Chalice's first proper gig will be a lunchtime session at the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, Tuesday 24 November 2026 1-2pm. All proceeds go to the church, which runs a great programme of creative music in the heart of London's West End. It's a beautiful, resonant space that should complement our sound perfectly.

Secure your ticket here! If you can't be there, please share this post (or the link) to anyone who may be interested -- as usual, we are innocent of the dark arts of marketing and rely almost entirely on word of mouth.

I thought readers of this blog might be interested in some discussion about the setup I'll be using, so for the rest of this post I'll break with my usual practice and do -- horror of horrors -- a rig rundown.

Earlier this year I joined a band with old friends Robert Kingham (of Minimum Labyrinth) and Nick Hajdu, along with new friend Ian Blake. We did a secret gig in London a couple of weeks ago to test the waters and are expecting to announce some proper dates over the next twelve months. For now what I have to show you is this teaser but I expect to have more news in due course...

[EDIT: The working title was "Alice's Chalice", the Alice in question being Alice Coltrane. We recently ditched her -- in name but not in spirit.]

An album of solos and duets for a clarinet and oboe, inspired by serialism and medieval mysticism -- listen here or on Bandcamp for free or on all the usual streaming services in the next week or two. As ever there's a bit more about the music below the fold.

I've been getting back into guitar lately and stumbled on this idea, which made me wonder whether I know the fretboard at all. The idea is that since a triad has 3 notes, a triad pair has 6 and so should be playable as a chord (or at least a one-note-per-string arpeggio, in the awkward cases). How many ways are there to do that? Surely I already know all about diatonic triads, right? I found the results mildly terrifying.

The idea of the pastoral is central to a great deal of Western culture, at least since the middle ages. The pastoral is the city-dweller's fantasy of the countryside, or rather "fantasies" since they are never just one thing. Sometimes they're regressive stereotypes but sometimes the pastoral represents a radical kind of freedom. This release is inspired by different versions of pastoral music, and different ideas of what the pastoral might mean today. A bit more context below the fold but meanwhile listen for free here, pay what you like to download on Bandcamp and find the album on all the streaming services within the next couple of weeks:

Continuing my little exploration of nine-note scales made from diminished triads, we arrive at 9-6, the scale you get when you take the total chromatic and delete three notes that are a whole ton apart (in our example, they'll be E, F# and G#). Let's see what we can get out of it.

A couple of recent posts (here and here) have explored what I called "quartal-ish" language -- stuff that has lots of fourths in it and sounds kind of quartal but actually isn't. In the process we've seen the "quartal triad" (e.g. C-F-Bb) a few times and I thought it would be interesting to see what I could find in its complement, which has Forte number 9-9.

Here's a little thing I found while experimenting with the complement of the quartal triad from this post (more on that to come). It turns out there are a few more ways to combine three diminished triads without any overlaps than I'd expected and, as usual, I found some unpromising globs of semitones with musical possibilities hidden inside them.

The hexatonic set 6-z38 came up in relation to some material I was developing out of Yagapriya and at that time I put it aside for later. Well, later has arrived. Let's see what we can make of this awkward pile of semitones.

Games and music are two of the very few true universals of human culture -- although they take very different forms and have varying functions, it seems likely that all human societies feature music and games. In English we even use the same word for both activities: "play". While I wouldn't want to push the analogies too far, games have probably influenced my thinking about music more than I'm aware of. Today I realised that games-people have a name for much of what I do on this blog and I wanted to talk about it a bit.