no apologies for boring the world with another photo of Salisbury Cathedral - I've often stopped on that exact spot over the years and taken a snap and probably used it as an album cover a million times already. When I walk to Salisbury, that is my first sighting of Salisbury Cathedral. You might expect that if you were walking to Salisbury then your first glimpse of the cathedral would be as a tiny pinprick on the horizon and there'd still be about ten hours of walking to go.
But no. Notta bittovit. Because it's very woodlandy for the last long section of the walk you don't really get a long view of anywhere much, and then suddenly, there it is, and there you are, like you're only five minutes walk apart from one another.
And no apologies for boring the world with another album of music that sounds like the last few things. I love this one more than anything ever.
Long-suffering fans will know that my first approx-one-hundred-albums all sounded identical - random loud twangings of an acoustic gtr and wibbly-dibbly weak keyboards, all reverbed to within an inch of their death. I'm not planning on making a hundred albums exactly like this one, but I must admit that I am very happy luxuriating in this particular type of music - it was all "luck" how I struck upon it - and even luckier that I managed to remember how I'd done it the first time so I could do it again. And again.
Yes almost an hour of this track is probably more than you can stomach - that's not a sign of failure on my part or your part - I do too much of everything so that anyone coming along for dinner doesn't go away hungry - this is a vast buffet and the idea isn't to eat every damn morsel on the long trestle-tables around the room, the idea is to quit when you're bored, and if that's after ten mouthfuls or one minute that's great - I hardly eat at all nowadays and I hardly ever download music or hear anyone else's or even my own (no I've not heard this one all the way through) and it'd be alarming if anyone ever came along anyway.
And big thanks to a couple of people for actually paying to download a couple of these things - it's the only downloads paid-or-unpaid that they've had, I think, but it does reassure me that I am not alone in thinking this is worthwhile. I'm going to blow my own trumpet here (ha ha ha, oh god no, not literally) and show how conceited I can be but it's true that when I was very young I had great taste in music, way ahead of anyone I knew - and I know it was way ahead of everyone else because decades later everyone else was pretending they'd also liked that stuff all along.
I can remember what it was like to think I was literally the only fan in the world of .... well I won't mention any names, but they're all the usual ones, hundreds and hundreds of them - to me it was always so obvious - and it was obvious that other people, in actually pretending to like shite that they thought they ought to like, were such fucking phonies then and always will be and there's nothing wrong with that, I can be quite phoney too when the chat turns to politics or things that don't matter - but it's why I've never much cared about how unpopular I am all through my life for all sorts of reasons.
If I wanted to get rich I would stop all this music stuff and write a book about how delighted all my days are and how I ascribe it to actually enjoying being unpopular and unliked and no one bothering me. And I would get rich by selling the crazy unsayable unthinkable idea that not only is it a fool's game to strive to be liked, but it's actually even more fun if you do stuff that you know will be disliked, like this music. It sounds impossible in this world of people where everyone is becoming the same thanks to the net and TV and film and lecturers and algorithms feeding more of you back to you till you become even more the same you as everyone else - oh my dears, you're here so you know this already, but isn't it good yes to be decent and honest and within-the-law and polite and nice, but also, beyond that, to know that pretty much everyone is desperate and lost and muddled and there's no kudos/joy in fitting in with them.
(TEN SECONDS AFTER PRESSING "PUBLISH" - I've just nipped over to my emails and I see that seven minutes ago "mark" sent me a direct message thru the Bandcamp wotsit saying that he can get my sales up to $1000 per day. Woooooohoooo - forget everything that I wrote above, I have decided that I shall become huge - goodbye to my trusty little band of seven loyal fans, I am now going to cold-shoulder you and head for the big time - hurrah !!! - rich at last !!! FAME !!!!!! It's not that I want to hobnob with Taylor Swift, but I do have a bit of an obsession about Lana Del Rey and it would be good if she and I could make a few songs together and just, like, yno, hang out and all that stuff ... oh Mark, a thousand dollars a day - I have been running out of money lately and I will probably have to sell my house and become a hobo - but not now - now I can stay here and get a TV at last and a smartfone and get an Uber to Salisbury every week so I don't need to walk there and I can download Ableton and pay someone to teach a thicko like me how it works and then I can make proper music at last - this is the last album of this kinda amateurish stuff I shall ever make - soon I shall fit in at last !!!!!!!!.)
recorded a day or two ago, photo approaching Salisbury a week or two ago
it sounds like those early Selbstportrait albums that Roedelius did a million years ago that have been my favourite albums for all of my life katharine eastman
The latest from Grails is full of woozy, expansive music that draws on a host of sources to create immersive compositions. Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 5, 2016
