I'm not sure quite how it happened

 But I seem to have been listening to a lot of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, this week.

Truly, they were always a step too far, into the land of Prog, for me. But, I do really appreciate those rapid, and inexplicable swings in my taste, which lead me to delve into areas I've not previously anticipated. And overall - you know what? It's been a pleasant journey. Those "Works" collections seem completely self-indulgent, but the first few albums are great. 

But yeah - what's next, Camel? Gentle Giant? 

This is where my head is at.

 Absolutely incredible article about the way that Social media is corroding our society. In essence, SM is bad for trust in Governments, Media, Institutions and people in general. So, if you have people who lose faith in governments, they lose trust in what that Government is saying. As we've always hoped, it's the Government's job to give us the normal, boring facts about everyday life . Jobs numbers, statistics, reports. And now, social media has made an entire generation distrust all of those facts. They just want to "do their own research". Facts are dull, and conspiracy is way more exciting. There's a visceral thrill to the sort of whacked-out nonsense that SM gives us. So, that's what people want. I thought Trump was a bug, but he's a feature, of the oncoming wave of idiocy, that'll wash over us all. As we sit and preen, with our performative social posts, about our favourite fabric conditioner, how we're working with brands, and how we can monetise AI to give us a side hustle. 

That performative aspect of SM has been gnawing away at me, over the last few months. I've obviously been deep in SM, as the band has worked its hardest, throughout 2024. Honestly, I think that corrosive effect has been eating me alive. You end up in thrall to the cold, dead voice of social media, enslaved by the audience, working to stay afloat and alive. 

What I always loved about a blog was its authentic voice. This is MY voice. the blog is me. I can watch as the letters I type coalesce into recognisable words and phrases. There's no gap, between thought and expression (thanks, Lou). I'm not a performing seal, I'm not attempting anything other than to make my way through my own life. I'm free of any outside pressure, other than my own shitty impulses. 

At the moment, I'm contemplating changing, a little. Perhaps throttle back from Facebook, a bit. Save the more integrated posts about myself (longer ruminations on what I've been doing, the music I love, and so on) for here. Otherwise, I'm just harvesting likes and clout. I'm a performing monkey in a Zoo. And, on current evidence, it would seem that the Zoo is overrun with feral creatures, hellbent on eating each other alive. I'm determined to stop feeding the frenzy. 

And this was how my New Year began

 Main Street, Tobermory. Watching the birds wheel down, above the harbour. Sun fighting to break free of those clouds. Cold, crisp, quiet. A warm coat, a scarf and a waxed cap. Fists balled in pockets. The children dawdling, on the footpath to the Lighthouse, directly behind me. the first time I'd walked that route, since 2019. So much had changed, and yet this view remained resolute, similar. Hell yeah, Isle of Mull.  

Well, another year.

And a rather difficult one, if I'm truly honest. I don't mind telling you there were times when I felt unglued, unmoored, and totally lost. I do think I'm still struggling, in the wake of Dad's death. Plus *points down* that post down there? About the tyranny of expectation? That's been my biggest enemy. I've been singularly unable to vanquish that foe, and it's killing me. 

Oh well.

But, back to the present. With an incoming Trump administration, and a couple of other things like the looming death of decent social media (Twitter is gone, Facebook is on life support, after Zuck got rid of Fact-checkers today) it's dark times, it really is. And it's got me thinking: should I just have a blog, as my outlet, for this urge to document things? After all, blogs are absolutely wonderful, in that regard. So, I could even go back to how this place once was - giving you a bit of a blow-by-blow on what I've been doing. 

Would anyone care, or know, or respond? I have no answers. 

But - here goes. I've been busy with new songs, today. Well, old songs, I should say. We're doing motion, Chemical, Tongue Tied and Righ Decision? Bloody hell, how's that for a blast from the past? They're subtly different, and that difference is still kicking my arse, a little. New things, to learn. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Thoughts on AI

 Here's my issue with AI. 

