After The Results

Good late afternoon internetica, or whatever you’re calling yourself these days. I’m here to talk to you again so for all intents and purposes you might as well be called ‘darkness my old friend’. If you got that reference this is probably where you belong.

For people doing A levels it’s results day tomorrow, a day that gives me awful flashbacks to those days when I slept all day and didn’t realise that I was wasting my education by being a lazy, unlikable, unrelatable, antisocial prick. Seriously, times seemed good to me then but they really weren’t. Also I hadn’t really started doing this blog or writing novels so I was missing out on what is now one of the happiest parts of my life.

Writing’s helped me out in the same way that songwriting helped me out years ago when I was in a weird place inside. It’s therapy to me, it keeps me sane and it gives me goals to aim for, as well as letting me vent and receive the illusion that other people actually give a shit about what I have to say from Superman Returns to dangerous super-quacks like Greg Braden and Vianna Stibal.

But I made that on my own, and what the borderline between A levels and university does to a lot of people is make them feel like they won’t have a future without going to university, and that’s a load of old bull.

The way that college stresses how much university defines the rest of your life was partially why I didn’t like it there so much. At the time I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do if I did go. I’d forgotten why I loved science so much, I didn’t want to do music tech because I didn’t think the course would get me to where I wanted to go in that industry and at one point I had settled on creative writing, but that was after I had started my year off, a year that showed me how much I wanted to go to university, to study science, to write, and not just to wish upon a record contract floating by for a band that split up two or three months into the year out.

As fun as the creative writing course might have been, I really enjoy studying science, and in the end, I wanted to do something that little Eddy (me from the past, not some undesignated sperm) would be proud of, and I think I’m on my way, if I can be so bold.

Dry Streaks In Tempo

I haven’t written any songs in a while.

And that happens sometimes, you have to be sitting there when it clicks, otherwise you can fiddle with your strings for hours and get nothing, there’s a certain kind of magic that you just have to snatch at when it happens to be overhead, and I’m not talking about astrology, just in case you think somehow my current musical writers’ block made me swallow a boatload of woo.

But much like trying to ask somebody out on a date it’s hard to know when the right moment will arise, sometimes you have streaks of four or five songs being written per month, other times it takes half a year for you to strike the match again and get the musical fire burning. Not that my recent songs haven’t met the same standard, they have, they’ve just been pretty sparse in comparison to last years riffing marathon that was never matched before and has yet to be matched since.

I used to think it was certain moods that did it, but it doesn’t seem to work that way for me anymore, perhaps because I’m too comfortable with a guitar in my hand to let my discomfort become a couple twangs and a few na na nas.

It may be that as I write more for blogs and for that story I keep gushing about even though I’m only one hundred and fifty pages into it, I don’t have much energy left for the kind of engine needed to keep a songwriter running for the half an hour or so it takes to write a half decent three minute song.

Or it may be that I’m just going through a metaphorical dry streak at the moment and come September my newly callused fingers will be distracting me from my studying all over again!

Maybe.

Sunday Hangover: Hardcore!

Where does the term hardcore come from? Would it be referring to a denser version of metal? If so does that explain why I can’t hear what the hell anyone’s saying in hardcore music? This doesn’t take away from the art or the power of the song itself, it’s just that when I can’t hear what the singer’s trying to convey I start making up my own lyrics. At that point a song that was supposed to be about the end of tyranny is sounding a lot more like a song about trying to find a quiet place to flip the chimp.

This conflict between my ears and my brain was in full swing when I attended bloodstock a few years ago, a festival dedicated to the kind of metal you have to have actually read the lyrics to know the words to. I think there were three or four bands I saw that I could understand, the rest ended up singing about badgers in their pants, crackers with AIDS or other things that I’m sure they had no intention of portraying in song.

Derivatives such as metalcore, crabcore, deathcore etc. seem to make no sense however in the way I first tried to understand hardcore music, by the name of the genre itself. If one has a core made of crabs, surely this makes you incredibly ill, it says nothing about how metal you are, nor anything else for that matter except for the fact that you really need to see a bloody doctor, hopefully one that wasn’t bloody before he tried to remove several crustaceans from your innards.

Deathcore is understandable in that context but that makes it sound as depressing as the smiths, what it should really be called is throatcore, because as far as I can tell the only way to make sounds that low and rumbling is to have vocal chords the size of a small elephant.

Sunday Hangover: My Idiotic Past

Right then, to business!

I’m losing a sort of grasp on the days of the week here, so I almost forgot that this is supposed to be my nonsensical post for the week. This passed me by partly because I’m not hungover, partly because I was actually thinking about finding some hot-button issue to talk about, and partly because I’m just a bit of an idiot. Excuse me, let me rephrase that, I’m a lot of an idiot.

So let me share some of my idiocy with you here today.

The day after I learned to ride my bike I crashed it into a bridge and had to go to A & E, I still have the scar but it’s shrunk a whole lot.

