Four shots of tequila.
Maybe you’ll die
Or just meet a floor you like
Greased by the previous occupants
And full up with your dreams.
Or maybe not.
It can hold your hand
Cradle your head.
Doesn’t mind the slurred come-ons
Or misplaced groping.
Wishing so much that we had done something better sometimes that occasionally we wondered our silent moments further and further away. And then end up waiting, lost in sight of the all-together smug and smiling face of what once was, and what still may be. Those glorious other places are always just that: other places. Ones that shine maybe more, maybe slightly brighter than we are able to now. Someone else might remember those days. Moments when I might have known better but didn’t. There are danker days I could live in, just holding on. Or I could love the better ones, those that resonate further and deeper than my formerly small efforts at joy ever could. Those stomping colours that weren’t just neon and gold, they loved me back. Those moments seemed glorious, and we might be glorious still. Those days, the ones that make me think of when I was a child, and I can remember the possibility seemed dashing enough; that for one split second, I might forget all my betrayals and launch myself into the sky.
A slight delay, but look for the the full release of these semi-improvised piano works in a small collection sometime in the first part of September.
Grey dreaming on an windy coast. The sky pulls against itself, clouds creating small vortex’s for as far as can be seen, shifting and churning in counterpoint with the crashing waves. They stretch out tall and long, like the ocean’s own thoughts…but they are not like mine, which always crash back to earth. Plummeting soundlessly and lying in heaps upon an empty beach.
The first track from a forthcoming small collection of semi-improvised piano works. They were conceived loosely as concepts set in a particular key, rhythm, tonal structure or quality, and in some cases just a ‘feeling’, then recorded immediately with little preparation.
The recordings predate the EP, but have never been released. They are being given slight gloss up and a rearranged running order. It looks like there’ll be at least six pieces included of an original thirteen, possibly more, enough to make up another tiny EP which should be available some time over the next couple of weeks.
It has been some weeks since the EP was released, and as expected the focus in now shifting to what happens next. Recent weeks have consisted of striking a balance between the ongoing work of trying to get the music around to people and places, rehearsing and general planning. In that time the possibilities as to what I’d like to see happen here and with the project over the coming months (and year) have been gestating, and as a bit of an update I thought I’d share some of them.
There might be a couple of videos for songs from EP; exciting, as it would be a collaborative effort with some folks who I think do really good work. It’s something I’d like very much like to happen, but don’t know for sure yet, and it may take some time.
Rehearsing has inevitably led to working up some new songs, and in some cases having even newer songs occur, as well as development of what the shape of the eventual long form LP will look like. There are two in particular that I’ve known for the past several weeks are somewhat in between in terms of where they belong. They didn’t fit at the time with the EP, though have some things in common with it, and they don’t seem to place with the eventual LP either. They could be recorded with the same resources, location etc, that was used for the EP. They’re decent songs, and a little different so I’m going to record them as sort of ‘one-offs’ and release them when they’re done, or as a sort of free A/B side digital single, with no real A-Side. They head off in a different direction a little bit, and I’m excited to get working on them in more detail.
There is a moderate pile of old/unreleased stuff kicking around. Not all of it is light-of-day-worthy, but if there’s enough interest some odd things might find their way out in some fashion. There is a plan in place to remaster a series of semi-improvised piano works from a while back, and make a shortened free release of them, initially doing so one at a time as an interdisciplinary and collaborative music/photography/writing series.
Another bit of work at the moment involves looking and applying for funding and support to help the project go forward. In an effort to expand its scope, any help, however small, goes a long way.
Shows? Hopefully. Working on it, or towards translating the songs suitably. They’ll have to be stripped down at first, but I’m hoping a larger-scale format will emerge soon.
For anyone who hasn’t heard it, you can listen to and purchase the EP over here. Also, If anyone wants to help in circulating it, that would be most welcome — please pass it on to anyone at all who might be interested, and if you have any ideas or suggestions as to how to reach more ears, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. There are a limited number of CD’s available, and if you’d like a copy, know someone who might, or where one should be sent, please write to: aquietend@intimatehistory.com.
What would you like to see here in the coming months? Please post any suggestions, notions, or questions in the comments, and I’ll answer them directly or in a future post.
—
Trying still to burn more, and brighter.
So in working on the current web overhaul, and with the release of music finally coming towards the end of this week, I’ve been taking a look at the various bits of ‘bio’ material written up over time to see if any of it is still useful. It’s an interesting process, because new, more concise info blurbs need written, but it leaves you wondering that while what’s old may no longer be representative, how much of it is carried forward into new and revised incarnations?
