Eukeeyookypoop this can't be right, I don't like this one much, I'm not even convinced that I made this music, I really do suspect that my computer had a fit and accidentally imported some old Creation Rebel Youtube thingy and it oozed its way into my old Audacity gizmo and popped out. But someone might like it - no one likes the music that I like.
I have become a sell-out. Instead of bravely ploughing my barren lonely outcast furrow in the full knowledge that 200000 years after I'm dead I will finally be discovered and hailed as a lost genius, the Delia Derbyshire of the 21st Century, I have decided to put something out here that isn't true to my core or whatever bullshit crap they talk about on all the shit Youtubes that seem to be aimed at me right now because I once made the mistake of watching a video of a man with muscles.
Let's be honest, if you'd asked me to make a track that sounds like reggae, then I couldn't've done it. No idea. I thought you needed echo and guitars and weed and I don't have those things, I'm a very straight classically-trained (eh?) pianist who's never taken drugs and doesn't drink or anything and when men see me on the Tube they sometimes ask me where's my cello because I look like that sort of person, someone who's going off to play a cello sonata at St Martins In The Fields.
So I hope to god that this is just a blip and I'll be back to my harder-edged bang-bang-bang-bang stuff next time and forever. The photo was taken yesterday and it's the Master Builder pub-whatever at Bucklers Hard in the New Forest where I sat out under one of those umbrellas and ate something that Five Guys would do for half the price and twice as nice. But no regrets. All around everyone was happy. Everyone around me was also very young - sort of uni age or twenties and in some international job and I have to say that the news I constantly hear about how miserable all young people are doesn't match what I see and hear around me.
Yes I know that the world around me isn't all of the world - e.g. if you thought about the last ten thousand people you saw out and about you'd go on to assume that almost no one is seriously physically disabled, and of course that is because most of the seriously physically disabled aren't out on the pavements and eating in overpriced pubs. And I guess the depressed are similarly out of sight. But even so I do wonder if all the stories about unhappy young people are just put out there to cheer up us oldies and make us more delighted to be dying quite soon.
But I can't understand how young people can be unhappy. I just think of their phones and I think it must be impossible to be unhappy with one of these things - you're only very young and already you have all the entertainment and information that us oldies are still struggling to get decades closer to death. Tons of news and films and sex and advice on what to bet on, ways to solve every problem, meet any sort of person you want to meet, ways to get to anywhere on the planet, ways to cook everything, places to eat anything.
We're all meant to tut-tut-tut when we look across at families at the next table and everyone is staring at a phone and no one is talking - but I am always delighted to again be seeing another modern happy family - no sarcasm - can't any of us remember how fucking boring family life was when we were trapped inside it pre-internet - no sibling or parent or child or relative could ever have anything as funny or riveting to say as the stuff on our phones. It is never rude when someone turns away from you and switches on their phone and prefers to get their entertainment from that - I mean, do you seriously think yr as interesting as all of the rest of the rest of the human race combined inside that phone ?
None of us stands a chance of being anywhere near as interesting to another human being as their phone is. And none of us needs another human being to be fascinated and delighted and amused and turned on and informed etc etc - I think young people are experiencing an emotion that us oldies would call happiness but they've somehow been taught to call it depression - happiness is that state of forgetting that you're happy, it is the arrival, it should never last, but it does now that we all have phones and all this beautiful music and even now I have come round to liking this track - just a bit, just while it is playing.
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
