#Storytime - the album

Joanne Harris knows a thing or two about story telling, what with more than a handful of bestselling novels to her name, a number of the having won awards.. but it turns out she's a bit of a musician as well, and has her own band playing progressive music, #Storytime. They put out an album last year. I have to say, I rather like it.

The album follows a pattern of Joanne telling a story of distant, but knowable, worlds - worlds of bees, mermaids, Queens of the sea - with gentle incidental music underneath, mostly played on piano. This is then followed by a song relating to the story. There are four tales and tunes on this first outing.

There are Middle Eastern flavours in the music, which conjures, appropriately perhaps, the aural tradition of centuries passed, and the tales of Scherezade and Ali Baba. The arrangements are largely piano/keys (with the odd bit of Mellotron - it is prog, after all!), drums, bass, flute and vocal. The flute draws the mind toward Jethro Tull and early Genesis, though the piano led passages have an air of Renaissance about them - all highly enjoyable. More up to date reference points might be Judy Dyble or Jarrod Gosling's recent works, though without so much psychedelia; one might also find similarities with the output of Ian Neal.

I found the album immensely enjoyable, and have returned to it a number of times since receiving it last year. It is everything a progressive album should be, and I really liked that the production is very natural, with room left for dynamics to shine.

Stories and songs may not be the most slickly presented programme, but it's high art for an Earthly audience.

Another album is in the works, hoped to be found in early 2020. There might even be a gig at The Lantern Theatre..

Legacy?

Bob forwarded this link to a comment on a Guardian article the other day: *click here*

It's a beautifully crafted observation, no wonder the paper have it as a 'pick.'

I find the line about 'done well at a desk' something that jumps out at me, and it might for many who work in a 'modern' setting.

Everything I do is ethereal - if there's a powercut or a router breaks, there's no proof of my industry; once a note has been played, or the line delivered on stage, it's a memory. Even if a performance is recorded, it still relies on the medium surviving along with a means of rediffusion.

Being a builder, carpenter, sculpter, etc. leaves something behind. Doctors, nurses, social workers, farmers, and others, heal, care, feed people and animals; their attentions are evident in the those whom they have, err.. attended. Even engineers and designers leave drawings.

Me? My greatest programming achievement was an automated reporting system for a utilities job management system I had written in 2003/4. I managed to get it working again in a virtual machine in 2010, but doing that now would be problematic as the VM tech has moved on. The physical work on which it reported is, at the time of writing this, 14+ years old. The holes dug for water repairs may have been re-tarmacked a couple of times since, so there's not even evidence to show for it - and being digital there isn't a chit or receipt that the work was done stored in some archive. Being magnetic, one can't even claim everything comes from dust and returns to dust - this never had a corporeal manifestation!

One might see this as the start of a midlife crisis, and "what's it all for?", but I've been comfortable with this since I started mucking about with computers and being a musician/tech 30+ years ago..

Hey ho.