Daniel Kitson 2020

[holyzombiejesus]

would it have hurt to send out an email mentioning this?!

He did, this afternoon.

Sooooo.

I hope you're as well as currently feasible.

For me, August is an odd month to be in my house. 

It's not all bad, there's a plant i never normally get to see flower, so that's nice but to be frank, and this is not a sick burn on my sweet pad* I would very much rather be in Edinburgh. I could wang on at great length about the wonder of the city and boast about how much of my life I've spent there and rhapsodise about the melancholy of the memories and the profound ache for the place and my concern for the various people and institutions that genuinely rely on the festival to greater or lesser extents but let's just say this -

Last year, having done some last minute previews in Hebden Bridge, I decided to break the journey to Edinburgh by visiting my parents for lunch. It was very good. We sat in the garden and had some food before I made myself a coffee to sharpen my mind for the remainder of the drive and my mum gave me a tuppaware tub with bits of baking and a big bag of what I only later realised were sugar free mints.

About half an hour north of my parents house having drunk my coffee and eaten most of the baking, I noticed a slight gurgle in the guts, so I popped a few mints down the pipe, to settle my stomac. It didn't seem to work, so I had a few more. Why not? I thought.  Self medicate with mints. Not only would their mintiness settle my chuntering guts but the sugar would throw the empty bag into the back seat and proceeded to do myself some real damage right up the A1M.**

There followed three hours of pretty constant mint consumption coupled with increasing confusion at their total lack of medicinal impact on what was, by this stage a pretty unpleasant stomach ache with my body contorting around increasingly brutal cramps and my car filling up with the thickening fug of rancid gas. Eventually, I stopped for petrol and whilst reaching back for my wallet, saw the empty bag of mints, noticing for the first time the words "Sugar Free" and suddenly everything fell into place.

As you may know, sugar free mints contain Sorbitol and Sorbitol, when consumed in sufficient quantities can often induce a laxative effect, I checked the ingredients without needing to, and having confirmed the presence of sorbitol in the mints and the lack of toilet in the services, braced myself for a tricky few hours and got back on the road.

I made it to Edinburgh, unsullied and having spent a few hours stress testing the toilet of the my Airbnb apartment, I rode my bike up a big hill and over some bumpy cobbles to have Ramen with my friends. I felt fragile but i'd been looking forward to having this particular meal with these particular people in this particular restaurant for almost a year and so I arrived a little late, told everyone about my terrible arse, ordered my soup, received my soup and then, having failed to anticipate the ferocity of the self service chilli oil, promptly ruined my soup and rendered my entire dinner a joyless and inedible war of attrition.

I then rode back over the cobbles and the tram tracks to the flat where I found myself utterly unable to sleep. The triple laxative cocktail of sorbitol, chilli oil and not yet having finished my show worked its ungodly voodoo and kept me awake well beyond 4am and then, when I did eventually fall asleep, I was woken up by an unfathomable and terrifying mess of noise. It took a few minutes to realise it was church bells and a few minutes more to realise this harrowing cacophony would be happening on and off, again and again, for the entire month of my stay. 

And yet.

I was still delighted to be there. 

Anyway, look the point is I'll miss the festival a lot this year and so, I imagine, will a number of you and so this email is to tell you about a couple of things I'm going to be doing over the next month or so.

(1)

The first thing is that starting tonight, I'm going to be doing a radio show on Resonance FM..It'll be Monday to Thursday nights at midnight all through the month. For me, August wouldn't be August if I didn't get a couple of weeks in and start wondering why I ever imagined doing a show at midnight was a good idea – so here we are.

The show will last an hour and a half and I cannot emphasise enough how patchy the quality of these shows will be. Someone once reviewed one of these things, which I found absolutely baffling. Anyway. I will definitely play songs that I like, I will almost certainly talk a fair bit – but there is also hopefully going to be a variety of little experiments with travelling and sound and phone calls and activity that will be varied both in nature and, I imagine, quality.

If you are unfamiliar with Resonance FM it's a little miracle of community arts radio that is constantly battling to exist, always trying to fund itself and locked in what seems like an endless process of relocation as rents increase over and over. All whilst producing some of the most interesting and odd and specific radio you'll ever hear.

You'll be able to both listen to the show and donate to the stations continued miraculous existence at:

https://www.resonancefm.com/


(2)

The second things is that I've released "It's the Fireworks Talking" on Bandcamp. You can get it here www.danielkitson.bandcamp.com and for every copy sold during August half the money will go to the Stand Comedy Club. So that's that.


(3)

The third thing is a general heads up really there's going to be various other things to tell you about, I'm going to release a few bits and bobs in aid of a couple of venues up in Edinburgh (and elsewhere) and there will also, I imagine, be other people making and producing work during august that I will want to tell you about, so I've put a new and temporary page on my website (www.danielkitson.com) called August 2020 and the plan is that I'll be updating it as and when things come together and/or get released, I might also put supporting materials up there for the radio stuff as well.

We'll have to see, but basically, because I'm not on any of the social media and don't really want to be, I thought it might be useful having a spot I can post time sensitive things that you can check as and when you fancy it/remember.  But if you can't be arsed with that, I'll also send an email every Monday during August to keep you up to date with everything***

(4)

I'm also putting together a tour of empty venues for October of this year – the idea being that I'll write a show that I can perform in and stream from empty theatres. Tickets will be capped at the capacity of the specific auditorium on any given night and most (but certainly not all, thank you) of the money made will go to the venues in question and its quite exciting to be honest. There'll be more details about that at the start of September, but I wanted to give you a tiny heads up.


