12th July 2011

I’ve finally got the Curse of Kevin Carter website sorted and online. The Curse of Kevin Carter is basically the final version of a band which started a very long time ago and mentioned on this blog way back in probably 2004. The initial line-up was that of myself, Thom and Ste, and we were going to be joined by Jo, Pete, Tom, Claire and Liam, but this never came to pass. We did record a few demos, a couple of which are still around. Eventually it whittled down to myself and Ste, and moved on from slightly jangly indie stuff to a kind of post-punk influenced sound, but that never really went anywhere; we went our separate ways, and he went on to play in the more shoegaze-inspired Eleanor Everything. Around the same time I began to put ideas together with Thom again. This took the punk sound further, being a jumbled mixture of melodic post hardcore (of the Yourcodenameis:Milo variety, not whiny 19 year old Thursday wannabes) and heavier sounds. At this point, both of us were writing lo-fi acoustic pop songs separate from the band. Eventually, the melodic side won out, and realising we were better at jangly indie stuff than shouty screamy angular nonsense, the sound unintentionally reverted back to something closely resembling that which we started with, and we began working on band arrangements of our solo songs. Cleverly, we chose this point to move to opposite ends of the country, and the project has hung in the air since. Needing a bass player, my beautiful girlfriend suggested maybe she could fill the role, what with her having a bass guitar and everything, and so became part of the collective. I put out the Second Thought sings The Curse of Kevin Carter EP last year, a halfway house containing the more experimental and electronic tracks I’d worked on, as an introduction to the project, and recently finished the first album, Almost a Leg. Although a solo project of mine, as I thought about expanding upon it, it seemed sensible to merge the band and the solo project, to form this rather bizarre occurance: The Curse of Kevin Carter. A tracklist for Almost a Leg is on the site linked above. We will be starting as an active band again within the next six months or so, and then exciting things will happen.

I spent a bit of today playing with some organ and rain sounds, and turning them into an incredibly long, beautiful ambient piece. It’s not done yet, I want to add some piano or guitar or something to it, but it’s turning out rather nicely. Not sure exactly what I’ll do with it yet, mind.

6th July 2011

With Sturmazdale complete, I find myself in an interesting position which I haven’t been in for some years: I don’t have a follow-up planned. Near the end of the Purlieu sessions, I had decided I wanted to record something that continued from the album, leading to Vacuum Road Songs. VRS was to lead on to the long-scrapped Dead Hymns; Safernoc gave me chance to record Since Every Hour, an album I’d wanted to do for years, and that direction pushed me to record a full on experimental classical album, Sturmazdale, via the ‘return to samples’ approach Leaf Pass. Now, however, I don’t have an album I ‘want’ to record. There’s no real musical or conceptual theme that I feel like I need to record next.

This doesn’t mean I’m out of ideas, but realising that I no longer feel tied to a series of linked albums is such a liberating feeling. I’ve actually got several ideas I want to work on. A couple are based entirely around field recordings, which is something I’ve wanted to do for ages, one is a re-recording of an old tape from 1997 named Cliff Edge, and I’m expanding upon the atonal sounds I played with on Sturmazdale by getting to grips with serial composition techniques. There’s also a bigger project I’m planning for a long way into the future. The main point is, it doesn’t matter which order these come out in. Album-wise, everything from Purlieu to Sturmazdale was sort of set in stone, whereas now, I can work on what I want, when I want, and release it when it’s finished (the release schedules that have plagued me so much over the last eighteen months are no more!). This is a wonderful feeling, and I think I’ll be able to record at a sensible speed from now on.

4th July 2011

The first album I’ll be releasing under my own name is done and label stuff is, staggeringly, sorted. It should be coming out on an established CDr label with whom it should be entirely at home. I’m very proud of the record actually… it’s a continuation of the modern classical sensibilities of Since Every Hour Is Too Late and a continuation of the melodies and sample-based textures of Purlieu. There are some atonal pieces and some more conventional almost Second Thought-ish tracks. The album will be called Sturmazdale, and the tracklist runs a little like this:

01. Oncoming Storm
02. Rain
03. Rectangles
04. Talnoa
05. The Deck
06. Upper Path
07. Hillside
08. Caves
09. 75
10. Underview
11. Vars
12. Lower Path
13. E Ccc

I really miss my guitar. I haven’t played it in at least a year. I was listening to Current 93’s Music from the Horse Hospital last night and it made me want to actually do some performance. A jam with other musicians. Once I’m settled somewhere, I want to find some musicians who’ll be interested in doing that. It’ll be nice to get back to actually playing music for once, as opposed to just sitting at the computer. I used to do that a lot more a few years ago (hmmm… nine or ten years ago), when guitar appeared much more in my music – on Second Thought or in my So Far So Good stuff – and when I did collaborations with Gregg and Laura and people. Purlieu even had a non-electronic track, Nsepan, which was performed by myself on piano and my friend John on viola. That kind of thing was great fun and I really miss being a musician sometimes, as well as a sound editor. Anyway, that’s something for the future.

