“Whitelabrecs’ Home Diaries is an invitation to artists and musicians to create an album or EP to document their personal experience during the lockdown or social distancing conditions that are upon us, due to the coronavirus outbreak. The series reflects a range of sounds, styles and ideas, as each artist portrays their own reflections uniquely. Each release is digital only for now, as we hope to raise what we can to help keep our label ticking over at this time. The releases feature a recurring polaroid image of a small lonely house, with a coloured filter chosen by the artist for each respective release. We also interview each artist and this is included as a bonus PDF with the download.”
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
2 CD set, arrived Friday. You can order the set here at projektrecords.bandcamp.com and listen to a bunch of it. It came out in 2003, and is a classic of the ambient form. All four CDs are going into the machine momentarily and that will be the soundtrack into early evening.
Chili day. And no, not using the cat treats you can see in top left. Unless someone annoys me. Defrosting a pack of venison and red wine sausages and a pack of elk sausages, currently roasting off tomatoes in balsamic and a head of garlic in red wine. The jar marked THYME is thyme salt I made last year.
Well, this is exquisite, and soothing my ruined body today. This set includes a blu-ray of a performance of the suite, narrated by the wonderful Tilda Swinton, whom I had drinks with in Edinburgh once, and we remained in touch by email for some time afterwards. She is just as fantastic a human as you would expect, as well as being one of the great actors and voices of our time.
A gorgeous, inventive and melancholy work.
Everything hurts and I’m clanking and grinding when I move.
And I just found out it’s a Bank Holiday and everything that wasn’t already closed is definitely closed.
I’m in slow recovery from the exhaustion crash, but mornings are harder than usual. And I had to clear 20 emails first thing. Inbox 14. I think today’s going to be quiet? I believe it’s still Passover, which slows a bunch of things down. So I’m going to try and make a large batch of chili later, and try and get my brain and body to calm the rest of the way down, because I need to hit the ground running tomorrow.
Okay. Everything just started hurting more. I’m off to take over the world, but very slowly.
My entire body hurts and my brain is basically a small dirty fire in a rusty bucket, so I’m going offline bar the essentials. Inbox 11 but most of those seem to be notifications of delayed shipping. Slowly developing the fear that 1) all my CD orders will arrive at once 2) I’m going to end up re-ordering my CD shelves like a madman trapped in one room 3) I am a madman trapped in one room
So, nobody needs another plague post, but let me tell you. I’ve been running full speed since last August, with just a little lull in January. In March — you remember March, it was 100 days long — I was supposed to take a very long weekend off. I was downing tools, getting the hell away from screens, and disappearing off somewhere with a book in one hand and currency in the other with which to pay people to bring me cocktails and meats. If I don’t switch off and go dark for a week every six months, when I’m working at this speed, bad things happen.
Well, it’s April. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a month. And my system for surviving 1000mphclub, it turns out, has failure points. Like, everywhere I usually go is closed and I’m not allowed outside. Hahahah.
I started crashing on Monday. Thought it would pass, and that it was just down to a lot of sudden work pressure of the using-up-decision-cycle kind. Today I barely made it out of the grocery store under my own power.
So I guess it’s time for me to figure out a new way of doing things, too.
I’ve been reading A NEW DAY YESTERDAY: UK PROGRESSIVE ROCK AND THE 1970S, by Mike Barnes, which isn’t a bad book, although some of the more striking stories and quotes so far seem largely sourced from other biographies rather than the extensive interviews he undertook. The problem is, you read the expansive descriptions of some of the musics he discusses, and then you go to YouTube to give them a listen, and…
…well, I always enjoy reading about innovative artistic movements, and there was a lot of invention happening there in a unique period in popular music and its industry and space, but…
…I just don’t like prog rock.
If you do, you will love this book. And it’s pretty readable so far, and Barnes’ personal perceptions of these works are really quite inspiring. They relate to what I’m actually hearing not at all, but I’d like to hear things that sound like what Barnes describes.
And it is teaching me things. Frankly, I could have done with a lot less Pink Floyd and a lot more about Ron Geesin, a sort of one man electronic sound lab from darkest Ayrshire, who I hadn’t been aware of previous to reading this book. So thanks for that, Mike Barnes!
SPEKTRMODULE 57
36 minutes and 32 seconds
This is an ambient / haunted music podcast curated by Warren Ellis, who is a writer from England.
I am at @warrenellis / warrenellis@gmail.com
and
http://warrenellis.ltd & http://orbitaloperations.com
We are #SPEKTRMODULE on social media.
It lives at spkmdl.libsyn.com
1) logotone by Dirty Knobs
2) “Lullaby” – S.E.T.I. (from: Sleep Environments for Interplanetary Travel – http://loki-found.bandcamp.com )
3) “Regenerative Being” – Eluvium (from: False Readings On – http://eluvium.bandcamp.com )
4) “ex” – kj (from: ex – http://dronarivm.bandcamp.com )
5) “Forest Ghosts” – Less Bells (from: Solifuge – http://lessbells.bandcamp.com )
6) “Floating into Infinity” – Benjamin Louis Brody (from: Far Away Music – http://preservedsound.bandcamp.com )
7) logotone
“A Katar with a pierced hilt, hilt made in Thanjavur, India, European blade, ca. 17th century”