Put us in a square on a flat thing.

The music industry is a relentless, devouring beast. If life is a landfill (show me evidence to the contrary), then the industry is an ill-bred dog, stalking the cruel and uneven hills of waste and rust and looking for something to take in its razored teeth and shake for sport.

The dog hunts with his eyes.

We’ve always had a mixed relationship with photo-shoots. I used to consider the cultivation of a look a distraction from the cultivation of a sound. The job of a musician, I thought, was to make music. The construction of an image or brand was about selling music. It took a little while past my most idealistic years to recognise the essential link between those two activities--a bit like when you realise Santa is a lie, or that any notion of political and personal freedom is an illusion cynically exploited in order to keep you in the mental prison of this false reality.

Your devices photograph you.

While potentially deceptive (so I’ve read), appearances are important.

I have just downloaded the new GCHQ app that tells you when you’ve got a bogey hanging out of your nose.

Still, beyond the narrative, beyond the waking up at five in the morning to growl through London rush-hour traffic, beyond the eye-rolling do we really have to do this and cardboard roadside coffee that tastes like Baudrillard’s gulf war, beyond the horror of living, beyond this mournful pop-up book of imagined successes, this veil of only death, this window of colour, this loud tomb, this fuss of speed and air where love is mechanised, where hope is monetised, where even the categorisation of emotion serves as a means to oppression, where empty hollow husks of proud apes bray and pump and starve and feed and hardly bare their teeth at one another so displaced are they by the consistent, Über-like punctuality of new heavens in screens and servers, beyond the industrialised death of glorious hot chaos, well past the point of no return for any cogent thought, well beyond the soft memory of that tall cliff that we all see when sleep appears entreating us to leap into a reddish black with hands to catch us disappearing into something human but not here, not death but not quite in between release and what lonely strand tethers us to this mirage of well copywrit feculence...

...we had fun at our photoshoot last Friday!

It was a really fun and nice day!

Cheers,

Tim

 

P.S. Photos shown soon. Cool fun. Music working. 

We'd like to insist that you complete this voluntary questionnaire.

We thank you for your involvement thus far.

To complete your submission, please answer the following multiple choice questions. There are no correct answers. This does not mean that all/any answers are acceptable. Please hand your completed application to the blank page at the front of the test after you have left the room.

1) You are...?

1. Tired.
2. Out of ideas.
3. Uncomfortable, but obliged to exist and act.
4. Seryn.

2) After one week on the road supporting the excellent James Vincent Mcmorrow, you fear that your band (and crew) consisting of six ragged men has garnered a reputation for...?

1. Sharp wit, style, and debonair elegance.
2. Farting, juvenile humour, and the scent of used, hot leatherette chairs.
3. Over-complication, obscurantism, and ironic maxilexicographicality.
4. Seryn.

3) The gigs were...?

1. Really nice. We appreciate everyone who came to watch us and who made a lot of noise. We also appreciate the whole JVM crew, and everybody who had us to stay or helped us out along the way with beer or advice or lifting things or all of it.
2. Awful. The stages were made of wafer and the crack-cocaine was sub-par at both best and worst and at average times of which there were few, which makes little sense.
3. What gigs?
4. Huh Oh man, I...I can't even remember. I was, like... oh, man – the lights were. You know, like, when you look at the sky, and you look at the clouds and...and with the contrast you're just like, 'Oh, man. Those are real clouds.', and you can see like the contours and everything and it's like...that's water? That's, like, a real sky, man. It's fucking amazing. Hey, man, you hear about Earth? He's with Honeyblossom, now. Yeah, they met in Peru when she was over there protesting against her Dad's oil company. Yeah, she's flying back today. Did you say you were making tea, man? We need milk. And tea. Yeah, there's a pop-up grow-your-own tea-leaf place just outside Waitrose.

4) There is...?

1. No way out of this, now.

5) In Copenhagen, we...?

1. ...were accosted outside of the venue, straight after parking the van, by a group of very nice people looking for our autograph. They approached the bus holding pictures of us and looking especially for Jeb. I hope they are reading this so I can let them know that Jeb sends his warmest regards. They also waited outside the venue for JVM, but were, I think, unlucky (I might be wrong). Still, eleven hours, what's that? Six films? It's nothing, really. Copenhagen seems a very nice place to stand.
2. ...met a nice man named Philip who, on being asked if he knew of any good hostels in the area, invited six random, sweaty/debonair foreign people to sleep at his house, and fed them with alcohol and mattresses and Danish psychedelia.
3. ...came across one of the friendliest and most professional technical crews we've ever had the pleasure of working with, in the venue most evocative of a Stanley Kubrick film we've ever had the pleasure of playing in.
4. ...went for a ride in a helicopter with a cow pilot.
5. 100% of the above.
6. 75% of e.

6) Every crowd was...?

