toy farm by katharine eastman
First I shall say nice words about the photo/cover, then I shall try to say nice words about the music;
I like this part of the New Forest (pic taken this week) and I used to wonder why, then someone told me it's because it reminds me of my happy childhood - this area has lots of small farms and no roads and the fields are small - this particular area is very horsey and there is much electric fencing - and there are little flocks of sheep and a few cows dotted about (and dotted on the skin) and old people march about with a bale of hay under their arm and the old people even say hello and never hold a phone. And didn't we all once have a toy farm when we were children - I did - a wonderful colourful wooden and plastic jumble of little fences and a sheepdog that was bigger than your three cows and a horse with only three legs - and I can remember falling in love with a metal (metal !!!!) yellow combine harvester in a toyshop window back when England had toyshops and I was with my favourite grandparents at the time and I begged them for it but it was too expensive.
Except of course it wasn't, because months later it was my best birthday present of the year. It wasn't just hours and hours of fun on the carpet with the farm - it was years and years. Except I was rarely indoors - only on rainy days. I'm not saying that young people now have lost something by (probably) not playing so much with toy farms and instead playing with their phones - I would've loved a phone, loved a games console thingy, loved sending secret codes to my enemies' gadgets to blow their goolies off.
Now for the music - the music is less fun than that. But I like it. Obviously I am conflicted - half of me is straining to steer my music into the direction of the "proper" "correct" ambient - at the right pitch, with the right number of things happening and not happening, trying to adhere to the rules in my Ambienteer Rulebook. And the other half of me is wondering what is the point of me trying to do something that I am not equipped to do - I don't have the right keys or the right software, and me trying to make a proper ambient thing would be like me trying to rival Herbert Von Karajan's seminal performance of Beethoven's 5th - if he ever did one. So instead I try to be happy that, in spite of my natural pathetic wish to be liked and to try to fit in and do everything properly and get good grades at school, the results are always a bit askew.
This one's a bit more askew than I would normally submit to the Bandcamp Musical Standards Submissions Board. I like it enough. Just about. 50 minutes though ? - it is like giving a yearning child a real combine harvester instead of the toy she really craved, but it's only music, it's all going to the same place, the place we're all going, it really wouldn't matter if I'd just made the beautifullest piece of music in god's universe, or the ugliest - all we'd all want to do is just move on, get on with the next thing.
made this morning, kind of
