I’m about to drop my new EP - Blackout Baby - and finally got around to listening to the masters. They are beautiful, simply put. Delicate, and raw material. It’s always a ritual. The files come in, and I leave it for a few days. Then, headphones on, and cast, expectantly, on the mink carpet, all that yearning I’d poured into the mic in the booth in those sessions coming right on back at me—like I deserved it, the continuous WAV file bathing me in some kind of an eternal polyphony.
As my producer friend, Max, puts it in his notes on an LA/Nashville/Glasgow co-write we did back in the heights Clubhouse (when the audio-inclined and insomniac were tethered to the app and its sea of itinerant avatars): “you never know what the mic will pull out of a person”.
It’s the magic of there not being anything there, then there being something. And it’s never not mysterious.
Such pulling is intimately tied to the ‘proximity effect’ - production parlance which describes the increase of the lower frequencies, or booms, which tend to dominate when the distance between mouth and directional cardioid mic is significantly reduced. How close can one get? And to who?
With a quality condenser, such as the Neumann U87, (which I used to record both Space Junk and Blackout Baby), the recommended six inches can be pushed to around three inches. We can also ‘eat the mic’, which really complicates things.
“I love the raw aesthetic,” said Nick, the engineer, on first hearing the mixdowns.
“Reminds me of Cat Power’s debut Dear Sir (1995). And have you heard What Would the Community Think (1996)? Take a listen, I think you’d like it.”
The world is such a mess. I’m doing my best not to open The Guardian, or any of them. (It might be preferable to live in a Vermeer painting and exist by candlelight, chores and all. I’ve no problem being a painter’s muse. It happened once.)
Losing the ends of words—complete in my flawed diction—caressing hidden corners, and retrieving soul. ‘You call me a lunatic / And I like it, I like it.’
The internal reviewer recommends that I …don’t hide behind the words, she needs better signposting and orientation.
It is perhaps of note, I write, that I insist upon (self) production (which is where our power lies), yet go out on a blackout.
Such a formal ploy or neat negation makes perfect sense to me, collapsing structure, and effectively erasing myself from the text but my subversive dalliance goes unnoticed. What is more, it’s probably a character flaw that I’ve no real interest in taking the reader by the hand, and guiding them through the text, even though I’ve heard that very same advice coming out of my own mouth on more than one occasion. But then, you’re also talking to someone who’s gone and released a three hour five-piece 34 track experimental album which no one will give the time of day in our one second world. This being all the more the case when “no one knows who you are”.1 Still, the songs aren’t going anywhere, and I own my masters. Songs don’t abandon us; we abandon them.
This has been a messy, organic project, I am quoted in the review. It could do with being distilled (a word I’ve always loved) and radically restructured. But mess rarely gets admitted in write-ups, doctoral or otherwise, when perhaps it should.
Circa 2003, I had a cleaning job at the art school. My boyfriend got me the job, as he knew the boss, Sandy, a merciless and stony-faced chain smoker. Died of it not long after.
There was another cleaner on the team, called Alan, who resembled The Penguin. He had greasy black hair, combed to one side and was permanently flushed, it could have been rosacea.
On occasion, I’d take a break from my figure of eights, and watch him through the glass.
“He’s cleaning with the light off, again,” I’d go and tell my boyfriend, who was tipping up the bin looking for dregs, whilst trying to ditch it.
One time, I found myself alone with Alan so I asked him why he kept the lights off. He said it made no difference either way, which I kind of got. Besides, my own cleaning left much to be desired.
Basically, I’d clock the BIG PILE OF MESS right in front of me. But rather than get to the BIG PILE OF MESS right away, I’d do all the other bits first. It was some kind of twisted strategy that meant that all there was left to do in my mind was deal with the BIG PILE OF MESS still right in front of me rather than risk being given more to do. (Come to think of it, it could have been early warning signs of ‘strategic incompetence’ kicking in.)
