There's a joke in this title.

What is a typical day like, at the moment?

We're in the gritty midst of a million different things, being snatched at and strangled by so many clammy hands that none of them can yet get a tight enough grip on our necks to pull us down.

Much of our work is fueled by bananas, coffee, and fatty snacks.

First thing is communication. There are always little bits of housekeeping to be done at the beginning of the day, be that replying to an email or putting a little package together or replying to your nice messages or checking this or that with whomever is sorting what.

I put things together sometimes, like little splashes of promo. Maybe a blog post, here or there, where I make things up entirely to put to bed the pretence that a musician's life is one of excitement and glamour. I often complete these tasks under a sheet, listening to Brian Eno and wondering if 11 a.m. is too early to finish yesterday's crisps.

It's not too early.

I've usually got about ten other windows open too, with some other stuff that I've been working on for a bit, so it ain't all sleep and cake.

Usually on a day like today the band will get together around 2 p.m. It's a time that suits everyone. Jeb's usually been up late, hallucinating into a computer screen until his clicking finger looks like one of Schwarzennegger's legs. Sez usually joins us around five or six, depending on what he's done with his day. Meanwhile Jeb, Trewin, Ed and I have a little jam, or just a noodle on some instruments, or edit some stuff for the new album, or have a session of ideas or just a cup of tea and a chat to warm up for the evening. Chat and a laugh.

Then we practice and problem solve. I think there's a new track where I'm going to be playing keys, and drums, and probably a harp with one of my feet. It's a bit like planning a war and sending your medic out on his/her/its/bear's own to plant explosives deep behind enemy lines.

And that goes on into the night. Getting the new songs done and choosing synths and putting the new live set together alongside the album. That's where we are. And we have little chats where we brainstorm and go off into flights of fancy about the future and what we could do with it, little ball of decorative marzipan that it is. And we look at potential artwork and trash it while drinking brandy with our little fingers sticking out and debating whether the ancient Egyptians predicted the Libor rigging scandal.

And then we say goodnight to each other and disappear into our respective hidey holes and drink Horlicks and cuddle our teddy bears and play old vinyls of our mothers singing us lullabys. And we do our homework and stay in school in play in the local sports team and eat healthily, just like Jamie Oliver has rigorously instructed us to under penalty of televised death for the last ten years of relentless commercial dictatorship on a show called The Non-Running Man.

And we fall asleep and suffer nightmares. Nightmares of the invasion by giant babies that swim through space as if it's water. Their scalp appears first, over the horizon, glowing like a torch shone from close proximity against a peach, before suddenly the big blue eyes appear and the smiling, toothless mouth that promises peace, at last, from all human suffering.

And then I wake up in a cold sweat to the sound of ethereal noise, and I realise that I never left my bed at all, but in fact fell asleep while writing this very note.

Then how did these words appear? I must don my cloak and jump the first carriage that will take me to the seminary. Surely Lord Pheethenstaph will want to know about this.

That's a typical day in the life of the band Phoria of which I am a part.

Tim

P.S. Probably mention Cargo album preview 10^th March as that's something we're doing.

I bet you thought I was full of surprises?

In a data driven world where it is possible to so comprehensively think and feel so many different things in an ever diminishing span of time, it's increasingly difficult to pick one idea for which it's worth getting out of bed in the morning. This might be caused by a childish loss of the ability to concentrate (which is easy enough to blame on 'the internet' just as it was on 'the television', 'the radio' and 'the paintings on the wall', rather than seeking the cause in our own personal failings and primitive need for quick slaps of quasi-cerebral occupation), or it might be that, in general, ideas are so diffuse and large swathes of the culture so homogenised that distinct ideas no longer possess the laser-like ability to energise in the way that they once did. So, one may wake up, have, achieve, do fun, and then sleep, perchance to dream, with little source of lobo-motive energy but pre-packaged plastic packeted slates of creatively perverted carbohydrate. There is as much negative to be said about this cycle as there as positive. There is as little left to preach of it as there is vitamin D currently being pressed through my veins. (So many people cared and feared for me and my paper white skin, eighteen months ago, when overloading yourself with as much vitamin D as you could possibly take became a strange source of Great British Pride until kale turned up at the bottom of an aeropress and ruined things for everybody who'd got it all so right, so far.)

And I guess that's kind of what I'm talking about. The world I see that runs rampant in screens and speakers is a flat plate of boring ideas, executed largely by pretenders, mainly for people whose primary interest is themselves and how selfless and nu-new-age they can appear to be to others while buying clothes made by slaves and paid for, with quivering and fearful hands, over a counter attended to by either a tax-dodger or a pseudo-socialist so pierced that they whistle when it's windy.

But perhaps that satirically emphasised point of view is just my own, if that makes it more easy to discard.

Hurrah, then, for a new energy in the Phoria camp, so we might at least attempt to avoid this fate of cookie-cutter drudge and despair and perhaps break through to something a bit different.

New shit. New shit. New people and things and ideas. New music. New directions. We're having discussions where we bash our heads against each other more hard than before to try and come up with something that'll work. We're all sensitive folk, and we're all finding our way, but we all see that we've been sucked into this particular breadth of the temporal vacuum where relevance is more relative than it ever has been before; where age and work can be more easily packaged and sold; where the ability to energise others with whatever you're doing can be achieved more succinctly, through a million different channels all at once, and in a million new ways.

Whether it will all amount to water and ash is something we will have to deal with as it comes, but for now the mere promise of doing something new, whatever it might be, is getting us going, and giving us a little glint in our eyes, and making us look forward to the future.

Let's see what will happen today.

I'll probably fall asleep in an hour. All this energy is tiring me out.

Tim

Look at the horizon. That's me, there.

Ingredients:

1 banana

2 knife fulls of peanut butter

2 slices of bread (white or wholemeal, but never seeded)

a tilted jar of honey

Lightly toast the bread put peanut butter on the bread slice the banana on the peanut butter on the bread tilt the honey drizzle the honey on the banana on the peanut butter on the bread grill for five minutes or until the banana starts to brown wash down with coffee and a coffee and whatever tobacco products you might have to hand and end up sprawled on the cold hard patio having chewed off your own arm.

We're kind of back, after the Christmas break, looking for winter berries and hot pockets to snuggle in. It's cold here. Everything online might be polished enough to successfully deliver eternal escape, but a computer screen can only keep you so warm.

I fear I may have to leave the comfort of my tiger-print slumbering table. It's dry in here, and outside it rains. But the tracklist is real. The album for the tracklist is real. Sorry – the tracklist for the album is real. We might be getting together today to further the infinite new of culture. Sounds exciting, eh?

All the stuff is ready at the band house. Just half-an-hour down up the alley.

But...the bed. This bed and the state it's in. It's got memory foam on it and I just picked up a new duvet. It has an aura. If temperature is a measure of the movement of atoms, I think the rate at which my body is expelling some musty odour is creating the heat I find myself in. If I leave it a couple more days I might even start to save on the lighting bill. I should not draw this experiment to a close, yet. Neither for the band, nor to reverse my twenty-odd year decline in social status...

I've also got things to do, don't get me wrong – I'm not looking for a day of zero sum.

I'm looking for a day of pulling puppet strings from behind a simmering pot of letters, like an evil Grandma cooking soup.

We've got a few meetings tomorrow, too, in that London, with some people or something who want to enjoy being a part of what we do.

If they like hot beds and bananas, they'll be just fine.

We'll let you know how it goes.

So speak free and loud, and listen out.

Tim