Grumpiness and Miles Davis extractions

I’ve just come through a grumpy weekend. Things are bugging me!

On the plus side, I bought an album of remixes yesterday which is brilliant. I’ve been listening to loads of music by Miles Davis over recent days – Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way – both of them in the Complete Sessions format which represents a staggering array of music in a highly prolific period.

Well yesterday I bought the panthalassa remixes. I’ve already got the original (?) album put together by Bill Laswell. This is a collection of remixes by half a dozen DJs including Laswell himself. I love the idea of working with original material and generating something new. It always gets me thinking about parallel ideas in the world of poetry. Variations and versions. I’ve done some of this with ‘Blue’s Song of the Earth’ and ‘Zen Poems’. With the first collection I worked with found texts, and with the latter I re-worked poems into new variations as the collection developed. I’m going to do some more experimenting later this week, using the panthalassa album and its remix version as source material to generate some poetry. This should be great fun!