Midears it's almost the end of the tax year and my accountant has been nagging me about whether my musical career is bringing in sufficient funds to pay the forthcoming year's council tax monthly thingies. It is fortunate that I hardly eat anything, I hardly buy anything, I go nowhere, I've lost almost all of my friends, I don't drink, I don't do holidays, I don't collect stuff, I don't have things that need repairing, I already own more than enough books to read non-stop till I die of old age, I have enough of other-people's music inside data-boxes-whatever to play unrepeatingly for about 30 years.
I like long walks and they only cost the £2 bus fare back home. It would be cheaper if I walked in circles, but it never feels the same. Making music costs nothing, painting costs very little, especially as I love crayons and I mainly paint/crayon on old newspapers, and I don't buy newspapers, just receive donations from the recycling bins.
I see that my first album on Bandcamp came out almost exactly 11 years ago. In that time I've spent about a fiver on a big charity shop acoustic gtr, about £2 on a small charity shop acoustic gtr, about £3 on an Asda kiddies xylophone, about £1 on a The Works flute, £19-99 on a Lidl kiddies keyboard. Audacity is free. Once a year I use LMMS - that too is free. I did once download a cracked thingy of Ableton, but no matter how many times I switched it on and off I couldn't get a note out of it.
My microphone and my computer are about a million years old. So in a decade my musical outlay is about £30. And my musical income has amounted to about 79 pence. I can't really include the physical merch stuff, because that is all a loss-leader to try to kick-start my musical career.
So every time at this time of year my accountant sits me down and beats me up a bit like I've just been responsible for a mass-shooting in Moscow and she asks me where it's all going wrong - and I have to make albums like this one so I can point to them and say "just when things were going well, I make an album like this and it loses me all the goodwill I'd been building up".
There's nothing much wrong with this so-so album (by my so-so standards) except that it sounds like I'm coming to the end of this particular phase of manic music-making. Or even overstepped it. Things would've been better if I'd paused after making "luudjtqibtlkuuvyqähäd kuurerðubreiðzeitfugue" - then gone on a year-long silence and whenever any newcomers randomly drifted over here that would be the one they heard first. Instead they'll hear this one.
It sounds like the music of someone who is trying to be a musician, and failing. Whereas my best music sounds like someone who is trying not to be a musician, and succeeding. I devote about an hour a day to making music - about the same time as others devote to having lunch or an evening meal. I don't have lunch or evening meals.
So making music isn't a big deal for me and I would no more call myself a "musician" than a lunch-eater would call themselves a gastronome or whatever the word is. I just do it because it is still amazing that it can be done. Whatever the outcome. I dislike praise, I'm comfortable about being disliked, it doesn't embarrass me that I have nearly no friends and a similar number of followers on Bandcamp and Instagram.
Fuck it, it actually embarrasses me that I am on Bandcamp and Instagram, when I know that if happiness is anything (and it isn't) then I would be happiest of all on nothing and doing nothing except reading those books all day every day forever and ever, warmed in the sunshine that shall one day come in through my big south-facing windows, no one disturbing my trance, possibly the only happy person in the UK - that's not a boast, because I am not that person, I am not brave enough to be like that, my accountant is beautiful and irresistible and I want sooo much to be liked by her, to feel the sweet tingle of electricity in my testicles as she agrees with me and I fit in inside her and everyone else.
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recorded yesterday, cover yesterday - I thought this was a very weak album in the immediate aftermath of making it, but after letting it/me stew and brew for a short while I'm coming round to quite liking it.
she says this is the last album she'll make like this before she goes off and makes stuff with Lana Del Rey - so just for this moment we have Kathy to ourselves - (yes I love Lana's music too) Simon Aulman
The new EP from Scottish songwriter Alec Bowman_Clarke goes deep, setting vulnerable lyrics to gentle melodies & stripped-back arrangements. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 30, 2021
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