1. So nice that no alternative answer will be offered, as I'm even welling up a little just thinking about the openness and generosity of all the people who saw us. Some of the applause and smiling faces will live with us for a very long time. My heart's fluttering a little, and that very rarely happens, such was the joy of the crowds we were privileged to play to. I'm also going to kind of hide behind a hedge with embarrassment after that little show of authenticity, so I'm now going to leave you in the hands of Dr. Shit.

7) My name is...?

1. Dr Shit.
2. The number-letter-changer; cognitive re-arranger. Tssss.
3. Arltang.
4. W-W-W-dutiful.

8) The road...?

1. ...is long, with many a winding turn.
2. You're still using numbers, rather than letters like you were before.
3. ...leads only to Berlin, where we were held up in traffic for two hours due to an apparent convoy, transporting some American representative somewhere or other. I have no idea if Obama was in town (no doubt droning on about something, right, readers? Ah, illegal, criminally under-reported, poorly managed, robotic warfare, we hardly knew ye.), but if it was him, then we'd like to take this opportunity, which may not come around too often, to blame The President of The United States for making us late for sound-check and putting an inordinate amount of pressure on us and the rest of the crew. Then again, I'm sure he can wriggle out of responsibility by getting another shot of diplomatic immunisation or something. I think diplomatic immunity is like MMR, but much more likely to result in strange psychological effects, damaging the lives of those around you.
4. ...sounds like Brian May with a cold.

9) We thank:

1. We're back to letters? Who the hell is in charge, here?
2. Jörg, Vivien and Mattias, Colin, Philip, Jamie Shaw, James Vincent McMorrow, Justin and the whole crew, all the technicians we worked with, everyone who made our food – especially 'Mr. Lamb Shank' in Copenhagen, who I've always said I wanted to me(at)et LAMB – Carlo, erm...the dinosaurs for dying and giving us fuel. Vauxhall. Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Koln. Our parents for giving us the kind of faces that keep our tour medical bills down to only paracetamol and burn cream. It's weird. It was four dates, but it was one of the most epic weeks of our strange little lives, so it's still a big deal, going out there on a shoestring and being thrust into a world of curious oddities and foreign languages and the kindness of others, which we took all-too readily, and live in fear of disregarding all-too cheaply. I hope everyone who helped us out is in this list somewhere, and, if I discover one day that it is not, then I shall write it in the stars when I die.
3. Jumping Piss Man.
4. Oh! The people who interviewed us. They were very friendly.
5. Satan.
6. Vishnu.
7. All gods who consist of the same substance and have all qualities attributed to them by all religions and also none of them due to their binary nature which is what gives binary possibilities in the first place, that is: all Gods whose existence is made possible only by their non-existence, which is a quality of them.
8. Xenu.
9. The ghost of Rik Mayall.

Thank you for your eternal submission.

Should you have any other queries, I refer you to Ed's staff.

Tim

Phoria Research And Tour Services

I enjoy it, anyway.

We’ll start at the beginning, then, as is the fashion.

Not that there’s much of a middle. Or an end.

Oh good: I can relax.

We hit Bristol last week and we’ve only just recovered. Thanks so much to everyone who came. Start the Bus is a great venue – really friendly and accommodating. It makes a difference when you get a good crew and a good vibe before the gig. The crowd grew in numbers while we were onstage, too, which is always good. Yeah…basically it was good and everyone was friendly and had a good time, is the crux of the matter. A bit of a non-story. This whole ‘starting at the beginning’ thing has fallen at the first hurdle to be honest - although that in itself would imply a linear narrative, which of course this inevitably has as it is, like music or baking a delicious cake, something that you cannot help but experience as something persisting through time, meaning you’ll naturally apply your own sense of narrative to it. If you didn’t recognise that I didn’t start at the beginning at the beginning (which I actually did) then you wouldn’t be able to say ‘He didn’t start at the beginning’ when your friend asks ‘What’s the first thing you notice wrong with this?’ Mileage may vary by tolerance and/or imagination.

But you digress.

It’s been a funny old week. One of those where not that much has changed but you feel like you’ve been up to loads. What that does mean is that you’re filled with the enthusiasm of busy days but with very few meaningful stories to tell if you, like me, were stuffed from a young age with a suspicious modesty and a tendency to slip subtle hidden messages into your blogs. It’s like life: at the end of it all you’re just left with a dull hangover; your brain feeling like a well-wrung dishcloth and your body blalaaaaaaaa

BLALAAAALALAALALaALAALA

aaaaaaaaand your tongue fingers licking at a keyboard with nothing much to say, but a sharp and distinct urge to say it, as usual.

Look, we’re a way in to the week, now, OK?. Oh no, it’s only Tuesday. We’re, like, a day away from the beginning. That was good, wasn’t it? Remember when the week was new and fresh and exciting, just like every Monday? It’s somewhat erotic, isn’t it? That first thrust into the week ahead, teasing Tuesday like a FILTHY WHORE?

