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

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

Pick it up.

We've been away.

The album got done, so we packed up and shipped out. Our faces had become to each other like the lost keys you keep scanning over, but never actually see and recognise. We saw more of each other's noses in that time than we did of walls. I don't even consider the guys as people any more - they're now just cardboard cut outs with loudspeakers attached, repeating the same stuff over and over again about reversing the car to get off their leg.

So we span in our various directions, for a while. Sure, we had a party or two, but all work stuff has been getting done over Skype and messenger services and things. It's been that kind of time. All briefs and contracts and mock-ups and things like that. You know, the gleeful stuff.

We've all been away on our respective desert islands, biking around the countryside, sitting in front of screens editing videos or other music or personal projects; scrubbing tiles in an underground kitchen somewhere - slinking our psyches into the shredder of life to try and take some of the thatness away. 

Consider our last few weeks a weekend with the kids at a leisure park, where only once or twice has it been necessary to duck behind a tree and take a phone call from Louise about the Marchester account. Tell them it was sorted on the twenty-third and I'll get Bill to call the contractors about upgrading the roofing.

We're very lucky to have a number of very good people doing things like releasing the singles and sorting tickets at gigs and things and all that monkey hair that turns to mush in such precious brains as the band members'. Thank you here, monkey hair manipulators.

So PRAISE THE CEILING we're meeting up in person today for the first time in ages to sort out some last bits of peripheral artwork, and really get some more of it done, yeah? Everyone's going to be happy about that.

Trewin will sashay into the room two hours late, big sunglasses on his face, one arm out to the side, asking what the fuck we want him for – he's got a car waiting, he's got other things to be doing, and who are we?

Seryn will be sat in the middle of the floor, cross-legged. In his right hand will be a toy train and it will be flying through the air. It will be making a “brum, brum” sound.

Jeb will have his PC set up in the lounge, and will be rocking backwards and forwards. His eyes will be red from coffee and strain, and he will be muttering to himself. Something about aliasing. He will look pale and ill.

Ed will be hoovering, checking behind the back of the sofa Jeb is sat on, and asking Seryn to make sure all the play-doh stays on the table, please, because he's not going to scrub that out of the carpet if someone steps on it.

I will probably be sat in the corner. Alone. Speaking to the floor. After a while the others will look at each other and ask “When's Tim getting here?”

And after ten hours we will looks at a picture that we no longer recognise and collectively shrug and say “Alright then.”

-

So Volition's out on 3rd June, and we've had a few singles out and all that. Thanks for your support on this, all. We're really glad these things get such good responses and we're really glad people like them.

We've got to get back into the swing of it all after this little break. Spring is here. It's time for drinks outdoors, yes? It's time for “fun” in the “sun”, isn't it? Isn't it? That's what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it? Those are the rules, aren't they? That's what it's all for in the end, isn't it? Five minutes in the British sunshine, eh? 

Eh?

Isn't it?

It's Thursday already. Wednesday seems like it was only yesterday.

Pretty slick stuff, I insist you'll agree.

Now get out there and kick your life in the chutney without fear of losing your shoe.

Me

an album

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

---

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

Preservatives.

Well.

Well, well, well.

Well, well, well, well, well.

Right.

As it were.

Worst Christmas ever.

We were so enthralled, that, even if we wanted to, we couldn't sleep. We stayed up all night waiting for Santa to come and put a little gift-wrapped box of hope under our second-hand tree.

Turns out we didn't even get a lump of coal. They didn't want to bring that old chestnut up again.

So yesterday we had our final practice before a trip to Belgium tomorrow. Tired and out at the studio 'til midnight. That saw us well. Dough-eyed, as usual, and with tails as low as the Lib Dem vote. New material? Che e eck. Playing the songs? Ch e e ck. Everything working? Ch e e e ee cck.

