an album

Taken from The pre-musician's guide to advanced post-musical production, b3rd edition, (2013).

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How to make an album, by Timothy Douglas (bass).

IF you are one of those people who takes the miragic carousel of life as real (IF), then congratulations: you are living in The Modern World. In this The Modern World, among the more popular things to do is to make music for listening. Music for listening can iron out your worries/shirts, liven up a boring funeral, or make you cry at just everything that's wrong.

No wonder it so as this popular!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!and!!!!!!

Music, much like a plumber's tool, comes in "information boxes". These "fo-bos" are delivered in different shapes. Smaller fo-bos, called “EPs” often come as packs of four (4) or five (4) songs or “tracks”. Fo-bos of ten (and/or 11) tracks or "songs" are “albums”. “It is albums about which we for an will be looking at today.” She said.

To make an album in The Modern World, there are ten things you need to do. We will start with number four (5):

4 (5). Miss your deadlines.

A deadline is called a dead line for a reason; it is the place in space where dead lines reside.

Experiment:

• Draw a line on a sheet of paper.

• Did you create this line? Or have you simply caused a small part of a line that already existed to manifest? This line clearly existed before you (unless you invented the possibility of geometry! (Which you didn't!)-!!and), and so is infinite and therefore better than you. You're not even as good as a line.

• Rest.

If you think about this as correctly as I have, you will understand that the place where all lines exist preeminently is a place to which you do not want to go. Neither is it a place you will want to think about. Steer well clear, then. Ignore the “deadlines” that punctuate your ever accelerating progress.

7. Run out of your money.

“I have all the money in the world!” said the man who never finished his homework. Why would you finish your homework when you have all the money in the world? You wouldn't. I never finished my homework and I didn't have any money. I didn't even start my homework! I didn't even have a home! I didn't even go to school! I was never even born!

Don't start your homework; do run out of money. That's the only proven formula for any success ever and is as old as time (which is quite old!).

(and young!)

3. To make an album you must run out of your money by spending your it.

If you're going to need to run out of money (see above it's quite clear), you're going to have to find a way to do it. Spending it is the most popular way to run out of your money. Aside from private healthcare and Council Tax, there are many things a person can spend their money on. Studios, instruments, make-up, guns, and a list of english colloquialisms with the names of seasons in them are the first things that spring to mind.

Think of as many things to spend money on as you can, then get some vomit-inducingly attractive person standing at a till to list them on a receipt for you until you die.

Experiment: 

• Do exactly what I just said.

6. Maintain poor lines of communication.

The last thing you need when you're trying to do anything at all even heart surgery is people communicating with you all of your time. Ugh, I hate all forms of communication. I don't even like it when my legs communicate with my brain. Legs can get a lot more done (swinging!) if simply left to its own devices, so cease communication with all potential interactors at all your costs (which is all your things!).

2. Have distractions to you.

Invent a game with your shoes! Tie yourself up and then wonder how you did it. Make a different album! Nothing is uninteresting if you've got something else that needs doing, so distract yourself as much

9. Lose will to live.

It's 3am and you need the toilet. You go to the toilet and hoist the arc and look at yourself in the mirror. There you are; paragon of animals. There you are in your 'jamas, staring at a sheet of reflected technicolour. Your skin looks pale and your eyes look deep. You feel dizzy with thought. The world is quiet, and a sudden sense of individuality returns after years of service to others.

What am I doing?

Where have the years gone?

Stare at the mirror for twenty days or until breakfast.

“Here comes another great album.”

5. Destroy others.

If you want to commit to making an album, you will also have to commit to not committing to anything else. This includes people. The loved ones with whom you had previously surrounded yourself must take on the role of mechanical hardware, while the mechanical hardware that you work with daily should take the role of emotional confidant, object of care, and reticent repeated sexual partner.

1. Destroy yourself.

"You are nothing. You are a waste of space. You think you're so clever, but really you're a dot on a speck on an arse. Fuck off. Go on. Fuck off."

You may find yourself thinking slightly less of yourself as doubts start to creep in following months of isolation and “private creation” (and when you think about everything you've done).

This is your favourite part.

The whole point of being someone who wants to make an album is to come out the other side of the process as someone with no idea who the person who started making it was. When you start to find the music recorded by that happy ghost unpleasant and baffling, it will finally hit home that all sentient life is not only an accident, but a mistake. This realisation will enhance creativity. Destroy yourself and see for how long you can crawl through the wreckage of your spirit, screaming into the great echoing void for anything that resembles mercy. (Hint: It's a long time!)

