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Category: The Untangled Knot

The Untangled Knot Confirms Our Berwick Venue…

Posted on by John Reed

To be honest, it’s been secured for some months, but my diary hasn’t synchronised with the venue Music Director’s until now, and there were details to confirm, spaces to measure, and so on. So the date for your own diaries is now firmly fixed as SATURDAY 21st NOVEMBER, and our very special venue is the most northerly parish church in England, the church of Holy Trinity and St. Mary, The Parade, Berwick upon Tweed TD15 1DF.

This beautiful Grade 1 listed building appeals to our sense of community, ethics, aesthetics, and history, because whatever your religious persuasion, or indeed whether or not you have one, churches have been bound to our communities for many centuries, often as their focal point. The Untangled Knot has been created to embrace a sense of community and inclusion in a world where it can feel that division and exclusion seem all too frequently to the fore. There’s a very strong sense of community here in Berwick.

The current church replaced a 12th century building and was completed in 1652 following a grant from Charles I, using stone and timber from the extensive ruins of Berwick Castle, just a few minutes walk down the hill from where I’m sat. It was designed as a Puritan place of worship, with its original construction being a simple nave with two side aisles, a distinctive flat roof, but no tower or belfry. Although Oliver Cromwell didn’t become Lord Protector until the following year, the minimalist design of the church showed the direction the country was going in at that time. 

   

As with all buildings of longevity, the church has also evolved to suit changing times, and that will no doubt continue. The chancel wasn’t added until 1855, together with an altar and classical style windows replaced the former Gothic versions. The end result is a place of architectural beauty and uniqueness, and we believe it will be a perfect venue for our first concert together, a pilot concert for a short run of performances across the country in 2027.

Our performance will be streamed live to the world from our YouTube or Bandcamp channel (we’re still sussing that one out) and will comprise songs that each of us has been writing since the start of our project on 2nd April. Although initial recordings will be made, both in our respective home studios and during rehearsals in town, it’s the live performance that will become the mainstay of our first album together. Our debut album together won’t be released until early next year, so we will be opening a crowdfunder in the Autumn specifically to cover the cost of production, CDs and other merchandise, and we would love your support with that. We are currently looking at what we can offer for different levels of subscription, and will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, take a look at the church website. It’s become one of Berwick’s more regular music venues during the time the Maltings Theatre has been under renovation, and the signs are that it will remain a popular venue after the Maltings re-opens its doors in 2027. Do join us for this exciting collaborative project!

Ticket links will be advised soon. There will be two: one link for those attending the church performance; another for those accessing the live stream.

Peace.

John

Technology and Time

Posted on by John Reed

Technology exists to help us become more efficient, or am I missing something? 

I’m normally pretty good at picking up new technologies, adapting to updated technologies, and taking in new information. However, it would seem that new technologies are increasingly ill-thought through in the rush to be first to everything, itself explaining the constant bombardment of updates we all receive. Nothing is ever right at the time of release. It you get it right in the first place, the need for those updates will either be minimal or non-existent. But I promise to stop talking sense for now…

Doing Things Online

I recently opened a business bank account for The Untangled Knot. I was directed to the bank’s App, except the account opening procedure failed to specify which one. As things turned out, I should have downloaded the black and white one for business not the red and white one for personal…but at no point was I told. Given the bank’s main logo is red and white, I thought I was on safe territory, but no.

That little saga finally behind me, I received a snail mail letter containing my business debit card, then a second a few days later another with my pin number. It had one of those handy peel-off strips under which the pin is revealed…except no matter how I tried the pin was completely unreadable. That’s security for you.

Thus, a telephone call was required to get the bank to send another pin. Trouble is, the bank had provided the wrong phone number on the letter they themselves provided, so I had to suffer a menu system and a long wait. The operator apologised, resolved my issue and asked if I’d like to formalise a complaint about the incorrect number. I agreed, only then to suffer a further 15 minutes for that process to play out. I have no hair left to tear out.