In my first band we were so bad at agreeing on new stuff that we spent over a year with our entire repertoire consisting of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’.

I once wrote a letter to J.K. Rowling suggesting that her next book be entitled: ‘The Secret of Slytherin’; this would have been some pretty impressive predicting had ‘The Chamber of Secrets’ not already come out and I hadn’t already read the book. She wrote back regardless, I don’t know what she saw in me.

I wrote a song last year that was thoroughly praised by a couple of my peers, only two weeks ago did I realize that the main riff is exactly the same as the main riff in Kasabian’s ‘Shoot The Runner’.

I spelled independent as independant until embarrassingly recently, the same goes for equipment and equiptment. Don’t ask.

In my original playthrough of Pokémon Crystal as a child, I was raising a tyranitar until I was convinced by someone that I needed a fire pokémon on my team instead. I listened and got a magmar.

I had been taught about mutation so badly in my younger life that I thought that the cancer and X-men mutations were the same thing, subsequently I thought I could cure cancer and create superheros in one fell swoop. This dream did not last.

I once ‘played’ through an entire game of mario kart at my next door neighbor’s house without my controller being plugged in, they were playing it instead of me and I had never noticed the switch. From this experience I learned that people are cruel and you can’t trust anyone.

When I first picked up a guitar I put all my fingers on one fret and strummed for a good ten minutes thinking it was the most awesome song in the world. Thankfully I’ve grown a more musical ear since then and can play three chords.

Ghost In The Stereo

I’m a little disillusioned having not been allowed to play open mic last night. It’s been a while since I took up that mantle and it was more than a little disappointing to see the welcome’s just as cold, in fact perhaps colder, than when I last went.

I do try to cling onto some little piece of confidence when it comes to my music but it’s pretty difficult when I basically have no output for it anymore. I’m going to try and change that over the summer with a few recordings but at the moment, and for the last 6-8 months it’s kind of felt like the world’s resisting my efforts in that area of the arts.

And you can’t very well say ‘fuck you’ to the world and expect a coherent response unfortunately.

It makes me really miss being in a band, like I don’t already miss that a stupid amount, and while yesterday’s sunburn thankfully turns into a tan rather than sunstroke I still wonder if there’s a chance of that happening again. These days it seems like a pointless dream, more romantic than realistic, but still it’d be nice to regain that little piece of my world that’s missing.

There’s still a little part of me, probably not the part that knows I can’t sing and am an average guitar player at best, the part that gets chills when the words start flowing out of my fingertips and gets those same chills whether it be on keyboard or pen. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps it is a bigger part of me than I give it credit for, and it loves to write. There are hundreds of songs it wrote and hundreds more it wishes to write, but what good are songs if there are never to be heard? What good is music when you know that Justin Bieber has somehow amassed more fans than you will ever have? It’s hard not to be a pessimist when that’s your nature, but when you feel yourself becoming more optimistic and then look back at your music with different eyes… Well, I know where I stand to say the least.

Music: The Proliferation of Crap

I really, really hate that there’s a whole subgenre of music written specifically to be played in clubs. Not just because the music itself is of questionable quality and is on pretty much everywhere you go after nine on a Friday or Saturday; for me it says something about why the music industry is looked at with distaste by so many people. I mean, if you really want people to think you’re making music because your passionate about it, then making a whole genre purely for business reasons seems more than a little counter-intuitive.

But I suppose if we start thinking like that we’re already falling prey to naive delusions; it does sadden me that, like everything in the Western world, it comes down to what will bring in the most money, but when it comes to music there is a constant proliferation of crap with a few gems flung out to the side.

There does seem to be, and correct me if I’m wrong, a slight improvement seeping in however. For all I know this could be entirely an artefact of confirmation bias, but if you consider the ease of access we have to music in the dawn of file sharing, people, at least I suspect, are only buying the music that they really feel passionately about. Considering this, I hope, the music industry is going to have to try a lot harder to please people, this, hopefully, will mean less of the endless crap stream (fuck you One Direction) and more of the songs that have enough time and effort put into them to not make your ears bleed.

And the more power that label executives get taken away from them, the more the market will be controlled by smaller, more dedicated companies. I’m no economist, but I do play one on this blog.

Resurrecting Music

So while taking a break from wondering why nintendo refuse to make a pokemon snap 2, I decided to do a couple of things with my resurrected computer.

First I removed the crown of thorns, then I decided to stick the music on and keep the stigmata, after all it looks pretty funky and gives it a sort of edge that it didn’t have before, it’s been through the wars after all.

But last night I decided to get my music back on it.

And I completely forgot how long that process takes.

If you want some kind of idea, well, I’m still doing it now.

And all because I wanted a little background noise when reading blogs and a couple of podcasts to listen to on the bus.

