I just thought that title was funny. I don't even know if anyone reads this. Are you reading this? Let me know. 

Having contacted E/Ne to tell them that I'm going to have material to send them for the next album (and thereby forcing myself to do it), I took the next important step in any music-making project of mine — namely getting in touch with Neil. 

We've agreed that I'll visit his home studio on the 21st or 22nd of this month and do some recording. I still haven't taken my guitar out of its case in I don't know how long. I don't expect to record a whole album of material in one day (just as well seeing as I haven't written a whole album of material!), but if I can have three or four songs (or whatever they may be) ready to be recorded, that'll at least give E/Ne something to work on while I work on more material. 

I've got two songs. I suppose three — the third a guitar sketch that a friend created vocals to on his phone. I was thinking that one needs to be rerecorded, now I'm not sure though. I interviewed Kevin Rutmanis, Gina Skwoz and Trevor Dunn the other day. They told me that some of their latest record ‘Last Days at Hot Slit’ used material recorded on a phone. If that's good enough for them, I think it's good enough for me! 

So I guess I already have one track ready to send to E/Ne. Woo hoo! This album-making business is easy, it turns out. 

As to the rest of the album, I don't intend everything to be so musical, but I do want to keep working in the direction of doing more interesting things with my vocal approach. One or two tracks in the droning, hypnotic style of “Your Body” would be fine, but I don't want to run this into the ground. 

The only limits are the limits of my imagination. I better get imagining then.  

So what do you do when you finally finish the process of making an album, when it's out in the world, you sit back and say “ok, this really is finished”? You start making another one I suppose, right? 

I had my interview with Mick. It was fun. I will put it out on my podcast, Whatever Comes Next. I was thinking that I might turn the episode into something more conceptual — maybe I'll add some music, or spoken word, some collages. I don't know what exactly, but it could be interesting. 

If Sara has any of the videos ready by the time I want to release the episode, it would make sense to have them there too. 

And now onto the next endeavour. 

The next album will be collaboration number two with Existent / Nonexistent. We've agreed we're going to do it. In the past days and weeks I've been warming my brain up to doing creative writing again. In parallel I've been making a conscious effort to escape from my phone. It's a scourge and a drain of ideas and inspiration. 

Tentatively, I think I can say I'm starting to feel some positive result as I live a little bit more in the world around me and not this insidious little void. No offence Ms Mobile Phone. 

So partly to push myself into action I messaged E/Ne yesterday to say I'd have some material ready to send them by the end of the year. 

I'm not going to fuss myself with trying to plan the whole thing out conceptually track by track (as I previously had planned). I'm going to take it one track at a time and see how it evolves. 

I have a couple of actual “songs”, but now I'm not sure if I want them to be part of this project, or save them. No, actually I remember now, I've decided I will include them. Why? They're connected to the past, so I want to have everything that ties to my time in Germany and Czechia completed — if for nothing more than the psychological peace of being able to draw a line and say my life is moving on. 

So with all that being the case the album will be Devil Girl and Her Latin Mushrooms. That'll be one of the songs. And what else? TBD. 

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. 

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.