8. Desire nothing.

You have nothing, and by now you have convinced yourself that you will always be nothing. There is nothing. Your album, then, is nothing. But you (and your friends!) want your album. By this logic then; if you desire your album, you desire nothing. Congratulations on finding the most Western route to nirvanic cosmic annihilation. Now set the levels on your input gain.

And finally of for your and with…

10. Do not divulge your secrets.

There is a reason your rooms have your doors. Your rooms have your doors so you don't have to install laser systems to burn out the eyes of sneaky trespassing bastards. Behind all albums/doors are stories and events that tell as much as the music/dungeon itself. Do not share these stories (at least as they are occuring).

Doing this is unseemly and could decrease your future income.




Follow your excellent how to guide (this one) and you will have made your album.


---



We made an album.

We recorded it and mixed it and selected the artwork.

Now that our part is over, it needs to go off to other people to have things done to it so it can make words and videos that people will find interesting. If people don't find the words and videos interesting, they might not know the music exists, and so never hear it.

We've had to come to the conclusion that this happening would be sad.

It's been nearly two years, so I think we're going to take tonight off.

It's Wednesday. There's no use in denying that.

Tim

"That's not what I said."

While throwing eggs at a cow (I was trying to make breakfast) the other day, a woman in drab, beaten clothes approached me, handing me a pamphlet.

“Time slows down as gravity increases!” She barked.

I didn't trust her skin and clothes because they blended in to one another.

Here gives you what the pamphlet said:

–

The dome has a ceiling as wide and capacious as the sky.

Beneath your feet is sand, and as you look around you see many soft shaped figurines posed as walkers. Each is attempting to make its way to the centre of the dome – the direction in which you, too, are heading.

In the centre of the dome, at ground level, augmenting the impression of vastness given by the gentle golden arches that soar above you, is a large black orb that at first glance appears lost in some orgy of vibration.

The black orb spins so fast that there can be no point of contact between perceiver and object, yet any person would insist, to any interrogator, that it is there.

You make your way towards the orb, breathing in air that thins and becomes easier the closer you get.

You start to feel light, and move with great freedom.

Closer to the centre of the dome, you notice that the sculptures change their posture. At first they were proud. Some were holding hands. Now they are separate, and some of them have fallen to their knees.

You keep walking, your arms swinging.

Your brain starts to fizz as breathing becomes so easy and smooth; you feel the thrill of gliding on ice. Your feet almost hover above the desert floor, they feel so light. Your chin rises. Your chest puffs out. Your body fixes on the orb, and you continue past the sculptures. Some of them show signs of struggling under weight.

You begin your approach, and the vibrations of the orb start to affect you. You now tilt your head and wince, but keep going as something in you says you cannot stop.

Soon your easy breaths become strange as the air begins to pulse. Now you walk and you see your skin move out ahead of your bones. The air distorts as if manipulated by heat. The sculptures around you are all on hands and knees. Some have curled up into balls and some stretch out in desperate worship of the orb that now stands over you, filling up the sky.

You continue as best you can but you feel a clash in your imagination. Every movement double takes at the rate of vibration you feel from the orb. You feel that you have already taken each step when in fact you have not moved. You see the orb and you reach out to it, but your body does not. Your hand is by your side. It rests as now, and moments ago when this feeling first arose. Your hand is out in front of you as if the task were already performed.

The sequence rolls.

And you are not there, or behind, but right here, existing as a point of past and future thought. You drop forever to the ground, inhale with limitless lungs, and now forever stretch one rough hand out towards the orb.

–

“What in stupid hell is this?” I said.

The lady, taken aback, shrugged beneath her rotting cotton.

“Religious... it's like religious things. It's about...look...”

She wagged a finger at the pamphlet.

“Here – this bit here. In the words.”

“I haven't got time for this! I said, “My band have got an album to finish!”

Ha ha ha! What a laugh, eh readers?!

Tim

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

It's all meet, meet, meet.

                Good God, the bags under my eyes are heavy.

                We’ve got two very excitable people in our garden, sorting out the guttering and shouting about how ‘it’s like a fence at the Grand National up there.’ One has just passed through the living room/bedroom/everything room, and told me about how his favourite concert was when he went to see Pink Floyd in 1987. I’m sat cross legged on the bed, in my old lounge pants, wearing a stinky t-shirt, and so absolutely shattered that I’m talking in that low, groggy way that you do. I’ve also just woken up... Basically I appear absolutely wrecked, to the appropriately trained eye, and it’s only 9am.

