Well I wonder if anyone remembers me. It is very difficult to make a big Come-Back when no one noticed you the first time around. I think I maxed at about ten followers back when I was prolific - I see that that was two years ago, I did no releases in the whole of 2022 and 2023, and I never visited this site till now, and I see that I now have four followers who for some unaccountable reason continued to follow me even while I wasn't making any music. Thank you.
If yr reading this and feeling fairly sympathetic, then you'd do my ego a big boost by downloading this for free - don't worry, I don't ask for an email address - I mean, what the hell would I do with that anyway ? invite myself round for Sunday lunch ? - but it'd boost my ego if I could start this second stage of my musical career with one or two of the stats lines lifted off the zero baseline. Thanks. Delete the music straight away of course.
I must admit that I didn't try very hard with this particular splat. It's slightly Catch22-y - why bother when no one's going to hear it anyway ? - and yet the reason no one ever wants to hear anything I do is because I just haven't bothered ? I might actually try a bit harder later in the year - but for now I'm just trying to remind myself how all this stuff works, or in my case Doesn't.
But no one ever came here for the music anyway. It was my brilliant cheerful writing that fascinated my half-dozen fans. I won't give you a detailed run-down of what I did during 2022 and 2023. I will tell you what I did last Saturday - I got the train to Portsmouth Harbour and walked through Gunwharf Quay - an upmarket shopping mall, far more upmarket than Southampton's West Quay, and obviously without any charity shops or indeed any shops that I would be remotely interested in buying anything in. Absolute dross.
But no matter - I was on my way to Carluccios for lunch with 6 girlfriends. Now we were/are a nice group of people and I loved it all hugely. But at the end of course we got to the bit where we have to pay and what always happens is that the three of us who are quite slapdash with the cash just glance at the bill, round things up to the nearest tenner, add another tenner for a tip and hope to move on. But alas that's forgetting the half of us who are either very bad at maths or who are, let's be frank, total tits - they glance at the bill, seem to freeze, they mutter something to the waitress that they hope we don't hear as they pay about £1-55 for a three-course meal with wine etc - and they just hope that our tips will subsidise their meals and don't give a fuck that our very nice waitress will eventually end up with a tip of about 7p.
Except that this time she didn't - because at the end of it all the waitress announced that we were still short and still owed money. Well I lost it a bit. I normally just bite my lip, but this time I spoke plainly, I pointed out the simple mathematics that led me to believe that I owed about £30 for my food and drink, and that I'd added another tenner, and that if they expected me to fucking well put any more money in the pot to pay for other people's meals well they could go fuck themselves.
So that is six fewer friends that I have. And I'm really no more talented at making friends than I am at gaining followers on Bandcamp. So you can imagine. Fortunately I've got to the age when I am quite disillusioned with people, and barely miss them. I love my little house and time spent here is never a bore. I have run out of money - thank god I've got a couple of months ahead when I don't have to pay council tax, plus I have a freezer full of cheap homemade veg soup that I made over Christmas from the cheapo supermarket veg - so I should be all right till the start of April. So I will not starve. Even if the electric gets cut off I can still put the stuff out in the garden - out in that unusual little dribble of snow that is still lying in my southern garden.
I'm not worrying about money at all. Except that, by mentioning it here, I suppose I must be a bit. But really I don't think it's affecting my sleep. If things get desperate I'll get a waitressing job and live off the tips of people like me, if any such still exist. And fortunately I do still have one wonderful friend left - and I walked on over to her place on Sunday and we had a beautiful lunch together, we had a long chat about all that meaning-of-life stuff that I'm afraid I still love talking about - and then we watched an odd film - Neil Jordan's Breakfast On Pluto - my friend, unlike me, has an actual TV which picks up stuff from the airwaves or wherever.
As we parted in the dark I said to her that I have nothing to do, have nothing I want to do, I have no money, but have nothing I want to buy, I hardly know anyone anymore, but I barely want to meet anyone anyway - did she think I was depressed? - and she, who never lies or tries to be kind, said that I was one of the most cheerful people she had ever known. In fact, right now, possibly the ONLY cheerful person she knows.
So this music comes from a cheerful place. I must admit that having nothing means that I have very little to worry about. And having no fans/followers means I won't get too upset that this album doesn't get into the charts. Why would it ? It's probably absolutely terrible. I haven't really heard it yet - just a snippet of it, to confirm that it has a bit of a slow beat and it is suitably distorted.
I hope it's a bit different from the usual stuff on Bandcamp - though how would I know now ? - I no longer visit other people's music sites, apart from Josh Slunk, my favourite Bandcamp musician, but mainly I have no idea what is going on around me, I seem to be slipping into reclusion (?), please don't feel sorry for me, the forecast for the day ahead is cold but sunny and I am lucky that the back of my house, which faces directly south, has big windows which suck in every ounce of sunshine and on cold sunny days my home gets very warm, I can strip off to almost nothing and move about fast and freely and get high on dark chocolate, the only other food that I ever eat, this is better than the alcoholism of my younger years, I think this is how it is going to be for the rest of my life, it doesn't feel like I'm missing out on anything or anyone worth anything.
recorded this morning - yes about 3am - photo Ocean Village dredger a few days 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
