The end of work.

Trewin had a giant whiteboard on the floor in the middle of the room. He navigated it like a game of Twister. I was slouching on half a chair, drinking my fifth deep mug of coffee and shoving tobacco up my nostrils until it burst out of my ears. The sun shone outside and while a musical project was up and visible on the computer screen beside the window, the speakers sat undisturbed.

We were plotting, literally, for another project.

The technical term is avoidant. This is avoidant behaviour. I am very guilty of this sort of thing, and that’s why I know it when I see it, and, after years of battering my head against the tendency, wilfully indulge in it. It is the only way to find peace, and you cannot complete a work until you find peace within it—be it the peace of carelessness abandon or the peace of some kind of holistic achievement. A spell of avoidant behaviour is the ageing of the steak. It is the non-watching of the watched pot. It is the abandonment of all heretofore accepted responsibility justifiable only by arrogance and solipsism. No, wait...

Anyway we threw our arms up and down and touched our chins and held our fingers over our mouths and talked about character arcs and thematic development and held our heads. I span around a lot in the old wheelie chair, throwing up ideas about chase scenes and desolate locations while Trewin drew arrows in that whiteboard turquoise colour from person to trait to scene and gave up little chunks of propellant. And then this. And then that. All deeply interpersonal and with a possibility of gaining compulsory attention. Every idea brought forth ten new ones until we had to reign it back in again to keep the whole thing manageable. Never too much. Which trapdoors should we leap over, and which should we sidestep?

But we never lost enthusiasm, which was good. Tiredness came but it came after we'd worn good routes on the island in the middle of the floor. We smiled as we gave up but I looked out the window and said how I didn’t like the day. I’d left the house without a jacket for the first time in months.

Ed arrived and my brain was a broken cog, whirling to no effect, so I left. On the way home I was so cold I sang to myself to distract from it.

The next few weeks will bring a lot of work that we are in no way prepared for. Such is the method.

Parks and decoration.

Brighton is cold tonight.

Happy New Year.

And we hope you had a fine Christmas.

Christmas is a time for reminiscence (and meat) (dead animals that is) (a dead thing in every house, plonked proudly on a table made from another dead thing, only for things that will eventually die to shovel it into themselves because I need it in order to live what a boring excuse that’s become for everything it’s an excuse for), but we didn’t do any of that (as I recall).

New years is a time for resolution, and new beginnings, but we’re on the tail end of finishing the album – by the time we’re ready for new beginnings it’ll be springtime, and what is there to celebrate about spring? Flowers? Literally who hasn’t seen a flower by now? Why do we lower our standards so? Flowers grow in Chernobyl.

I’ve just come back from a band session and the rather pleasant feeling is: more of the same with a bit more. We’ve hit a few periods of momentum over the past year – it’ll be nice to hit one of those again. We’ve all got it in us, we just need to keep the temperature down and see what happens. It’s true we’ve got to up our game in many ways – but it’s always been like that. More of the same with a bit more. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to learn. We’ve got to be open.

This isn’t anything new. This is just moving forward. Doing this is about standing and waiting to jump on a moving roundabout. There’s nothing more to add.

So if I’ve understood everybody correctly, I’m going to spend the next few days down the park (it’s cold, so I’ll wear my mac), trying to hop on the roundabout. I’ll also try out the swings as a metaphor for the ups/downs (forwards?) of career/life, and probably end my day early by going down the slide.

Don’t worry if you don’t read this – I won’t use this opportunity to make you feel guilty – but if you’re here then hello. I don’t know what this is but it’s going to get better.

It’s an odd ride, isn’t it?

So have fun, and stop being so careful. Quit your job (if you're looking for a sign - this is it) and go back to school or go travelling or whatever and just do it. Live in one room for a while, if you have to. It’ll be fun. What do you think you’ll be missing? There’s literally nothing here.

Tim

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. 

The Fable of the Van, or 'How to Make an Album Underwater'.

We were cruising just fine, until a problem came up.