There was an unfortunate downside to my untenable rationale, though, in that Sandy would pop her head around the door, on cruising the corridors, and, being hit by the BIG PILE OF MESS still right in front of me, get shirty.
Whereas with Alan, well, he’d go straight to the BIG PILE OF MESS as it was all he could see and she’d be happy.
I raise this now as I suspect I’m probably doing something similar here—skipping around the margins, opening back doors, and side cupboards. Hiding out in stairwells, and stealing time; my line of flight being caught up in a tangent of swallows over the lake, heading south.
When I was a kid, we went on Sunday afternoon trips to garden centres. It was one of the only times that we were ‘fully functional’ as a family. Dad would pull up in whatever car he’d hired that month, ranging from white vans to Mercedes, and we’d all leap out the back.
Mum is a gardener, and all our gardens in the various houses we lived in were always well-kept, mowed, and manicured. One time, a neighbour, two doors down, stole our palm tree on his way back from the pub. When Mum went around, he denied it.
Mooching around the plants, stone statues, and specimen trees, I’d mouth their Latin names without having any idea what Latin was but liking the way the italics went. I’d then get caught monitoring the tanks in the aquarium, absorbing their slowing down time powers.
Later on, at Middle School, came the Fortune Teller Miracle Fish. Not only could this mercurial property predict the future, but it could also tell if your boyfriend was kissing your best mate behind your back, or whether your best friend was truly your best mate for life, or only until next week. The best bit was that if you didn’t like the answer you got, you could always go again.
The Fortune Teller Miracle Fish is manufactured by Fortune Teller Fish.2 Upon the mechanics, the company claim that: “the fish's movements describe specific emotions, moods, and temperament of the person holding the fish. A moving head means the fish-holder is the jealous type, while a motionless fish indicates that the person is a ‘dead one.’ Curling sides mean that the person is fickle, but if the fish curls up entirely, the holder is passionate.
If the fish turns over, the holder is ‘false,’ but if its tail moves, she is an indifferent type. And a moving head and tail? Well, watch out because that person is in love.”
I liked the fact that I often curled up entirely.
The reality, though, is that the fish is made out of sodium polyacrylate, like baby diapers, and it works because only one side of the fish is wedded to the sweat glands in your palm at any one time, stopping it from getting
attached.
I ran away on the first day of primary school. A friend who was in the same class told me this twenty years later, swearing it to be true. I don’t recall my exit route but I do have a vision of me running across the playground and nearly into the brick wall. In my mind, I was on my way home, my school uniform caught up in violent gusts.
The above photograph was taken in a field in the middle of England. I’d be very sad if the tree were ever to be cut down, or the land sold off to developers (which I expect it will be, someday), its coupled branches invoking me to disobey the rule of thirds whenever the sky comes into the equation.
It’s gone midnight. 00:14.
01:00.
W/m on. Quick wash. Plunge prices.
The security lights over on the shipping yard are treading upon the swans, their necks folded in,
drifting,
always in twos. But never
together.
Whenever one drifts too far, the other
lessens the gap.
Thanks for reading Blackout Baby.
On a totally unrelated note, I found myself re-playing this footage of tourists3 posted on social media by the group Venezia Non è Disneyland (Venice Is Not Disneyland), morbidly fascinated by the way the woman is gripping her phone, to the point that it’s stopping her getting a hold of the gondola she’s trying to get into.
Upcoming dates
For Glasgow peeps, the next gig is with GIOdynamics at The Glad Cafe, on 20 December. Doors 7:30 PM. *Bring mistletoe.
Damien Keyes. How to Get 1000 Genuine Fans in 30 Days (youtube.com)
Helmenstine, Anne Marie, Ph.D. "How Does the Fortune Teller Miracle Fish Work?" ThoughtCo, Dec. 26, 2021, thoughtco.com/how-fortune-teller-miracle-fish-works-607867.
Venice gondola capsizes after tourists refuse to sit down and stop taking selfies | Venice | The Guardian