clots by Simon Aulman

Much like the previous few albums - but more variable, in good ways and bad. Though the album covers are all up and ready and dry and beautiful I didn't have the nerve to put this out as a physical thing - you can overdo anything and it'd become just a joke. Also, I couldn't decide which tracks to keep back for CDR-only.

Anyway, that's not important. What's also not important is that this is planned (hear god laugh) to be the last album like this for a while. I miss doing those albums where some tracks were half an hour long and like proggy kneeling hissing things with terrible singing and oddness - like the Hammill Plath Stevie Smith etc etc things. They were tremendously unpopular, but so is/was everything else I do. It's like nothing I do really matters. A wonderful freedom. I never want to lose it - always understood those musicians who sometimes say they regret learning to play their instrument(s). I need a change of course before I do something so long that I learn how it's done.

Talking of nothing at all, I'm starting to get that fine healthy taste in my mouth that you get when you stop a bad habit - ie for me, now, it's spending on anything except the essentials. I now drink just tap water. I don't eat much. Hard-boiled eggs and nuts really - yes really truly - my life has become a Laurel & Hardy classic. Oh but I still do weaken. I must go back and get that 2xCD thing of Werner Haas playing Debussy that I saw a couple of days ago when I got lost in town and went into a charity shop by mistake.

It's volume 2, the less good stuff. I've always thought that Werner Haas was the best of all the Debussy players. He's not classic and no one else will agree with me. But his big yellow 5xLP boxed thing was the first complete Debussy solo piano thing I ever bought and I can still remember how gently it all sounded back then. But after I get that - if it's still there - and part of me hopes it won't be - then that will be it it it it ! Richi wants us to be good at maths so we can work out how much to spend. Well I might not have any talent at anything else, nothing on display here, but I am good at maths and I already knew how much to spend. Nothing, except for the nuts and eggs, and maybe frozen veg for my mad soups - no two ever taste the same, though I try so hard to make them eternal - so they're like my albums - every one lately has been an attempt to remake "Hymen" and christ alone knows how adrift I'm getting and that too makes me quite cheerful.

recorded over the past week, photo Southampton yesterday