I wanna write real songs, about girls and work and mates and the pub and taxes and sex and dating and dancing and shopping and wishing you were still young.
I wanna play everything through an old 4-track recorder and lay everything down loads of times to make it sound really fuzzy and shit. I want to use loop pedals, cheap equipment, soft beaters on glocks, broken guitars, out-of-tune pianos, plastic flutes and recorders, bad microphones, dictophones, telephones. I wanna lose my capo. I wanna unlearn the guitar. I wanna unlearn music.
When recording, I will get so drunk that many of the notes are wrong, or perhaps the whole thing gets accidentally erased.
I will use bad reverb units with the fx level too high and crappy 2-band eq with loads of hiss. I will put the gain up full and perform really quietly, then pop open another can as the noise floor overtakes the entire sound. I will use chrome tape in a tape machine that doesn't support it so the bias is all fucked and wrong. I will deliberately turn stuff up too loud so it occasionally goes into the red.
The next day I will mix this, sat in the passenger seat of the car. The 4-track will run on size C batteries that are almost dead. I'll have to change them regularly, which may warp the tape. When I've had enough, I will bounce everything down onto a standard C-60 cassette tape and I'll drive around with it on full blast to drown out my hangover. That evening, I'll put a big jumper on and go out into the cold. I'll stand on a hill and watch people's living room lights come on. I'll smoke a ciggie and scratch at my stubble.
I'll take a picture of the sunset on my camera phone.
The coloured cardboard cassette label will be turned inside out and the words "Fuzzy Warm Sounds" will be written on the side.
After that, I'll take up painting - but instead of using my fingers to hold the brush, I'll just strap the paintbrush to my foot and kick the canvas around the room.
5 comments:
Well, the part about losing your capo is easy enough! He he.
How many shit 'faux-bad, no actually really bad' bands could that be aimed at? I don't think my numeric keypad will let me type such a high number. Maybe the NME has the answer. Or maybe Q. Or Ian Brown. Or all three of them, in some sort of mass shepherd convention, where the sheep don't even realise they're being fed their own faeces and the shepherds are drunk on milk.
Sorry, I don't know what that last bit meant. It went a bit awry...
I wanna unlearn LIFE.
:-)
Ironically, I think I have actually lost my capo!
Shepherds drunk on milk? I have literally no idea what you are talking about!
No, it started off making sense, but then I couldn't think of an analogy for the NME, Q and Ian tosser Brown and their sheer lack of grip on reality.
I don't think you ever lose your capo. I think that sometimes a magical capo appears from nowhere and then disappears again when you need it most. He he.
I hate to say it, but that sounds quite appealing to me. The biggest enjoyment in music for me was discovery, from not knowing or not being able to...... its that that i miss.
id quite like to be shit and excited about the possibility of getting better again. i know you can always be better, but its not the same. you reach a level and all you can be is arrogant, unimpressed, passive..... nothing good can come of it. I think it may really be time for foot painting.
thom x
I can get passive and unimpressed sometimes, particularly about my own music. Sometimes you don't feel like you've gone anywhere with a track: you're already at the finish line before you even start. You can't get excited or challenged by your own processes anymore because you have drawn a line between 'becoming' and 'being'.
One possible antidote to this is to work with others. Everything feels new and exciting, and because you're not really in control of the way things are headed, you don't know how it's gonna turn out.
It could be shit. It could be a waste of time. Or it could be unbelievable. The only thing for certain is that it is an experience of growth - a real feeling of discovery.
It's made even better when you are doing something with others that you haven't really done before, like being a front man / guitarist in my case.
Obviously that all sounds a little prescriptive - but I'm just trying to relate to you my experience of it.
On a final note, I recognise that Jim, Rob and I are unbelievably lucky to be working with each other, and these kinds of musical partnerships are hard to find. But it's worth mentioning that it's by no means perfect (and neither should it be).
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