escape by Simon Aulman
(slow gloopy reverby random echo-y piano - previously released as Meditation In Memory Of Warren by Sonja Berlin-Jones a couple of days ago - it might have seemed non-serious - but lordy it is very very serious and rather lovely)
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(The following was written while this was uploading - after several failed efforts to upload this music I just gave it one more chance to upload before thinking I'd have to chop the long thing into lots of short things. And of course the long thing finally uploaded. I can't be bothered to change stuff)
The Musical Taste Police are busy - ever since last night's Windows update-thingy I can't seem to upload any of my long masterpieces or even long catastrophes - after about 6% of a piece getting zapped up to BC the computer decides it can't inflict any more of this nonsense on other people and up comes the red "upload failed" thingy.
Ah well, it's all progress isn't it. As a luddite it is my duty to work around life as it is rather than try to improve things or solve things completely. Consequently this is a different kind of cliche album from the one I'd planned. The plan was for an album of long random piano, a bit of echo, a bit of reverb ... bingo! - another ambient masterpiece. But now, working inside the new limits, I've chopped the long piece up into lots of different but very samey-sounding small bits and of course will now obey ambient convention and waffle on a bit about how this is an album whose tracks are meant to be played in random order. On repeat. Forever.
My sympathy to anyone who ever tries it. And yet - here I am - being self-deprecating - because this is actually a fairly beautiful album. Just because it is simple doesn't mean it's crap.
Someone with even less musical talent than I have (yes, a hard thing to imagine - and yes I'm doing it again) could make this album in less time than it would take you to download it - random slow piano - the fact that you can't play the piano is an advantage - "wrong" notes sound beautiful - then add loads of echo - that's another thing that proper musicians will frown on, but you can never have too much echo.
Then finally tons of reverb. I'm not a big fan of reverb and will maybe side on the side of proper musicians in being wary of overdoing it - but shit, with a thing like this I turned it up to eleven million and thanked fuck that it covers a lot of wobbles. For me, delay and echo are usually what helps turn a drunken old bloke in the back bedroom into a posh bloke in a million quid studio.
Yes I am on a binge right now. It hardly happens at all nowadays, and when it does it usually means I do nothing much except watch Heat on repeat for a fortnight. But so far I've only watched it once, along with Audition, Mike Bassett, and The Bedford Incident. I'm getting quite bored of this lockdown. Everyone else seems to be too - people are quite bad-tempered out there.
I've changed my tune quite a lot over the past year - and shit, it has been almost exactly a year. Back in March last year, while Boris was dithering and delaying, I and most people I know went into lockdown about ten days before Boris finally stopped shaking hands with every coughing person in hospital, and my stream of bitter comments on the Guardian CiF thingy were the standard/approved "look at Taiwan" "look at NZ" etc stuff.
And I still think Boris is a cunt and there is no way I'll be doing the shit he wants me to do - and I know that as a 60-year-old bloke I am at risk and these could be famous last words, but I am more wary of our kind smiling reassuring politicians and experts than I am of the virus. I won't be allowed to fly, I won't be allowed into John Lewis - fuck it - I just want to be left alone - if it wasn't for BC, and Russell Brand on Youtube, I'd chuck this bit of junk away.
Six years ago my beautiful eccentric wonderful wife was dying in bed at home and life was turning into a very strange thing, soon becoming the very surprising thing that is grief - it's not the expected stuff of crying a lot and moping about - I did a lot of the former but very little of the latter - I went mad in a strange harmless (harmless to me, harmless to everyone else) way and did a billion things per year - amazing things - sometimes I can't believe I actually did all that stuff.
For the last year I, like everyone else, have done very little, and unfashionably I have largely enjoyed lockdown. I've lost weight, read a million books, and made too much music, some of which I think stands the test of any time, though "time" itself will of course blah blah - but in 2021 making music is a waste of time - drinking in the way that drunks drink is a way to see that it's all a load of crap - beautiful crap sometimes, but none of it really means anything to anyone else and if it means anything to me then I'm making another mistake.
(recorded march 2021 southampton uk)
