Closing time, I’ve had more than my fill
legs keep walking, get me over the hill
stars above never answer back and never
dare to judge misery and misbehaviour
for in that rose contained was
heaven and earth in little space
Closing time, all alone in filthy weather
cars go by on their way to who knows where now
streetlights shine, rain and mist create a halo
just like mine – if you love me, why won’t you say so?
for in that rose contained was
heaven and earth in little space
For a period of about six months from late Autumn last year to early Spring this year I was working near to Harmondsworth Moor, and had the opportunity to go out wandering over the moor at lunchtimes. I took some pictures –
and, whilst staying overnight at the very accommodating Jury’s Inn hotel in Hatton Cross, I made some music on my laptop. Lacking instruments, and limited in the amount of noise I was able to make, I composed and recorded everything entirely in software, using the excellent Reaper DAW and a bunch of free instruments and plugins.
The collection of tunes that emerged over this period had some common features: from the beginning, I decided to make music focusing on Harmondsworth Moor, which would evoke both its flourishing flora and fauna and the often wild, wet and windy experience of walking across it. Rather as the black metal artist Striborg establishes rules of mimesis whereby different sonic components of his music correspond to different aspects of the experience of wandering through the forests of his native Tasmania, I started finding ways to produce “blustery” or “burgeoning” sounds using electronic instruments and complex signal chains. My previous experiments with w/trem and (the electronic version of) Spiral Jacobs provided some ready-made techniques for making electronic instruments squall, throb, fuzz and hiss; I also found that arpeggiation gave me a nice musical analogue for the profligate natural self-propagation of bushes and flowers.
You can hear the entire album below – it’s also available as a name-your-price (including “free”) download from the Blackwaterside bandcamp page.
Here is my complete Ubi Caritas written for my daughter Ruby on her 11th birthday. It’s not perfect – it’s the first thing of its kind I’ve written in 20 years – but it’s not too bad either.
One of my favourite acts of the late 90s was Dave Pearce’s Flying Saucer Attack, whose eerie, folky, bedroom-shoegaze was the template for a lot of what I did with w/trem. FSA had what I call a “complete” aesthetic, which is perhaps unintentionally recalled by the recent Indie game The Rapture Is Here And You Will Be Forcibly Removed From Your Home: reality is breaking down (isn’t it always?), black ships are eating the sky, you might as well give yourself up to it as a shimmering heat-haze consumes everything. Musically, the rule is: let the artifacts consume the signal. Multitrack until the hiss takes over; turn up the feedback on the delay pedal until “ringing” resonant tones start to emerge from the fuzz. It’s an approach to the constraints of low-tech recording that makes a virtue of necessity, of not having Kevin Shields’s budget to blow. FSA probably softened me up for Xasthur, which Simon Reynolds once described as sounding like Robin Guthrie “doing warm up licks on his guitar and FX rig, hampered by the world’s most disabling migraine”. A major point of continuity between w/trem and Spiral Jacobs is that I’ve had the same shit microphone for about 16 years.
Anyway, here’s a tune that cleaves quite closely to the FSA palette in some respects, although it’s brighter and more drum-heavy than they usually were. It’s one of the instrumental interludes from Speaks Your Weight.
I think it’s fair to say this tune owes a great deal to the mighty Neph…
A few minutes of (I hope) not displeasing Zappa-esque guitar noodling.
An actual song, with actual lyrics.
What happens?
What happens next
for the hard of working
textphone and fax?
You don’t pay attention.
You don’t pay enough tax.
You’re famishing
for nuclear secrets.
You’re sickening!
You’re sickening!
What happens?
What happens next?
You’re weakening,
you’re weakening.
What matters
couldn’t matter less
to the hard of thinking
who dreamed up this mess.
They hand down detention
and they pay for sex.
They’re stifling
your intellect.
You’re thickening!
You’re thickening!
The title was taken from a graffito on an abandoned petrol station in Leicester. Who the author was and what they meant by it I never found out, but this was before anyone very much had heard of fracking.
The most obvious influence on this one is Radiohead’s Kid A, in its more tranquil moments.
These are the first few bars of a short choral piece I’m writing for my daughter.