30th January 2025

Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics

00’00 Storm Éowyn has arrived in the village. The trees are taking a battering outside the studio door as it clicks shut behind me. An oscillator bubbles away in the bass. Frequency-spinning, left-right panning. A cumbrous clunk as the transport on the cassette deck engages a magnetic tape in its grasp. < Play >

Synthesised orchestral manoeuvres, bright as a button, sweep up a scale signalling something momentous is about to occur. Rosie meows. A man’s voice appears to us from 1980s America. We know he is a Business Man. He proudly announces “this is ‘nEVEr Be NErvoUs agaIn’ … wHetheR you’re tHe C-EE-OH of a ForTUune five hundred company, a sAALesman, Secretary or account executive, yOU’re faced with commUUUnication chaLLEnges every dAy … this program will help you meet the demands of giving talks, presentations…” ahh he’s fading away. Rosie meows again. And here is his compatriot, a Notable Broadway Actress of whom I have never heard. She is now going to tell us the secrets of her steady-handed success, but not without sticking it to the very late grande dame Gertrude Lawrence first.

01’45  Untitled #25. Bass is rumbling, sprinkled with sumptous crackling in the higher registers. It sounds like a needle in a groove but it’s not because I made these sounds and I know where they came from. And now there are beats, beets, beatles. Piles of sugar beets on the edges of fields. I am making these beets by triggering sampled drum sounds at logical intervals. I wouldn’t say they had a groove. The voice of the Notable Broadway Actress is doing some heavy lifting, rhymically-speaking. Rhythmically speaking.

I sliced some of the sounds of my breathing – breathtaking, taking breaths – out of the December liner notes recording. These  I have morphed into a something like hi-hats. Have you ever heard Henry Collins’ Music of Sound, where he took out all the speech and song from the film the Sound of Music and released the 30 minutes of what remained? Aside from the footsteps and church bells and doors creaking, it’s mainly inhales and exhales.

Some white noise has been sculpted into a breakbeet, a little reminder that we’re moving through this piece at 140 beats per minute. The orchestra of the woodburner, red hot pops from the firebox.

04’23  Untitled #26. Does this adorable little melody come in too strong? Did it give you a slightly sweet sickly shock? It sounded fine on the car stereo but on headphones it barged its way in, and who’s to say which of them is right? Well, I’ll have added a rising low pass filter to the first few bars by the time you hear this.

Though barely audible, the utterly magnetic, magnificent voices of Toni Morrison and Mavis Nicolson undertow this piece. They are loving one other’s company, on this sofa, in this television studio, some time in 1988. The atmosphere is electric with their intellect. At once compassionate and unsparing.

The white noise break returns to anchor us in the present.

07’12 I’m out walking in the field. A tiny biplane drones very slowly over my head, you will hear it move from your right ear over to your left, as I did.

The aerodynamics are as noisy and improbable as a bumble bee. You know what the sound of this kind of plane reminds me of? Little Fluffy Clouds. Let’s see if I can remember how it starts, something like “What were the skies like when you were young? Oh, they went on forever, they were long and clear, and there were lots of stars at night, there were colours everywhere, the sunsets were red and yellow, on fire – they were the most beautiful skies, as a matter of fact.”

Something like that. Iykyk. My neice – one of my neices, she is a twin – described electronic music as “a quiet aeroplane in the dark” back when she was four.

Much excitement as the seed eaters are out in force again. A flock of chaffinches with russet-blush chests. Do you remember I told you about these fragments of fields that had been planted with white mustard and left to go to seed over winter to support farmland birds? Well, it’s really working. I think to myself, as I stand there admiring the scene, that I would like to write to the farmer to thank him. I wonder if I ever will? Maybe if I say it out loud in this forum, then I will have to, because I will have made a promise. (Is this manifesting? Is this cosmic ordering? Shall we throw a party? Shall we invite Noel Edmonds?)

08’51 The weird bass is back, Ted. My footsteps slush through mud and grassy sog and the steps become beats, beets, sugar beets. A vintage deskjet printer is at work, rolling out paper ready for me to feed back in. Print, turn, layer, print, turn, layer. Sheets of paper that become small handwritten cards added to the Limited Edition Compact Disc orders I’m about to dispatch.

10’00 Untitled #27. It’s late on Friday night. I haven’t made enough music that I can share in the mixtape yet because all of the best stuff has been set aside for an album. I am starting to panic. I decide on a scale and try it out on the melodica (haha! that’s what I do folks! I can hold it in my hand it and only needs my breath to work! But it never stops feeling comical.)

