I’m beginning with a video Jason created, starring Guilaine Arts as Mrs Champion and Jason as the Bilingual PI, (watch out Jim Nettles) in Cacophonie Nocturne sur Sunset Blvd. The video represents the peak of Jason’s Russell Mulcahy period. Peak Mulcahy.
This week Jason has dropped off the first from his video series to accompany my new short long player, Music Inspired By The Museumgoer of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Jason has lots of creative control, so blame him when you see the video for Andrée X Andrée in this space next week. Russell Mulcahy is not where we are now.
It came to me in the middle of the night. Sudden. Anxiety… What if my new short full-length music collection, Music Inspired By The Museumgoer of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is sonically, not appropriately overwhelming, but marginally underwhelming. I never thought I’d ever even say those words. The fragmented tunes, inspired by all 16 Museumgoer EPs, are great. I listen to a lot of music and know this to be true, otherwise, why bother right? But... What if it doesn’t pop when it should pop or sizzle when it needs sizzle. Or just fizzles? I return to my Musuemgoer EPs and my More Specials LP and ponder… Maybe, in the middle of the night, maybe I thought, maybe I need help.
A few WhatsApps later, Boris got back to me and said he knew nothing about music. But what was that new green colour we’d used in the kitchen, he asked? And would I be interested in quietly helping him with that?
It really is a great green. But I couldn’t recall the name of it. Couldn’t help him with further greenwashing then. And anyway I thought, that’s fucking typical, when you think you need help, he’s just faffing around as ever wholly immersed in his own self-interest. What to do with friends like that.
Anway, things have advanced so far with this that there's even cover art and a tracklisting but... I don't know, maybe one of these tunes will get voted off the Island by next week...
1. Andrée X Andrée
2. The Musuemgoer of Baton Rouge
3. The Need To Feel And Be Felt
4. The Hang Ups
5. Whipped Up and Stripped Down
6. Swamped By This And That
7. Let's Get Yampi Dancing
8. The Cure
9. The Hush Hush Allotment
10. Across The Street From The House of Bad Vibes
11. The Lost Minutes of the Last Meeting of the Bearwood Lake Fountain Committee
Small Time Operations
Technically, as a small-time operator, I lean on Loudness Penalty a bit, and am tweaking these tracks so that they all sound great for you and only affront your hearing sensibilities when I want that to happen. If I was to say at the moment, the very exciting ‘Whipped Up and Stripped Down’ was apparently going to suffer a -2.6dB loudness penalty and that the Ham-Fisted-Hefti-esque ‘Let’s Get Yampi Dancing’ was to require a significant volume boost of say +2.5dB so everything lands in just around the same sonic spot when being ingested into the global distribution grinder, you might be forgiven for thinking (and it might be true) that my hearing is all over the place. It could be true. Sometimes, I think that even after all the compressors and expanders and all else, that those Yampi Dancing splash cymbals that are supposed to sound like a bone idle Clem Burke playing at the sports and social, bleed over everything and everywhere. At other moments of doubt, I don’t know whether I should have copied and pasted in a second verse nor those chord blocks on the organ solo?
The Hush Allotment
Have you tried to get an allotment lately? The Hush Hush Allotment, and I mention it because of the perfect artwork the artist Lorna Rose created - to accompany my musical commentary that concerns itself with the sort of secret deals and secret handshakes and paranoia and waiting for messages in the night that say “I’ll fix it tomo.” Makes the European Super League plans look opaque to your average fan. Oh, they actually really were. Oh, and I have been working on a greenhouse reconstruction project on the Hush Hush Allotment so this picture is perfectly piquant I'd say. If only it features a very very sunburnt person. I need to be more careful if I am to survive climate change.
I've been listening to Peter CottonTale, Sons of Kemet and Flowertown. It's really been helping.
ESSENTIAL INFO
Main Greenhouse Image by Lorna Rose
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