What happens when Penny Goring and I collaborate on a words and music project? BOLUS, that’s what. Penny is, as any of you who know her work from her blog and the Year Zero Writers website, a pretty extraordinary writer – and her spoken word delivery marvellously detached and deadpan.

I’ve wanted to do more instrumental backings for spoken word pieces for a while – and when Penny sent me recordings of her works “House” and “Temporary Passport” they seemed ideal. Musically I’ve drawn inspiration from William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops” plus my beloved doom/drone metal, as well as using some more folky instruments – the Appalachian dulcimer makes an appearance, as does Estragon the deluxe shruti box. There’s even a tuba solo in there somewhere.

Here’s an excerpt from Temporary Passport:

BOLUS – Temporary Passport – excerpt by Stuart Estell

You can buy the mini-album as an MP3 download from Amazon for just £1.38 by clicking here.

It’s also available on iTunes but thanks to a pricing cock-up in the hands of the electronic distributiony people it’s considerably more expensive on there. Plus you can also listen on Spotify here.

I also posted this on Audioboo last night – an ad hoc recording of Howard Skempton’s piece June ’77.

You should of course buy this, and play these glorious miniatures: Howard Skempton’s Collected Piano Pieces

This may of course change, depending on which way the wind is blowing…

Aficionados of black metal, drone metal, doom metal, “griefcore” and whatever other metal genres have sprung up in the last fifteen minutes might like to investigate Vasculum. The group/artist’s page has a few songs for download – I like it very much, but then I would.

The Vasculum manifesto is, apparently,

no audience engagement – no promotional engagement – no performance – no collaboration – no photographs – identity of no significance – location/eating habits of no significance – to be listened to at massive volume or not at all

It’s safe to assume that it’s music in the best tradition of one-man lo-fi black metal projects, I think, and puts me in mind of the likes of Xasthur and Leviathan. If anything Vasculum is (are?) a lot less refined and a lot more brutal. Listen here: http://vasculum.co.uk

Seeing Bavouzet perform Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche at the Proms last Friday was an immensely inspiring experience. His technical assurance was such that he made the flashier, more mercurial runs and fiendish final cadenza seem like a spontaneous outpouring.

I had some serious goose-bumps several times during Bavouzet’s performance, which more than made up for the lacklustre première of Arvo Part’s fourth symphony, which I’d be inclined to describe (at best) as inoffensive.

It’s only recently that I’ve seen other pianists perform works for the left hand in concert. The other was James Rhodes, in recital at the Guardian Hay Festival. There, James played the Blumenfeld Étude pour la main gauche in A flat – and, as was the case with Bavouzet, one really wouldn’t aware of it being a single-handed performance, were it not for the fact that both pianists at various points used their right arms to brace themselves against the side of the piano.

This element of posture interests me – I’m not sure (and perhaps James will be kind enough to comment on this if I prod him on Twitter) whether it’s deliberate or almost unconscious. You see, when I play pieces for the left hand alone, I tend to keep my right hand rather demurely anchored on my right knee.

Now, I’ve never noticed any extraordinary aches or pains while playing, for example, the Bach-Brahms Chaconne, but when I work on the Ravel – particularly the evil (for me)  jumps up and down the keyboard at the end of the first cadenza – I come away feeling a bit the worse for wear, particularly in my back muscles. It’s early days – I don’t have to have the piece learned until next spring – but I’d be interested if any of you who play pieces for left hand alone have any thoughts on the matter… does a gentle lean into the piano with the right arm help matters?

If I’m lucky I manage to spend about an hour practising per day. This, clearly, is not enough to maintain a healthy repertoire, or to conquer a piece like the Liszt, so I’m breaking it down into manageable sections that can all be beaten into submission separately. Once they’re all subdued I shall try and stitch them together.

I’ve currently two main points of attack. The fugato section, about which I previously had a bit of a mental block, has proved to be straightforward to play, but easy for my fingers to forget, so there has been a lot of repetition of that around these parts. The prestissimo octaves towards the end of the piece have proved less daunting than I feared although it’s taken weeks of slow practise to get them to a respectable speed. I’m still not sure that they’re really coming out at a proper prestissimo – more of a panicky allegro moderato, I suspect… but still, they’re coming along quite nicely.

However, while I’ve been focusing on these bits so narrowly, I’ve found other sections that I’ve resurrected go back to rack and ruin. I think I need to organise my practise better so that I spend at least some time reminding my fingers how the whole thing goes.

I’d be very interested to know how other amateur players with limited time manage the challenges of learning larger works.

“This won’t do,” thought I.

So: the Schumann Symphonic Etudes have been put to bed for a while, along with Carter’s 90+, while I get the Liszt going again. Interestingly, getting it up and running again – in an albeit slightly shaky fashion – took me just four days. It just goes to show how long a piece can stay ingrained in your subconscious if you spend long enough learning it to start with.

I’ve returned to Caténaires after letting it lie fallow for a while. Now, I’ve by no means mastered the other short Carter pieces that I’ve been looking at, but they’ve been ticking along quite nicely, and I’ve become comfortable with Carter’s idiom – whatever that might be.

Greater familiarity with his musical language has made it much easier to process – and memorise! – the stream of constant non-repeating semiquavers, to the point whereby I’m now reasonably confident I can get the whole piece under my fingers. Reassuringly, it’s also starting to feel like music rather than just a chain of notes.

It seems to have been very worthwhile to take a step back and do some preparatory study with slightly easier pieces. And I’ve got to know more of Carter’s works in the process.

Another interesting and pleasing side-effect of playing music as intellectually stimulating as Carter is that after an hour spent battling the irrational rhythms of something like 90+, a lot of more “normal” music doesn’t seem quite so difficult any more.

Where next? I’m looking forward to trying to play Berio (the Sequenza) or one of the Stockhausen Klavierstuecke. But I’ll get these Carter pieces sorted out first.