albeit by Simon Aulman

.

.

It's May Day bank holiday Monday and beautiful and sunny and going to be the warmest day of the year so far and even David Cameron hasn't privatised May Day yet and I spent most of the weekend with a man who was dying and alone and I do this a lot and it's one of the reasons I don't fear death - it's really nothing - and I won't mind not having millions of wailing family-spawn weeping all around me when I go - it's something best done out of sight - the way an old cat chooses to die, in a sunny little nook undisturbed.

This album is a scruffy mess and yet I am already quite fond of it. The first track is one of my short minimal Autechre-alikes. The second is similar but not as crisp. The third I like very much. It has an irritating riff running all the way through it. But you can pass thru its pain-barrier and it actually becomes something to admire. The final track is so terrible and lazy that it might be the best track here - boldly nothing-at-all.

All the music was made in LMMS - the lowliest of all music software. I am still a total beginner. Decades of making music - and these last few weeks have been the first time I've ever used "proper" music software. Thanking god that I am a natural luddite, there is no urge in my loins to tweak any of the presets or anything. Everything here really is as lazy-fast-lucky-and-unlucky as it appears. I'm at that stage where I've learnt enough to get actual sounds out of LMMS and therefore feel no obligation to learn any more and maybe make the sounds a bit better and more danceable and prettier. Another five minutes on youtube and I could double what I know about LMMS and therefore be twice as good.

But I just hate learning. I have always been this way. At school I was good at the things that needed no learning and were just common sense - physics and maths and English and art - and crap at anything that needed stuff to be forcibly lodged inside the brain - foreign languages and history and so on. And in my many crap jobs I always wanted tos tay on the bottom rung - where all the nicest people always are. But I did go onto tpb and think about downloading Ableton. But what a bore that will be - learning all that.

It took me long enough just to be able to learn how to do the internet. And I still don't really understand email or our mobile phone or the camera that takes these cover pics. Over the weekend I brought along a DVDR of Michael Haneke's Lemminge to watch in the man's flat. But he wanted to watch TV too as he lay dying and so we mainly watched his boxed set of The World At War. It made sense. Most people say they want to die while listening to their favourite Nick Drake album and watching Breakfast AT Tiffanys and eating their favourite ice cream. But that would make death so much more painful and sad. Far better to watch how awful mankind can be and be glad to be saying goodbye to the planet.

.

.