seven at 77 - preorder Joel Mellin

As much as the phrase can be co-opted for indie pop music, Where it's At has been 'thinking global and acting local' for 21 years now.  I got involved in the early stages of WIAIWYA with my Miss Mary project when John approached the label I ran with my brother Jeff, 'Stereorrific Recordings' about a split release.  We'd then often split releases, Jerv in the UK, Stereorrific in the US. We've been through years together, with trans-atlantic pop releases and trans-atlantic rock and roll shows and most important - a host of friends.  I'm not sure either of us can retire on the proceeds from any of it, and WIAIWYA has outlasted Sterorrific/Waxfruit for sure, but it was never about that - it was about making music together, and in that way, we've always been there, you know, 'Where It's At' with Jerv.  Congrats on 21 years, John.  You're Where It's At and that's where we are.

Artist: Joel Mellin
Track: Be Here With Me
Album: Sevens Ceremony (Seven at 77)

"It's more painting than music."  


You're head is at the center of a sphere - at least seven feet in any direction. One voice appears, then others over time.  Sporadic at first, moving in disparate arcs around you, and yet, all together in one space.

There was a piece by Yoko that I read a few years that talked about pushing an elephant and changing our heads instead of changing the world. 'That we can do' she wrote. 

Compositionally, Be Here with Me melds contemporary notions of aleatoric and stochastic music with traditional, harmonic progressions studied for hundreds of years.Realized in a three dimensional ambisonic paradigm, a space is created for listening and reflection.

Written entirely in Java, the piece was designed for a custom 3D Ambisonics decoder and encoder  - placing the listener's head at the center of a listening sphere.  This piece could be decoded in a multi-speaker environment of 4, 8, or 16 speakers in various positions around the listener, but is decoded to stereo for this recording.  A melodic voice moves at a constant velocity around the listening sphere and harmonic voices move in slowly accelerating circles above and below the listener in various directions and and trajectories. 

The melodies are chosen at the start of each 7.7 minute section based on a pseudo-random function that considers musical key and the chord progression of each section.  The chord progression is chosen using an aleatoric process commonly referred to as a 'markov chain' - in which the probability of the next chord is determined by weighted percentages of possible 'next' chords of the current state.  In this respect, it has no memory.  These percentages were programmed using simple assumptions and understandings of common practice progressions dating back to the 16th century.  These chords are never voiced directly, though, as a mathematical distribution functions controls the timing and number of single voice events that occur for each of the 3 harmonizing voices.  The seemingly random voicing is each event itself choosing how to harmonize the melody in real-time. 

There's an additional nod to my interests in Asian music and cultures with the addition of an underlying drone and clearing bell.  The gong, as is common in Balinese music, signals both the end and the beginning of sections. . 

In a sense, it's music reflecting back on itself after years of 'progress'.

seven at 77 - preorder The Great Electric

Inspired by a creepy internet legend (see below), the band's usual approach - tracks are sculpted, overdubbed and from collective improvisation - was abandoned.


The members retreated inward, working solo, on instruments unfamiliar to them, using outdated analogue technology. Assembled by the band's 'editor' Pete, the anonymous tracks were placed randomly together, chance creating a hazy, shifting collage that can turns on a dime (much like the legend that inspired it).


RIYL Faust Tapes, side 1 of "Millions Now Living Will Never Die", Sentridoh, Soul Junk, etc.

seven at 77 - preorder Jack Hayter

Flashes And Occultations

Jerv wanted a 77 minute pedal steel improvisation, but I wanted to create a transient sound sculpture from the identification patterns of distant lighthouses, buoys and light vessels; to convert their flashes and occultations into small voltages using telescopes, light sensitive resistors and photodiodes, then to use those derived signals to trigger samples and control analogue synths.

I was overambitious and my experiments were largely a technical failure. I also got cold and muddy while recording foghorns. Worse still, those supposedly unique and exciting light patterns often turned out to be "one flash every 20 seconds" or "red occulting thrice every minute on a Tuesday."