But, now that Steve Jobs is dead and gone, I think it’s a good time to ask why you’re not allowed to access the music files on your ipod. Why are they all hidden?

If someone’s computer breaks down they still want all that stuff they had before, why prevent them from getting it?

People can’t accurately use it to lend music to their friends for free, it’s all labelled with ridiculous strings of four letters that Jimmy Neutron would find hard to decipher and for a company that was essentially resurrected by the ipod surely it would be nice to let it at least be a two way system.

Okay, now everything but the artwork is sorted out.

I understand that apple is a company designed to be drooled over, I’ve seen the prices of their computers and I have to say if I had enough money for one of them, no matter how much I’d like one I’d probably be tempted to spend it on something like a holiday across the world for the amount of recreational fun it could get me.

But that gives them no excuse to be so awkward when it comes to their little music-playing baby.

Letting It Live…

The dream lives in the dark recesses of a forgotten room,
Its ashes trembling, a phoenix chick waiting to emerge from its greyish egg,
The potential is there, the body is willing but the mind ceases to give itself credit for what it can do,
And yet the dream lives.

It hides there within the strings of a forgotten guitar,
Its tone as beautiful as ever, it holds the legendary bird in its hollow,
It knows that there is all the time in the world but it yearns to have its moment now before the rain comes,
Because the dream lives.

Never so simple as letting it rot it knocks at my door,
I left it behind not long ago, knowing that it would get me nowhere,
But the happiness it takes with it and the chemical release is enough for it to ensnare me with its rope,
The dream lies.

I let it tell me what it thinks I am and pretend,
Although I know that the pen holds more safety for me,
The curse of the storyteller keeps me hooked but I cannot deny my first love was music,
The dream that died.

But no more, there’s the rest of my life to go,
I remind myself of this as I let the instrument rest,
If I take my chances when available I could stand a chance at the old dream,
But dormant it survives.

It stays with me in my heart and I wear it on my sleeve,
Despite the fact that my potential may lie elsewhere in my brain,
The old Gods still having some sway over the old it keeps its hands on my shoulders,
And I treasure its soft embrace.

Developments!

It’s blog time once again, and while everyone sets up for the whole back to school/university/work/regular routine but at a different time of the year thing I have been blessed with a rather persistent stomach ache paired with some rather delicious non-symptoms (or symptoms of life if you prefer) that are making my last few days of freedom before I’m required to get drunk with a load of people I have yet to meet a lot less productive than I would have liked them to be.

Regardless, I’ve actually managed to start some recording so I might actually have some half decent music to link to from here in the near to late future, depending on how much I procrastinate and how hard it is to find an appropriate drum loop for each song, because yes, I’m not sure that recording a drum kit with one overhead is a great idea, although I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.

So yes, with only basic knowledge of music technology and fuck all knowledge of ableton I’m about to embark on a long and loud quest to get some more songs online so nobody will listen to them.

To be fair to myself, I’m actually doing it to try and get some gigs but seeing as that’s not that amusing an idea let’s just stick to the first explanation shall we?

Also, in news of me trying to get some of my vocational stuff done in my run up to academia, I believe that I may actually have some more letters going out to literary agents soon, so fingers crossed, you might see my book in the future if I’m incredibly lucky.

I’ve also just finished a gig review for Nottingham LIVE for Long Dead Signal at the rescue rooms relaunch party and done a load of reviews for Alter The Press recently including the new Charlie Simpson album (which is awesome), so if you check those out as well as my blog you’re absorbing just as much of my writing as is humanly possible without your brain exploding.

Something intellectually stimulating tomorrow I promise.

Personal Gain

So there are a couple of tactics people take these days to try and get far in life, tactics that don’t really seem viable to me. That may deem me doomed to ultimately find no success and that saddens me deeply but I cannot change my personality, that would require a lot more than determination, that would involve emotional conditioning or gene therapy or any number of strange things to happen.

I’d much prefer we all got an equal chance, but that’s not the way the world turns apparently and unfortunately.

Because I cannot shun people for my own personal gain (type one)

or brown nose everyone in sight (type two, mostly unobtainable because I have incredible trouble approaching people and by the time I’ve talked to them I’ve come across as sufficiently dull to warrant ignoring)

Does this mean I can never achieve my goals to the degree I wish to?

I hope not, because I’m pretty determined.

But the fact that I never get gigs, have had no attention from literary agents and screwed up my A levels still gets to me a lot.

What do I have to do to get attention for doing the things I enjoy?

It would seem that in some places the well has run dry and my stomach tightens at the thought of giving up on anything.

But I am incredibly worried that I might have to give up on at least one of my dreams, and I’d hate to think of letting go of any of them, not after I’ve worked so hard to achieve them and got so little reward.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I need a little help, not just from people to get my feet off the ground (but that would be lovely) but to actually get some advice from people who know what I can do to take myself further, because for now it would seem that I’m faced with a huge brick wall with only a chisel to break it down with.