Sunday confession.

How do we go about it?

Well first, you need to get stuck in an old car in the icy weather, one of you out front squirting de-icer at the windscreen (Ed) while the other (me) petrifies inside trying to get the heaters to work (they don't) and skating the windscreen wipers across the still frozen windscreen when you hear a muffled 'OK! Try it again!' over the sound of whirring fans and pop-pickers' radio.

Then you've got to skate on worn rubber to the train station and wait at a kind of pick-up/drop-off roundabout for the person who claims to represent your interests on a day-to-day basis. (This road is no good for someone like me – someone who wouldn't know where to put themselves if they'd been assigned their own seat at their own birthday party in their own house and they were the only person there, e.g. May 3^rd 2013 – so there I was behind the wheel, shuffling and moving and making little trips backwards and forwards around one of those 'no-one-minds-we-don't-mind-you-don't-mind' blind-eye car-park-non-car-parks out the back of Brighton station until every other car just left a nine foot gap either end of me, placing bets on what I was going to do next.)

I was just trying to stay out of everybody's way, and strike the balance between my car neither blowing up nor breaking down. It's a see-saw, this life, I tell you.

Then you purchase Hussein quantities of alcohol. And carrots and crisps and dips and pizza.

Then head home to have a business meeting.

And share stories that go nowhere, and discuss mixing engineers and international corporate finance and strategy. And sit in light diffused by a couple of freshly laundered shirts because you don't have a good enough lampshade. Headaches are for tomorrow – not now. We're talking business and getting things done, you see.

And we're getting on one another's nerves and tickling each other's little bones, as it were, of contention and trying to pick the locks to each other's thinking places.

And we discuss the usual. How we're going and where to get there. And usually the trip is only as far as the kitchen to get another bottle or to check the food hasn't burned and whether any new gossip has come about in the house – which is spilling over like bad broth with the lives of 'other people' – in the last few hours before taking a deep breath and goodnighting to the others and diving back into the sea of six of us too skilled in the popular arts and living too much in the shadow of our shared cultural history to go to bed sober even once at this stage in our slowly degrading lives.

And us chosen ones hammer our lungs and livers and head out, as some of us fall by the wayside late, yet early, to the nitty-gritty of where we are, and who we are, because we're friends and not everything is easy and this great block of iron that is us needs forging, and that needs fire, and sometimes in a fire a hedgehog will catch alight. 

And the hedgehog will come running out from beneath the brush and swear his revenge against all of humanity, wherein the devil will find a willing soul, and engage us in the never-ending battle between good and evil; this world and the next; Ant and Dec.

So how do we go about it?

How do we go about our business?

Like righteous Gods. That's how. Breathing fire at the devils for your own protection.

So...

We're still working. We have these pictures in our heads. It's a process; it is what it is. Just know that today is Sunday and Sunday is for bleeding the evil out and letting the spirits in.

So get your leech on and allow us to shower you, as ever, in our everlasting love, for you have been invited to attend our mass.

Tim

Exactly the kind of thing you should expect in the 21st century.

There’s a chill in the air, isn’t there?

               

                Valentine’s wishes to those of you having a tough meterological time of it in at the moment. We’re on the South Coast, but are not seeing the kind of badness that lots of you are. Do be well, or ‘do-be-do-be-do be well’ as Fred Sonata would say.

               

                We’ve been all around the houses this week. A couple of days of recovery, a couple of days of great big work and more new songs for live purposes. Lots of stuff going on behind the scenes as always, new avenues and futures and all that as usual. The same old stuff in that everything is new. Consistence in novelty and excitement. It’s pretty good, really.

                I’m just putting together the last bits of my ‘Valentine’s day surprise’ for my loved one. It’s a 21^st century musician’s lifestyle simulator – the most realistic one yet! First I will succumb to an absurd desire to destroy my body and mind, then we’ll live in one damp room with nothing but books and guitars for company, and then this evening we’re going to feast on scraps of rat and cupboard shavings! Ooh, she’s a lucky girl. Then she gets to agree to everything I say and agree that everything I do is good so I don’t crumple into a pool on the floor, weeping into an essay entitled ‘What I want to be when I grow up.’

                I think the rest of the band have the same kind of thing ‘planned’.