The van’s engine, until then our must trusted ally in the fight against Achieving Nothing, was sputtering, groaning, and cutting out at random intervals. Its glitchiness started just as we entered London—as if the four wheeled veteran had made an effort to wait for the best time to finally admit its frailty but, in a case of combustibilia nervosa, was guilty of a gross miscalculation.

Sometimes on failure the engine would burst into life, and roar, bringing us smiles of relief. Sometimes it would crank and its tones would veer up and down, like a hoover singing a Christina Aguilera song. Sometimes, after the engine cut out, we found ourselves riding a large, yellow, four-wheeled rock.

This blog entry tells of the first time we drifted over to the side of the road.

We got everything started again, and, making decisions on what to do, approached Blackwall Tunnel. If you’re not familiar, Blackwall Tunnel is a long...tunnel, with no place to pull over. Tons of traffic makes its way through it every hour of every day.

There were stories about people who had broken down in there, causing tailbacks for miles and grinding half the city to a halt. These stories hit the whole of London. Some wanker’s broken down in Blackwall Tunnel...

It was rush hour, and after numerous delays we were running late for our gig at OSLO. We had to risk getting all the way through. Cars were piled up on either side of us, trailing down into the dark entrance. The opening scrutinised us like an eye. It scowled. It knew what we were up to.

‘That’s the point of no return...are we sure we’re going to do this?’

To our left was the final turn-off before all traffic was funnelled into the black by a hundred signs.

‘We don’t want to be the ****’s who break down in the tunnel.’

‘How long will it take us to get around to another crossing?’

Phone’s were whipped out. Sat-navs smashed with sweaty palms.

‘In this traffic? About forty-five minutes to get there, and then we’ll have to get to the venue from there aswell.’

‘Right. I guess we don’t have a choice, then.’

And then the engine died.

‘Oh no...’

We drifted forward a few feet, restarted the engine, and scarpered off the main road on the last turn-off, out of everybody’s way, to pull over, spend five minutes on our lives, and make a decision.

Everybody had something to say. Six people all trying to figure out whether they themselves were stupid. Who was the most wrong person here? What’s the gamble? What’s the here and there? How long to wait for a fix? How long to take an alternative route? Do we run the same risk whatever we do? How late can we afford to be? What’s sunk? What’s up?

We are, when it suits us, a democracy.

Four votes to two: we go through the tunnel.

Ed’s arms are folded.

I’m jumping around the cabin.

‘You just have to believe, Ed. We’re all on board. If you don’t believe, then it falls apart. If we all do it, we’ll make it through. Trust me. That’s how it works.’

‘It doesn’t though, does it?’

‘No. But YES! DO IT ANYWAY. FEEL IT. BELIEVE IT. COME ON!’

‘It’s an engine, Tim. An engine that’s going to get us into trouble.’

I believed in that engine, and I believed in my bandmates.

We turned onto the main road again, ready for the great eye to take us in like a tiny photon, indeterminate, of unknown status, either a particle of success or a wave of unmitigated failure. Breakdown inside the eye will mean the gig is off, and London stops.

We passed the point of no return.

‘COME ON!’ We all chanted. Ed rested his head on one arm.

‘She’s been fine since we last started her,’ Trewin said. He revved the engine and it purred.

The traffic slowed as four lanes merged to two.

COME ON.

Once the lanes had merged, there was space. The traffic kept moving at a steady pace. The entrance to the tunnel moved over us like an eclipse, and from then on it was all concrete, tiled artery and grim, artificial roadside light.

Ed clenched his fist. He was silent.

The rest of us shouted.

‘COME ON! WOO! WE CAN DO IT!’

And we all believed into our bellies and we all starting singing football chants. There were three things to the experience: the doors of the lorry in front of us; the ochre warp of the tunnel walls passing on each side; and the sound and sensation of song and will in that cabin, driving us forward. We were already at the end, tasting victory. We had already succeeded. We were over on the sweet otherside, in the sun, nowhere to go but forwards in every direction. There was no questioning it. We had the sheer volume of voices on our side. We had taken our gamble, together, and we had won.

