55-minute newsletter 26.6.26

Giving myself more time today as the last one (30 mins) was too brief , felt like I’d barely started. And anyway it’s not about the length of time, but it being pre-defined in some way so it doesn’t spiral off. I could do the 1000-minute newsletter for all it matters ,it would still have the same focusing effect, but i’m not ready for that. Friday 26th June, Current outdoor temperature 34 degrees & forecast to reach 35 around about 3pm. Tried to work on something earlier but the heat and the noise was too distracting but I’ll come back to that. We have strung some bedsheets and a patterned rug we bought in Fes to the outside of the front windows—an architect friend told us it’s better to do this than shut the curtains, “because once curtains have started to push back the heat the heat has already got into the house”. There’s a heatwave mitigation trick for you; the most useful bit of information in this whole letter, so I thought I’d stick it at the top

Some other items of order related to gigs: (all ticket links here)

^{Newsletter host pop up jumps in to say “Did you know you can easily monetise your content?”}

I wanted to start writing these in February but kept putting it off. I wanted to write to you all with a problem I’d been having with starting on a new record. I will quote what I wrote then (8th Feb, when things were at their worst): The process of recording has so far not been very smooth and I am not making very good progress. At first, the reasons for this seemed to be out of my control. I began this email by writing out all of the things that have gone wrong, unwinding them all in this big meaty paragraph like I was Jon Fosse – the new and irresolvable ground hums, mic crackles and stuck keys and locked headstocks, money misspent, mounting non-compatibilities, other misc. capricious ghosts in the machine – but when I put them all together in this whining litany it got very tedious. Even for me it was tedious. You can reach a point sometimes where things seem so obviously set against you that it would be madness to consider that the problem is coming from inside your head. To consider that it was coming from inside your head would be to suggest that you have the power to make computers fail or function at will, pianos uncontrollably buzz, hard drives disappear from desktops. But as always it is more complicated than this.

It has got better since February. Overall the record is about 90% written and, generously, 20% tracked. The drums were done in a studio in North London before Christmas. Much of the bass and piano was done there too (and subsequently re-done), and acoustic steel-string instruments (guitar, cittern) are basically done as of last week. On Monday I will track more guitar in the back room of a shop where I work. Last night I built a pop shield out of a plastic hummus pot and an old pair of Tilda’s tights. There is a tutorial on YouTube that wants you to use chicken wire and a glue gun and all this complicated shit (Youtube tutors always think we all have hot glue guns just lying around the house on a Thursday evening) — my suggestion, if you have a spare mic stand, is to use the tub-and-spandex, a clothes peg, and lots of tape

26/6/26 I will now be ready to record a new song w working title “stalker” [not sure if that’s too obvious or overused] which is mostly piano and voice recorded at once . This is what I had tried to do earlier, but there was too much traffic and bird noise at this time of day. I normally don’t mind the bird noise but this song is very stark, it wants absolute dead silence. So I will come back to it around midnight. Two weeks ago I did the same for the song that comes before it and it made all the difference. Together they’ll make a midnight pair

The record does not have a title yet but I’ve been calling it QP,SS ,which is an acronym for a line in another song (if I gave the title the line in full it would be too cheesy). Later something better will come to me. It has eight songs and has ended up being structurally moulded around these two quite long pieces which are positioned at the end of each side

In the February draft I go on to explain that rather than focusing on the album I had instead been working on my website, which has become an extended fragmentary text spread across multiple pages. You can read it here. I didn’t plan it like that it was just something I was compelled to work on, even though it was the last thing I should have been concentrating on. I wrote a bunch of things about the South Pennines where I am from, and then had to stop in March to go on tour. When the touring finished I then went back to the record (my north star, my meat and potatoes). But still sometimes you have to pay attention when you are drawn compulsively to these random projects, they might be trying to tell you something in their dead-ended-ness. The newsletter is the compromise position in that I can scratch this itch — I am drawn to these sorts of time-intensive, seemingly pointless (i.e. non-monetisable, ‘horizontal’[?]) writing exercises — but I can still keep things boundaried — try to reconcile the texts and the record rather than have them competing with each other. And also try to see if they help each other. Texts after all can be so informative when making a record and later I will share a few things I have drawn from. And so my goal, in writing all of this down, is that it would motivate me to keep pushing forward with all this, because now I have implicated all of you in this and I am responsible to you. NB photographs and descriptions enclosed are not solicitations for any feedback or advice on my raw engineering techniques (it’s actually called lo-fi thanks)

If the newsletter ends abruptly, take that as evidence of my honesty!