We developed the internet, which was fine, but we expected too much of it. We thought it would expand our consciousness - and turn us into better versions of ourselves. But it didn't; it just let us look further into our hearts. Look at what's on display now, the angry, bitter, venal behaviour that floods social media. The internet wasn't a gateway; it was a mirror. It's showing us, US. And we're not great. 

But that would have been fine - if we'd learned. It doesn't particularly seem to me that we have.

And now - there's AI. We took all of that machine learning and let computers loose, with the expectation that they'd create something wonderful - or that they'd replace mundane employment, freeing human beings to enjoy lives of unfulfilled promise.

Except that's not happening either. We gave AI everything we know, and expected it to be able to replace us, but it's just another version of us. Instead of a person idly scrolling on the internet, flicking through Instagram, wasting their life with something petty. AI gives us a program, idly reforming images (based on inputs we've given it), flicking through those images as they endlessly morph and grow into further iterations of minor inputs we've supplied. AI isn't going anywhere new, it's going to places w'eve told it to go. It's the logical progression to the internet as a mirror. That internet mirror showed us all the dark places, the faults and the foibles of our existence. Then, AI turned around and started to just pinball around through the fractal chaos of all that information, defining and redefining the strange neural journeys our minds can take. But we know the steps on those journeys; they're nothing new.

Instead of AI, we need a way to expand ourselves, not have a program crawl through the myriad pathways of the houses our minds already reside in. We need to escape the paradigm completely. AI represents something that's still inside us. It will reproduce and grow but can never escape that boundary. 

The next step for us is to identify what's on the other side of that boundary.

The tyranny of expectation...

 ..Is hanging over my head again. I need to find a way to escape its clutches: to wriggle free of the idea that other people's happiness depends solely on my actions.

I'm always like this, on the eve of a concerted period of activity from the band. Really, I ought to have learned my lesson, by now - but it doesn't seem to have happened yet. Perhaps realisation is the first step towards altering one's behaviour? Le'ts hope so.

It's been a particularly trying few days, if I'm honest. A few days that I would really rather forget. I've walked off a lot of frustration, and confusion. The one thing that could save me, is a bicycle. But the weather has been (typically, for February) absolutely appalling. I'm hoping that will change, tomorrow. 

Blast from the past

 Every time I listen to The Flys, I'm in awe of exactly how perfect they were: a seamless mix of new-wave optimism and power-pop dynamics. Hooks and melodies for days. 

This is the opening track from their (totally forgotten) second album "Own". But, it's a Peel Session version, which I'm pretty sure has never been released. It's very odd - there has been an otherwise comprehensive 2CD Anthology, collecting everything they ever did, yet the radio sessions remain missing. Normally these are the first port of call, when a label goes looking for extra material. I live in hope that one day, absolutely everything can finally be released. Until then - just play this nice and loud, cheers.

Every now and again

 You want something.

Something that'll make you want to destroy planets, spit in the eye of God. 

This totally fits the bill.

Turn it up, people.

In other news, life is hard, getting harder. 

A lazy Sunday.

 Is there really any other kind?

But I managed to get back on the turbo trainer today, so my Strava stats for the week look vaguely respectable. I'm definitely down, as far as fitness goes - but it does feel like the power is still there. I do need to work on my cadence a bit - I suspect that's a lack of endurance riding. 

I've been busy keeping a diary for this year, as well. It's nice to have that, in concert with this digital alternative. The analogue version was a Christmas gift, and it's a lovely green Moleskine. A page a day, which seems like a perfectly good ratio, too.

Mind you, it is only January. Best laid plans, and all that.

I'm really not a musician.

I mean - I'm totally not.  

But there are certain things that just make me think I know what I'm on about. Case in point: the absolute guitar genius of Robert Quine. My favourite guitarist by some distance. Primarily for his work with the Voidoids, but more than that - for his absolute, single-minded focus. He took that left-field skronk-jazz madness, and made it his own, all the while maintaining a rigid discipline. There really wasn't anyone else like him.

RIP, Robert. 

Aw, c'mon now

 Sometimes you hear things which just totally blow you away. Here's a case in point. 

On this absolute banger, The New Pornographers are not just going into math-rock, they've emerged out the other side, into some rarified atmosphere where normal humans can't comprehend what they've just done.

