The
Mind Shop
– being of sound –
The Mind Shop’s first album, Treetop Songs,
released in October 2008, contains nine pieces:
1. The Other (words by R.S. Thomas)
2. Without / The Uses of Light / Pine Tree Tops (words by Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island)
3. Serinus serinus (words by Jeff Hilson, from Bird bird, spoken by the poet) MP3
4. My Bonie Bell (words by Robert Burns) MP3
5. What Waits For Me (words by Mary Coleridge)
6. Dreaming Hill (improvisation on a song by The Children; their version is on In Memory of Grace)
7. Slides (words by David Miller, from Collected Poems)
8. To Live So Long (improvisation on a song by The Children)
9. Petronia petronia (more from Bird bird, as above)
The album was recorded in the Wren church of St Anne & St Agnes in the City of London; in Jo’s Kitchen, Blackheath; and at the Tipi Studios in Upper Norwood.
It's
all in…
The Mind Shop
The
Mind Shop melds
sung poetry
with instrumental improvisation in a hypnotic fashion.
The group formed in 2001 to play at the Burns Night celebration at the Poetry Café, the headquarters of the Poetry Society in London. Armorel Weston sang her own setting of a Burns poem, ‘My Bonie Bell’, while David Miller and John Gibbens made a range of music-type sounds on their respective instruments.
Since then this simple but effective method has been applied to an expanding repertoire that includes lyrics by Yeats and Mary Coleridge and Bob Dylan, traditional spirituals, and poems by the two poets in the group.
The
Mind Shop played
- Jazz Vespers in the Lutheran church of St Anne & St Agnes in the City of London
- “Honey & Locusts”, a festival of poetry, music and spirituality at the church of St Edmund King & Martyr (a stone’s throw from the Bank of England)
- Southwark Festival
- The Klinker, London’s most notable night of the unexpected, and so on…
The
Mind Shop are
Armorel
Weston singing and playing shakuhachi (biography here),
John Gibbens on electric guitar (biography here)
and David Miller on clarinet.
David Miller is a London-based poet, prose writer and musician, whose books include The Waters of Marah: Selected Prose 1973–1995 (Singing Horse Press, Philadelphia, 2003) and In the Shop of Nothing: New and Selected Poems (Harbor Mountain Press, Brownshville VT, 2007). He runs Kater Murr's Press and Crossing the Line, a monthly series of poetry readings held in Bloomsbury.
Buy
Treetop Songs
via PayPal
Treetop Songs
The Mind Shop
UK: £7 (inc P&P)
Overseas: £10 (inc P&P)
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