Then I ran out of time.

So I improvised Iazily around some field recordings instead, playing along on a pedal steel using a Sharpie instead of a steel bar. At the same time Pete Bentley kindly gave me a thirty two year old Kawai 8bit digital synth...so horrible and yet so right...the only keyboard I used.

Many thanks to Oliver Cherer and Riz Maslen for adding oscillator, harmonium and vocals. Oliver and Jeane recorded some bedtime lighthouse talk. I cheekily emailed the brilliant Aoife Mannix, who I once met during my short career as a bad poet, asking if she had a lighthouse related poem. She promptly sent me ten great ones and I used most of the one called "Quiz."

What you hear is a plan B. It's second best; a cowardly collage evoking lighthouses, but not a brave sonic transcription of their actual output. One day I will get round to re-attempting  that original plan ...or perhaps you can? It's good idea...but wear thermals and waders.

Jack Hayter:Everything apart from:

Riz Maslen: Vocalisation

Oliver Cherer: Harmonium, AF valve oscilllator

Jeane Lancaster: Bedtime ghost stories.

Poetry: "Quiz" Aoife Mannix

Artwork: Andy Dean

seven at 77 - preorder Papernut Cambridge

It really is all numbers, when you think about it. Minutes, seconds, bits, bytes, equipment settings, poster dimensions, dpi…. a couple of hundred days thinking about it since Jerv asked if we could do it…a few dozen band emails….however many seconds to midnight we are now on the Doomsday Clock…...

So what have we done, and what is it called?
Well we thought we might call it just Hello, but in fact it’s properly called Everything You Say Is Lyrics, Anything You Touch Is Art.

It’s a celebration of all things WIAIWYA, the number 7, and the actual process of making the track. We’ve also bestowed a kind of art-message on it  - the concept that the observer is part of the art. if there is a 'fourth wall' analogy for music, we’ve clubbed together to have it knocked through.




We thought about famous long songs - how Sister Ray gets to be not quite so groovy after the first few minutes, but the Live 1969 version of What Goes On could literally go on all day; how you wish the solo on Marquee Moon would go on for another half hour at least; how the best Yes or Genesis patchwork epics fly by in what seems like an instant; how a repeating chord sequence can be dull or brilliant, even for a few seconds; how they managed to get Todd Rundgren’s The Ikon (30mins+) on a side of vinyl etc.
We saw this in The Guardian, we also thought about Thom Yorke’s Subterranea (432 hrs long) and John Cage's ORGAN2/ASLSP (639 yrs).We knew ours had to fit in somewhere amongst or against all these, and we also decided there had to be a 77-second version too, for radio.

I wish I could say we’d written an actual 77 minute epic, with reams of lyrics, like a book of The Aeneid. Sorry, we didn’t. This was an exercise in taking one riff and expanding it, then singing something over it occasionally to explain! You can tell we've heard of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, but we have the mentality of The Troggs.

People might not listen to all 77 mins (or seconds for that matter) at once - you could dip in at any point. It’s inspired by functional/background music for people that aren’t necessarily sitting down listening to it intently. We’re not talking so much about ambient music, Eno, passive listening - it’s more inspired by what the Fire Engines said about their Lubricate Your Living Room record when it came out. It’s music for doing something else to. In fact you needn’t necessarily even be in the room. You could even put it on and go out.

So then there’s the idea that if you are doing something else while this music is on, you’re kind of creating something, interacting, and becoming part of the art form.

And then there’s Allan Kaprow, the inventor of “the happening” - where you adapt, hijack or simply observe things that are already happening, and they become an art event, because you call it one. We’re not sticking to his rules because we’re using ‘traditional’ music and we’re not manufacturing any events, but his ideas about blurring actual life and art are a big inspiration.
What we’re saying is if you are listening to the track, or even not listening to it, you’re actually part of the art because we’ve said so. Whatever you’re doing you’re part of our event. Everything you say is lyrics. Everything you touch is art.

One of the early poster ideas was a homage to this record Allan Kaprow made in 1966: