i saw a reel a few months ago dramatising the first person to put a dusty 50s vocal sample over a lofi beat. this technique is apparently so ubiquitous that comedy skits are being made about it, but in all my 20+ years of composing, i’d never had a chance to give it a go. so, once the vague musical shape of ‘go to work. do me work, and enjoy meself for that day’ started coming together in a jam session, i realized this was the opportunity i was waiting for. for context, i was also experiencing a post-phd longing for the chaotic energy and culture of london, the city of my birth.

so i went searching for 1950s films about london on youtube and found an old bbc documentary called 'the more we are together' (www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EMWJwMRCxo). the film itself comes from 1958 and follows a reporter with the finest received pronunciation interviewing the various adult members of an east-end, working class family. it’s very much a product of it’s time, and to read the comments would be to believe it reveals some kind of paragon for life that we have collectively let die under the weight of ‘progress’. you know the argument, how it is ‘sad’ that england has changed irrevocably in such a short space of time, how life was simpler back then and people cared for each other back then. the subtext being that if we were only to reverse the advances made in the past 70 years, socially, culturally, technologically, then everything would be better. 

nostalgia like this does my head in. nostalgia in general does my head in. i chose to illustrate the underlying awfulness to this nostalgic ideal by sampling a particularly telling section from the documentary. in it, one of the working-class patriarchs talks about his disdain for the middle classes and how he enjoys the simple things in life; golf, football, alcohol. to his side sits his wife who, when questioned, shares her despondent resignation to a life of service and unfulfillment. i dunno, it just got me. 

i don't believe music can say anything in of itself. meaning in music requires written context. i don't know what i'm trying to say with this piece beyond that life in the past seems utterly awful for everyone involved. whether it’s the bigoted patriarch drawing lines between his personal culture and the hated middle-class, the wife who is denied a fulfilling life by a society that inhibits her, or the son who just wants to enjoy his music. sometimes it’s just nice to remember that, despite everything, we're moving in the right direction.

Go To Work, Do Me Work. And Enjoy Meself For That Day

so i've been writing this musical, right, about how friendship dies slowly but we're all the better for it. i know, sounds pretty bleak. in my defense it is going to be very loosely based on my own experience, or at least the long tailed feelings of anger, sadness, resentment, and peace i felt when it happened to me. 

to sugar coat the bitterness that the text risks descending into, i've decided to write the music as upbeat and positive as possible. to that end i wrote 'the view from down here' as a sketch to test the musical aesthetic i planned on aiming for.

lyrically, well it's a nonsense isn't it? but my wife wrote me a text by just constantly hitting the left auto-correct word and it spilled this oddly poetic collection of words out. i edited it, popped it through my favourite voice generator and bob's your uncle. literally in my case.

it's all a bit moot now as my hard-drive died and took all the work i'd made on my musical with it. but such is life.

The View From Down Here

We Move

Three Pieces vi: 07/09/20

Plastic Organ

Three Pieces v: 01/09/20

Damn, Son

Three Pieces iii: 11/02/20 - 20/02/20

where to begin. this is a song about brexit and labour and class and frustration and helplessness and the world going mad in the aftermath of bowie's death. more specifically, it's an attempt to articulate the sheer emptiness felt as successive decisions were taken by my home nation, politically, culturally, and morally, that i couldn't recognise nor relate to. brexit, boris, you know what i mean.

it is a song that i filled with my loneliness and sorrow. but because i am a coward i chose not to sing it myself, but to fashion the words into the mouths of distorted robots. i dunno, it just clicked with me. 

the loss of self i felt back then was crushing. i'm still not over it. but i write music to express the things that i lack language for, and that is what this is. an expression of the words and feelings and rage and impotence of the weird, weird post-brexit shitshow we found ourselves living in.

Uplit Sunlands

i write a lot of music and write a lot about music.

this soundcloud is a scrapbook of all the demos, ideas, works in progress, spoken essays, and all the other audio that i write just for the fun of it. i dunno, artists are allowed to idly doodle in their sketchbooks without expectations so why shouldn't musicians.

as always, i'm a polystylistic composer and academic, so the styles of music and topics may vary wildly. all context will be provided in the description.

be my friend. get in touch.

rryrry

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