But we hadn’t. Yet. The tunnel was a long, and soon my throat cracked. Nothing changed. We saw no progress. After a few minutes, the white lorry, moving at the same speed at us, appeared static—a square void hovering in focus. The tunnel walls no longer passed in blurs but were blurs, like paintings. It had all turned to simulation; film set. Now our songs served not only to take us above the river where we could breathe but also to make the inside of this cabin real. We asserted not only our beliefs but the existence of those beliefs. We made ourselves real and looked at each other with doubts about our destination. We had fallen victim to bravado and brain chemistry. What were we doing? We kept singing, up and down. We should have called for help. The engine stayed smooth, but we faltered. We're not going to make it, are we? We were lost, on a path with only one road...

And then the pitch of light changed, from pub-tooth yellow to pearlish white, around the outside of the white lorry that now looked dirty and real.

‘YES!’

‘COME OON!’

‘VINDALOO...VINDALOO...’

The traffic stopped and we could see the ridges of the tunnel’s round exit.

‘I can’t believe we’ve done it.’

The traffic moved again and we moved off.

And then, twenty metres shy of the tunnel's exit, the van’s engine went dead.

‘NOOO!’

We cranked the thing and pumped the gas as the white lorry sped away from us. We drifted forwards shiftlessly, like a piece of debris lost and aimless in space. We chanted and hollered at the engine, at the world…

‘There’s a big guy behind us,’ said Trewin.

And the big guy blew his horn as we slowed:

PPPHHHHPHRPRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP.

Which echoed down the tunnel.

‘...Christ.’

We were almost to a standstill, losing all momentum. Cars were slipping by us on our right, with ease.

COME ON.

We all shouted at the top of our lungs, cajoling each other and ourselves.

Ed shifted forward in his seat, an energetic smile on his face, completely in the throes of a new emotion.

Other cars were beeping around us.

The van stood still. Trewin cranked the engine.

‘Alright! I believe! I believe!' said Ed, 'We can do it! Come on, Buttercup!’

Our van is called Buttercup.

And we all called her name at the top of our lungs.

...

POWER.

And we roared out of the tunnel, almost rearing on our back wheels, beeping our horn. Trewin threw his arm out the window, clenching his fist, and the big guy behind us, a huge metal tanker, blew his horn again, short and repeating along with us. We caught up to the traffic and settled in the London evening light, ten minutes away from OSLO.

We arrived on time, and, as the venue had no lift, carried our gear up six flights of stairs in silence.

Tim

P.S. The album will be done. We have a date. What that date means, we do not know. Whether we get there in time depends on whether we can will ourselves across the river to the other side of the tunnel. Eh? Eh? Do you see?

How it feels to come home.

We are not on tour.

What do I wish?

I had been home longer than three and a half minutes when I received a text message. Mr Douglas, do not forget your 10am dentist appointment tomorrow…

This was not the text I was expecting. My manager was due to get back to me about what days I would be working this month. She’d reeled off a few dates last time I was in, but I work there so seldom I hardly listened. As far as I knew, I was due behind a desk for a day or two in the distant future. I had asked her to text me back to remind me of exact dates. I thought she had a good week or so to get back to me.

The message from the dentist didn’t half make pretty shapes; entirely abstract by this point in the evening. It said something about the morning—something a long way away. Further application of whisky will sterilise any wounds for now (I figured), a morning panic-scrub will make all those tidy gnashers gleam like greek arches, and a quick goodnight kiss will improve my mood such that any overnight healing will be hastened by deeper sleep and a flood of health-enhancing chemicals.

Needless to say, on day one of the band’s return, my affairs were not all in order. The internal bliss and renewed intellectual peace following our experience outstripped the unwarranted self-importance of any ‘appointment’ or ‘supplemental employment’.

Later, as my weak and heavy eyes fell closed, my phone buzzed.

It was a text.

You know you’re in tomorrow?

-

We are not on tour.

What do I wish?