                Happy Valentine’s Friday!

                Telston

                Tim’s top tip: One thing missing on Valentine’s day? i.e. human contact? Simply drink heavily and manipulate a hand puppet into a selection of depraved acts! Or, order a bunch of flowers delivered to your door alongside a card that reads ‘From yourself.xx’ Upon receiving them, immediately open the card, stare the courier in the face and declare ‘They are flowers from me that I sent to myself.’ The courier will run away so fast that they’re bound to knock someone unconscious in their retreat. Hey presto! A Valentine’s date is yours!

'All these...moments...will be lost in time, like the smell of your shoes when you use our new product!' [Quote from 'Glade Runner'.]

            Whatever I say here, it’s the bread in my head talking.

            Right, so, what’s been going on?

            Saturday night we only went and bloody well recorded with a bloody string quartet didn’t we? Eh? Only went and strummed and pickled along with some proper bloody musicians, eh? Ed got to accompany one of the violinists ‘practicing’ some Vivaldi during one of the breaks, as you do, which pleased him so much I thought he had a banana lodged in his gob.

            We did it all in the recording studios at The University of Surrey, with the very able and amicable Oscar (Oskar? Oska? Glen?) Somethingorother who also very kindly put us up at his house after our 3am finish. The evening ended with us blearily watching the pale blue glow of sunrise appear behind net curtains while drinking some remarkably dodgy sherry. Thom-of-the-Novi was also in residence, filming all and making every mistake watchable a thousand times over. We’ve handed the footage over to Edward Snowden for safe keeping, so it’ll be viewable soon.

            Sunday was something of a write-off, then. We went to the effortlessly sterile PC World in short-notice-search of a big hard drive to take the previous night’s recording from Oscar (Oskar? Oska? Glen?) Somethingorther, and also to back up all of the work currently teetering on the precipice Trewin’s computer. Imagine. It’s all on there. It’s all on there, dangling by a thread of computer failure. One wrong website, Trewin. One wrong website…

            And I, like so many defence contractors, have already seen his search history.

            In the waning words of the world’s worst; Fred Durst: Back up, back it up.

            We also treated ourselves to a Sunday feast in Frankie & Benny’s (despite my fervent protestations) which was like eating some dinner inside an arse. Our waiter was a dude, but the food tasted like someone had read a cookbook backwards. My stomach made noises I’d never heard before, that evening. There’ll be samples of it on the new EP.

The sounds, that is.

Then, just as soon as I’d fallen asleep in the van and then the next thing I know woken up the next day in my own bed, it was time to play The Haunt with the ever wonderful Mt. Wolf.

Here’s an example of their music which both the band and their existing fans will no doubt find an achingly predictable choice, but I’ve already put the work ‘achingly’ in front of ‘predictable’ in order to emphasise it, so I’m pretty much running the risk of post-modernism as the sentence descends into a wry smile of nonsense.

(I tried everything to embed the video on here, but it seems Google are unable to integrate their services properly unless you're a Government, so here is a long hyperlink and explanatory sentence.)
 

This song’s been in my head for a very long time. It bangs the shit out of your bones if you go and watch it live. Go and watch it live, then.

The Haunt gig was good. Thanks for coming down, those who did. Those who didn’t, find Doc Brown, go back, go watch. I’ll thank you as my memory alters.

            Last night was our gig with the same band in Heaven. That’s always fun to say. Another good gig – perhaps our biggest yet! Despite my really rather painful neck problem making me feel like an emotionless statue onstage, I think we all had a really good time.

            Good work, gang. Keep following – all sorts of news and other delights are flowing freely from our rusty pipelines.

            Today, then, is a day of restful delights. I’m currently sipping my second coffee, I’m about to stand in my freezing back garden with an invigorating little cherry ended friend, and then I think I’ll spend the day inside under a blanket trying to complete Half-Life on the PS2.

            Because that’s how bread rolls.

            Have fun, whichever baked good you choose to become.

            Tim

           

George Osborne covers my girlfriend's income.

There’s this girl who lives in my house. It’s her birthday today.

