I was recently thinking about how releasing music has completely changed in the last 20 years, especially for smaller/DIY artists. For quite a while, I was very much following the more traditional record label approach, with every album being an ‘event’, with accompanying website redesign to match the album art, weeks of promotion either side of the record, maybe a few music videos. A tracklist would be announced some way ahead of the release, and reviews would pour (or trickle) in over the following months. And then it would go quite for a while, and a new album would appear a year or two later. I kind of did things this way with Purlieu and Vacuum Road Songs, and began to do it with Safernoc, before I ended up doing the 2010 experimental series and kind of burying it a little.
Last week, Bone Moor was made available to pre-order. And I did my usual bit of social media promotion, some chat on Twitter, Third Kind did the same, and got 50+ pre-orders in the first 24 hours. All pretty good, but that kind of feels like… it. It doesn’t feel like the grand culmination of a long period of recording and promotion. It’s just out there, copies will be shipping in a few weeks, and onto the next thing. This is neither a positive or negative comment, simply an observation. It’s so utterly different to how I did things back in t’day, and even now it does feel a little strange. I’m always living in the ’90s in my head, though. Hell, even my favourite band just stick albums online out of the blue multiple times a year these days.
Anyway, Bone Moor is possibly my favourite Enofa album to date. It’s certainly up there with Arboretum in terms of being a very tight, concise collection of strong tracks with a coherent theme. Unsurprisingly a moorland themed album, inspired by living in Yorkshire and often seeing radio and television transmitters high on horizons, and imagining snippets of transmissions coming from them. It’s the darkest sounding thing I’ve released since Melkur, and has a very Second Thought-esque feel in that sense. I’m ludicrously proud of it, and am glad it’s finally out there for everyone to hear. CD and digital can be pre-ordered from Third Kind Records.
Up next is another album due out on CD later this year, The House by the Sea. A lengthy and quite literal sounding title which is unusual for me. I suppose it had to happen one day. Last year’s Shattered Infrastructure was very much me pushing the maximalist approach to its extreme – 79 minutes of eight minute long densely layered ambient house tracks – and if Bone Moor is the start of a stripping away of that sound, then The House by the Sea very much continues that, largely a collection of ambient miniatures. More news on that before its release in the summer. I recently accidentally permanently deleted a folder of all my unreleased material, including a half-completed album. I tried a few pieces of restoration software but none of them could get glitch-free tracks, sadly. So I have a clean slate at the minute.
No news to report on the personal life front. Sheffield soon, I hope. When I get there I’d really like to start up The Curse of Kevin Carter as a band. I’ve been talking about it for fucking ages, and it’s really overdue. It’d be nice to take it out as a noisy slightly experimental psychedelic melancholic guitar pop project. So I might be looking at doing that later this year, if I get chance to meet new musicians. If anybody has any recommendations about what’s going on in Sheffield, do let me know.
Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Christopher Bissonnette, Alva Noto, The Joy Formidable and Placebo. I’d actually forgotten how odd a lot of Placebo songs are. I don’t think I’d properly listened to them in about 16 years until recently. I’ve actually gutted out my album wishlist and am trying to take on far less new music these days. I’ve spoken about reaching “peak music” for quite a few years now, as a way of describing my brain’s inability to take in too much new stuff for being overwhelmed, and the utter lack of time I have to actually listen to my existing collection. I recently calculated that if I hadn’t sold off a ton of stuff over the years, I’d have over 3,000 CDs, records and tapes by now, which is impossible to even listen to in a year. Even though I only have around a third of that these days, there are still albums I own that I haven’t listened to in maybe five years. I still have a Discogs wantlist, largely featuring rarities that go for ludicrous sums of money that I’d love to buy one day. Of course with the cost of everything rocketing again, who knows when that’ll be.
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