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.