For my birthday, earlier this year, she bought me (among other things) an 18” Terminator 2 doll (‘poseable battle exoskeleton’) and a Kindle. I’ve looked at the Terminator doll every day and thought ‘Oh Stan Winston, you genius. You’ve built the scariest motherfucker in the land and made a whole generation fear for the future.’ I’ve also used the Kindle every single day, taking food out of the hands of starving orphans who I would so often fund with my book-buying charity splurges. It’s all electronic, now. If I didn’t enjoy contributing to human suffering so much, I’d feel bad about the guilt.

A challenge appears: What in the heck do I now buy for her that will in any way compare to two of the best gifts I have ever received?

What do you do, Tim?

I don’t know.

You could buy her some diamonds? Perhaps an extravagant vomit of flowers delivered to our door every day of the week leading up to her birthday? A sex oven?

Get real, Tim. A sex oven would just be a present for yourself. She’ll see right through it (through the little window, at least. When the little light’s on.) At least there’s a timer. 

And she can control the amount of gas.

Anyway, I got her what I did: a mound of tat. There are two ways to approach the inevitable couple-gift-wars on a budget. 1) The nuclear gift. Pretty much what she did to me – inadvertently creating a rod for her own back when she did it. Her future is fucked. She’s peaked too soon. Or 2) Buy a whole mound of tat, substituting quality for quantity.

Worked like a charm. She totally fell for it. Who’d have thought a 4” LED illuminated perspex statue of The Virgin Mary would prove so popular?

           

Then…someone turned up at the door. An entire governmental department squeezed into a little brown envelope. One of them jumped out of the first thumbed opening and smacked me in the face with a frying pan. My girlfriend laughed. I was on the floor, bleeding from the nose and eyes. She continued opening the envelope but she couldn’t reach the end before they’d burst out of the lumpy, writhing package she’d been wrestling with. Someone ran over my head on a unicycle, and I swear the naked trapeze artist stole my design.

One of the ‘Dancing Clown Firework Army’ ran up to my girlfriend carrying a big creamy cake, handed her a fat cheque, then slammed his face into the cake (sending the cream topping flying into all of my electronic equipment) before farting Stop (Right Now) by The Spice Girls.

‘Oh yeah!’ my girlfriend hacked through fits of laughter as I lay comatose and leaking all over the floor, ‘A sweet tax rebate!’

Jesus, HMRC. Way to upstage the king. I was doing really well up until this point. I’d done pain au chocolat and everything. This Government.

So, now the only thing I can hope to get away with is fumbling my way through a cool recording session tomorrow where we’re hoping to do some live sessions of some of the tracks with the Phorchestra, and shuffling flat-footedly through our forthcoming gigs, 11^th, 12^th, and 20^th November in London and Brighton respectively.

So long as Santa doesn’t turn up in a fucking Mustang and start handing out chocolate covered credit cards, my mediocrity should go unnoticed, and even praised, just as planned, and just as I’ve gotten away with thus far.

It’s better to be the best regarded giver than to receive.

I hope you are presented with everything you hope for this weekend, whichever way you take it.

Tim

Me Again!

I've been waiting for somebody else in the band to post a blog but obviously when you have :

*Trewin, too busy mixing our new EP, "Bloodworks" and occasional bike ride, 

*Tim, too busy looking up porn, drinking whisky while telling "believers" that god doesn't actually exist, 

*Ed San playing "Uncharted" and getting harassed by his young music students,

*Jeb trying to figure out how to use 360 visuals with 6.1 surround sound for our show at the Olympics in August,

considering all of those factors I guess I'm the only one who has enough spear time to post something on here.

Anyway I will be no longer doing "my favourite food" section as I received a sense mood that no one actually gives a s_ _ t about what I'd like to eat so I'm only going to post "my favourite song" from now on.

Toe - Mukougishi Ga Shiru Yume

Toe is a Japanese music group. While mentioned in many post-rock circles, their song structure and dynamics are similar to many popular math rock artists.

Toe is composed of Kashikura Takashi on drums, Mino Takaaki on guitar, Yamane Satoshi on bass guitar, and Yamazaki Hirokazu on guitar. Toe has formally played with this line-up since the band’s inception in 2000. They are currently one of three bands on the indie label Machu Picchu,along with the bands mouse on the keys and Enemies. This is a label formed by the members of Toe.

If you don't know them already I highly recommend you to give them a listen!

Sayounara

Sez x