About
A held chord on a pipe organ can signal a looming arrival—of a Boris Karloff character or, in a brighter register, the bride-to-be. Such a stately chord encapsulates anticipation. It makes its listener cognizant of waiting, because the instrument can sustain such a chord forever. That is how pipe organs function, and it is one reason they are perfect for churchly representations of heavenly—that is, eternal—choruses. Mark Weidenbaum reviews Kali Malone on Pitchfork.
In 2004, I spotted a poster on the common room wall of the call centre I was working at in Bristol. It was a hand drawn picture of a werewolf playing an organ underneath the summons: KEYBOARD PLAYER WANTED. The next weekend I took the bus back to London, and borrowed the family electronic keyboard for the audition. Using the organ setting, I busked through the songs and made up a handy lick to the garage smash Fashionably Tortoiseshell which I still use today. I was hired immediately, although to be fair I was the only keyboard player from the call centre to show up for the Dirty Whites audition that evening.
Rehearsals were twice weekly in industrial estates in Bristol. The other four members were all ok musicians, much better than me, so I threw money at the problem: becoming a werewolf and spending £300 on a Hammond organ. It was a Japanese built X-5 transistor copy of the B-3 in three parts: manual, frame and pedals, and it sounded reedy and thin but it looked the part and came alive when plugged in to an Elka Elkatone 700 rotating speaker cabinet. On days off I would sit in the garage and play chords for hours, waiting for something to happen.
Both of these pieces of musical equipment have been sitting gathering greenery in the woods behind Tyntesfield House since M Dirty cancelled my storage subscription and left them there for wont of a better place.
In 2020 I found myself living in Chilcompton, Somerset, where I spent hours wandering round the local fields, looking for something to do. Every time I walked past a church I would imagine a heavenly chorus, even as it sat there in pandemic silence. I longed to sit down at the console and make a heavenly racket. On one such walk I got talking to the church warden of St John's and they said I should contact Rev. Izzard at St Peter and St Paul's in Kilmersdon. The church warden was happy to grant my request and I spent three happy hours there one Sunday afternoon, holding chords with the stops pulled out until I was politely and firmly asked to leave. Annoyingly I forgot to press record, though I had set up a portable studio to document the event.
Now I live in Bristol again and I am trying to play and record as many of the city’s organs as I can.
Contact Every Organ
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