I fired up Cubase this evening, thinking “I know, let’s make a bit of floaty electronica using just one synth and a bit of a delay loop, should be fun, no need to use too many effects or anything”, and approx 30s later was riffing furiously in sub-Sabbath mode, all thoughts of floaty electronica abandoned, just sweatily chocking away on my cheap Korean strat copy and occasionally zipping up the fretboard to do unspeakable weedly-whee things around the 17th fret.

This is a disaster. Around the time I first got into heavy metal, I was also listening to Terry Riley, Japanese Koto music, Ravi Shankar, Sandy Bull…so why is it that my default musical activity is playing the riff to Megadeth’s “Black Friday” even faster than it is on the record for fifteen minutes at a time?