safety by katharine eastman
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another "minimal techno" one
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okay, okay, in this okay life, but life would be easier if everything was either wonderful or shit, if people were either worth all your time or none of it, if music was either glorious or awful - and sadly this piece of music has been on the cusp of is-it-good-enough? for 12 hours now inside my head - I didn't like it at first, even though it barely sounds any different from several of my favourite albums. I nearly deleted it when I first heard it - no I don't listen to my music while I'm making it - only (unavoidably) the very beginning, and the very end - music-making would be too boring and take too long if you kept on digging up the plant and looking at the roots.
I am often (never) asked Why do you make those beats so boring - why don't you put a few kicks and hits and misses in and make it all more interesting ? But in music, as with so many people, "more interesting" just means more boring. If I mucked around with the beats and made them more "interesting" that'd just mean they'd become more distracting - and I think these things are best when they're not distracting at all - when your brain clocks what's going on in that dept after only five seconds and then it can relax and forget about the beats and concentrate on the other things - it's like how you can easily ignore a fridge humming noisily if it does it ceaselessly, but it is annoying if it keeps on stopping and starting.
People are the same. People who are interesting are hard to live with, dull people are easy. But more to the point, this music can only make sense if you are drunk (something I know too much about) or drugged up (something I know little about, but kid myself I can well imagine it) - in those states where the brain is braver and more accepting - and though nowadays I am sober 98% of my life and rarely drunk, I always live each day knowing how on-the-cusp I am from one state to the other - using that phrase again - this piece of music is a grower - sufficient for me to be happy to give it the full glare of publicity here (sometimes more than 5 visitors in a day!!!!!!!!!!!!!) - knowing that while I was typing this and playing this I found it easy/natural to forget that the music was playing - that's where it should be - existing, playing, happening, but without anyone realising it or noticing anymore.
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Incidentally, yesterday I was parked in the golf-club car park behind the Bell Inn in Brook - just to go for a walk in the forest with a friend. The walk wasn't memorable, but when I went back to my van the guy in the car in the adjacent space was putting his clubs away and I asked if he'd had a good round, all that stuff, and we got chatting more generally and it turned out we were born in the same year in the same place (Hythe Hospital) and went to the same schools - though he was in the year below me - and we shared the same friends - or at least they were friends when I was at school, but I haven't been in touch since, whereas he still lives in Hythe and plays golf with these same people - people I'd sat next to in maths (Richard England) and etc etc etc - they all play golf together, go to the pub together etc etc etc - still - after 40-plus years.
I saw the life I nearly had, the life I would now be having if my parents hadn't gone mad and suddenly left Hythe when I was a child and moved to the middle of nowhere - I think I would've drunk less if I'd stayed living that life, I would've loved golf, I've never enjoyed pubs much, I would've married more conventionally, had a career which I might've loved or might've felt trapped in - there's no telling till it happens - but overall I think I would've been happier if it was me putting the golf clubs into the back of the car than I am now, having lived this life which I could see he thought was a bit puzzling, or lost, or sad - I think he had a point - life lived in the more conventional way has much to recommend it, and those of us who accidentally went astray a bit tend to try too hard to justify our own lives and pretend that we willed it all to be like this - but I never did, and inside I know that I missed out on more than I gained.
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(recorded yesterday, photo Lockerley last week)
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