Okey doke, that's it for now. I'm hungry.


GOODBYE FOREVER


Daniel


*Criticism of my house.

**The road, not the euphemism

*** There's an unsubscribe link below if that's all a bit much for you.

[mrfridge]

He did, this afternoon.

Yep I spotted the email earlier. Better late than never and the prospect of some new stuff on Bandcamp and a tour of empty venues sounds terrific! 

[JT666]

So did anybody manage to record last night's Trifle? There's nothing on Mixcloud and i've checked that wonderful dx3x link which has got all the 2020 breakfast shows on but nothing just yet?

[privatefriend]

He is broadcasting from home and not the studio, resulting in even more technical difficulties than usual. Should hopefully be smoother sailing from tonight.

[mrfridge]

He is broadcasting from home and not the studio, resulting in even more technical difficulties than usual. Should hopefully be smoother sailing from tonight.

So was there actually a show on last night?

[JT666]

He is broadcasting from home and not the studio, resulting in even more technical difficulties than usual. Should hopefully be smoother sailing from tonight.

All of the breakfast shows he did earlier in the year were from his home I thought anyway..

[The Always Red Society]

So was there actually a show on last night?

Yep, but he lost the stream for a while to start with.

[privatefriend]

So was there actually a show on last night?

About 40 minutes of music and some talking. Subjects broached: jam, pottery, Volvos, van repair, new kettle.

All of the breakfast shows he did earlier in the year were from his home I thought anyway..

He usually cycles to the Resonance FM studios nearby I think, the point being to get him out of the house. I may be wrong about the most recent run though.

[mrfridge]

Ok cheers. The most recent run was definitely recorded in his house.

[cakeinmilk]

It's not as automated a process as I'd like yet but here ya go https://cakeinmilk.github.io/trifle/feed.xml

Or it's going to be available on Resonance's Mixcloud but for a limited time for some reason.

[one_sharper]

It's not as automated a process as I'd like yet but here ya go https://cakeinmilk.github.io/trifle/feed.xml

Or it's going to be available on Resonance's Mixcloud but for a limited time for some reason.

Thanks for this! Last night's show is up on the Resonance FM Mixcloud now: https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/trifle-4-august-2020-1/

[jim_funtingham]

It's not as automated a process as I'd like yet but here ya go https://cakeinmilk.github.io/trifle/feed.xml

Or it's going to be available on Resonance's Mixcloud but for a limited time for some reason.

Thanks for setting up a podcast for these!  It works great for me (using it to listen right now, in fact).

[Old Thrashbarg]

Yeah, always very much appreciated to have the feed set up.

[Quisby]

Resonance have just tweeted that it's not going to be archived on mixcloud from now on and it's live or nothing. "It's to do with the story that threads through... (Sorry, no further details.)".

Thanks to cakeinmilk for their work because I doubt I'll be awake.

[Le Tourbillon]

Thanks very much for posting these - I'd be missing them (in every way) otherwise.

[AzureSky]

And another thanks from me also.

[mrfridge]

Ditto. You're a good egg. A great egg in fact. A Gregg.

[Hesham]

Thanks from me too! Although has anyone else's stalled after the first one and not pulled through Tue and Wed episodes?

[cakeinmilk]

Odd.. they've come through for me. Can you manually refresh?

[lemint]

Yeah, I've only got the first one too.

Many thanks for the RSS though!

[Hesham]

Brilliant - unsubscribe and resubscribe did the trick!

[olliebean]

Thanks from me too! Although has anyone else's stalled after the first one and not pulled through Tue and Wed episodes?

My podcatcher is only showing the 5th August episode (which was the latest one when I added it), and Inoreader is only showing the 6th August episode (also the latest one when I added it there). I wonder if it's because the new episodes are being added at the bottom instead of the top of the feed?

<edit> Unsubscribed and re-subscribed in the podcatcher and now it only shows the 6th August episode. I think it must be reading from the bottom up and ignoring items dated earlier than previous ones.

<edit again> Tried a different podcatcher and this time only the 4th August episode is showing. There's definitely something non-standard about it.

[cakeinmilk]

Cool. Somethings up with the automation somewhere along the line then; tried to make the whole thing as hands-free as poss. I'll check tonight to fix it.

[Old Thrashbarg]

I think the issue is the guid in the XML. It should be unique for each episode, but they're all set to the same value currently ('cepod01'), so the readers will likely only recognise there being one episode.

[cakeinmilk]

I'd be grateful if someone could let me know if it updates ok for you today - made a couple of changes but I'll probably redo the whole thing over the weekend - was just in a rush to get something set up and wanted to reduce some of the time-consuming parts of the process.

[AzureSky]

For me, the 4th episode appeared OK in the list earlier automatically, so I could see 4/5/6/7 all together, but now only 4th and 7th ones are showing.

[Old Thrashbarg]

Last night's show is working fine, with the guid being set to the URL of the file (https://cakeinmilk.github.io/trifle/audio/0708.mp3). The first three are still all using the same guid though (cepod01), so only the first one is showing up.

[olliebean]

All four episodes are showing up now as a newsfeed in Inoreader and as a podcast in MusicBee. I notice they've all got unique guid's now, which is doubtless what fixed the problem.

[lemint]

Bang on using Podkicker

[JT666]

Was there no Trifle last night / this morning? Did his bad tooth cause a no-show?