It’s not, is it.

Music.

The band.

Enjoy yourself, whatever you’re doing.

Tim

Three little gigs.

What a couple of days/weeks this has been.

I’m typing this on a half melted, half absent set of keys on my hardy little laptop. My lady and I (absent) had a relatively minor fire in our flat two days ago. Two days ago while the band were stranded just off the A2 in London, our van Binky having broken down about 20 mins from the The Old Blue Last where we were scheduled to play for some very interesting people. Half of the keys on my keyboard are gone, so in an act of poverty driven defiance I’m typing directly onto the little rubber buttons that usually rest unseen behind the wall of helpful Roman characters. I don’t recommend this technique. I will now call it ‘Xtreme touch typing’.

As the fire spread, licking the Terminator and Metal Gear Solid posters and other ephemera that line the wall of ‘Tim’s corner’, my heroic little bundle of sense exhibited the attitude that got everyone through the last few days – sort the guitars first, and everything else can be sorted later. I smiled with relief (after asking after her wellbeing, of course. Of course. Ahem.) as she recounted her tale of leaping over the bed like a kangaroo to save my precious Rihanna and Betty (a relic-ed US Stratocaster and baby blue telecaster, respectively) from Satan’s faulty-hairdryer-fuelled clutches. They are safe and warm [sic], and thanks to my constant drilling of my girlfriend [sic] in the most dangerous and irresponsible ways of tackling large fires on your own, my precious collections of dangerously graphic ‘art’ films and hate letters to Michael Gove remain unscathed. Please show your love to her under the codename ‘Fire-officer Grimsby’, should you so wish.

Meanwhile, as she was pansying around with that shit, Phoria had three gigs in three days, four days after our return from eleven days on the road through Europe. That’s a total of three hundred million days.

Thanks to all who came to all. Your support is so incredible and we really appreciate it. It’s so nice to do what you do through all the stresses and worries and waiting three hours for the recovery services and flagging down amazing strangers in vans who take you to the venue in exchange for a modest fee and people you met in Croatia who come to the gig and take you in and buy you beers because you have nowhere else to stay, and at the end of it all see a new bunch of smiling strangers who so kindly express their enjoyment of what you’ve just smashed out through a suffocating sweat onstage. The promoters, also, showed a great deal of patience in dealing with us and our Laurel and Hardy ways.

So it has to be said that the day is done for me. All the band have earned a day of rest. Ed’s going on holiday, so the focus for now is on the new EP, which is taking shape for release this year. That’s right. Bloodworks was our nemesis for a while. A slow, cold war. This one’s going to be slick and easy. The songs have been brewing for a long time anyway – now all we have to do is pour the tea (tea being a metaphor for the songs) and wait for you to spill it all over yourselves in bed because your partner didn’t realise you had a hot drink in your hand and moved around really violently to improve their view of Ainsley Harriot’s Go-kart Meringue Vol. VII.

So yes, a new EP. Gigs. More stories from Croatia, once I’ve sorted a new keyboard.

I’m going to watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and eat chicken nuggets.

For now, have fun, and remember: sort the guitars first, and all else shall follow.

Tim

P.S. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Diary here.

On encouragement from others, I kept a diary of our journey through Europe. 

There’s an awful lot in there, as the trip took us up and down, through highs and lows, through frowns that broke our teeth and cheers that changed the direction of oncoming ships.

For now, I have here decided only to hint at portions of it. Still, that gives you all another reason to look forward to my eventual demise. The fully published diary will no doubt be offered as a free gift on the front of the Sunday Sport (by that time a well respected literary journal) on the day of my death, or at least mentioned in my obituary as some kind of lost treasure - the whereabouts of which will then be left to rumour and perhaps the subject of a new Indiana Jones adventure. (Hint: I’m going to protect the diary with a five headed AI double-cyborg Wolf-man, which can only be defeated by being buggered. That ought to teach Harrison Ford a lesson.)

It’s difficult to even try and fit those ten days (is that all they were?) into any self-contained…thing. There’s just so much there: not being listed here. I won’t do that. Instead I’ll take them as they come. Like a sexual health nurse.

Before that: the news. Three gigs this week: Tuesday, St. Wednesday, Thursday. Prince Albert, Old Blue Last, The Hope. Brighton, London, Brighton. Fun, Fun, Fun. We’re well up for it.

All relevant info, and the new shop, is all on www.phoriamusic.com, in case you weren’t aware. You are now, so there’s no excuse not to bookmark it and visit it every day, like a postman.

Day 2

Tuesday 6/7/13

Location: A small rest area beside the German Autobahn.