                If I appear in a state of insobriety now, however, it’s nothing to how I was on Wednesday night – the whole band and a few other tag alongs had a big one to end a big day in old London town, popping between places where people wanted to talk to us about one thing or another. I think I ended up on one of my late night solo monologues – something which everyone I know has to go through with me at some point. When the sun is tucked up and the flow of the evening has trickled into an inlet, I always wonder how rooms empty out so quickly – usually right when I start talking. When the sun comes up, I realise what I’ve done. I walked home along the seafront in the wind and rain as punishment, mumbling ‘nonsense’ to myself. I flay myself publicly here, too. For shame.

                But the meetings were good. Very good, very enjoyable, and we got to see a lot of London. That’s all I can really say for now. I was going to write a bit about how I wasn’t wearing jeans, but instead a slightly lighter, brownish fabric that shows up liquid and splashes of water like nobody’s business. Going for a wee became a matter of very intense precision so as not to make myself look like a cow in the shade or perhaps a monotone Jackson Pollock (take your pick from those two). These things pop into your head when you’re meeting people. I’m not going to mention any of that.

                The men from outside have just gone. I always try and offer people tea, but after recent slips and...not needing any more mugs, we don’t have enough mugs. If I was to just make a drink for them in the one mug we own, I’d end up having to pick a favourite and, as every parent knows, that’s not fun. Essential, but not fun. I could of course have made them one cup to share between them, and then just put two straws in it. Well, they’re gone now. You live, you learn.

                So yes – things look good. Really good, actually. Apart from the crushing sense of shame and despair, I can look forward to the future a little. That’s rather novel. All the boys feel the same, as one or two raised glasses will testify.

                Right.

                They’re gone.

                Time to put the coffee on.

                Have fun,

                Tim

P.S. Come to this one, of course. Just don't invite me to any after parties.

                

Hugh, more or less.

            Christmas is just around the corner, isn’t it? Can you feel it? I can, weighing on me like an elephant. Every penny counts, so don’t be surprised if we can’t send you all an individually engraved solid gold statue of Seryn on the toilet. I can barely afford the one I bought for myself.

            The new EP is being groomed, like a prize dog. The last few hairs are being glued into place with Copydex. You know, the stuff you used in primary school then never ever used again, and don’t forsee ever using again, because it smells so bad and you go home and realise you’ve got a bit of it stuck to one of your fingers and peel it off and roll it up into a ball and play with it for a bit. Yeah, like that.

            I have no idea how it actually sounds. It’s become a part of the furniture, now. We hope everybody will like it.

            It might be being put through some interesting channels. We’ll know more when we know more, and you’ll know more when we decide to tell you we know more. For now, we know enough, and that's enough to spur us on and keep us believing through the cold, dry nights.

            This intense poverty is taking its toll on our sanity, I think. I say this every now and again – such is the way when you get five young(ish) people working together, chasing after an oasis. The power of belief can be enough, for the most part, but sometimes it fades and you’re left alone, in a desert, surrounded only by voices coming from far away, telling you’re not good enough, and should be doing more to ‘get us all out of this mess’. Still, you’ve got to plough on, haven’t you. ‘It’ll be fine’ is pretty much the band motto. I just romanticise it into a kind of 21^st century bohemia. Maybe this will all be looked back upon in one of those ‘I love 2013’ programmes, beamed straight into your eyeballs using Google Retina, and it’ll be ‘Oh yeah we had to hold our house together with bits of string and use guitars made out of felt tips. Great times. I’m so happy we went through that and developed character…’ all the while resting our feet on some slave or other, sipping 25 yr old Glenmorangie in our Canadian mansion while our enemies dig in the dirt outside for a briefcase containing £100,000 that we told them we hid somewhere, but didn’t.

            We’re still straddling that line between envelopment and isolation. It’s a tightrope, for sure, but we are definitely getting there. We have to remember that.

            We have you guys, anyway, and that’s enough to get us through. Of course, as always, your support and nice words make all the difference.

            So, the cold has snapped in, Christmas has taken all the jolly out of us, and now I’m just a whining old wind-up merchant. The best kind of company, and the best kind of person to let you know how we’re doing, now and then.

            I didn’t mean to bum you out. Don’t cry. We’re fine. The future looks rosy, but it’s like when the iPhone 5 comes out and someone says ‘You can’t have it right now, you have to wait for the iPhone 6 – it comes out next week.’, and you’re all ‘Well that’s OK, that’s great. But I’d very much like an iPhone 5. Like, now.’

            Temporal materialistic urges transferred onto idealism. That’s what’s going on. That’s what’s healthy.

            Have fun, and stay warm, whatever you’re up to, or not.

            Tim

PS. Say hello to Mr Ando.

