July 11, 2004
‘My Hotel Year’ done and dusted, it’s that time of year when ‘post-album depression’ sets in and I find myself craving for a very long holiday away from myself.
A common feature of PAD means that I have a constant urge to throw everything I’ve ever done into a North Manchester skip and set alight to it.
In this scenario, I throw myself on top of the flames soon afterwards.
Entering a ‘put everything in the drawer for a month’ phase, I hope to re-emerge with enthusiasm and ideas aplenty sometime in August, or maybe just a strange desire to abandon music and run a busy pub in Bradford.
The Guinness diaries await!
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The second Cambridge festival of looping went well, with considerably more people in attendance than last year and a seamless change over between artists.
After a dazzling rehearsal, myself, Boy Bennett and Michael Bearpark were slightly disappointing and restrained in our first set. Sounding like a psychedelic folk re-write of Darkroom, the experience proved enjoyable, if not totally satisfying.
Our second set, however, with most of the other musicians present, was far more expressive, spacious and experimental. Mike’s acoustic guitar generating effects suggested some exciting new possibilities for us and, after doing little with it in our first set, I made fairly inventive use of the DL4 and developed some fairly interesting cross rhythms and textures.
Earlier in the evening, the Butler’s assured performance certainly proved one of his best, and overall, the festival still seems like the sort of event I thought would define early 21st Century culture.
The rather standard 50s-styled Jazz trio accompanying my meal at the restaurant earlier provided an effective contradiction.
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Already involved in promotion for the My Hotel Year album, I did several interviews this week with Martin Aston (The Times/Mojo).
A No-Man fan who’s doing my biog for One Little Indian, intelligent and informed, Martin made what could have been a tedious ‘hack’ job an enjoyable experience, with the interviews making me question certain things about the album that I’d not previously done.
Subsequently, I now realise that one of the aspects I most like about MHY is that like No-Man’s ‘Speak’ (an album consisting of work written in the late 1980s), it’s an example of music produced under the radar of industry consciousness.
Music written more out of love of creating rather than the result of any external or internal pressures to succeed or impress people, I genuinely hope that there’s a sense of creative honesty that pervades every one of MHY’s non-existent grooves.
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Watching:
old Woody Allen films
Reading:
TC Boyle/Flann O’Brien
Listening:
Nick Drake – Made To Love Magic
Fennesz – Venice
Kings Of Convenience – Riot On An Empty Street