I woke up too early to a dark morning and shnarfed down an unhealthy breakfast from a plate nobody had washed. When it came time to leave, my face was too-dry-soapy clean (I could feel my skin crack when I smiled), I had my neat shoes on (with holes in), and my stomach had decided to take me on a 17th century sea voyage. The woman who lives in the same place as me (is she sadist? Masochist? I can’t tell which, but it must be one), who had left the house about twenty minutes before, WhatsApp’d me to say the bus stop at the end of the road would be out of service for the next hour or two, and I’d have to walk the extra distance to the next one that was working.

It’s very cold. She said.

I put one foot out of the door and a sheet of rain fell from the sky.

-

We are not on tour.

What do I wish?

I arrived annoyingly early at the dentist’s, as I’d rushed through the rain straight onto a bus. The run was long and lurching (thanks to the sudden onset of nausea), and the bus was packed and hot and misty, so I’d sweated through my work shirt which I’d have to stay in all day.

The receptionist looked at me over her glasses and offered me a seat.

I had a long time to go until my appointment and the other person waiting was coughing through stories of grim infections she’d had. She laughed, and was good natured, but I tried hard to bury myself in internet ego death. It was no good—my stomach was churning and rolling and I held it with one hand and winced. One of the receptionists (one of them: an old person made young through that parasitical age-transfer that can happen when a lump in time so desires to steal what is not its own, the other: blending so well in to her surroundings I thought there was a strong wind moving papers about) had decided to put The Worst of Smooth Elevator Jazz on the reception stereo. The cackles of the infected woman played along to it. Since the last time I had been here, all the interesting decorations had been taken down. There was, however, a rack selling herbs in metal buckets. The walls and the surfaces and the chairs were gleaming white. Of course they were. The combination of internal biology and external ambience gave birth to the fatal combination of not only needing to fire lunch from the front, but actively wanting to.

I blindly sweated a few cog twirls down the plughole and my name was called. I followed the hygienist down the hallway into the white surgery without looking at her. I smiled at the floor and braced my abdominals. My belly had a knife in it.

‘Feel free to put your things down there and make yourself comfortable on the chair.’

So I got on the chair, and the motors ran and slowly and, like a great cannon shifting its aim, my open mouth was now directed straight at her face.

She smiled.

My stomach lurched and I rolled my eyes.

‘Is there anything in your mouth that’s bothering you?’

‘Not yet,’ I thought.

And another wave of nausea ran from the bottom of my stomach through my chest and into my face, throwing my consciousness off. Something would have to give.

‘Not really,’ I said.

She looked at me. A moment passed. She smiled a soft, motherly smile before donning a face mask and a pair of protective goggles.

-

We are not on tour.

What do I wish?

What is enlightenment?

Is it a state of bliss, or a state of ignorance? Or a state of bliss in ignorance? Or is it knowledge of the bliss of ignorance and the acceptance of bliss as bliss? Enlightenment is nothing more than enlightenment. Is that what it is?

What is the opposite of enlightenment? What of the heaviness of a thought? Is enlightenment the freeing of the mind from the weightiness of thought—a state where you are able to see the valuation of thought as an illusion? What is the value of that illusion?

Of what value is consciousness?

Thus, a quiet day at work passes. Another drop in the bucket. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Fluorescent lights kill.

Nausea passes.

Teeth get cleaned.

As I walked home past the gyms with large windows, I watched the women on the treadmills with their bouncing ponytails. I stood still and watched them run and we both failed to change in size or shape.

I wish we were on tour.

Tim

Sunday service.

They look into your eyes and see your gratitude.

Your face: Thank you for spending years building and maintaining your arms and lower back so you might spend every sunday afternoon on all fours, my feet perched on your spine.

Their eyes: Alright.

Ah, the internet. It is without boundaries. Unless, obviously, you want to find anything remotely interesting. If you want to find out what your Auntie’s dog smells like today or read about the effects of kale on the inflammation of the pineal gland, the internet is the most happening place to be.