Enthusiasm trickling. Put it all back together like we haven't in a surprising while. We've all been holed up in our respective caverns, working on music and movies. Trying to balance the creation of the new with the return to the standard is a funny old see-saw of satisfaction. Tweak this and tweak that. More coffee. Keep it up. We descended a few times into lazy jams. The songs stumbled a little under our collective psyche.

BUT don't let that worry you. We're still attempting to keep our pride intact, and we don't take this stuff lightly, and we always look forward to it and try and do everything the best we can.

It's like when you've bought that new loaf of super-seeded incredi-bread, but you've got to use up the loaf you bought the other day. So long as the jam (hey!) is right, you're still having breakfast, but you kind of can't wait to open that other loaf. You fall asleep dreaming of unwrapping it, of reaching in past the end piece and running your finger along the strongly seeded top. Mmm. And a whiff of fresh. And you take the slices out, only two, and squeeze the little plump sponge canvasses and see the air pockets bulge and give way, gleefully.

Oh, bready bready bootsy.

And while it slowly cooks in a little box, and the room takes on the scent of history - of a million little repertoires performed throughout the ages and still, to this day, in most households with a heart and a Hovis - you pick up the bag and spin it, and it twists in the air like a ballerina, and you swing it around and it hovers delicately until you stop it with a thud, and this delicate and beautiful parcel gives you a noetic sensation of power and authority – the very thing that makes that well-baked coquette so restlessly enchanting – and to save the thing and keep its definition you tack the little label on the neck that runs to the bunched up bag like the stem of a rose, and you seal it. A little yellow leaf. And the sell-by-date is still days from now. There will be mornings more than this sweet sunrise. So you smile, and as you do two warm, golden brown hands pop up and wave hello, and they fall onto a plate and say how happy they are to see you.

And then you take the butter from the fridge. Butter so soft. Ripples so enveloping, she could churn heads (...). And then you take your knife from the drawer that rings like a treasure chest of an Emperor's silver, and you...

...you...

...the knife...

...the butter...

...it all...

...spread about and messy and...and...

...dripping...gold...

And then you wake up. It was a dream. And your real life kicks in. And the loaf is sat on top of the microwave, bulging at you. Plump, like a cat.

But you know you have to use up what you already had open; the loaf you bought on your way home the other day and you only had 50p in your pocket and didn't need enough stuff to spend on your card.

And the butter's all hard and unworkable and there are no clean knives, so you just find one sticking out the side of a pizza box and you wipe it on your pants and figure you're going to die one day, anyway.

And then you eat this weird biscuit that smells like pants and stare into the middle distance, thinking about the emptiness of the pain of thinking about nothing.

That's what it's like.

That's what it is.

That's where we are.

See you in Belgium.

I swear it's going to be fine.

Tim

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

There are way too many sentences in the world.

What are we, if not present?

It's not like there's anywhere for us to go, anyway. We're always in here, somewhere. What are you doing? Streaming us? Clicking on a file front and having us blast through speakers that weren't made for us? Having a big black needle-scratched lozenge dance around in the corner of your place on a turntable that your parents would turn their noses at if they cared enough about this century to talk to one of its victims every now and then? They don't care, do they? They don't want anything to do with you. They never have. I've got a theory that every parent, when their child leaves home, joins a secret club and they all get together and bitch about their kids and how much they know that their kids will never know until their kid leaves home. I've always had this feeling that there's some secret to life that gets revealed to you at some point along the way – probably when you least suspect it and hopefully whenever my bloody phone stops ringing.

I suppose that's all good and fine. I'm sure you're loved, really.

New material's at the bottom of the just-boiling pan. To add to my legendary failure to poach an egg the other day (my close friends, at least, know that it turned into an 'underwater frying'), I also failed to boil an egg just twenty-four hours ago. I have no clue what I'm doing wrong. I was standing in my kitchen in my underwear next to the netless windows, stirring the water well with my fly swatter, keeping time by sniffing my herbaceous pits at measurable intervals (being a musician I, of course, have an impeccable internal metronome), and yet when the egg dropped onto the plate it collapsed faster than my dream of being the thing that pings the ball up at the beginning of a pinball session. I just never had the hips.