In the spirit of this undertaking here is something written in a rare clear-seeing moment in hazy 2007. In a lot of ways it still captures the core desire (for lack of a better term) of the project that in many ways still holds true, even if it’s a little overwrought; as well as what doing it meant on a personal level when it first emerged as an idea, even if it would take some time yet to form more tangibly.
This is the part about purpose and meaning. This is where we make a sales pitch. This is what makes you either believe or turn the page. That decision is up to you. We offer only ourselves, but not a packaged version of ourselves. We tire of image heavy culture that lacks real ideas and imagination and pretentious bands that sound alike and yet claim to be a revolution. We’re sick of surface meaning. Irony for the sake of being ironic, self-conscious stabs at nothing; it is meaningless and exhausting. We never want to hear another shoulder shaking anthem about going out on a Saturday night again. What happened to the poets? Art is a catalogue of human trials, tears, love, evil, misery, illusions, delusions, imaginations, high hopes and bitter failures. It is beauty and ugliness existing in the same frame. It is duality and unity simultaneously. It is not a way to get laid after the show. Of course, this in itself is pretentious, but we don’t want you to buy into anything or dress like anyone. We want you to think. To reach deep into you inner recesses and find that the universe exists as much there as it does all around you. We want you to know that we think music can facilitate this no matter what we look like. If you don’t like this now, come back later, maybe you’re mind will have changed. Also this will continuously evolve. What is presented now is only the skeleton, the meat will form over time. Be open-minded, apathy serves no purpose.
Creation unfolds around us, despite us, and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it “love.
— David Mitchell
Sunday morning. I’m lying next to a stranger in a bed that belongs to neither of us. Nothing has happened, and at this moment it’s nice to have the human comfort without sexual escapades, as rare and simple a thing as that can be. It’s a gentle kind of morning; and despite the early hour and the preceding night, a hangover is nowhere to be found. The moment is pleasant in its oddness, staring up at the ceiling, drifting outside of myself next to someone who doesn’t know me, and for whatever reason it’s astonishingly easy and strangely comfortable.
She shifts her gaze from the far wall and looks at me. “I’m going to have a shower.”
Was that an invitation? Do I care? The answers to both I think, are no. Despite being in someone else’s apartment, she digs out a towel with ease and finds her way into the shower like we were waking up in one of our own.
I sift around and find the pot that also belongs to neither one of us and begin to roll a joint. It’s Sunday, I think, no problem. The truth is I’ve spent far too many mornings in my life, Sundays and otherwise, high enough to decay whole days of self, and not just on pot. Regardless, the inclination is always suspect, but I’m in a good mood, and have seemingly gotten much better at dealing with myself in recent months. Although I appear to be ignoring the fact that I’m in the midst of two straight weeks of going hard, and have been conveniently forgetful in noticing how much this stretches as a theme over my recent year of ‘good living’, or attempt at better living, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The sky is that blanch colour of midwinter, bright enough to not be dreary, and pleasing in its calm monochrome.
She emerges from the shower just as I finish, wrapped in a towel. I hold up the newly spun joint, glue still drying. She nods.
Holding the towel in place across her chest, she climbs back into the bed I have yet to leave, yanking up the covers and moving in close.I fish around for a lighter but can only find matches. The smell of sulphur briefly fills the room. I pull, thinking about how I sometimes still miss smoking cigarettes for the act more than the cigarettes themselves, once again ignoring my willingness to indulge, as evidenced last night, and instead treating it as something that is still very much separate from me — an equally indulgent self-deception. I hand the joint over to her, she switches hands on the towel to receive it.
“It would have been great if we could’ve gotten some coke last night,” she observes in hindsight. I think the more accurate reality is that if we had, we’d still be doing it now, and speculate that it’d be more likely something would have happened between us. I remember that she asked at the bar, and I had begged off, though knowing exactly where we could have gone to sniff some out.
“Do you like it?”
“Sure, I guess…” I say.
She raises an eyebrow in note of my hesitancy and passes the joint back. I begin trying to explain why I feel like I need to stay away; half-hearted justifications spill forth in my typically evasive and vague manner. I leave out that it scares me, the potential black hole that’s always around, and how it seems to grow wider when going to certain places, even if they are supposedly fun. That sense I’m always masking one thing or another. That I hide from myself, and I’d like to stop, even though the notion of stepping into my self fully is a terrifying prospect for so many reasons. That I’m likely not over it either. It means accepting far too many things more consciously than I am willing. Physical intimacy has often been the only way to throw open all of the tower doors and occasionally tear down the walls, a fleeting yet actual way of widening the cracks and peering into the core. At this moment with her, I’m just in it for the tenderness, which used in such a manner is in itself just another fix. Knowing all of this is incredibly useful, but I wish that I could make myself actually get it better. The going in circles is tiring and predictable, a more dynamic stuck-in-the-middle, but one that still goes nowhere.
