Sleeping under blankets
above a pub and spending Christmas Day serving roast dinners by accident. A bad reality. I had even started smoking, unheard of.
During this time, I worked
almost exclusively on Become A Flood,
by Future Loss. Programming the multiple
kick drums and trawling through the many keyboard parts that had been laid down
during September of 2013.
The sound achieved from
those overdub sessions remain seminal for me:
they seemed to nudge towards the experimentalism and ambience that I
wasn’t sure I could achieve using the primitive equipment at my disposal –
especially the outro. Brian also managed
to get many different colours into his guitar palette. I remember hanging microphones from porch
ceilings and using aggressive low-pass filter roll off settings, in order to
warm everything up.
We didn’t feel so attached
to the song as some of the others. I
felt that gave me a little more licence to mess with it. To stretch it and use it as a framework on
which to express the atmosphere I had been plunged into: nocturnal London, a lean place with little
warmth to it. Trapped inside the laptop.
This track would undergo
repeated re-edits throughout the next year or so; on account of its length and
monotonous nature. In the end, it’s a
miracle it ever made it under the nine minute mark.
Simultaneously during this
time, I was walking the streets of the capital with a camera and an audio
recorder, paying witness to whatever was around me. The samples from these treks made their way
into a number of solo pieces that included some fragments of old piano demos
from the Bensham church era, buried underneath the hooting of busking
saxophones put through bespoke delay patterns and trains rumbling around. Without any access to studio equipment, it
was the only way I could make music.
Which suited me, since at the time I was quietly defiant in not wanting
to go down that well-worn path again. I
was instead able to occasionally distract myself – as one might with a
crossword – with these chunks of found sounds, cutting them together into
collages. None of it ever felt too
precious.
They sum up the feeling of that time rather accurately: planes overhead, night shifts, getting thin, standing on a roof listening to trees of Richmond Park sway and the air conditioning click on and off.
They sum up the feeling of that time rather accurately: planes overhead, night shifts, getting thin, standing on a roof listening to trees of Richmond Park sway and the air conditioning click on and off.