In case the blank screen
cometh, one must have written down what one has done.
In writing this very
paragraph, my computer spontaneously reset – a bad combination of a cracked
copy of Microsoft Word and an aging MacBook, and now I must struggle to again
find those words from ten minutes ago.
But that’s the whole point. At
some juncture, we will be reset too, and if we’ve done things, then isn’t it
worth leaving those things behind for others to discover for themselves? I wonder if the caves of Lascaux echoed to a
similar discourse.
And sometimes, in order to
go forward, one has to look back.
Respect the backlog. Those
folders of unmixed audio files, and Logic arrange pages that still need
automation tweaks and crossfades applied to them. Acknowledge their power over how one goes about
the present and the future. Documenting
the past allows me to do this. It comes
in the form of the records I have produced – and some still waiting to be
finished – and also in the entries, photos and clips of audio that have
littered this blog over the last eleven years.
I foreswore music in 2013
after an intense decade under its bonnet. However, things of a musical nature kept
leaking out, spread thinly over three years.
Where once there had been a flood of rehearsals, gigs, recording
sessions, musical partnerships, there was now a trickle. That was part of the plan. The field had to lie fallow after a long time
spent going about things in the wrong way.
But every now and then,
something would get saved to the hard disk, and in a way I found that
reassuring, to know that it hadn’t left my nature altogether. This is a recap of that time, and some of the
musical things that happened during it.
Even though there hasn’t been a lot happening, that which did happen has
been important. Embracing live recording
using a stereo pair mic set up, finding a new way to produce live in the room,
working with found sounds in collage arrangements, designing soundtracks to the
cues and cuts of the film edits, working within a brief, playing music purely
for fun and nothing else, attending all that London has to offer musically,
from high brow concerts by Jonny Greenwood and Asian Dub Foundation at The
Barbican, to queuing for The Proms at The Albert Hall, to reggae club nights at
The Scala, to minimal Berlin techno at The Egg, to Terry Riley’s In C performed by an orchestra I can barely pronounce.
Coming home for two week sabbaticals, and finishing the past. Honouring the living, and the dead.
At heart I am an archivist. I see the value in documenting things. So that others may experience them, but also
so that the author can move on. Recorded
media looks back, at something that now stands still, viewed forever in
retrospect.
That is not to say that I
don’t also respect the power of live.
Its job is to ground us in the moment.
To bring to life things from the past, and give clues about what is to
come. To lock author and audience
together in something shared and spontaneous and unique. Often in a freezing cold warehouse in the
middle of February, with deafening treble and spilled wine on the floor. The kind of happening that makes people
say: “I guess you had to be there.”
One form looks back, the
other is in the here and now. Both are
required to move into the future. They
need to balance each other out. Then you
can walk into a clean room, freed of all the weight, of all the responsibility,
to do this stuff the justice it deserves.