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

Play along.

So I was asked this morning to organise a meeting between four of the five members of the band.

        Play this music while you read the rest:

        (Read it as me with a kind of gruff voice, waking up in my Spiderman bedsheets wearing a coat and hat and smoking a cigarillo. Just a normal day, in OTHER WORDS.)

        The phone called out like a lost child…lost on the streets of loser-ville. I’d lost her/it. I was lost. The sense of loss weighed on me like one of those fruit hats. Lost. Unfindable. This was a game of cat and sheriff, and I’d already lost. My favourite television show was Lost, but that’s over now. Misplaced.

        ‘Hello?’

        ‘Hello.’

        I was at a loss to place the voice. (I was blind.)

        ‘Who’s this?’

        The caller was Nancy Smithington – someone broad I once met down on the four corners of 4^th and 4^th. I was a perfect square, and she offered to look at me, dead, in the eye for a couple-a bucks. I didn’t take the deal. I saved her life that night. Since then she’d always called me, looking for a date. I sent fruit baskets.

        ‘Johnny, honey, you never cawwl me anymawer.’

        That bit is to give you a clue as to how stereotypical her accent is/was/she dies at the end of this story. Oh shit now I’ve given it away. Well, as they say, people always die.

        She read me a list of names. She told me what it was fawer.

        ‘Jawnny, baby, we need these guys. We got shit to do, honey. Get in touch wit ‘em. Call me back. I have diarrhea so I can’t dial the telephone.’

        Damn. Three names and a whole lot o’ nuthin.

        ‘Oh, and baby…’ she said, ‘come round soon. I miss ya.’

        I threw the phone out of the window. I wouldn’t be needing that again, unless someone needed to get hold of me, or I them.

        I swam down the rotten stairs of the building to retrieve the telephone. ‘If I’m going to call these people to get them together for a meeting,’ I said to myself, which brings into question the ontology of the ‘words’ I was using, ‘I’m going to need the telephone so that I can talk to them on that.’

        I called the telephone company to check that the phone was still working. They said they couldn’t tell, but that they’d send a guy round. I told them not to bother – Johnny Macintosh will figure these things out if it takes him all month.

        I called the first guy on the list. No reply. Typical. I called the second. I think he answered, but it sounded like he was just pumping air rhythmically through his lips. A secret code, eh? Nobody gets Johnny Macintosh like that. I slammed the handset against the table as hard as I could, and put it to my ear. He was talking, now. A little rough stuff from me never hurt anybody.

        ‘Little man in the phone?’ I said.

        ‘Hey Tim.’ It was Ed. I should have known.

        ‘Johnny Macintosh.’ I said.

        ‘…sigh. What do you want, Tim?’ Still talking in code. It was difficult to crack his nuts.

        ‘A meeting, little man. A meeting. Today. Skype.’

        ‘I’ll be there.’

        Dominoes. Life is dominoes. You knock one over, but if you set the dominoes up properly i.e. glue each one to the table so that it can’t go anywhere, then you’ve got to remove each one by hand, individually. It’s the only way to keep things tidy in this work-one-day world, and I was a tidy little man.

        ‘Seryn.’ I gargled.

        ‘Hey Tim.’

        I spat, and rinsed.

        ‘Seryn, we got a meeting. Nancy wants us.’

        I heard the sound of gunfire.

        ‘I’m a little tied up here, dude. What time?’

        ‘One-ish? Two?’

        ‘That gives me something to live for.’

       

        The sound of death filled my ear. The screams, the gunshots, the burst of explosions. ‘Secure the bunker!’ ‘Get the bastard!’ ‘You’ll never get your secrets back, Dr. Inchera!’ ‘Burden?! I thought you were…’ ‘…dead? Heh…dream on, Doctor…IN HELL! DREAM ON IN HELL YOU BASTARD!’ Bang bang bang boom. 'Oh Seryn, my hero!' 'That's right, Dad.'

        I sent Jeb a telegram. He replied and said it was fine he was just making some beans alongside toast.

        So, my job done, I had breakfast. Eggs over-easy, and a difficult cup of coffee. I squeezed myself in between the two panes of glass in my double glazed window, and wondered how I got into this shape. One woman, a list of names...

One name was missing, I knew that. He’s on the upper-South side, trying to conceive of opposites to left. Maybe he’s got the right idea.

        After all, as Nancy said: We got shit to do, honey.

Bloodworks US iTunes

Bloodworks UK iTunes

Phoria Store

Sept 5th: SoundScreen event at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, full audio-visual show w/orchestral ensemble.

