There's minimal, and there's minimal, and this might be the wrong kind of minimal - I like it, but I am extra-forgiving about beats that are bludgeoning and unsubtle, I find I can quickly zone them out and concentrate on the other stuff that's happening. In other words, you will need to have my brain to like this music. You probably don't - I think I'm the only one with it.
The blips of distortion that crop up repetitively throughout the middle of the masterpiece are not distortion at all but amazingly skilled focused dabbles of incredible production.
How can it be nearly the end of January and I still haven't got my brain back in the routine of knowing what day of the week it is ? - our bins still aren't being emptied on the correct day each week and that must be the reason. As a child, would I have tried to pass exams and once gone to the school careers advisor if I'd known that in the end my life would just be me worrying about when to put the bins out ? - that really is just about the biggest worry in my life right now.
How the hell did it come to this ? Yesterday afternoon I came back from the cinema and found a note half-hanging out of my postboxy-thing. It was from my neighbour on my right side. It was a very nice note - we get on very well - in spite of my grumpiness I actually seem to get on well with all my neighbours right now. The note said that he'd tried to knock me up this morning but I was out and he was just wondering what was the noise that I tended to make in the middle of the night, because it was keeping his family awake.
I was mortified. My neighbours are brilliant and considerate and wonderful, and in return I have always tried to be kind and thoughtful. I have an unusual sleeping pattern - I usually get up at 2am, have breakfast, come up here, look at emails (10 seconds) and then make music. And I'd always assumed that because I have a kiddies' battery keyboard that I can barely hear and because I then flaff around with the resulting aural-ooze on a computer with tiny tinny computer speakers that therefore the sounds I was making here in this windows-closed well-insulated room was barely reaching the walls, let alone going thru the walls and annoying the neighbours.
I walked straight round to my neighbour and I apologised and said I'd had no idea that my music was permeating our mutually terraced walls. It was a very affable chat. I am determined that my music shall not seep next door at this sort of time of day (night - it's 4-13am right now). I can't bear wearing headphones. So it just means that I must make my music very quietly and have little idea what it is sounding like - as I play it back to myself I can barely hear it and I am having to use my imagination.
During our chat yesterday I explained that I was a musician - oh the toe-curling skin-crawling embarrassment - how could I've been so pompous and stupid and up-myself ? - me, a musician ? - not from the other side of our shared wall I'm not. Apparently to anyone living next door it sounds like I'm trying to teach elephants how to perform circus tricks.
If that is what my music sounds like only a few yards away, what must it sound like to anyone hearing it miles and miles away, in other counties and other countries, other continents ? I'm sorry. If I could I would pop round to you too and apologise for this mess - it does sound rather good to me - but in spite of being the sort of deluded twat who goes around saying I'm a bloody "musician" - I am sane enough to know that it probably doesn't sound like music to you.
A couple of days ago a friend and I drove over to Hayling Island just to go for a walk, and on the trip there I shoved a CDR of my music into her machinery. It was horrible. It'd sounded so good here. But in a car on a motorway it sounded like the roadworks. I might be lucky in having nothing to worry about except my bin collections, but I feel very unlucky that when we play George Michael or Lana Del Rey in a car they actually sound like GM and LDR, their music actually sounds like the stuff sounded in the studio, but when anyone hears my music (including me) in any place except at this desk it sounds like elephants and men leaning on shovels and the whole misunderstood random rubble that life becomes towards its end.
recorded this morning, photo Hayling Island, Saturday
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
