The talented Piers Faccini will be performing five times in NYC this month. His Wednesday night residency at the legendary Living Room in NYC kicks off tonight at 7PM. He will also be playing 2 intimate spaces in Brooklyn. Piers will be introducing some new songs from his forthcoming studio album as well as playing his earlier works. Don't miss this opportunity to catch Piers live.
02/09/11 The Living Room (7PM) 02/10/11 Zebulon (9PM) 02/16/11 The Living Room (7PM) 02/20/11 Barbes (7PM) 02/23/11 The Living Room (7PM)
We recently played a show in Nancy in France and as we were soundchecking my road mnager Pierrot asked me if it was ok if a photographer by the name of David Verlet could do an interview after we'd finished. So once the customary grind of checking levels and frequencies and hushing humming monitors was done with, we sat down for a brief chat during which I did my best to pull something interesting to say outside of the usual hatful of platitudes and cliches that make up the majority of interviews. A task made easier in this case by some good questions. He said he'd be at the show to take some pictures and judging from the quality of our conversation, I got the feeling he'd have something to look at once the gig was done.
Sure enough, I was blown away by his work, the difference between his work and the usual snaps one sees of concerts is that this man has ideas, he doesn't just take action pictures! He thinks before pulling the trigger!
p.s also if you haven't already done so sign up for the newsletter with your email and you can download my cover series for free! (top of the diary page)
Parallel Body is Dom Gabrielli's second book of poetry published by Ziggurat Books. Within this new collection of poems, you will find a few discreet drawings of mine. These drawings as well as the front and back cover illustrations are taken from sketchbooks that I produced in my early twenties. Although initially I wanted to produce something new to go with the poems, we found that these drawings, made on lined notebooks using carbon paper to draw through, provided a perfect foil for the poems.
Dom Gabrielli's voice is the voice of a true poet, one that has been carved over the years out of emptiness. It is the song of one who has stared silence in the face in order to discover what it is to have a voice.
It is this voice that calls, moans and sings throughout the book, holding invisible mirrors up to life in order to catch what reflections should fall.
Dom Gabrielli will be doing a reading from his new book on the 29th March 7pm at Shakespeare & Company, 37 rue de la Bucherie, Paris 75005. I will be accompanying him on guitar during some of the poems. Hope to see you there, come early if you want to get a good seat!
Piers
poem 3
words can sing now words from so far motionless in a moment of you
moments wish to leave beg to depart to live their own lives as bridges between our crystal skins
smile another smile
every poem is a moment trying to escape time
kiss my poem and your skin will come alive
poem 15
you lost her
in your arms
her final heartbeat
was yours
you turned to the desert
not the sea
your poem
began that day
your parched throat was hers
in a sea without water
your thirst for her
for her hand
for her lips
for her bosom
waves in your verse singing
for her who was still you
in the desert alone
you would always be together
you called her back
line after line
you begged
the wounded earth in labour
to bring her back
your voice
calling to the elements
calling each tear with a new name
all names were hers
your voice
hers to call
to unite thirst with thirst
and live on in song
Songs, the earth and the plough
The harsh winter cold will soon be coming to an end. The days are getting longer, the buds on the plants and trees are beginning to swell and the sap is slowly releasing itself from the throes of seasonal sleep. On an afternoon under the warm southern sun where the onset of spring seems tantalisingly within reach, I decide it's time to turn the earth on the plot of land we reserve for our vegetables. The earth that I have at my disposal is not very rich, the region has traditionally very little agriculture and only olive trees and perennial oaks seem to flourish on the dry rocky soil. As all amateur gardeners know, nothing is better to kick start a poor batch of earth than a good load of rich manure turned into the soil. I wanted to track down a sheep or goat cheese maker in the region who could provide me with a trailer load of manure. Although there are many organic cheese makers in the Cevennes, the manure the animals produce tends to be kept back for friends and contacts of the shepherds and is often surprisingly difficult to get hold of. It's funny that in a world where there's so much of it, a good load of crap is hard to find. I ran into some luck one morning when dropping off my oldest boy at the village school, the mother of one of his classmates and I struck up a conversation during which she told me she'd come across my music and liked it. As the conversation and small talk ensued, she informed me that she made organic goat's cheese. Sensing this was too good to be true, I suggested that we do some old fashioned bartering and we quickly shook hands on a deal. The deal being: One of my albums for a trailer load of goat's manure!
It's possible she may have thought that she came away with the better deal but I'm not so sure, after all in some unforeseen chain of events, the writing and recording of some songs has ended up with me potentially being able to grow some prize tomatoes and aubergines this year, making it perhaps the most productive thing to come out of my years of writing songs!
Apart from the pleasing bypassing of cash and money in our deal. I felt it was appropriate in some way that it was the music that I made that had created this prized opportunity to get my hands on some good manure, or in other words on some good shit. (The next time I hear someone say my music is crap, I'll take it as a compliment)
In a way you could say we are here because of shit. Or at the very least you could say we can carry on being here because waste is broken down and recycled by nature. The champion recyclers are the ants and worms and countless insects and organisms that eat up and release the elements back to a reusable form. Decomposing leaves and branches, dead plants, insects and animals all eventually make up the soil and earth that we grow upon. Life decomposes, gets broken down and is remade all over again in a never ending cycle. Nothing is wasted, every element is returned back to the earth and rebuilt from the bottom up in an eternal circle of decomposition and composition, death and life, destruction and creation.
Similarly, as anyone who writes will testify, it is in the decomposition or de-structuring of life in the form of relived emotions, memories and feelings that we are able to grow, metaphorically speaking, songs and poems. There's no getting round it, beauty comes from waste.Thankfully we know that we don't have to hold our noses when listening to a good song as the stench of decomposition has transformed itself into a unique perfume.
So who would have thought that when I serve up a tomato and basil salad or a freshly made summer ratatouille that songs that I'd recorded in a studio somewhere would have added unwittingly to their sweetness.
I guess the moral of this particular tale is we all need a good dose of shit to grow from time to time.
P
"Dai diamanti non nasce niente, dal letame nascono i fiori" Fabrizio De Andre'