"The Jessica Numbers" has always confused me, as I tried to work out that time-signature. Was it 13/8, or something? No, it's more complex than that. It's a series of guitar hits, which assume the formulation of a reverse Fibonacci series. Thus, each hit is the sum of the FOLLOWING TWO HITS.

The standard series would be: 1,2,3,5 etc, but this is in reverse - so the guitar hits are played as 5, then next time round it's 3, then 2, then 1........

 Aaaaaargh! Basically, it's (I think) an attempt to weld the Golden Ratio into music. My mind isn't just blown, it's scattered to the winds. 

First of the year.

 2023 can get in the bin. 

What a truly terrible year. On the plus side, at least I managed to get blogging again. More than 40 entries was my best performance for a while, which made me smile. Precious little else did, to be honest.

So, we're kicking off another year. Another year of my little blog. Howling into the void, yet again. I'm actually kind of pleased nobody gets to read it - I seldom have to worry about what to say, how to say it. I don't care about content, or anything else, at all.

It's liberating, cathartic, creative and wonderful. So yeah - here we go again.

What's music about?

 

At first, I thought music was important, and power was inherent within it - but after all these years, I think that might be nonsense. My understanding of chaos theory played a huge role in this - how everything dissolves into fractal chaos, yet there's a beauty and a grace within that disorder. Above all, I think music is utterly hollow until it attaches itself to us. Once that happens, it follows the fractal pattern of our lives, as they seek contextual belonging to a broader world of uncertainty.

My favourite XTC song is "Generals And Majors" - but is it because it's great? Again - I don't think so. It's not their best song; there are many others I admire more, and love more. So, why is it number one? It's all context. I love the song because I can see rows of the sleeves piled up in my local Woolworths in Devizes. I can feel how important it was for me to be connected to music and to a love of these objects. I can see how that single was an object of desire and slotted into everything else around it. The music, of course, is performed by a bunch of blokes from Swindon - it has the bucolic, West Country twang - melancholia, whistling, it feels - distant, yet close. And it's all about Cold War paranoia - I was living on the edge of Salisbury Plain at the time, and I can recall seeing low-loaders with ICBMs being driven through the streets of our village. It normalised armageddon and placed it into the bucolic little place I called home. Again, context. And those blokes from Swindon felt like me, too - outsiders - removed from the big city, slightly cast adrift. 

The power that song has is all contextual. It's power I bestowed upon the song, not power that the song had to begin with. 

I think that's what music is. It's nothing, but it's everything, so long as you can map out that personal context, and tie it to the ever-expanding fractal beauty that lies at the periphery of one's understanding. Beauty doesn't lie within; it lies on the outskirts, at the boundary where fractal lines blur and escape our power to control them.

I can still feel the pavement under my feet

I can still feel the same way I did in 1990, walking these Akasaka streets for the first time. The sense of optimism, of hope and possibility. It's all there, in the air, buildings, and skies over East Tokyo. 

I'm older now, but I've not lost anything over all these years. Tokyo still feels like home to me - or like a home, perhaps. The streets seem to envelop me, and the noise of the city fills my head. I tried to listen to music whilst walking the streets early in the morning - but it was somewhat futile. The earbuds came out, and the city's sound rushed back in; it was all I needed. 
 

I really, really needed that.

 The past few weeks have been vindication for the worst of years: a cavalcade of sensory overload, an embarrassment of riches after the paucity of grief and confusion.

Japan for a week? How could it be anything other than extraordinary? In truth, it was almost overwhelming. A chance to revisit old haunts with friends old and new. So much memory and happiness. The sensation of a life that unfolded around the joy of travel and exploration. Not just of mere countries - but of life itself. I was assailed by nostalgia for something still living in front of my eyes. A dream that refused to awaken. 

And this weekend was the Shiiine festival. A meeting of the tribes, for us - seeing Neds, Stuffies, Poppies, EMF. So many friends. Watching the Stuffies, as we did from the side of a stage thirty-four years ago. Feeling humbled that our lives still afforded us the luxury of feeling the same way. 

I needed these weeks.