I mean, that's what brought the vision of the little bubbles that start at the bottom of the pan to mind when thinking about new material. It's born of heat and chemical and structural change, which makes it exciting and indicative of forward thinking, which is important. You have to get this right. There's no point in giving this kind of line to you, a line direct to us (or at least, one of us and perhaps the one most least qualified to conjure images in anybody's head likely to result in our success), if we don't get it right, you know? Everything has to be correct so that the whole music/image/personality of the brand can form a cohesive whole.

I mean, so long as the album cover is a .gif of me scratching my balls and the music consists mainly of my sampled farts and belly slaps, I think it's as cohesive as Nicky Minaj's strategy, and, when you really think about it, inclusive of almost identical content.

Unless the pictures match the music, there's just no point in any of it.

I guess we've all started to assume that the current government is mainly a post-modern performance art experiment, yes? Yes.

This is the last day of idleness and political obsession before hardcore rehearsals (I can't use the word 'practice' any more, as I literally cannot get to grip with each incarnation of it, so 'rehearsal' is now the word) in preparation for our supporting James Vincent McMorrow around Europe next week.

The sense of being and time in this band can be bizarre. Display came out in June and seems to have been really good for us, and enjoyed by lots of people. That's good. But on this side, you want more. You want to make more, do more, experience more, be more, in a kind of childish not only wanting to play with the toy but almost wanting to be the toy and eat the toy and play with the toy, all at the same time. So, whatever you're doing, or not doing, it's not enough, so you get kind of paralysed with movement – not only wanting but needing to go down every road at the same time. We've been here before, but the roads were smoother before and they and led to less. This one is different. It's like choosing which minefield to cross to get to the place where naked people smother themselves in whipped-cream champagne. Last time it was like choosing which country road to walk down to get to a hug from a warm, roadside-hedge-bearded vicar who smelled like lavender and fed you with sticky Murray mints.

Jeb's been in Italy, the git. That's one road you can go down, I suppose. Trewin's been working at the farmhouse. Ed's been trundling around in his new 198...3? I think it's a 1983 Citroen BX. I might have remembered his registration wrong. 'Two lady owners', is the standard description, I think. 'Only drove it to the carvery and back on Sundays.' Suits Ed, then.

Seryn's been indoors, I think, much like myself. It's pretty good. The main thing about spending a lot of time in isolation is that you don't consider how your hair looks, even for a second.

I'll let you think about what kind of paradise that might be when you look in the mirror tomorrow morning.

We'll see you on tour.

Dates and ticket here. We're with 'The McMorrow' from Hamburg to Cologne.

Don't let us put you off.

And don't forget to pick the news out of this ramble like one of those bogeys that makes you wonder how your funny bone got stuck up your nose.

News: a couple of new tunes, taking shape.

We're gonna kick each others' asses on this one. We want to get this stuff out.

Now, it's Friday, so care must be taken – but be sure, this weekend, to throw your personality at people like monkeys fling their shit at paying customers.

Otherwise, there's no point.

We're nothing, if not present.

Have fun, and don't forget that if you do what needs doing now, then it doesn't need doing, so don't do it.

Tim

It's like you've got one of those dentist's mirrors and you're using it to peek around the corner of our lives like a Hollywood spy.

So we've got an interview today. Cool! Not a bad way to spend a Sunday evening.

It makes you wonder how to be, though. How do we turn up? What do you wear to appear in words? Does it change anything? Who do you appear as? Yourself? Maybe. What if even you find yourself somewhat of a doof? What risks do you run in putting up a front? Especially if you question your own judgement on what makes someone not a doof. Using the word 'doof' marks you as something of an ass on its own. So what do you do?

