tom osman

Well I had planned to make these posts a weekly affair, but this is at least within a month, so that's some kind of improvement. 

So, Real Silence. I went to London to record and mix with Neil. In fact a had two successive weekends over there. We managed to get all the recording needed in one day (including one track that for reasons perfectly logical at the time where I recorded the vocals lying in Neil's bath — dressed and empty of water, I might add). 

That was due to be vocals for six tracks. In the end I binned one of them. I had this idea to use a near-ten-minute track from Augurio Drama. It was going to be a very ambitious conceptual piece narrated by a disembodied head of a person who's been chopped up, found and wakes up in a forensics lab. 

I still like the premise, but in the cold light of day when I re-read what I'd written months ago, I decided it was… well… shite. 

Irredeemable in fact. So I made an executive decision and now the album's going to be nine tracks in total. 

So recording's all done and we've had a few days since then for mixing. It's great to be working with Neil. He's so much more skilled at this side of things than I am. 

Nevertheless, I'm going to try to get three of the previous tracks I'd recorded and started mixing myself up to a decent standard. At the moment, the plan is that I'll visit him again in the last week of May and maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to finish everything. 

Don't know if the video is going to happen anymore. That's up in the air. 

Ok, so it turns out that without reminders I'll just find three months have passed without any updates here. Time to bring Google Calendar into the mix! 

…

Alright, it's in there. Let's see if I'll start posting here more regularly with a reminder. 

Needless to say, I haven't been idle in this time. My music interview podcast Whatever Comes Next is now on Spotify as well as Substack, with some cool, new artwork (courtesy of Jack Rogers - @Get a Real Job Kid) and I've been consistently banging out episodes every Tuesday. 

I'm also now apparently “Reviews Editor” at Ghost Cult Magazine. I say “apparently”. I know what I'm doing there, it's just that now it seems that's officially my title. In practice, I'm now the guy deciding who reviews what (oh the power!!) and liaising with publicists. 

But anyway, that's all by the by. This journal is to talk about the music I'm making (or whatever exactly this is I'm doing there days). 

A few updates then. Firstly, “Your Body” the opening track of the forthcoming album is basically done (just bar the final mastering). Currently I have a creator of erotic horror videos making a video for me. No idea what it's going to come out like, but hopefully that'll materialise soon and when it does, I'll post it here on the website. 

The next signification news is that I've recruited my friend, former bandmate and collaborator on my first album Neil McKeown to help me record and mix this album. In fact tomorrow I'm off to London to do some recording with him. I'm really glad to have him on board. He's got far more skills than me as a producer and now that we've timetabled when we're going to do things I believe it'll get this project finished more quickly. 

So it's off to the pub I go a little later today, printed texts in hand, to read again through the various texts to do any necessary editing before the weekend's recording. 

Oh, and I've also been talking with existent/nonexistent. We're both keen to do another album together. As soon as Real Silence is in the can, I'll get in touch with him to start the next project.  

I am an inherently lazy man. I'll cop to that. No issue. This time around though I can give myself some leeway. Life came in and took an axe to any semblance of peace and order.

Whatever, it's not important for here. But I feel like making my excuses anyway. So it's been nearly since the last time I wrote here that I've done anything at all connected to this project. I recorded scratch vocals for all of the new pieces I wrote. I wanted to be able to listen to everything in sequence and hear how it all hangs together. 

Unsurprisingly, I want to make some amendments, but nothing too drastic. I think. But now it feels like this project's been dragging about me for too long. Finally I'm back at it. It's of no particular interest, but I needed to do some cleaning up of files for these various sessions. Well I've done that. Right now in fact. All nice and cleaned up and ready to be worked on. 

I figured out a new plan of action. I don't know why (it seems wrong-headed now), but before, I wanted to gradually build up the new pieces to the level the first five are at. Now I've decided instead that I want to go through them one by one and get each track almost finished in turn. If for nothing else I need the satisfaction of (almost) finishing something. 

I'm also itching to reveal some of these recordings. Next week I'll be having a Zoom call with a sound engineer friend. He's given me a couple of tutorials to help me with this mixing process that I'm pretty green around the gills with. 

So that's all for now. I'm back on the horse. Here we go.  

I was in Crete for two weeks. While I was there I did some writing. Yes, I couldn't think of a more inventive title.

So prior to this trip I had five stories/vocal performances written and recorded and I'd done a first couple of passes of mixing on each one. Total run time: 18min. All for the as-yet-unnamed collaboration with Augurio Drama. My idea is to have 45min of material. So I still needed to write at least another 5 or 6 stories/vocal things (depending on the lengths). 

I was hoping that during the trip in Crete inspiration would strike as I lay in the sun and roasted. And it did. 

Over the course of a few days, as I lay by the hotel pool pouring sweat, I wrote 6 new texts. I already had a whole bank of audio tracks to choose from that Augurio had provided. Having figured out what soundtracks would fit for each I've now got 46min of material. Whenever I get some time I can start doing this next phase of recordings. 

Provisional track titles are as follows:

Lose Control - a parody of a terrible Pop/House track that was puncturing my ears from the hotel stereo. Naturally I twisted the idea of the original song to make it disturbing. 