She holds her quizzical gaze, a slight smile touching the corners of her mouth, but says nothing. Should have just said yes, I think to myself, mostly people want simple answers.
“This isn’t entirely different,” she says, telling me something I already know in response to my one-quarter explanations. She hauls one more time before handing the joint back to me and hopping out from under the covers. She walks to the far corner of the room and begins to sort through her things while I continue smoking pensively. I watch her dig around and wonder about the curious and yet clinical ease with which we’re able to do this. It doesn’t often happen in such a way, even with people you know, but perhaps that’s the burden of history.
This particular lack of awkwardness feels easy, though it’s not one that is possessed of any actual depth of feeling. It’s nice in this moment, but only because we don’t actually care about each other.
I sit up in bed and peer at her over a couch. “Do you want to make out?” I ask, completely stoned and with a childish grin on my face.
She laughs quickly at this and gives me a quick look as she continues rifling through her things; one of those looks. “Actually, I have someone,” she explains, “If I didn’t we’d have done more by now.”
I scoff exaggeratedly. “That’s a mighty big assumption,” I jokingly inform her. This is met with more laughter. I flop back down on the bed and sigh. The question was more one of obligation than actual interest, and the answer suits me fine. I’ve been purposefully alone for some months recently and don’t know that it’s something I really wish to change.
Suddenly I find myself speaking again. “There’s somebody I love too,” I tell her, “but they’re really far away and we’re not together. So it’s different.” This isn’t an attempt at an excuse, or presenting a not-wounded ego. For some reason I only want to tell her the truth, and for myself, have a brief moment of no longer hiding in vagaries. Saying it aloud though makes me realize how strangely different from anything that feeling and the experience of it has been in my life recently, and that this is the first time I’ve actually said the words out loud. Even to myself
“Lucky girl,” she notes.
“Yeah…” I trail off, lost in it all, and uncertain of the accuracy of this statement.
She turns her back to me and pulls on her jeans from yesterday, dropping the towel as she does. No underwear, I note, unable to remember whether she had been wearing any last night.
“I think you know how good looking you are,” she says, turning back to me and clipping her magenta bra behind her. I balk at this random statement, a number of insecurities flare in my mind, suddenly painfully aware of all the things I can’t seem to ignore and am afraid of as I grow older, yet marveling at the torrent of compliments that seem to have come recently from the oddest places. If only they’d fix something.
She catches on to my waffling. “You should really think so. It’s true, and you’re not even my type… a little feminine maybe.”
I never know what to say to things like this. What does that mean? I think to myself, slightly uncomfortable with the direction the conversation has gone. But it’s okay; she isn’t my type either, if I were to have one.
She sits down on the end of the bed, still buttoning up her shirt. “What kind of women do you like?” She inquires, smiling again.
“I’m not sure how to answer that, or that I know,” I say. “Why do you ask?”
“I’ll bet you like,” a pause, her eyes narrow slightly, “complicated women.”
I laugh at this. Is she right? “Why do you say that?”
She shrugs and smiles again warmly. “Because you yourself are complicated, and maybe you hope for the understanding.”
For someone I’ve known for less than twelve hours this could be considered a fairly astute observation. I think back to some of my more problematic relationships, that they were often accompanied by a person with a much starker perspective than my own, and too many divisions of difference.
“Maybe that’s true, but it’s near impossible to see yourself from the outside,” I tell her. “Sometimes I think that thinking everything as so complicated stops me from being simple, which is more likely the truth.”
“I don’t know about that. I think you just are,” says this girl who told me I had nice aura within thirty seconds of our meeting, “you’re different anyway.”
She’s not a new-ager as far as I can tell, or at least doesn’t seem as such. Well-educated, excellent job, works with children, psychology background. Maybe that explains the probing. I think that to her I must be some kind of oddity. Truth is, I’m tired of being an experiment for different people; I’ve never understood the fascination.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing either.”
This may be true, but it certainly doesn’t make it easy.
She asks me to write out directions to where she thinks she left her car, explaining she had promised to let her brother borrow it later this morning, and has a long drive ahead of her back home after that.
“I’ll give you a ride,” I offer, considering that it’s time I got dressed anyway. “I’ll shower later,” I reassure her, noticing she’s antsy to get going.
“Thanks,” she says, putting her hand on my leg, “that’d really help. I don’t really want to rush off but…”
I wave my hand. “Don’t even worry,” I tell her. The day blazes nicely in its subtle grey and suddenly I feel the need to be outside myself. Whatever was here with us this morning has come and gone anyway, I can feel its absence.
