Well, I did stumble my way through some mixing at home. I returned to Neil's place for the final session and we did indeed manage to finish everything… well 99%. 

What I think worked out quite well for us is we arranged to go out and meet a friend of mine in the evening. It forced us to be pretty ruthless with ourselves about how much time we had to agonise over little details. 

In the end we agreed that we'd give ourselves a day to reset our ears, listen to all the mixes and see if there were any final tweaks needed. Ultimately, all that was left was that my vocal track was a little loud ("proud" as Neil calls it) on two of the tracks. 

We also tried having the first two tracks blend together, so that the last word of track 1 falls as track 2 starts. Nice idea, it didn't work in practice. 

But that's it. Neil will hopefully have time to make those little adjustments and then that'll be it. He'll send me the final tracks, I'll forward them to Augurio Drama and he'll line it up for release. 

There is of course one other matter: album art. I really had no idea what I wanted to do about this. Finally I had an idea. My collaborator Existent/NonExistent (who I made Industrial State of Mind with) also does photography. This was in fact my introduction to him: I saw his artwork on Instagram. 

That introduction led to me contacing him about collaborating, which ultimately led to me contacting Augurio Drama about collaborating with him (and releasing Industrial State of Mind). 

So even though Ex/NonEx isn't wasn't involved in making this album, I thought it would be nice to be able to have his name listed on the project (plus I like his photography). Now I just need to write the liner credits and then when Neil sends me the files we are done and dusted and I can move on to the next project. 

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 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.