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

A breakdown.

We're heading into London while the UK government falls apart. Civil society might not be far behind, but that's OK.

We had a day off yesterday after our breakneck, whistle-stop tour of Germany and Switzerland. Nothing much to be said but thanks. Nothing more to be done yesterday but sleep.

Oh look, the van's broken down right this second. Trewin's currently trying to mold some connection or other out of copper. Ed's on the floor, rifling through my suitcase for my toolkit (ain't I a pro?) and the van is being rocked by the air pressure from lorries passing at top speed. We're on the hard shoulder somewhere outside London. There's nothing to be done but try. The van smells like burning. Who knows what's next?

We've got time, so we'll be fine for Oslo (not the city - a London venue) tonight...it just depends how we get there.

Our hazard lights have just stopped working. Ed's just popped back to put a triangle out.

Here he is again. He looks back at where he's just been.

"The triangle's just fallen over."

Time to sing a song.

Trewin's working on it, and I have no idea on what level of expertise he's working.

"Bloody triangle's fallen over again."

The road, the boundaries, and the trucks are dirty and grey. Everything moans and hisses as it passes. The van shakes with an unseen force. I'm getting out of the van. There's an element of fear.

Not for the first time in this band, I feel like I'm in some spiritual netherworld.

We'll see you later.

Tim.

Live and Direct From the Rear Corner of a Van Full of Men.

We're in the inbetween.

There is no health, here. The things you say and the things you do have no meaning. All actions are fleeting, all conversations are hypothetical, all memories are temporary. Leave them as lines on the map. All possible things converge to one: the destination

You can develop strange habits on these seven hour journeys. Right now I'm about to add the fourteenth piece of gum to the amorphous clay of nastiness I've been pushing around my molars for the past half hour. That's about the size of things in the inbetween. Nothing is food. Everything is chewed. Every boxed stretch of highway ends with us spitting everything out, forgetting the taste, and starting again tomorrow.

We've done Dortmund and Berlin, so far. Lovely times. Too lovely, in fact. I've been doing a lot of hugging. As the two responsible ones take turns guiding this ship down the autobahn, I've been doing a lot of necessary snoozing in the back. Berlin, especially, is an unfair torment to a mere mortal. It parties like Windows 10 updates: it's relentless, it's intrusive, and you have to do it even though you know it's bad for you.

The landscape outside is turning to soaring hills and golden forests. We're closing in on Munich. It's Friday night and we have a day off tomorrow. The very talented Rosie Carney and band, who have been following us round on these dates, have promised us a good time. I'm sure any competitive element will be solely in my head. I'm a fierce competitor, so we'll have to see how that goes.

Something's going to get lost.

Thanks to all who have come to the gigs so far and thanks to all who have seen to our comfort and wellbeing. We appreciate everything people do for us.

The air in here may be stale, but everything else is sweet.

Whatever you're up to, and whenever you're up to it, sprinkle some sugar on it like a mischievous little pixie.

We'll see you at the gigs.

Tim

Fwd: Re: 2018 phoria tour & message to all ye who enter here

07/11/18 Freizeitzentrum West (FZW), Dortmund, Germany

08/11/18 Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany

09/11/18 Heppel & Ettlich, Munich, Germany

11/11/18 Kulturbetrieb Royal, Baden, Switzerland

12/11/18 Salzhaus, Winterthur, Switzerland

15/11/18 Oslo, Hackney, UK

16/11/18 Rough Trade, Bristol, UK

 

Ticket links and details on our website.

 

Lets keep this one light and industry friendly.

As passionate go-getters, we are so excited and thrilled that we are going on this exciting and thrilling mini-tour. The music we are going to play will be very exciting, and we are excited to share it with you and with each other, as we excite each other so. We are so excited about it we have yet to recognise the yawning chasm of death that awaits all animals. We are so excited about it that the mysterious forces of the universe no longer have any meaning for us, and instead of contemplating the mysteries of existence we can just float like dead ants on a colourless sea of distraction and wasted potential. We are so excited about presenting literally anything to do with ourselves that this decadencium of 21st century reality no longer contains enough conceptual bread to sustain us, and we have had to construct a new reality – named ‘&&2’ – in which to live (part of persisting in ‘&&2’ is maintaining ones own parallel existence in the world in which you (you) have lived your entire life, or as we call it ‘The Village of Small Potatoes’).

We are very excited to have become gods and can’t wait to withhold the secrets of the universe from you in order to maintain a wholly manufactured sense of intrigue fuelled mainly by your own negative self-perception. 

 

There we go!

Put that on a t-shirt.

 

Tim

P.S. Great joy and abundance to all ye who enter here.

Track or treat.

This story manifested itself in the band's studio toilet.

