I always feel very guilty when I end up making an ambient thing. The only time such things ever sound original is when they also sound terrible - e.g. the original version of this track is/was dominated by a high-pitched relentless scream which I'd never heard anyone else make, and which made the thing very unpleasant to hear - almost literally unbearable. So then I tried to retune it to be more agreeable, and that of course just means it gets to sound like everything else. If this current dollop has any reason/excuse to exist then I think it's because it manages to be both fairly pleasant and also fairly out-of-tune at the same time.
Well maybe it'll be a comfort to others if I admit that that was one of the worst Christmases ever for me. It wasn't just the dreary weather, which could've turned even your happiest wedding day into a funeral. It was just that I really wasn't in the mood for whatever was meant to be happening - which wasn't much - and that little turned into stuff which I would rather not've done - it would've been best if I'd just spent the whole day alone at home lying on the sofa and reading a good book.
It might not've helped that this is one of my very rare dry Christmases. Though even if right now this room was piled high with full boxes of wine, I'd not be remotely tempted to start drinking. The main bummer is that during my most recent binge I tore my meniscus while coming down stairs. Oh lordy, the sweet irony - I walk millions of miles every year, over the dangerous rough pavements of Southampton (I know so many people who have tripped up and hurt themselves while walking round round this city) and I've walked a trillion miles through bogs and stuff in the countryside - and yet the one time I really fuck myself up is when I am descending gracefully down my own safe city padded staircase.
My knee is very slowly getting better and I will never have surgery on it or anything dramatic. But it is another lesson that we all know but which we never really learn - that the whole of life can turn in an instant. It hasn't really sunk in, but if it turns out that my injury means that I can never again do my lovely long walks, then that will feel like about a third of my life has suddenly vanished - my walks are more important to me than making music or painting or listening to friends do their chattering, or maybe even reading.
If I can never go for long walks again, then yes I do at least have those other things, and they will have to expand to fill the gap. But it is such a huge gap. I think of my mother, and my wife, and all the other people who I've known well and watched die, and I've seen how their world shrinks as their body limits what they can do, and the less they do the more timid they get and the less they want to do.
I can still walk miles a day. But at the moment I can't walk miles and miles and miles - the way that gets me so high. I don't want to go back to the life of non-stop drinking and endless overeating, because it is what half the people around me are doing all the time and I see how awful it is.
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recorded this morning on the floor here, cover art/painting by me
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