However, at least we now have a bank account for The Untangled Knot Limited, into which we can deposit sales revenue and the funding so kindly granted for our project by our friends at Create Berwick.

QR Codes

I struggled for a while to understand the relevance of QR Codes. When Ali Karim and I put a QR code together for one of our works, and it just directed followers to the website they could have gone to in the first place. It seems I was right all along, unless any of you geeks out there can tell me what exactly is the value of having these things anywhere in our lives?

Automatic Checkouts

They rarely work. The fact that they struggle to work is evidenced by the need to have paid staff on hand in the very likely event that they won’t. I’d rather queue with my one item at a busy manned checkout than waste energy on trying to make an auto-checkout do it’s job properly. If they did, I’d use them. Quite apart from that, I like to pass the time of day with another human being when I’m out shopping, and the till person generally likes to pass the time of day back…because we are all still actually humans. Just.

But Just Don’t Get Me On AI

And while we all struggle to make the things that used to work perfectly well work, we have search engines that present AI summaries of our searches at the top of their first pages, most of which are hilariously inaccurate or downright misleading.

AI, like most technological developments (I’m loathe to call them ‘advances’), has been created largely for good purpose, but it relies on pre-existing accuracies and people using it well. Otherwise I really might be the long dead John Reed, the US Communist journalist who covered the Bolshevik Revolution. What’s the expression I’m left groping for?…”Shit in, shit out” I think.

So that’s my little technology rant for the day. I could have gone on – for pages – maybe even written a book, but I have far better things to do with my time. I’m sure you do too!

Peace.

John

The Untangled Knot Is Here

Posted on by John Reed

Well we weren’t going to start our project on April Fools’ Day! The Untangled Knot is now officially a thing. It’s as much a community project as it is a music project, in which we aim to bring people together to demonstrate what’s possible. Our pilot performance here in Berwick on 21st November will be preceded by a four-hour afternoon song creation workshop, in some way to mirror what we’re doing as a group over the next few months.

We began our work together on 2nd April. Although we’ve been scheming for a while, the deal has always been that nothing would start until the official start date: no tune creation, no lyrics, no preconceived ideas, no nothing. It means we all start from the same point, and each have the same amount of time to write our three songs for the project. The Untangled Knot is a clean page for all of us. This is where the journey begins.

In similar fashion, participants in our November workshop will be tasked with creating a song in an afternoon. It’s less easy to enforce the ‘no preconceived ideas’ rule, but we have some good ideas on how the workshop will work. The idea is that anyone or any group of people who feel confident enough will be invited to perform their afternoon creation in support of our debut gig. More details about that will follow soon.

Each of us has different experience of making things happen in our own music. In my case, I know the spontaneous approach works because that’s how Ali Karim and I created our “Breathe” album. It began as a happy accident. Rather than reviewing past video footage, we opted just to create something. I happened to have a few sets of lyrics in my bag at the time. Four hours later we had the title track, and that’s what you hear HERE. Thereafter, we constructed each song in a day from a randomly selected set of lyrics. At the end of the process, we threw all that video together in Breathe, The Film and edited it in four frenetic hours.

I’m not someone who likes working to rule books, and that’s carried into my music. Jamming can be a great way to find a way forward. It’s a little different for The Untangled Knot because we won’t be writing our album songs in the same room. Following our three-month writing period, we’ll be adding to each other’s work, then exchanging vocal and instrumental files. We then have three periods of rehearsal here in Berwick, one in October, two in November. The last of these will be in the few days before our debut performance as a group. The album will come from initial recordings, rehearsals and our pilot performance, which will also be streamed live to the world. Ambitious? That’s not something we worry about!

