June 18, 2025
It’s time once more for that unfashionable high on text, light on imagery, online blog. All hail the dead formats!
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Since last I wrote, ‘the personal situation’ hasn’t improved (it remains dismal), but creatively it’s been an incredibly fruitful period. Additionally, as I hope has been obvious, the problems surrounding my social media and online presence have been very ably dealt with (by the industrious Rob Skarin at Crystal Spotlight).
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The main creative focus has been my upcoming solo album. The writing is pretty much complete and now it’s down to getting appropriate guest players, correcting elements of what’s there and doing final mixes. Basically, the 5% that takes up 95% of the time making an album!
After the frenetic and eclectic Powder Dry, the latest music forms a very coherent, thematically linked suite of epic electro ballads. All co-written with Brian Hulse, the songs possess a sweeping, cinematic melancholy and I genuinely feel they’re amongst the best things I’ve done. While more traditional and expected than either Powder Dry or Butterfly Mind, what we’ve done feels subtly different from other excursions into similar territory and there’s one (18-minute) track that is quite unlike anything we’ve attempted before. The guests I’m hoping will contribute will be very special indeed.
At one point in early March, I seriously considered whether it was worth releasing anything again. The marketplace is tougher than ever – as is the gig circuit – and the rewards are minimal. I was at my lowest when the first piece for the new album ‘appeared’. It was a welcome kick up the creative backside. Luckily, my belief in it and the music that followed is strong enough that, yet again, I’m happy to go down fighting with something I fully believe in. ‘Once more unto the breach’ etc.
As it should be, I’ve been excited and moved by the process of making the album and I’m keen to get it out into the wider world. Unfortunately, I expect this won’t see a release until at least Spring 2026.
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Prior to the new album, I was working on a number of pieces (both solo and collaborative). While I enjoyed creating the music, nothing felt like it was leading towards anything substantial.
Consequently, I’ve decided to set up a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/TimBowness) where I can upload exclusive material (both audio and visual) that has no obvious home.
I wrote seven solo pieces in the Winter of 2024/2025, which were deeply personal and, for me, too unformed to warrant an official release. In answer to a few people who’ve asked, I’m happy for these tracks to remain Patreon download exclusives. For me, the focus going forward will be on my next solo album, which I want to be as well presented and promoted as possible (in terms of packaging, social media and videos).
I love (and still regularly buy) physical releases, but in a world filled with far too many ’things’, I like to be careful about what I put out. The same logic applies to official downloads and streams and that’s why the Patreon material won’t appear on Burning Shed, Bandcamp or Spotify etc. I don’t want to muddy the waters with too many releases and I’m content with these songs and instrumentals being available to a very small but dedicated audience.
I intend to add extremely rare archive releases to the Patreon page, as well as sneak previews of forthcoming material and extended video footage. Whatever’s raised by it will go into funding guest musicians, artists, Atmos/5.1 mixes, video makers and so on.
Here are the credits – and intended sequences – for my first Patreon exclusives:
Songs For Dark Nights EP
1. Trying Not To Drown
2. Shattered Gameface
3. What We Have Lost
4. Headstrong Boy
Music For Dark Nights EP
1. Dark Empath Retreat
2. From The Make-Believe Ballroom
3. The World Without Us
All songs written, performed and produced by Tim Bowness.
All seven pieces were written and recorded between December 2024 and February 2025. They felt very in tune with one another (mostly desolate and highly atmospheric). It’s probably not a coincidence that this was a period when I had to put my extremely ill father in a nursing home and take over his affairs. Not the stuff of Pop songs (unless Sabrina Carpenter’s working on an end of life concept album I’m unaware of!).
The three songs are not songs in any conventional sense (more emotions in sound) and two of the instrumentals I envisaged as being the basis of songs.
Bar From The Make-Believe Ballroom, all the tracks were played in real time. There are no programmed rhythms or sequencers, everything’s performed in the moment. These are my crude non-mixes.
I was pleased with the fact that they capture a time and a very particular set of feelings well and I was also happy with some of the processed sounds I created. Steven Wilson referred to Trying Not To Drown as ‘beautiful and hauntological,’ which was nice.
I like these pieces, but I don’t feel a need to take them further or officially release them.They capture moments in time (usually at 3am!). In contrast to Powder Dry, they’re painfully slow (and even more miserable!). The lyrics to Shattered Gameface relate to the Lost In The Ghost Light concept.
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Toodle pip.
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Listening
Alas – Alas (1976)
Cate le Bon – Michelangelo Dying (2025)
James Brown – Mutha’s Nature (1977)
Gil Evans – There Comes A Time (1975)
Theatre Of Hate – Omens: Studio Work 1980-2020
Reading
Jonathan Coe – The Rain Before It Falls
William Hope Hodgson – The House On The Borderland
Watching
The Eternaut
Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Poker Face