We make our way to the car in relative quiet, and the drive to where her car was left is punctuated by mostly mundane chit chat. The getting-to-know-you’s that were either forgone the previous night, or have simply been forgotten, fill the space between us.
We arrive and she climbs out, turning back before shutting the passenger door. “Maybe we’ll see each other again sometime,” she says before closing it.
Maybe, I consider for an instant, but probably not.
So once again a whole month has ticked off the calendar with little in the way of updates. I know, I know, I’m not following through on what I had intended; the reasons as to why are legion, but I’m not sure I have my finger on them completely.
Through posts in February, I had noticed I’d sit down after working all day and try and write something only to not finish. Largely this was due to mental exhaustion, and not feeling I had the chops after having already spent eight to ten hours plugging away on music. Combine this with my self-imposed and overly critical need to only do ‘good writing’ (whatever the fuck that means), I ended up with a whole bunch of half finished items and ideas that haven’t made it anywhere. Instead, because it was easy, I noticed I began posting more songs, videos and little things from other places to try to fill space and keep making regular updates. There’s nothing wrong with this - certainly, it’s what most tumblr users do a good part of the time - but it wasn’t what I had intended to use the space for. So I halted altogether. I think mostly subconsciously, because I knew I wasn’t being true to the idea of what this space was to represent and how it was to function.
Also, as February rolled over into March some things went down that brought about some questioning and a little bit of desperation. Those moments where everything in life seems wrong and you realize how little, despite so much effort to the contrary, peace with yourself you’ve actually managed to achieve, and give yourself a hard time over everything because of it. This is all exaggerated by negative life events of course, even non-serious ones, but sometimes they have a way of dragging up all kinds of other things that have been lurking about for far too long, waiting for a chance to try and best you. Things have improved a lot, but some degree of vague fragility has remained for a while, the kind that feels like it takes a lot of effort to keep glued everything together. For a time, even working at all became extremely difficult.
Sometime in all of this, I also became more self-conscious about what I’d consider writing and putting up. I found myself questioning what was worth writing about, and what was interesting (again, what does that even mean?) and began to see so much subject matter as boring, self-involved, pointless and on and on. This definitely had the effect of leading to a kind of self-censorship, and every time I sat down to try and write I’d get in my own way of letting anything flow freely and openly, which of course doesn’t lead to anything worth reading.
Much of what I had initially set out to do in this space was explore the ins and outs of getting a musical project off the ground, perhaps in a different manner and from unique point of view. There are a number of issues, creative and otherwise, that I’ve neglected to delve into and should have - mostly for the reasons mentioned above. Despite this, the work is coming along well enough, if a little slower than hoped. An E.P. should be making an appearance in the (hopefully) very near future, and there are many more songs and things to follow. What I discovered though, was that after spending so much time with the playing, recording, editing, mixing, and everything that goes along with a project like this, the notion of writing about it (let alone having to pay attention to grammar and the like) with an already fried brain wasn’t particularly a good one. The details of this process themselves are often tedious, even though the victories outweigh them; they are often too short-lived and infrequent to make daily postings about.
Still, there are a lot of related things I could have been discussing, and certainly it probably would have been useful to do so; perhaps allowing more objectivity to emerge in working through certain creative problems and roadblocks.
I said at the beginning that I had figured on this evolving, and certainly it has. I’m not trying to keep to a rigid, fenced-in, idea of what it should or shouldn’t be, but I haven’t made enough use of it either, mostly due to a combination of being busy, intimidated, bogged down and occasionally self-limiting. I can only say that I will do better.
And always, thank you for reading/listening/being here.
I neglected to mention another reason as to why there has been so little said lately: if possible, I try to avoid forcing things to come. It’s a tricky road to go down, and I find it usually leads to the kind of clunky and uninspired output that I often end up shaking my head at upon going back to. I encountered this today in an entirely different context and it reminded me of other times when I’ve tried to forcibly make the muse speak, or at least say something in particular. Sometimes the pressure to say anything at all drowns out the small voice that speaks with the most clarity. Then of course there are times where there’s nothing. Not completely nothing, only nothing clear; and what’s there is shapeless and not about to offer itself up out of the murk anytime soon. Of course, I’ve still done this from on occasion; tried to make it happen despite knowing full well I’d be unhappy with the result. I’ve been guilty of it here. Maybe I’m even guilty of it now. There’s so much that’s said just to fill space. Noise that exists only by virtue of being heard and yet saying nothing. The only thing that can cut through is meaning, and meaning is something that no one can coerce.
An exploration into a multitude of processes, creative and otherwise.
aquietend@gmail.com
More information can be found through the network links to the left.
A self-titled EP is available and can be found here as a free download.
'Past Fragments' is a newly released series of instrumentals, which also available for free digitally via
bandcamp.
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