- 

The beast moved through his own grotesque physique with the fractional perfection of the most oppressive industrial machinery. His limbs, long and dark, rolled themselves around their hinges and joints so smoothly as to unnerve the most fastidious engineer. The beast’s knees—such was the distorted nature of his earthly apparatus—danced at a crooked tempo around the top half of his body as would those of a preying spider. He tended to keep his arms in front, like a destitute beggar, but when his filthy twig-like fingers were not on display his chipped and yellowed nails would shriek and squeal as they scraped whatever ground was desecrated by his gait.

I shrank into the antique sofa as the figure loomed above me. The furniture in this room was once infused with the illuminatory influence of hope, knowledge, and novelty; but such sentiments had long since rotted to an unpalatable stew. The entire room, and the other souls in it, once flush with the erotic inevitability of new dreams, now stank of sterility, and served only as well as a cracked cauldron might serve any conjuror. The beast himself had not always been as he appeared to me today.

In the cemetery of time there stands a monument so vast as to nullify the most saharan sun. The monument stands as manifestation of my testament today - that the past was brighter; a thing filled with carelessness and drink and the plucking of young flowers. Alas, the tempest of change has weathered its words so deep that the finger of my memory now runs uselessly over a blank plane of dead rock. Night after night I have rested against this crypt, knowing that to tear it down would be to free us all from its torment, but gripped also by the knowledge that to live now can only have meaning if it is to return the monument to its days of gleeful shadow, when we, and all around us, were as paltry to its gaze as mites to the grandest god. The man who builds his own house cannot let it crumble. The desperate gambler, ensnared by chance, cannot quit when he is behind.

The beast, as that is what my friend has become, might yet be transformed. If there is a curse upon us, let it be lifted by our names and by our works. Let it be lifted by the blessings of swift endeavour and the charity of luck.

Please, dear spirits, lift this curse from us.

From my already sunken vantage point, suffocating in an ancient and discarded leisure, I sensed the beast lowering something towards me. It appeared to me as some sort of disk. Its bottom side was encrusted with untellable muck and swirled with a kaleidoscope of freshly hatched maggots. He brought it down slowly, towards my chest, and as the disk, like our hallowed moon, continued its inevitable course beyond its point of eclipse, his face revealed itself with its narrow eyes and baying crowd of stained and rotten teeth. Present also was a number of vessels, each as grim as their courier, each holding an amber-brown liquid that I knew well.

Putrid steam rose into the high room like the spirits of evil men.

“Cup of tea?”

“Are we running the set again?”

A chill of horror ran through my bones.

“No, we’re going to work on new ones.”

-

My dreams are no longer so fitful, dear reader, as before these words were uttered. That very day, the beast did seem to me more human, his movements more serene, his words less mournful of what he had forgotten.

I still spend my muted hours wondering through the shadowed graveyard. I still yearn for the words that once adorned that prideful construction that reaches up into the sky beyond any tree, beyond any vault or temple, but of late I have walked beyond the shadows, and in that light I have seen the dead dreams of other men, and among them, I should swear, I have seen my own thoughts—of fear, of hopelessness—as they were when I first saw the beast in all his frightful nature. Such fears, such nightmares of fresh horror, have escaped me since the beast uttered the words I here describe, and, as free thoughts, those accursed strikes of cerebral torment have found no fertile ground but this – the dry and heavy earth of zero. They are no more.

So now, when I search the stone monument for any path, for any inkling of what once was and what should next come to be, I trace my fingers a little lighter, and, in doing so, no longer do I overlook the pathetic cowardice of a grim fate, and no longer do I shun the spirits of death.

Quite the opposite.

A. Ghost

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.

Session.

‘It’s a Brighton vegetarian cafe. It’s not like the one on London Road – it’s like...a Brighton Vegetarian Cafe. It’s hateful and awful but it’s also pretty amazing.’

I’m trying to arrange the day with the woman. There is a vegetarian cafe in Brighton that a friend once took me to that I’ve been meaning to let her in on. They have these wraps (I’ve forgotten what was in them) that taste like [I’ve forgotten exactly what they taste like]. (They probably taste like exactly what was in them.) I’ve also forgotten what the name of the cafe is.

One possible cause of my cognitive uselessness is last night’s post-shoot ‘celebration’.

They started work at about 9am, shifting gear around and setting everything up for the arrival of the very talented and excellent Alice Humphreys, who would be shooting us for the day. She worked with us a week or two ago on a new batch of press shots, and we thought it would be fun to get her in again to shoot a good time fun live session for the benefit of the internet.

I turned up well behind the stated schedule, following a mishap with three tins of WD40 and a caffeinated whooping crane.

So we set everything up, we got what lighting we could, sterilised my infected wounds, and tried to make sense of this feeling of performance in front of one person. That was very odd – to perform for one person while performing for everyone. We knew that we were no longer in a practice session, but at the same time we were not playing a concert.