8:07 am

We have woken up to the sound of grasshoppers trying to drown out the rumble of the road. We stopped last night somewhere South of Frankfurt, the night-time’s driving becoming nothing more than a rolling screen, like a repetitious background from an old Scooby-Doo cartoon. I drove for about four hours – successfully resisting the right-hand urge to pull off into oncoming traffic…

Jeb and Rory have set-up camp outside. Jeb approached the van last night with a look of distilled fear in his eyes. A strange man sat watching he and Rory pitch their tents; one hand holding a cigarette, and Jeb insisting: ‘I know what his other hand was doing.’

8:36 am

It cannot be uncommon for people to wonder if certain public conveniences are more or less sanitary than having a member of the public defecate directly onto your face.

22:16 pm

Achingly tired. This may not make much sense. We’re in the van, in a campsite beside Lake Bled in Slovenia, drinking beer bought from the most perfectly situated branch of LIDL in the world. [photos will surface].

Slovenia so far has been…[the word ‘beautiful’ has been removed here] Mountains border your view at every turn. They vary from lush and green to sheer rock cliff faces, cold and cracked and aged. We drove through Austria to get here. This is so difficult to describe – partly because of fatigue.

I watched the landscape fold itself up like paper. The mountains, near and far, traverse each other as you pass them. The awe at each turn is the sense of creation on an industrial scale. The bridges rest on the legs of giants. Earth, above and below, shows off like an attention seeking child: petulant and resourceful. Grand, but nothing more than crude, quarried bumps. I felt as though I had been thrown into nature’s bosom.

We held our breath for 2km through a tunnel that burrowed underneath one of the mountains, gasping only briefly in a five second flash of light - as we returned to the vacuous caverns, lit through slits in the omnipresent green of the fir trees - to scream ‘WOAH!’ and then plunge back into a tube of sensory deprivation.

It was grand, and so inhuman. I do not know how to take it all in.

I feel like a bag with a hole in the bottom.

And that’s your lot for now.

Have a great day, whichever mountains you travel through in a van.

Tim

Soundwave festival is taking place on the Southern coast of...

...Croatia.

This has been the theme for the past...eight or nine days. It's all any of us can think about, it's all any of us are acting upon, and, at the expense of our bellies, it's the only thing that's making those small numbers shrink even further into oblivion. I see the descent and subsequent rise of those pretty little figures marked 'overdraft' as the final death throes of reason and accountability. 'F*ck it', we say. We're still young, and we're going to drive across Europe to play music at a massive party festival.

Lake Bled in Slovenia; one of our scheduled stops. Not pictured: The relentless march 

of industrial and economic progress.

The road holds its own promise. Ed, myself, and Trewin will be sharing the driving equally between us. Trewin insisted yesterday - 'For the duration of the trip, we become 'Yes Men'. We take everyone up on any offer of accommodation, parties, whatever.'
I'm certainly up for an adventure (see: not being held for ransom).

So, there it is. All is booked, and the only thing that's been packed so far is my Speedo.

Oh yes, music: the art of the musician. Well, we got together for the first time in a long time yesterday, Trewin's voice having finally healed. That's right, you heard it here first (unless you're in the band, a circumstance of which there is a 5/7,079,000,000 chance). We weren't great to start off with - rusty hinges and all. Towards the end we got it, and tonight we'll be down there again, smashing away and big lumps of songs until we remember how to play them, and how to break them into a million pieces in front of thousands of people.

Talking of breaking things; millions of people, the CDs arrived, finally:

Not pictured: Mountains of cash; Alf Ramsey chainsaw juggling.

We've also got t-shirts. That's right, pledgers - after promises and promises and apologies and 'a couple of days' turning into a couple of weeks, we feel we managed to break your spirits just enough to eventually send some stuff out to you. You'll see them in a couple of days, weeks, months, etc. (Seriously: they're going out as I type.) (Sorry again for all the delays.)

Both products will soon be available for purchase.

So, that's it. What with hay-fever taking my spirit from me and Croatia occupying my mind, that's all I can be bothered to write. I feel it adequately informs you how we are, what we're doing, etc. While also adding another aspect of personality to the public perception of Phoria. Likeable? Perhaps not, but (supposedly) consumable content with which the audience is able to engage, which must, like our home-spun cheese, be regularly churned.

It's another hot, sunny day, and it's FRIDAY! 

Have an ice cream and stare at the sun.

Tim.

PS. We have a spare ticket for accommodation and festival entry which we're looking to sell. If you're interested, email us at phoriamusic(at)hotmail.com

PPS. That (at) is so that spambots that scour these blogs can't steal our address and send us loads of penis enhancement pills. We've got plenty of those already. So put an @ there, not (at). You probably knew this already, but I'd hate for you not to come to Croatia with us just because of one little mistake. You in particular. Yes, you. I am actually referring to you as an individual. This is not a trick. CROOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAATTTTIIIIAAA