Records label. I’ve now done three other “finished” albums, which are on the web site. In the winter of 2008 I designed the Mount Bermo Timbo website, and started to distribute the three albums under the terms of a non-commercial Creative Commons licence.
I’ve developed the fantasy that I am making field recordings of an old ethnic musician out in the wilds. (I had loved listening to tape field recordings of “tribal” music on the radio, when I was a kid). I tried to retain a rough edged improvisatory feel to the music, and resist the temptation to over produce the final mixes to recreate a conventional studio sound. (It’s hard to do that convincingly on budget equipment, in any case). I tried for that “together untogether” sound that I loved on the old 78 blues or Dixieland records. The little digital machine produced good quality recordings to my ear, far better than the cassettes I had previously produced circa 1985. Thus I set off, ever and a day up the mountain with a mike, a banjo and a portable studio. The undiscovered legend of Mount Bermo Timbo was born in the total anonymity, which has proudly survived to this day.
For the first two years of recording al fresco, the weather was great, and I had a good site half way up a mountain (close to home with a foot bridge tunnel as a rain shelter). The first reasonably convincing album, Snakes or Ladders or Train Out of Time, came out of this period (circa 2006).
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The following year the weather was poor. I decided to move to a heroic site at the top of a mountain, just off the beaten track, and set up a tent to protect the equipment. (A £40 used watertight canvas marvel from eBay!). The weather was so bad that I spent a lot of time in the tent practicing singing and playing, waiting for the wind to drop and the rain to stop, so I could record in quiet conditions. (One Tooth Carol in Sad Old Ram of the Mountains was recorded low fi in a storm). The mountain microclimate high above sea level could be quite cold even in mid summer, as the owls hooted in the trees overhead at dusk. It was nevertheless a beautiful and inspiring site, with the sound of the steam train, running water, and views of the sea and the mountains of Snowdonia. Towards the end of August I had got to the last track. I was forced to leave a couple of banjos up the mountain in weather too foul to risk bringing them down. By the time I was able to get back to them, they had been stolen. One was a valuable vintage project banjo that was being done up, and the other one was of great sentimental value. Somewhere up the mountain there are a couple of black sheep playing mountain banjo with evil smiles on their woolly faces.
I was devastated, not just by the loss of my beloved banjos, but by the sense that something unique had been desecrated and was gone forever. My fond innocent fantasy of a space unmolested by Man, had been replaced by the feeling that nothing on earth was safe from Man’s greed and corruption, however divine the environment. (Apologies to Woman!)
I struck the tent and packed up. I made a final miserable journey to the site and recorded the vocal to the darkly comic destruction myth A Phantom Fiddle’s Mad Song. (This is the penultimate song on Sea Song to a Phantom Fiddler). I did the vocal tracks on one of the few fine days of the summer, so I needed no tent. The rest of the album was recorded and mixed down at home using synthesiser, electric fiddle and drum machine, in stereotypical home recording mode.
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The following summer I planned to record my remaining selection of songs, but the weather was appalling. ‘The rain it raineth every day’ … and it really did. I had a new even more remote site for my tent, which felt more secure. But like the Grand Old Duke of Record I walked all my equipment up to the top of the hill, and then I walked it down again, as I was rained off day after day. Great exercise for a young lad, but exasperating for a superannuated recording artist with a hundredweight of gear in his rucksack. In more paranoid moments, I sometimes felt the buzzards overhead were expecting me to snuff it in mid trek. I walked always onwards ever upwards with slavering buzzards dribbling on my head. Nevertheless the new site was still achingly beautiful, with a strong view of the mountain. I kept the energetic midges at bay by rubbing yeast extract (Marmite) into my face. Well protected but I smelled permanently like a 1950’s sandwich!
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The days of Summer 2008 collapsed into the months with no recording done, as soggy day succeeded soggy day. I had to build a causeway of fallen branches in front of the tent, as a marsh developed fed by the masses of water pouring down the mountain. The midges thrived and made more music than I did. I scrambled around the mountain explored, practised and pondered in bramble shredded waterproofs. I wrote and rehearsed a new song called Mount Bermo Timbo’s Lament. I decided to place the new track at the end of Seasong to a Phantom Fiddler (2007). In retrospect by 2008 the album felt unresolved. It needed a more positive ending.
