katykatyabandonedcareener by Simon Aulman

(BOTTOM LINE = this album is bleak lofi techno in the same area as some of Wolfgang Voigt's stuff.)

I like this album more than I expected. But it isn't the stuff I meant to make. I'd been liking the quiet mellow lofi-electronic stuff I'd been making lately, and wanted to make more - to make a long piece like one of my current great musical heroes Porya Hatami. But I'm clumsy and tipsy and quickly I ended up sounding more like Wolfgang Voigt - another of my great musical heroes.

For someone who's owned a million LPs and been to way too many crap gigs (ie all of them) and blah blah blah, I've had surprisingly few obsessed-over musical heroes over the decades - off the top of my head: Peter Hammill, Joni Mitchell, Steve Stapleton, Roedelius, Klaus Dinger, Jimmy Webb, Richard Harris, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Benjamin Britten, Herbert Howells, Gerald Finzi, Porya Hatami, Wolfgang Voigt ....

I must've named one of my old albums on this site after Wolfgang - because according to the stats half the people who come to this site come via a Google search for Wolfgang. The other half come here because I must've also named another album after Robert Wyatt. I suppose all MY fans google me and get sent to Wolfgang's and Robert's sites. No wonder I haven't got any.

It's hard to explain my long obsession with Wolfgang Voigt. He's made a lot of dull music. Almost all of it. The only good one he's ever done is that Freundshaft (??????) single thingy - the one with the sample of the opera singer - and that opera singer is the only time he's ever allowed a tune onto one of his records.

Oh yes, there's the Gas stuff, some of that was good - the tracks with beats, not the ones that sound like, well, gas I guess. But anyway, I was definitely NOT intending to make an album (this one) that sounds exactly like Wolfgang. But that's the joy of being a truly "experimental" musician - ie I don't have enough talent to make the kind of music I set out to make - so I just have to flail about making loads of random stuff, and then pick out the 0.00000000half percent that I think is possibly tolerable. That's why my stuff is all over the shop.

And I'm glad it is. I'd hate to be one of those "experimental" musicians who is musically competent enough to be able to make the music they set out to make, cos they are usually very dull boring people who only ever set out to make the same kind of music every day for the whole of their lives - don't want to surprise their fans. You open The Wire and you go "oh yeah, that's a guy who's just made another album that sounds exactly like a vacuum cleaner, oh yeah that's a woman who's just done a gig that sounds exactly like a vacuum cleaner, oh yeah that's a group whose vacuuming is so perfect there's not a spot of dust in their posh studio ....."

Me - I set out here to make an album that sounds like a vacuum cleaner - but in a mellow almost-pretty Porya Hatami kinda way. Instead, I must've bashed the keys a bit hard, and ended up with this rough techno. Come on - the start of the 4th track - that could actually BE Wolfgang. Promise you it isn't - I don't do plunderphonics. That is just me thumping the multi-fingered repetition out of my cheap little keyboards. Seems like Wolfgang shops in Lidl too. Obvious when you think about it.

Is it a good album ? Yes and no. I like it in the same way that I like Wolfgang's music - ie I admire it way more than I like it. For me, the only really weak track is the long one. But that's what you do with weak tracks - you make them very long. Whenever Wolfgang does something weak he decides that it should fill up the whole of side 5 of an album - and people listen to it and they don't like it and are bored shitless - but they keep on listening to it - believing ludicrously that if they hear it enough times in their lives then it will all suddenly make sense. Ha - music: "make sense"? - what a fucking joke.

You can pretend to like it cos the Wire interviewer will think you're cool - or you'll think s/he'll think you're cool - but they'll really just know you're a phoney. Me too. I'm a phoney - not sure what kind - the best we can do is be un/like Holly Golightly - decide whether to be a genuine phoney or a phoney phoney.

(LATER - in a sad and totally phoney effort to try to retain that burn-your-bridges once-it's-typed-you-can't-change-it thingy that I used to love about the old manual-typewriter/fanziney days, I haven't changed my total mis-remembrance of the Wolfgang fave track - but I couldn't resist later finding out what it was really called - it's this one = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ru4Py-QJPE )

(MUCH LATER - i love this so much - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmo9oTLSV5A )


(album made on 5th & 6th February 2021, drums created in LMMS, all other sounds from my toy keyboard and mic, photo by me, taken in hampshire 2021)

hand-knitted