There are various levels of performance, and ways of performing. You do not perform the same onstage at the London ICA in front of a thousand people as you would at Delila’s 85th in the dining room of Restful Pines Retirement Hotel. They simply don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do and I think knocking out the back wall to make space for the lighting rig caused more problems than it solved.

No, you have to adjust your performance to the occasion.

So what is this occasion? A hovering camera. There is no air moving, there is no crowd. There is focus on yourself and focus on the music – and it’s all being taken down; it’s all being noted. There is no transcendent moment, here. There is no ether into which you throw yourself. It’s all being taken down like courtroom portraits – here’s a man in his emotion, now scrutinise him. Here’s a man in as much vulnerability as he can take. Here is a man projecting every fibre of himself onto the world – now watch it forever. Forever and ever. NSA watch it. GCHQ keep it. Look at their faces look at their little eyes darting around in uncertainty. They’re play-acting. They’re fakes. Are we? Are we overdoing it? No. How do we know? We’re underperforming. Are we? We’re overperforming. No. None of it ain’t going nowhere. Nothing’s disappearing, is it? Nothing’s getting forgotten. Nothing’s lost...nothing’s gained…how does my hair look?...oh god…

So we had a few beers to lighten up, and that progressed into a party of us heading down to a Brighton pub to start the night early and end the night upside down, strapped to a tofu kebab and being dragged home on a skateboard by a kindly fox. Sunglasses Indoors was the theme of the night. Also the band game Five Card Rocket, to which – once they have been officially codified by the Phoria Occupations Organisation - I will one day explain the rules.

All in all, while the difficulties of red-light syndrome do exist, the day seems, from my current slanty angle, to have been a success. We did lose ourselves in some of the performances and we did try and create a nice little package for people to enjoy, as we always try to do. You'll see it once it's all been cut together nicely. It ain’t anything like suffering, this malarkey – but there is something in there that asks to be shared, so we try and share it.

So today, being Saturday (as it is), and that being after such Friday (yesterday), I need some vegetables. I need vegetables and I need love.

Don’t we all?

Do have fun, in whatever mischief you may partake.

Tim

P.S. Remember to follow our Instagram @phoriamusic, and our Twitter too @phoriamusic. Chat to us. We like it. Go to www.phoriamusic.com for details on our upcoming tour.

The most accurate portrayal thus far.

This place is an abattoir.

One hundred miles in every direction – all you see is hanging red bodies that look exactly like us.

You’re taking the guided tour.

Your tour guide is delivered directly to your optic nerve.

It’s me.

It’s my face and it’s in your head.

‘Look at this shit,’ I say. ‘Look at this rotunda of absolute bollocks. This is us. We did this to ourselves. What do you think goes on here?’

‘Fun?’ you say.

‘Ugh. I guess.’

‘Finish the album.’ you say.

Tim

-

Phoria guided tours are available throughout Germany, Switzerland, and the UK, this November. Visit www.phoriamusic.com.

We'll start with proof of life and see what happens next.

Yesterday, sat here, in the exact same spot I’m sat in now, I wrote the first Phoria blog post I’d written in nearly eighteen months. The last blog post was published on 25th July 2017.

It wasn’t an easy thing to try and write. I flipped between truth and lies, between silliness and sincerity, between going into everything as an act of defiance against common sense and going into nothing as an act of defiance against myself. Could I craft a balanced approach, perhaps? Well, what’s the point in that?

Sorry, I’m being dreadfully rude.

How are you?

We do care, you know.

So the second album is underway. It has been for a long time. You’d be sick to know the amount of music we’ve either thrown away or put in a cupboard. It’s all there. I have no idea how much of it you’ll ever hear. We did those two songs Rrotor and When Everything was Mine. Thank you all so much for your support on those. Especially in odd times it’s good to know people are still out there, enthusiastic about enjoying what we do. If you haven’t heard them yet – get on Spotify (or whatever music service you use), and check them out.

We’re on the road in November. Germany, Switzerland, and then London and Bristol. Check the dates and the tickets on www.phoriamusic.com. We’re out mainly to escape the studio for a bit – feel the wind in our hair (…) and have some fun. We’d love for you to join us, or get your friends out if they’re in or near any of those cities. We’re told we put on a good show.

So it’s Sunday, the world is in turmoil, the psychology of young people is as twisted as a marshmallow stuck in the gears of a revolving restaurant, and it’s impossible to do anything without the putrid stink of electronic analysis hanging in the atmosphere.

What are you going to do? Drink too much coffee and watch five series of King of The Hill back-to-back?

You’re damn right you are, you little fluff-basket.

Go on. Away with you.

We’ll be more, in time.

Until then…

Have fun.

Tim