Yes thank you, today I decided to make some music. Most days I don't want to make music, but I have lots to say. Days when I make music, I have nothing to say. So here, with my opportunity to say anything I want, I can't think of anything. I think this is why/how musicians are all so stupid and boring - making music is just such a boring brain-emptying thing to do that when you're doing it and immediately after you've done it you have nothing in your head at all.
I've used the heat of the last few weeks as an excuse to do nothing except get drunk and read a lot and go to the cinema a lot and I have so many daytime naps on my sofa nowadays that for the first time in my life I probably actually get the full 8-hours-a-day sleep that I am apparently supposed to.
I've done lots of long walks in London and loved them. They're surprisingly tough - five hours walking in London is harder on me than ten hours walking in the countryside. But the toughest walk I've done lately was last weekend when I went to Marwell. Usually I don't like zoos and don't like the idea of zoos or the idea of anything in cages or glass boxes or fenced into small bits of land when they really want to own the whole world.
On a train journey I look out the window at all us Brits in our tiny houses all on top of one another and I wonder how a nation can live like that - even though if there was a railway line running by my house people would look out the window at me on my knees in my tiny garden and wonder how I could live like this.
Maybe the animals at Marwell are as reasonably happy as I am living here in this tiny place. Certainly on Saturday they all looked quite contented. It was so hot and sunny and slightly breezy that I guess many of them felt at home. The day was too hot for visitors and we almost felt like we had the whole place to ourselves - it was so quiet. On my regular walks from Petersfield to Southampton I do walk round the outside perimeter of much of Marwell and on those cooler days I always hear the screams of the public - but on Saturday there was none of that - everyone was at the beach. Except us and the animals. We took every opportunity to have ice creams.
The now leopard was my favourite - so beautiful - panting gently as he sat looking out at us from the hole in his tiny-mountain home. I would've liked to have seen the huge long million-legged millipede but sadly he was hiding behind a snake - that is an odd friendship - they must be a puzzle to one another.
It was a strangely beautiful day. A friend of mine who understands these things - as much as any human can understand what an animal is feeling - says that she never loses much sleep about Marwell because they do look after the animals very well. I do wonder who is looking after us out here in our human zoo where so many seem so miserable and it is so obvious that the society we have made for ourselves is just making so many so frustrated. On these hot days we don't feel so trapped. But in a week it will be the longest day, and then next winter will be closer than last winter and our moods will diminish. Even in this beautiful freeing heat it seems that many are going doolally - stabbing one another and shouting and honking horns and no one likes anyone else.
So I shall try to stir myself a bit more now and make some more music, because in spite of music's main pleasure being that you can leave your brain at the door, it and walking and reading and tiny bits of socialising are all that I have or want to have.
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recorded this morning, photo by Neil A at Marwell last weekend.
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