Are you charming? Who knows? Could you pretend to be? Maybe.

Are you disarmingly humble? No.

Do you risk, in projecting an air of confidence, appearing to think that you're more talented than the person on the other end of the dictaphone thinks you are? Where are we then? Does that air result in your convincing people that there's more to you than first appears, that perhaps your work demands an even more positive appraisal? Or do you come off as some arrogant and clueless little thing, convinced of its own superiority but ignorant of how opinions are formed in other peoples heads?

What if you come across as caring too much about how you're taken by others?

What if you come across as alarmingly insecure, or worse, boring?

No, conversations are too big a risk to take. Expression is too big a risk to take. What I think we should do is just sit indoors and never talk to anyone, ever, about anything at all. Like Kate Bush, but without that nagging history of success.

Maybe it doesn't matter. At all. Maybe it's all OK. Maybe there's no such thing as expressing an opinion or attitude that doesn't potentially alienate a large number of the people you're supposed to be trying to get on your side. Maybe if you try and please everyone you just end up going into politics, claiming that The Big Society is part of some grand spiritual mission rather than an attempt to rip out hard fought for governmental support for people who weren't born into a comfortable network of potential. Are there no workhouses? No? Then they should build their own.

So who cares, eh? These questions rise and fall, and the only answer is to go and do and be and not care about it. Have fun, and ignore the sirens and riots that result outside the pub door as a result of what you just said.

I hope you're well, having your Sunday. I keep saying it, but things are coming. We are working, and we are happy with how it's sounding. Artwork, at the mo. That's where we are. The sounds are there. It's coming. And we just might know when, but, as is usual with self-production, we're taking the time to do it right, lest we alienate anyone; lest we fail to appeal to every living thing and come across as people with ideas.

Tim

This unpopular post written with the aid of self-reflexive irony.

Oh it's time for FUN. EH? ISN'T IT? EH? YE

                Right. I’m supposed to tell you about the photoshoot we went for, aren’t I? That’s the kind of thing that usually turns up on here. I tell you about the horribly early morning that only took its toll at 9PM yesterday, when I looked at my phone (goodbye, horology for the unenthused) expecting it to read ‘late into the night’ when in fact it read ‘you just bombed the town of Circadia’. 

                I tell you about the journey up. Five of us facing forwards in a car, having a puffy-eyed laugh, rather than rattling about in the van with the threat of a cymbal stand in a face-hole looming its chromed head at every red light.

                Then I say that we arrived at our destination, in a kind of ‘phew’ tone. A feeling that even this description of that phenomenon has managed to induce a little. Don’t ask me how it’s done. And there’s the bare sarcasm, layered thickly like the similes that often appear here, too.

                Then a funny thing that happened. Something relatively small but humorously magnified. Ed was worried about something in a sandwich, or Trewin realised he’d left his washing on a goat so we had to rush home. Something like that. Nothing like that really happened. It was literally a normal day with very little adventure. The photoshoot was fun and we’re very grateful to Rhona for doing it for us. We’re either getting more professional or more boring. I see no evidence of eitherTHERE’STHATSARCASMAGAIN(hee hee ho, mateys!)

                So we’re back in it now; back in the actual description of events rather than an attempt at having fun with the format. We just drove home. That’s literally it. We said loads of funny things and talked about the shortcomings of various Hollywood franchises. People in a car. You know how it goes. Imagine times you’ve been in a car with people (not that time you parked around the back of the industrial estate because your divorced friend said she really wanted to try it but needed someone there in case ‘something goes wrong’ and then you realised that in fact you have a fear of gloveboxes so you vomited all over her skirt and she had to drive you to the hospital because you were starting to retch your leg bones up around your ribs and through your dribbly, bile smeared lips) I’m really out of ideas and still very tired have a nice weekend I’ll let you know how we get on with the new material next week.

Happy Mothering Sunday.

Tim