liverpool by katharine eastman
Obviously I don't know how my Bandcamp page looks and sounds on your computer - for all I know everything looks stunningly beautiful and the music sounds more beautiful than anything womankind has ever made in the history of whatever - and if that is the case then please tell me what computer you are using, I must get one. One thing I know about my computer and this page is that if I look down at the bottom one of my tags is "minimal techno" and yes it was a bit of a stretch to take such liberties - but I do seriously think that my music peaked around the time of albums like "Society" and "Protect" and they were a tiny bit m.t.-ish - and I know that that music was music at its peak because it was when all my fans left me and told me I had gone all rubbishy and cheap and lazy.
This album is a loose attempt to return to that sort of music - people will hear the relentless "beats" for about two seconds and understandably run off - and of course this stuff only works by immersing yourself in it, letting it all overwhelm you .... well, something like that. I am making a lot of music at the moment because my best and probably only friend Vanessa is up in Liverpool this week (see photo/cover) and that leaves me with nothing to do except sleep and drink and make music. She tells me that Liverpool looks fantastic. I'll be fair - I'm usually very down on Britain and how much of a dump it all is - but most cities in the UK do have things going for them. I can think of only one city in the country which is unambiguously unarguably a godforsaken awful pooh-hole and that is Southampton.
This morning among my Youtube suggestions was this one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGcT-X31q7o - a couple of young van-dwellers (?) who park up at Weston Shore and walk into town, wander a bit of the high street, and then give up. I know every inch of that walk (and all the roads around it) soooo well - I walk that walk a few times a week - and e.g. on my now-regular walks to Gosport that walk of theirs (in reverse) is about ten percent of my entire walk from my house to the Gosport ferry. It still stuns me that I meet people who tell me that Southampton is a nice city. I haven't been to every city in the UK, but I've been to some famously unromantic places (Stoke, Hull, Middlesbrough, Scunthorpe, Birmingham, Sunderland, Dundee .....) and I've found all of them way more impressive than Southampton.
Even if some of the people are a bit shabby, their cities all have bits of character and grandeur in places that make them distinct. Southampton has none of that. It comes to something that the empty dilapidated Debenhams building is one of the few characterful buildings in the city - and it comes as no surprise that this building is going to be demolished any time soon and be replaced by seventeen storeys of student flats as bland as any buildings in the UK can possibly be. I don't particularly warm to the guy in the Youtube who's doing the commentary, and I'm sure he probably wouldn't warm to me - but I cannot argue with one word he says. Southampton has more rough sleepers out on the streets than anywhere else I've ever been, and I'm being honest when I say that they are usually the only nice and happy-ish people in the town - they do at least have some kind of purpose to their days.
[ LATER - this one is also worth watching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNG_pXUL_Fk ]
recorded today, cover photo by Vanessa Oliver this week