19th June 2011

I sat ruminating on the various ways in which things have changed lately, particularly in regard to my music, how successful (or not) it is, and how I share it. Back around the time of Purlieu I was part of a few online music communities where many people shared their tracks, collaborated, worked on various remixes and generally enjoyed the whole process of sharing music with each other. This was one of the keys to the success of Purlieu upon its release, and its high sales. These days, there’s so much free music around that these kinds of places have little to no purpose anymore. My old haunt, the ArtistServer (ElectronicScene as it was at the time) forum is, like most music boards I read, plagued with continual ‘check out my new free release’ threads without any desire to engage with people. The whole online music world changed so drastically during my five year absence that I’ve not really managed to find a niche since returning a couple of years ago. Certainly the difference in sales and general interest between Since Every Hour Is Too Late and Purlieu is startling; this can be explained by both my lack of participation in relative music scenes, and the onslaught of music I’ve released lately – I’ll admit I wouldn’t be able to (or even want to) keep up with someone who’d released as much music as I have in the last 18 months, so I don’t blame people for giving up some time ago.

That said, it’s definitely given me food for thought and I realised I really do need to get involved in things more if I want people to recognise my music. I am hopefully going to work with different labels with my music in the future as I have neither the time nor money to distribute my music through Jerky Oats at the moment without the diminishing returns of late. The other thing I’ve realised is that live performance and getting involved with ‘scenes’ and such is an important factor. I’ve been sincerely worried about future live stuff as the direction I’m taking is much more towards the avant-garde, modern classical, experimental end of things, so the beat-laden synthfest of this year’s Awakenings show will be a long way away – but I’ve not had a clue how on Earth I’ll actually do it. Anyway, some reassurance from Lucy has given me more confidence, and I’ve begun putting a few ideas down for what I could do live. Ideally at some point in the future I’d like to take it away from a pure laptop thing, as I’m becoming increasingly interested in the use of acoustic sounds, but for the moment it’s a stripped back attempt, just using Ableton, but I’ve definitely come up with some interesting ideas which I’ll be expanding upon a lot in the coming months. I really would like to get some gigs next year and with a move closer to London on the horizon, I should be in a reasonable position to look for them!

Some titles which may be heading your direction next year… Talnoa, Sturmazdale, Upper & Lower Path.

23rd May 2011

It is with a mixture of sadness and relief that I have to announce the end of Second Thought at the end of 2011. This has been something I’ve wanted to say for a bit now, I was going to keep it quiet for longer but decided that it’s better to get it over and done with (also, I’m the least patient person ever, as anybody who knows me will tell you). There are several reasons for this, the first being I REALLY HATE THE NAME SECOND THOUGHT. I haven’t actually liked the name since around the time of Purlieu, but for one reason another, I kept it – largely to make a name for myself and so people remember me. However, after the last couple of years, the name doesn’t really mean anything anymore. A person coming to my music for the first time might imagine Second Thought as a dark ambient/drone project, or a modern classical one, or a harsh noise, or ambient, or dub techno, or even lo-fi indie project. The array of releases has put to rest any idea of an image or brand around the name, so it made me wonder why I would keep a name I don’t even like… Also, I do really love a big clear out and a chance to start again.

A few bits and bobs have changed recently, so it’s probably best to ignore my ‘no more music until next year’ promises, ha. I will be releasing one more full album as Second Thought, called Leaf Pass, which will be out in the autumn. It’s sort of a ‘return to Purlieu’ affair, containing some new material and a number of Purlieu era tracks which have been reworked, remixed and updated. I was planning on having it out in the future, but it works so nicely as a closing album as it ties up nicely with my first album, so I’ve decided to put it out this year instead.

At the end of the year there will be no more Second Thought and I will continue to work under my own name.