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Autumn kicked in, and it was now getting wintry cold. I realised I needed a larger heated tent that I could record in, if I was to get anything done. I pitched the new mini tipi tent in an even more inaccessible spot in the mountainside hamlet of Badgersville. The site looked phenomenal in the autumn leaves. My freshly pitched tent was cased out at night by a surveillance polecat, and by new large striped neighbours as dawn approached. Finally in early winter there was an intermission in the incessant rain, long enough for me to complete Mount Bermo Timbo’s Lament. It was now really chilly, but I was sustained by flasks of hot porridge and warmed by my very efficient flameless tent heater, when my shoes became little fridges. At this stage to get to the recording space, I was wading in my wellies along paths turned to temporary flood streams running off the mountain. Brian Wilson like, I had taken the whole summer and autumn to produce a single track. Enough to drive a bodhisattva bananas, Brian, and the vibrations were mixed!
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Calling all you sleeve note musos out there, here are the horrendous devices with which horny old Timbo slowly masticates your tender shell likes!
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Pilgrim 12 string. Guitar
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Ovation Preacher Stereo Electric
Guitar
Ivor Mairants Flamenco Guitar
OzarkAcoustic Resonator Bass
Violin
Electric violin of dubious lineage, now being set up as a fretted viol by Cardigan Bay luthier Chris Shaw (not too vile a job, I hope Chris!)
Mandoline Family
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Venerable Savanna banjo mandoline.
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Harmony electric acoustic mandoline.
Troubadour octave mandola
Fylde cittern
Electronic
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Vintage Yamaha DX7 synth
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Wind
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Clarkes C Original. & Aluminum high D whistles
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My dad’s spectral battered Hohner harmonica (It's quite a blow, but my harp playing sucks as well!)
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Corton wooden clarinet with Van Doren jazz mouthpiece (long slow notes with lugubrious vibrato)
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Zaphoon(plastic sax)
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Percussion
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(really what I do as an instrumentalist!)
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Arabian tablas (played using a modified classical Egyptian style).
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Small rattly darabuka
Home-made Arabian bass davul drum.
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Jaws harps.
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Antic Earthworks Appalachian mouth bow
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large wooden Djenbe made in Java (tuneable)
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Latin Percussion bongos.
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Remo large Buffalo drum
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LP maracas
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SlapDrum' snareless Lapdrum (I’m supposed to be strictly non-commercial, I know, but this is a unique and marvellous mini cajon. I’m praying for sterling to recover from the credit crunch, so I can afford the Chris’ snared Cajon bongos. I need them for a song called Summer in an Empty Room!)
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Skinless tambourine and Remo Rig tambourine
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Wooden bones and claves.
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Small, thin, cheap saucepans and metal vacuum flasks (played as found bell drums)
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Used Zoom digital drum machine(astonishingly good sounds from a budget machine, after earlier battles for rhythmic survival with analogue dinosaurs in the eighties)
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Yamaha DX7 synthesiser (some delightful synth percussion sounds, marimba, gongs, log drum, tympani in particular.)
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Analogue gorilla clap (a King Kong of an effect from my old analogue drum machine)
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Hand claps. (Best drums in the world, and so neglected in the West).
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(A rolled up summary)
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I’ve been writing verse for over half a century. I started writing songs about forty years ago. At first I thought that songs were songs and poems were poems. Poems took years to finish, drafting and revising endlessly. Songs were like off duty poems, when you let your hair down writing fast and freely. These days I can’t really tell the difference. A song is just another poem with music, and a poem is a song without music. They both take about the same time to draft. Am I losing it or finding it?
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· I I don’t write much autobiographical stuff. Usually I write in character or adopt a persona. Foundry Labour Work Song on Sad Old Ram of the Mountains is the only song I can think of, which is a factual diary of the actual events I experienced, as a student doing labouring work. (Forty years later I can still smell and taste the fear of the lethal molten metal, red, spiteful and unpredictable. A mould really did explode when I poured hot metal into it. My cap and hair were set on fire, a spark of molten metal went up my nose, and it set fire to my filthy handkerchief in my sooty trousers). It was originally conceived as an A capella work song, but I record it as a heavy metal art of noise job on the album, grinding out a history of dangerous industrial pollution.
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Timbo’s Overarching Vision in the Arts
(my visionary bifocals)
