First off, oh dear yes apologies for putting a price on the download. According to the stats approx zero people have visited my BC page this week and maybe even month, but this will probably be the one day when someone calls in and they'll see that I've sold out and am trying to become rich and famous via my amazing musical skills ..... there is just so much ludicrously wrong with the way this sentence is going that I shall now stop.
By way of consolation as well as further apology I will say that of course there is software out there that freely downloads absolutely anything and now that I think about it I do believe that I use it myself - and the good thing about being old (me) is that my hearing is so duff that I can't tell the difference between 128 and FLAC.
And also, of course, my pieces are so samey and long that you have to wonder why anyone would download them. My pieces are designed to go on so long that the listener finally tires of hearing them for their whole lifetime long before the piece reaches its end. I hope that last sentence makes sense.
I have no plans to ever remove this BC page and it will only vanish when BC themselves finally tire of hosting someone whose music is as direly uncommercial and unlucrative as mine - I should think that about half of the big BC storage hard-drive thingy is full of my music and they're bound to want to have a clear-out eventually.
So anyone can keep on coming back here and hearing anything for as long as they like. I still don't quite get why we're all supposed to be so horrified by the Global Capitalist promise that we will own nothing and be happy. I like being happy, and I want to own as little as possible. If hearing my/any music means I have to go onto BC and click play, rather than find it in one of my millions of external hard-drives and click play, well, what of it ? Sure, it's harder to get BC music to play on repeat. But who on earth would ever want to hear anything nowadays on repeat ? Who has the time ?
I haven't ticked that box in the BC background that is supposed to limit the number of times someone can play any piece of music. But truly, if you would like to download any of my pieces properly and for free, then do tell me and I'll change the prices or whatever it takes. It's just that - another reason - I lose track of what's going on - I may not be much of a musician, but I'm certainly not a statistician - and suddenly I notice that someone new has come along and downloaded the one or two dozen recent-ish albums that are free and suddenly my 200 freebies each month gets perilously close to zero - and then everything suddenly goes to $7 or something and there aren't many shops in Southampton that accept dollars.
The photo was taken a few weeks ago - on a walk to Salisbury. I haven't been on a walk for a while. I like to do about one a week, but it has now been weeks of lack. It's like when I was so much more strongly addicted to booze. I get these sudden flashbacks to moments and places along my favourite walks and I realise that everything else that I'm doing is so much less than just being out alone walking fast across fields for tens of miles, knowing the way without a map or app or gap in my knowledge - fitting the country together in my head - knowing every step of the way from my front door to Newbury, and beyond to Wales.
But things keep blocking my life. I have too many late nights or it rains or I make promises to people on days that would've been perfect for walking but instead I must try to entertain them and pretend to be entertained by them. Last night I went to see Neil Cowley at Turner Sims - sometimes he was dull, sometimes he was wonderful - and because I always sit in the front row I can't be much of a people-watcher - but I can't help but be a people-listener. And again, all I heard from the happy couples and groups around me was the same brain-dead join-the-dots conversation-by-numbers chatter that apparently helps towards making a life more full.
If my BC page ever gets any visitors, then I hope that my main meaning-of-life (ish) point for today will pass on - that being solitary and being unpopular and having no fans is a lot better for the mental well-being of quiet people such as myself, and maybe you too. I do have quite a lot of friends, and I do more socialising than the average person, I think. But I only get through it because it means so little to me. Oddly, this music means much more to me. And if you'd seen the casual too-fast way I made it this morning, you'd realise that that's not a lot either.
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recorded this morning, photo by me from Michelmersh a few weeks ago
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