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droning - for a long time. Not usually my favourite kind of thing (to do or to hear), but I like this one a lot. Thinking of pylons crossing fields helps.
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And I don't usually do the following either - chiefly because I'm never remotely interested when other people do it - but this is how this happened, and it's the same way it always happens when things end up like this -
- I only have Audacity, a nice mic, and that battery-powered Lidl keyboard that's on the cover of my album "Home" - and I wish I had more, I wish I could cope with more, I do still possess that big (but not better) second-hand keyboard I got in CashConverters a few months ago, but its posher deeper smoother purer better sound was a big drawback - characterless - and literally years ago I did once try playing around with a cracked wotsit of Ableton, but I just don't have the brain that wants to learn how to do stuff like that - I can lie on the sofa and read a huge "difficult" novel or incomprehensible poetry for a whole day, but I can't read/learn new instructions for even 30 seconds and Ableton etc were/are always beyond me - I couldn't even reach the starting-line.
It's like so much else - where barely-enough is actually ample, it does the job, and to have more would be a step over the edge. It's a weird quiet HSP thing. After 11 weeks without the internet here - ie no landline or phone and the router EE sent about 10 weeks ago has never had a chance to work - Matthew from Open Reach knocked on my door yesterday lunchtime to have another crack at finding where the problem lay - somewhere in the cabinet over by Sainsburys, or in my house, or my tiny (as big as this table) front garden or somewhere underground in the 280 metres between here and the cabinet - he had a gadget that could tell him instantly how far such things are.
He had to call in orange-jacketed reinforcements, but eventually they cracked it - something underground somewhere, no idea - and at about 4-45pm yesterday I could stop using the little white SIM-y box that's kept me in touch with the internet and actually use my router and apparently now I am "80/20" or something, the fastest possible. Apologies for not being more excited. But once I get used to something I rather like it and rather dislike having to change.
Matthew kept on saying that he couldn't believe that I'd been offline right bang in the middle of the hi-tech whizz-bang modernist city of Southampton for 11 weeks - I asked him if it was the longest he'd ever known anyone be offline like that, and he said yes - and I actually felt that an apology/explanation was due (from me) - so I explained that I was quite happy phoning up EE every so often to get another 250 GB top-up for my SIM-y gizmo and that the people at EE were always so nice, and it was just a cosy arrangement - they'd tell me that obviously some important difficult work was being done in my part of town and it was taking longer than expected, and I was eager to accept it.
And this lazy accepting of the current situation re everything in my life - it's why my music will always be this basic and limited and "everyone" will say "I can't believe you still make your music like that" and I will get defensive and feel that I am somehow in the wrong, but I've seen the instruction manuals, whether for routers or music-making or our wonderful Life In The Future and I'm sure it's brilliant, but it just seems too much like hard work.
And this isn't saying what I was meaning to say - about how this thing was made - so here goes: it's a blurring of some random keys I recorded for a few minutes on the floor right behind me here, and then in Audacity the result was put on repeat and then about three doses of different echo, maybe one dose of delay (I don't get on with delay much), maybe a dose of reverb, one dose of added bass, and maybe two doses of compressor and then split the long stereo thing into two mono channels and I only ever use phaser about once per year and this album is that annual event, with each channel getting differently randomised phaser-whatever, and then speed one channel up microscopically and then export this thing as one mono track and then re-import it and more compression on the result and then find the perfect speed and obviously at various stages the amplification has to be reduced to cut out the clipping and this all maybe takes less time to do than to write down, and certainly less time to make than to hear, and these are the reasons why simpletons like me slightly fear doing things the way they should be done because they'll leave no time for anything else - like today, it's not even 9am and already I feel that today's """work""" is done, my guilt for the day at being such a drifter, that has gone now - and I have the rest of the day for fun and doing nice things - things that are just as fun as what's happened already.
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(recorded today, photo north Hampshire this week)
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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