Over the Sides - a little story about being sucked into the void. 

A Number - kind of self explanatory, though probably not really. 

All in a Day's Work - came out of an idea I had from interviewing Eugene S. Robinson recently about his memoir. He mentioned a story about a guy giving up and dying out in the swamps of Florida. I took it and ran. 

The Optimist - various thoughts from a dismembered corpse. 

On This Day - at this point I figured I just needed one more and I was drained after “The Optimist” which took me several days to crack. I went back through various past writings and found a story I still thought was interesting about the sun not rising one day and how the world adapted. 

And voila, we have an album. Just have to record it (as I said) and complete the not insignificant task of mixing the fucking. Stay tuned. 

I am in the midst (when I can carve out the time) of making the follow up to Industrial State of Mind. As with that project it's a collaboration. I suppose I can say here (how many people will read this anyway?) that it's with Augurio Drama — owner of the Drama Recorder label that released my collaboration with existent/nonexistent. The shouting in the bathroom session I wrote about before? That's part of this project. 

Similarly to the last album AD is providing the sounds, while I'm writing the text and recording the vocals. 

A major difference this time though is that the sounds come first. With ex/nonex I created the stories myself, sent the vocals and they created sounds to accompany my parts. This time however, AD has sent me various recordings and I'm making stories/ vocal parts to fit with them. I don't think one approach is necessarily better than the other, but it's good to mix things up and try different approaches. Keeps the brain juicy and all that.

Another important change this time round is that I'll be the one doing the mixing. I have some minor experience of this in the past. I was in a band (a duo) called Midnight Boatman some years ago. The whole recording and mixing side of things actually proved to be something of an all-consuming nightmare in the end (you can read about that on my Substack — check the links page — if you search for my interviews with Neil McKeown).

But anyway, I assisted him with some mixing. That was mostly in Pro-Tools (now I'm using Ableton), but certain principles remain the same. So I've been beavering away with that. A lot of trial and error and some conversations with Mark McKellen (a friend, and former bandmate, from my years in Glasgow, who mastered my first album). 

At the moment I've got 5 tracks that I've been working on. Total run time is about 18min. I think the album should be about 40-45min long, so I need to do some more writing. I have plenty of recordings from AD to work with, so it's all down to me, really. With the 5 recorded tracks I've got listenable mixes, but there's still quite a bit of work to be done with the mixing. I guess that can wait now till I have all the recordings and I can assess it all together. 

Anyway, here's what I've got so far:

Your Body — Delivered like a guided meditation, but (surprise, surprise!) it gets weird.

My House — A very short, kind of existential nightmare, I guess you could call it.

Nothing — The “shouting in the bathroom” track. Inspired by latter Whitehouse. 

This is the Place —  Floaty and spaced out, sort of dreamy, I guess. I know what it's about, but I'll say no more.

Real Silence — Another floaty one, my typical thing of being soothing, but actually creepy underneath. 

The task I've set myself now is to create text for a 9min+ piece. The soundtrack is pretty noisy. Quite interesting for fitting voice and text to. I have a thematic idea that I've been working on. I'm hoping in the coming days I can get the words mapped out. 

Following on from my last post, I went back to my May Hauptbahnhof recording and created another experimental piece. 

This time I tried combining the train station ambience with some acoustic guitar playing. I really haven't played much guitar at all since I've been in Berlin. I was encouraged to try doing something with open tunings by the boyfriend of one of my girlfriend's colleagues. He's a much better guitarist than me, that's for sure. On a night out (and over some beers) we got into a music theory chat (really him explaining some theory to me). It actually helped my understanding of the instrument (a little bit). 

So anyway it reinvigorated my interest in the instrument. I actually have no idea what tuning I had my guitar in for this recording. As you might hear if you listen to the Soundcloud recording (Berlin HBF May#3) there was some music playing at the station. I was in part trying to get a sequence of notes that would work on top of that. So the tuning was all just by ear. 

Let's see. I can figure out right now what the tuning is. I broke my high E string the other week (and haven't replaced the strings yet), hence there only being 5 notes:

1. G (down tuned from E - Godflesh eat your heart out!)
2. G (1 step down)
3. A# (2 steps down - I think. I'm not very good at this)
4. D (2 ½ steps down?)
5. A (1 step down)

Well, that does look like quite a strange tuning to me. It gave me some nice sounds though. Also I just realised that I was extremely sharp. So if anyone ever wants to play along, it'll be a right pain in the bottom. 

Well hey, I finally sat down to spend some time making music (well “sounds” would be more accurate). 

After making some field recordings at Berlin Hauptbahnhof, I first fiddled around with them on Ableton (adding effects and generally warping the sounds), then tried playing some melodies on my MPKmini.

Well in a fit of inspiration today I went back into the tracks and played around with the MIDI parts. Spent a couple of hours playing around with that and posted them on Soundcloud. 

So if you're curious, you can check them out there. Just click on the Soundcloud icon. It's the icon at the top of the page furthest to the right. 

This damned “my house” story/ recording is going to be the end of me. 