So, putting it together, we’ll all be spending our Sunday afternoon using our loved ones as footrests and browsing MedLine articles (I have an itchy pelvis), won’t we?

NO!

Did you see that coming? Certain views of digital ontology might suggest there was nothing to see! But you did see it, didn’t you? Look! It’s there!

NO!

But weekends are a time of relaxation, yes? Whether that means forking in the flowerbeds or chucking some dough in a hot oven or sitting back and tapping a button or two, we’ll be taking this time to chill down and wind out, won’t we?

This life doesn’t work like that.

The new tour brings new material. Songs, as written, are like blueprints. You can listen to the recording as many times as you like, but live performance, like a group of swimming cows, is a whole different cattle of fish.

So this cold Sunday will see us all bejumpered and beleaguered, huddling over guitars, keyboards, and a trying to roast chestnuts on an open project file as, in our own separate domains, we practice and put parts together for the new stuff.

Then there’s the prospect of heading to the studio to sort out some technical issue or other that’s been bugging us for weeks to which I seem to hold the key. I’m a bit like a Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman for the 21st century.

Dr. Tim: Computer Man.

I’m not sure I like it, but I’ve pretty much become imprisoned by facts.

My morning was a glorious shuffle of croissants, coffee, and an awesome documentary about the first George W. Bush presidential campaign.

My afternoon and evening will be nothing of the sort. They will be pigeon-holes of pain and suffering. I shall have to play music, and I shall have to talk with people, fully clothed.

And my loved one shall weep, balancing my shoes on her back in my absence, looking up at only a rotten watermelon on a broom handle, and hearing only the gentle crushing of her spirit in my absence, like a polystyrene cup in a boxing match against the moon.

We shall overcome.

But learn from me: relax this day. Endeavour may only lead to suffering, and from suffering: endeavour.

Break open your circle.

 

Tim

 

P.S. I love working on band stuff. Come see us on tour to see what I mean. www.phoriamusic.com for dates and details. We really will be playing new material. Follow us on twitter and instagram @phoriamusic.

Better never than ever.

I’m running late.

I try not to run late, but sometimes I do.

I’ve got a lot to do, and I guess I have enough time to do it in, but the things don’t get done as smoothly as I’d like them to when I try and do them. I come up against brick walls, against personal road-blocks, and against constant changes in plans, directions, and problems. So, sometimes, I wake up when everything’s fallen apart already and decide to take it easy. Just lay in bed a little while longer, just saunter into the kitchen in my pants and pour my coffee into an unwashed cup, just lick the crust of yesterday’s lasagne off the inside of the microwave, where it exploded. That’s breakfast. That’s my life.

I’ll spend an extra twenty minutes on the end of my bed, fresh out of a long-quick bath where five minutes turns into ten turns into twenty, and let the towel and my hair wet the mattress as I sit here doing this thing.

The lads will be together, doing something – I don’t know what. Working on tunes or something. Working on some album we’re making. Getting ready for some tour or other (www.phoriamusic.com for dates and tickets). I’m supposed to have gotten one of the new tracks down, by now. I haven’t. It’s there, but it ain’t down. I’m not useless, I’m just creaky. We’ll work on it in the practice room and it’ll be fine. It’s a bit of polishing – nothing serious – but I wish I had it down because now it’s going to be effort.

I don’t want any effort today. I want to sit here and play video games with the woman. I want to eat filthy food off filthy plates and smear melted chocolate all over my chest and have that be-boobed thing lick it off me. I want to climb naked onto the roof of the house and pitch a big flag on it with a picture of me with a crown on my head, then spend the afternoon setting up searchlights to illuminate it. Then I want to sit outside the front of the house in a lawn chair, wearing sunglasses and sipping long cocktails and screaming my name. If anybody walks past I’ll point at the flag and they’ll smile and nod their head.

They will.

But no. The band denies me that.

Well, I’m going to be fifteen minutes late. Let’s see how that learns the bastards.

Tim

Do you like your sense of vision? Follow @phoriamusic on instagram, then, lest you miss out on imprinting our lives onto yours.