bane winter by Simon Aulman

First a few apologies - except the most obvious one. Sadly the cover is misleading. It was taken this morning, when I was determined to make another guitar album. But by the time I rolled over onto my stomach to turn on the microphone I'd changed my mind, and this is an electronic album. "Electronic" !!!!!???? It's made using that cheapo keyboard I got in Lidl last week and which has been understandably neglected ever since.

It's odd, but that keyboard has 99 different instrument-sounds on it, 99 different rhythms, it records itself, it has sustain and vibrato options etc etc etc - and yet it feels far more "limited" than the mere six strings on my acoustic gtr. The guitar always attracts me more strongly - and if I had a one-string gtr the attraction would be even stronger. And yet today, at the last moment, I resisted the gtr and turned on the keyboard.

Another apology is that this album is very quiet. Probably barely audible. That's deliberate. I've always thought it was an admission of defeat if a muso wrote "PLAY LOUD!" on their album. I believe we can all make our own minds up about how loud to play stuff - except when the musician describes themselves as "experimental", and then the thing should be played as quietly as possible.

I've done this for you - turned everything way way down. This is music for the background, to be lost somewhere under your radio and conversations and vacuuming etc. Yesterday I read an interview with a musician who said that he'd always regretted learning the guitar, because the music that he'd made in his pre-skilled days had a beautiful naivete which he could never now recapture or even fake.

Well I am one of those lucky musicians who has no musical ability whatsoever, and whatever it is that that musician was trying to recapture I have it by the ton. Guess I'll never discover what he was talking about until I lose it too. But I am too lazy and impatient for that to ever happen. But I did get very bored very quickly with the keyboard. It has too many options and is destined for the charity shops if they ever re-open.