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. 

(Stud)Hi-ho, (stud)hi-ho, it's off to work we go.

        So we’re building a new studio. ‘That’s good,’ you say ‘you need a new studio.’ Yes, we do. Thanks for understanding.

       

        Here’s a bad photo of it in progress:

There's no such thing as bad photos; just bad people.

        It doesn’t tell much, though I know Jeb was making a Changing Rooms style time-lapse film of the transformation of the once inhabited bedroom from a dirty, scuffed white to an all over shimmering, spectacular, incandescent…grey, which should soon surface. I, apparently, was the worst at painting the walls. No-one specified to me that ‘walls’ did not mean skirting board, carpet, and face. My artistic training consists mainly of drawing imaginary pictures of me going through an intense eight-week drawing class - none of which can be deciphered by the average huumun.

Trewin was very excited about the purple sofa-bed he managed to pick up for £30. ‘It’s a £1000 sofa-bed that I picked up for £30! Try it! Try it out! Mmmm. It’s awesome, right?’ It was awesome. I got paint on it.

So that’s where we’re going to continue work on the new EP - our new little studio set within the picturesque grounds of the Phoria househole. It’s brewing. It’s brewing nicely. There are songs on it.

And so far – no distractions whatsoever.

So that’s that. Life, it seems, is a river of pain with a jagged bed.

Shop here, then.

Tim.