further by Kirsten Svuure

Bottom line - my favourite album so far. Very similar to my previous album, but somehow both more and less in-yr-face. Both tracks on this album are so so so similar that anyone wanting to download the album only really need bother with the first one.

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Well I'm finding this one quite perplexing. I made this album immediately after its predecessor - "Anyhow Skies" - and it's made from very much the same ingredients and using very much the same formula. So much is obvious. But Anyhow Skies had been me not really caring very much - only really caring what I thought - which is still quite a lot - but I can also be very forgiving in a way which you can't expect a casual passer-by to be. And somehow Anyhow Skies became an album that I liked and still like very much.

So feeling on a roll I returned to near the beginning and started to make this one. I wanted this one to be even better. I actually wanted this one to be liked. Oh woe. "Wanting to be liked" - it's never worked for me as a person in real life, and it never seems to work in music. And I knew that I was making a less-good album.

I was so (subconsciously?) determined to make a less good album that, yes, I succeeded in making such a thing. But then an odd thing started to happen. The more I heard it and got bothered by its efforts to be liked, the more I actually admired it - and it probably helps that its attempts to be liked actually fail quite badly. It is too repetitive. But how can any music be too repetitive ? Impossible.

So yes - this does sound like Music For 18 Musicians in a locked groove - taking Steve Reich's minimalism one step minimal-er. Er. And I do feel obliged to state that no this has never been near Steve Reich's wonderful masterpiece. I don't do plunderphonics. Every sound on this album comes from the "flute" tone on my battery operated Lidl keyboard - the "beats" are just separated snippets going at three different speeds, and the floaty keys are just stabs that are slowed and echoed and reverbed and compressed to within an inch of their death. Neil Young would be horrified. I think Steve Recih would be too.


The wonderful thing is, in spite of or because of this piece of music's efforts to be liked, it's genuinely turned into my favourite album so far, and that doesn't usually happen. When I do something which I think is so good, that's when I start to find something to worry about. And in hearing it back there are a few periods when the left speaker (headphone thingy to my younger fans) seems to be regurgitating a weird kind of distortion. Ironically, the first time I heard it I thought it was rain hitting the window here .... ha ha, here on the dryest hottest day ever.

Yes it's a kind of distortion. But it's a good distortion. It comes from my effort to make the piece less "glarey" - so I panned the thing over towards the right speaker - and, um, somehow that's made the left speaker sound a bit odd. But it's not odd at all. It's just left room for a facet of the music to occasionally actually emerge from the reverb/compression ...... ah bugger it, I always know that it's time for a muso to STFU when they start talking muso bollocks like this. What it all amounts to is that every single thing you hear in these 59 minutes is totally intentional, totally perfect, this is my favourite album so far, made totally by accident in a deliberate attempt to make something quite different.

The two tracks are pretty much identical - except the second track is a hurried attempt to cut back on the weird moments - it pays the price by being more glare-y, and it fails in its main intention anyway. However, it does have its good points. But the first track is better, it's my favourite, it's the only one you need, well that's what I think anyway.

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recorded today photo Soton this week