I program a few notes into the sequencer. I patch in a stacked super voice using three oscillators playing the same or very nearly the same sequence. What we are listening to comes out in one take. I am really pleased with it and stop panicking. I save it with the intention of returning to it later, maybe it could become something for a Proper Release.

12’03 There is a strange split-second artefact in the recording. Too late to do anything about that now.

14’11 Some more little crackling artefacts? Ah no, of course, it’s the sound of rustling. I am folding up squares of tissue paper and making little packages around the CD sleeves, sticking down tape, scribbling notes on bits of coloured card.

16’25 I often listen to podcasts, or voices anyway, to get to sleep. These people are asking: what is time? Is this man a crank, with his handmade model, all cardboard and cocktail sticks, his infinite universes made of triangles? He says, “Time is just a succession of such shapes.”

The sounds of stacking logs into the covered woodstore behind the house. I like to place them in neat rows. My eldest daughter’s technique is just to throw them in, any which way.  I try not to despair.

A seagull shrieks in Brighton, down near the Lanes on The-Day-after-Boxing-Day, whatever that’s called. I quite like ‘Betwixtmas’. Here is me trying out those notes from Untitled #27 by making them into chords on the melodica to see how they might stack up when put through the delay.

26’44 A final tip of the wheelbarrow and a sharp fizzing Electro-inspired rhythm snaps into the grid. The oscillators pick out the notes of a chord one-by-one. My breath is back as hi-hats. Now I am noisily unwrapping a Tunnocks tea cake. Do you remember the rest rooms at Liverpool Street Station from last time? My friend M has birds in her bathroom now too. She got them free from a man at the pub who couldn’t get rid of them despite being assured by the man from the organics shop, who flogged them to him in the first place, that they’d fly off the shelves.

“One way of thinking about time is that it’s different slices. Are you saying there is no difference between the slices?”

23’02 The track disintegrates into a fierce wind on the beach at Walberswick on New Year’s Eve. It looks calm in the photos but it’s blustery as all hell and the cold could cut you in two with a knife. There is still someone willing to venture into the sea, the little girl paddles because it really is too rough to swim. I get wet ankles. I’m trying to shield my phone inside my coat while I record. I have my back turned to the sea, my body a rudimentary windbreak, caught out with a sudden icy shock. Luckily I am wearing my good boots, which are mostly waterproof.  

We have come to watch the starlings murmurate at dusk but they never show up. Laura has brought tiny cups for hot chocolate which she dishes out while a rag tag bunch stare off into the horizon, leaning our arms on the high wooden sides of a bridge. We stare across the reedbeds to nothing. It’s lovely even so.

23’38 They’ve built a new community centre in the churchyard of the small market town near where I live. It wouldn’t look out of place in The Modern House, all zinc and cedar and triple-glazed. I love it. It’s the only community centre I’ve ever been in that has proper acoustic panelling in the main hall. You clap and nothing claps back: it’s wonderfully calming. Anyway it has some parking you can kind of get away with using for free so here I am walking between the car and the town. I lean against an ancient yew among the gravestones and listen to the birds. In traffic terms, it’s quieter than my garden.

A snippet of the hustle-bustle outside the big shopping centre in Brighton. I needed some new trousers but I still haven’t actually worn them out because now they seem too good. The white noise break is back, still rolling at 140.

24’20 It’s Christmas Day, D and I go for a morning stroll up to Brighton racecourse. We take a tour through the grounds of the disused Victorian hospital that I’m told started life as a work house, perched high above the town, visible for miles.

We manage to escape its spidery maze, breaking out onto a road far up the hill, into thick white fog. We come across a long graffed-up underpass. Of course it has epic reverb. Of course I record some ‘aaaahs’ into the phone. On Monday I make a garage tune out of them, using the modular for the bassline, and some tape clunks for the extra-clicky drums.

The song thrush has returned to the garden at home. Most mornings this week it’s been perched on a branch right at the top of the ash; clearly visible without the usual leafcover, singing its little heart out.

We are walking down the tunnel, reading out the grafitti. A gaggle of people pass us in the opposite direction, big smiles, “Merry Christmas!”

28’03 End.

stray links

Toni Morrison interview | American Author | Award winning | Mavis on Four | 1988Welsh cultural powerhouse Mavis Nicholson (1930-2022) in conversation with writer Toni Morrison (1931-2019). They cover a lot of ground, including a deep dive into The Bluest Eye. “How do you know if death is better for me.. since you’ve never died?”

The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld (1991) – Little Fluffy Clouds

“The clouds would catch the colours everywhere…”