Although Rachel and I began talking over two years ago, we’ve never worked together as a group before. We have never met as a group. Beth contributed to Shirley’s debut “Begin, Began, Begun” EP in 2024, but that’s the only prior creative connection in our locker. All we’ve done so far is to establish a basic theme and agree a ‘progressive folk’ style, purely so the final album will feel like an album and not a collection of songs from four different artists. I say ‘all we’ve done’, but actually we’ve created a fabulous spirit between us, and that will be the springboard for the songs that emerge. So here’s our Project Start Day Video to give you an idea of who we are…

Please follow The Untangled Knot on whatever social media you use. We are in the throes of creating a website, and our links are also available HERE. We will be creating a crowdfunding campaign to cover the costs of creating CDs and other merchandise, production, and other marketing costs, and will signpost that nearer the time.

This is a hugely exciting project to be involved with. It’s a project of equals in a world that doesn’t feel especially equal, a project of freedom in a world of restriction, and a project of possibilities in a world where things feel impossible right now. So join us for this inspiring ride!

Peace.

John

And So The Untangled Knot Begins…

Posted on by John Reed

The Untangled Knot (TUK) can now go full steam ahead  here in Berwick upon Tweed thanks to generous funding support provided by Create Berwick 

TUK is an ambitious project that aims to follow up the Berwick pilot song writing workshop and evening concert on Saturday 21st November with similar events in four or five further locations around the UK in 2027. The whole project will be hugely expensive to pull off, so this first tranche of funding is hugely welcomed, and will cover our Autumn rehearsals and first workshop and performance.

 

Our November evening show in Berwick will be streamed live, and we will be bringing on board a poet, a British Sign Language (BSL) professional, and a videographer/audio engineer to record, film, and stream the concert live from a very special venue, to be announced soon. Many of our rehearsal sessions will also be recorded, both together in the room (for which we thank The Straw Yard Theatre), and in our individual spaces as we put together the songs for our debut album.

Because this is a live music project, we will not immediately have CDs or other merchandise available at the pilot event. Our 3-month synchronised songwriting starts on 2nd April, with each of us tasked to write 3 songs. This will be followed by a ‘familiarisation’ period, during which we learn our vocal and instrumental contributions to the others’ songs, in preparation for our rehearsal sessions.

Nothing has been created by any of us before the start date, so we expect an inspiring journey of creative discovery. By the time we take our show to other parts of the UK, we will have tried and tested our format, and created a range of merchandise, paid for in part by a crowdfunding campaign to be opened later in the process.

So please keep your eyes on the prize and your ears to the ground, and support this wonderful collaboration of equals in any way that you can. We will announce more details as the project gets underway. Meanwhile, please join our socials and keep tabs on our Bandcamp page, because there will be a few surprises along the way. All the TUK links are provided below.

Peace.

John

Bandcamp:

https://theuntangledknot.bandcamp.com/

Socials:

Facebook: @theuntangledknot

Instagram: @the_untangledknot

Blue Sky Social: @theuntangledknot.bsky.social

YouTube: @TheUntangledKnot 

The Untangled Knot: A New Collaboration

Posted on by John Reed

For the last couple of years or more, I’ve been talking with Rachel Taylor-Beales about putting together a new project. It gathered a head of steam last year when we were joined by singer-songwriter Shirley Barr and serial session musician and half of the Bookshop Band, Beth Porter.

And so The Untangled Knot (TUK) is born, and we hope you’ll follow our socials and Bandcamp page to create a little momentum before the start date of our project on 2nd April. The project focuses on themes of unity and inclusion: “there is freedom in togetherness”. Each of us is tasked with writing three songs in a three month window from that start date, with contributions from the other artists for a couple of months from 1st July.

We are planning five live shows around the UK, with at least the pilot event being streamed live from Berwick upon Tweed. We have applied for funding from Create Berwick and should know the result of that in 6-8 weeks. The more help we receive, the more we can do.

For that reason, we will also be opening a crowdfunding campaign on or around 2nd April, and we would really appreciate your help in getting our project off the ground at that time.

For now, our Bandcamp page is https://theuntangledknot.bandcamp.com/ so please give us a follow over there. Our social media presence is growing, and will continue to grow. Follow us here on Instagram – more social media pages will be advised soon.

Peace.

John