For now this is probably the last of my series of long relentless samey piano-moored pieces, the samey-est and the most distorted of them all - and those things, especially the distortion, are deliberate - absolutely integral really - when you are on your knees on a mat with the cheapest technology money can't buy then you really don't want things to be clearly audible, you want a blur, and thanks to my love of over-compression that is the way through.
So in a thousand years, when I get a fan and she decides to hire an engineer to tidy up my sound, please don't, this is the level of tidiness I want - I don't like an untidy house, but I do like living inside untidy music. This is likely to be the least liked of my recent output, but it is my own favourite one. And yes, sorry, but PLAY TOO LOUD to distort it even more - there really is no other way.
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The photo is of four shells taken from Calshot beach yesterday - apologies to the people who always shout at me for being the sort of person who likes to mark every visit to a beach by taking home a shell or a pebble - if it wasn't for the fact that I quite like my modern newbuild brutalist little terraced house then I would start mixing the concrete and attaching the shells to the front of it.
Calshot is one of my favourite destinations. Salisbury is another. Lymington yet another. Obviously I like to fit in and moan that this government has never done anything good. And it hasn't. It's really been like the UK is under enemy occupation. But they have done one good thing, and that is the £2 bus fare. Nowadays I almost never drive anywhere. I just don't enjoy it any more. As the culture has changed, so has the mood on our roads, and people are now less patient and much ruder - it must be more exciting if you are young, and I'd love it if I was, but for the old it is annoying and offputting.
Until fairly recently I did most of my travelling by train. But lately I've done almost all my travelling by bus. I talk to people at bus stops, whereas I never talk to people on station platforms. I talk to people in buses, whereas I almost never talk to anyone on a train. Buses are more of an adventure and you get a better view and you get a better feel for the people around you. The people on buses are noisier and less inhibited. Depending on what you want, but you're either lucky or unlucky if you have a bus ride without constantly being blasted by phoney crappy two-second blasts of random music as someone desperately searches all day and all lifetime for a piece of music to hear for longer than two seconds.
And now, on a bus much more than on a train, you will usually get the one-side of a phone conversation. Or, unlike on any train, you might actually get a real conversation going on somewhere - two actual people talking to each other like it's pre-2005. None of these things are ever interesting, but they are reassuring - they remind the lone traveller that s/he isn't missing much, that the lives of pretty much everyone I've ever met or overheard this year are fairly desperate and empty, and if you are comfortable with that, as I am, then that is nothing to worry about, life on the bus really is the small thing we look back on when we can't do it any longer, and miss incredibly.
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
Soft and soothing acoustic compositions from this Italian guitarist with melodies that flutter like leaves on a breeze. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 1, 2021