15th May 2011

Since Every Hour Is Too Late is available to pre-order – an immediate download as of now! I’m hoping to get the discs out on or before the 1st June release date. This is an exciting and relieving time for me. I’m very proud to get this album out, as it’s got some of my favourite work of mine on, and also it marks the end of a run of releases which has been almost non-stop since November 2009. The first track for the album was composed shortly after Safernoc was completed, back in October 2009, when I still lived in Manchester. Since then I’ve moved four times, scrapped a lot of recordings, finished four different mixes of this album and been through a lot of personal things – but come out of it in one piece and have this album to show for it. It breaks the pattern of my previous soundscape albums, containing individual tracks which each tell their own story. It is certainly my most melodic album to date, and the most personal, and probably the most sad sounding. I had a number of personal crises which led to the composition of some of the material here. Other pieces are portraits of birds I recorded for my fianceé, without whom I would not have got through this time. More than this, the album is the achievement of a long term goal. Many years ago, I was walking in Wales with my friend on a camping holiday, and the landscape, with some ruined buildings, inspired me to plan out an album of pieces for piano and strings that would reflect the ancient landscape. It was due to be my fourth album following Dead Hymns, themeatically acting as a spiritual reawakening after the trip through hell. This album might not have that conceptual wholeness which I over-planned, but it is an album of mostly string and piano arrangements, it is my fourth record, and it is in many ways a soundtrack to a time of readjustment and dealing with life. It might not have been quite the landscape record I imagined seven years ago, but it certainly is the melodic, modern classical album I wanted to record.

I’ve been working more on new material, which is definitely continuing with the classical theme, but that won’t be out for some time yet. After a barrage of material lately, this is the last new stuff I’ll be putting out until next year – it’ll be nice to get back to one or two albums a year. This album marks the end of a series of albums, and the end of a continuous run of releases (other than the outtakes split EP which will accompany it on 1st June, of course). I think May acts as the perfect closer to this era for me. Thank you to everybody who’s listened over all this time, and I hope you enjoy the album. 🙂

5th May 2011

Initial sessions for the next album have come along nicely. It’s nice to be working with samples again, and as soon as I opened up Fruityloops (yes, I’m going full on retro) I reverted almost immediately to Purlieu mode, which is interesting. This won’t be quite the same in overall sound, but melodically I think there will be definite comparisons. The more sinister, jarring edge to that record is definitely present, along with some influences from serialism and other 20th atonal music. The nearest comparisons to my own music so far are Parin Onia from Purlieu and Cwn Annwn from Safernoc, I think.

In more pressing matters, I will soon be getting copies of Since Every Hour Is Too Late in the post. It’ll be nice to have that released, as with my recent working with strings and piano for forthcoming material it seems more fitting, and the initial sessions for the album were recorded in October 2009 – although it was only completed four months ago. Either way, it and its accompanying EP will be the last new Second Thought material for quite some time (until next year at least), and will mark the last material from the 2009-2010 sessions (other than the shelved album, anyway). So an important milestone there.

I finally bought that Kerkville album. It’s absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend it.

16th April 2011

Sample collecting for album #6 has been coming along quite nicely – I’ve been listening out for interesting sounds everywhere in the last few days, and have so far taken snippets from various sources, everything from famous IDM to contemporary pop, one of my favourite symphonies, a computer game and a classic animated film. Some sounds are beginning to come together and it’s beginning to sit nicely in my mind. Some elements of Treatments may be making a re-appearance too.

Recent listening and all-round excellent music:

Sibelius – Symphonies 1-3
Xedh – Vinduskarm
Murcof – Cosmos
Christopher Bissonnette – Periphery
Nick Drake – Five Leaves Left

6th April 2011

If anything’s going to get me in the mood for making sample-based music, it’s the incredible research that appears midway down this thread. FSOL’s music becomes more dense and layered every time I listen to it. What amazes me is that the process – if not the attention to detail – is how I used to make music until the last few tracks I completed for Vacuum Road Songs, and purely by coincidence. I am going to begin collecting samples soon I think. Hopefully Since Every Hour will be out in the next couple of months and then I can move on to tentatively starting composing again in the summer.

1st April 2011

After a lot of consideration, I have decided that now is not the right time to release Aeolian Landform. This blog must get quite tedious with its constant ‘New album! Wait, no, actually, I’m not going to release it’ contradictions, I suppose it would be more sensible to say nothing about a release until it’s concrete and finalised. Either way, I just don’t feel comfortable releasing the album this year. With the direction I’m going to be taking in the future, and the releases of Safernoc and Since Every Hour Is Too Late, it feels very out of place and not at all representative of who I am as a person and a ‘musician’. Maybe it’ll re-appear one day in the future, or under a different name. I’d like to think so, as it is rather good.

I have been enjoying some slightly more avant-garde sounds lately. Nothing too far out (I did listen to Markus Schmickler’s Sator Rotas earlier, but it didn’t sit right with me at all), but the sample and field-recording manipulations of Xedh, Mystified, Christopher Bissonnette and M.Rosner have been ticking the right boxes since I’ve been in Brighton. I also really, really want to get ahold of Kerkville’s ‘Days’ album – but I suppose that must wait until I have money!

Since Every Hour Is Too Late news soon!