I had some kind of existential moment yesterday. I'd been working on this piece of writing. Refining it (so I thought). I decided the text was ready. So I tried recording it, experimenting with my delivery. 

First I tried a sort or hysterical, theatrical style. That didn't come out right. Frustration didn't work either. 

Then the whole thing felt like it wasn't any good. Like the writing itself sucks and that's why no amount of vocal experimentation will get anywhere. 

It made me aware that I haven't been doing enough creative writing recently. My time is taken up with too many other things. Plenty of articles, interviews, reviews — all great to be doing. Apparently quite a different muscle to my stories though. 

So I gave myself the task of spending a little time each day (again — I had this routine in the past) to do some creative writing. 

This morning I spent a little time in the park, sitting alone with a shitty cappuccino and a slice of cake, working on this infernal “my house” thing. I'm pretty sick of it now. I feel like I maybe did something useful with it though.

Later today, if I'm in the right mood, I want to try recording it again. Third time lucky? (Maybe the fourth actually).

I'm not making excuses in advance for myself by saying “if I'm in the right mood”. It's quite emotionally draining I discovered to work myself up into a panic, or rage, or despair for a recording. In a way I take that as a positive. It seems to be that I'm brining real emotion to the surface. It hangs on my afterwards though. It isn't easy to shake off. 

That'll teach me for deciding the next album should be significantly more harrowing than the last. 

I'm working on a new song. “Song” is the wrong word. I'm working on a spoken word track for the next collaboration. This will be the fourth track in fact. After Industrial State of Mind got finished I jumped enthusiastically into the next project.

But you know how it goes, other things come up. Work. Life. It's definitely not a bad thing that I'm busy. It's like with my Substack writing, if I'm not doing that, then it means I'm getting “real” writing assignments. 

The creative outlet is important though.

So I bought this piece of kit. I'm never quite sure what to call it. It's a dinky little keyboard and sampler and now I can't even remember what it's called. It's in the other room and I'm too lazy to check. Anyway, I've played around with it a bit, but it's really just the surface of figuring it out. I'll be able to use it to create electronic music/ sounds. The possibilities are almost endless. 

That's dangerous. I remember years ago in Glasgow when I was in my first band: RedSun. I wanted effects pedals for my guitar. What I bought was kind of excessive, this effects unit. There were too many options and I never got the hand of it. 

Still, this time round it's not quite the same. There's now the option for me to write and record keyboard parts. That in itself is a great option I didn't have before. Yes, I can go down a rabbit hole for eternity looking for sounds, but that's on me.

So that happened (buying that thing), and I've been working on this new track. Now I remember I already wrote about this next collaboration. The last track was the shouting-in-the-shower one. 

What I'm working on started out with a particular idea that's evolved into quite a different thing. I actually started it in Italy, visiting my girlfriend's parents over the Easter weekend. It's become something quite creepy. Well hopefully, creepy is absolutely the aim. 

Anyway, I should get that one finished soon and ticked off. After that, I guess I'll need another three or four. Getting a bit ahead of myself I've already started conceptualising my next solo album (for some reason I feel like a wanker writing “my next solo album” but there it is), ‘Devil Girl and Her Latin Mushrooms’. 

Two songs are sitting waiting for me and I have an idea for the structure of the album with reference tracks (songs by other bands) corresponding with each track of the album. We'll see how that pans out. 

By my own particular self-imposed measure I'm ahead anyway. I want to get out an album a year. That would mean this latest project needs to be out by the end of 2024 and ‘Devil Girl’ in 2025. Plenty of time.  

I didn't touch a guitar for almost three months. 

Actually it might have been more than three months. For the whole time we've been in Berlin they just sat there forlornly in the corner of the room.

I finally took my acoustic guitar out a few days ago and had a tinker about on it. After a few minutes I was feeling totally uninspired. My fingers and brain were falling back into the same old habits and patterns. Boring. This is why my guitar break occurred in the first place — and more often than not why it's happened in the past — I get bored of the same old sounds. 

Nevertheless I feel the sense that I should be working on my guitar playing. I saw a solution: get back into practicing Oxbow guitar parts that have unusual guitar tunings. During COVID lockdown, when I was still living in Prague, I discovered a helpful facebook post where guitarist Niko Wenner helpfully listed all the Oxbow guitar tunings he uses. It's quite a list. Most of their songs are in alternate tunings. I figured out (more or less) quite a few of the parts back then. 

Time to get back on it. I picked the: C G C D# G C tuning Niko uses on the following tracks:

The Snake &..., SbarX, Stallkicker, Sorry, Shine (Glimmer) (An Evil Heat)

Time, Gentlemen, Time, A Winner Every Time (The Narcotic Story)

I'd already worked out parts of Time, Gentlemen, Time—it helps that there's a video of the band performing it on YouTube. I went over that a bit and then decided to tackle A Winner Every Time. Several hours later I've got a rudimentary version I can play. The timing (as with many Oxbow tracks) is one of the harder features. This isn't like playing Pantera. It's not physically gruelling; it's unusual, it's avant-garde, it's mighty cool. It's fun to play. Maybe I'll get inspired to write something myself in this tuning. Whether I'm able to do that without sounding like I'm copying Niko remains to be seen.