P.S. Nancy dies of skydiving poisoning.

       

       

       

Like Hesse without the beads.

The five young men were hurled from the city gates, their flimsy shoes skipping against hard dust..

'We'll resist you!' said the gatekeeper, as he threw the smallest one to the ground.
'We'll resist you!' said the tallest one, lamely.
'That doesn't make any sense.'
'You don't make any sense.'
'Hem. Hem Hem.'

And with that, the large wooden gate of the walled city was closed; the twin living thickets booming against one another like a warning shot.

The five looked at one another.
'What are we doing here?' asked Jeb
'Tim's being clever.' said Ed, 'he can't find it in himself to outright describe how the band is going at the moment, so he's writing a kind of story to explain what's going on. He's being silly and slowly disappearing, rather than just doing something that he won't enjoy and just boring everyone.'
'Yeah.' said Seryn.

The five stumbled to their feet.
'Thanks for noticing.' said Tim, 'I hate when I have to explain everything.'
'I hate you.' said Jeb.

Ed approached the walls of the city, probing the crooked stone with his fingers.
'What does this represent, then?' he asked.

'That's me!' beamed Seryn, 'Tim's saying that I'm a massive wall. Right, Tim?'
'I'm afraid not,' Tim replied, 'the wall is a barrier. Inside that wall is worldwide success, stardom, and all the Shreddies you can eat.'
'Coco Shreddies?'
'All the Shreddies of the rainbow.'
Trewin choked on the dusty atmosphere.
'But we're out here?'
'Yes, I know - that's the point. We're out here. It's tricky right now, trying to sort Europe dates and stuff, trying to get UK dates - not being able to actually gig at the moment doesn't help when you're trying to book shows. We're trying to get new stuff recorded, we're trying to sort out our merch, and we keep coming up against obstacles! It's not anyone's fault, but we can't pretend we enjoy being thrown out of metaphorical doors by big burly geezers, can we?'
The five nodded, solemnly.
'He looked like Justin Beiber.' said Jeb.

The five took time to look about them - to see that without the walls of success surrounding them they were still free to venture wherever they wished. They stayed put, mainly. Sat around, jamming. There was no life outside the city walls. It was filled with office jobs and standing on street corners holding signs advertising hot dogs this way.

'I need a glass of water.' said Trewin.

'Seek Merlot.' said a great thundering voice from above. The five retook their balance, staring at the sky; shocked.
'Pardon?' screamed Ed.
'I have booked you an appointment with the great Merlot this Wednesday. You should go - he'll sort it right out. Then you can get on with your lives and hopefully get in the walled city of success through the gates you were just kicked out of, which is what put you into the situation you're now in, if you weren't aware.'

'Yeah.' said Seryn, 'Basic causality!' before becoming the same character he was at the start of the story.

And so, under keen instruction, our intrepid idiots set off in search of the great Merlot.

...and who knows where the road will take them? 

To the Doctor's. It'll take them to some specialist Doctor or other. And to a band meeting today, where we're gonna get everything planned and sorted and get this show back on the hot-damn road for real. One subject to be discussed: timetabling of new EP.



Next week: A biography of Prince written by describing a BBC period drama reflected off a midwife's eyeball.

Van Halen's tiny sleigh.

Valentine's day, eh? That should be enough to bump us up a few google rankings. Now let's leave it there.
Tuesday night (Bloodworks launch party at Hoxton Bar & Kitchen) was a bloomin' banger! Thanks of course to Akira for having us, and thanks to Apollo, the God of music and medicine, among other things, for whatever and all the music and medicine. Kickstarter. Thanks to the other bands, too. Ed Prosek. Halflight. Hollow giants. Oh, and thanks to you intensely attractive fan people for coming down to check it all out and making loads of noise and heat radiation.
The gig was filmed, so hopefully some footage should emerge, in time. 
Let's all have fun and a great day. I'm going to push my camel of a brain through the needle eye of the after-party aftermath, and try to avoid anything related to FAILentine's day ('That is a great pun, Tim.' 'Yeah thanks I already know.') by locking myself inside a giant heart shaped greeting card (with real blood!), eating opportunistically priced chocolates bought in a forgetful haste from my local newsagent, and gifting that girl who keeps hanging around my face a bunch of near-dead wasp-magnets pinched from a petrol station forecourt.

Hope my great plan works and succeeds!

Tim

P.S. If YOU would like gifts and public displays of affection etc. from us/me then you don't have to do much. Just look at and share THIS. Please! Thank you! Sharing remains the key indicator of caring, as my Children's Book of Marxist Theory: Abridged Edition attests.