It’s that time of year again: I’m making an album. In July 2001 I forked out $550 to bring Paul Winstanley down from Auckland to be engineer, hired Thistle Hall and a professional mixing desk, and somehow roped in Chris O’Connor, Chris Palmer and Simon O’Rorke as session musicians to finish off The Marion Flow (the first half of which was recorded in New Plymouth in 1999). I wasn’t as well organized as I could have been and managed to piss the guys off.
In November 2002 I spent most of the days locked away in my bedroom on Lipman Street overlooking a carpark, with a four-track tape recorder, pair of headphones, guitars and bass guitar, and smoking copious amounts of weed to record Mantis Shaped and Worrying. The intense introspection required contributed to the collapse of my relationship with my girlfriend – and I don’t think she ever ‘got’ the album.
In October 2003, with Parataxes completed through group effort, I was in a dissolute state after my contract at DOC finished. I lived in a filthy flat in Mt Cook that resembled a run-down circus sideshow, with interiors painted in bright primary colours that had faded and become dingy. The lounge featured a big mural of Where the Wild Things Are taking up the whole four walls. In a weird correspondence, the Winter Show was in town just around the corner when I moved in and we went on some of the rides as a flat; the gas stove at the flat also meant popcorn became the snack food of choice for a while. My flatmate Mike, who also played in a band the Circus Machine, thought of the place as home; I found it kind of sinister. I dragged myself right to the psychological bottom at this time for reasons I still don’t understand, but also managed to record the last few tracks for Loose Autumn Moans – was it an extreme kind of ‘method acting’ so I could get the necessary duende into the songs?
And now I’ve been putting together a DVD which I’m calling Live 2004 (an oblique reference to Bob Dylan - his great Live 1966, Live 1975 and Live 1964 albums that have come out in the last few years). The music’s all in the can, it’s just a matter of assembling it into a cohesive package. It’s video footage, so a technological leap. It’s got the Ascension Band at Meatwaters, me solo at Bomb the Space, and, since Ascension Band is partly a collaboration between myself and Nigel Patterson, the Chandeliers at the Cross to balance it out. It’s coming together nicely, still a couple of technical hurdles but I’m getting there; I designed the cover artwork yesterday.
There’s also the album ddpp: Mood Music which was recorded in 1999 during The Marion Flow sessions – I managed to get an American label Digitalis interested in releasing it. It’s quieter and more electronic than most of my stuff – mainly Paul Winstanley’s project, I just play on it. The two new albums bookend my time in Wellington, this big chapter in my life.
Around the beginning of this year I’d almost given up on making music – The Winter were in hiatus, I was way out of practice on guitar, and Loose Autumn Moans seemed like the end of the road since it used up my stockpile of songs from the previous few years. But now even with these two new albums I can see dimly into the future and won’t be giving up for a while yet. There’s the Ascension Band – Electric Symphony show in the Fringe Festival which is going to make a great album (a double might even be appropriate), and then another solo album that I’m now getting a rough idea of. I also want to get my second book of short stories out of the way over summer. It’ll be more thematically unified than Anterior Pathways and darker in tone – I’m trying to find a way of ending it without being morose. And since Creative NZ lacked the vision, taste, intelligence and foresight to grant the funding I requested to make 500 factory-stamped CD copies of my ‘best of’ compilation, I’ll just have to fund it another way – seems like a good thing to do in Australia since Dual Plover there is supposedly the best CD-making service around for independent artists.
So anyway, the artistic side of my life is proceeding nicely at the moment. I'm still losing money on it, but money’s not what it’s about – running at a loss and continuing anyway must be some token of honesty. If only I had a patron! And it would be nice to have more of an audience but I’ll just have to earn one. I’ve got gigs lined up for December: Ascension Band at Newtown Community Centre on the 18th and also an acoustic performance at Photospace Gallery a couple of days before (date tbc).
The flipside of course is that to get all this done I’ve put jobhunting on the backburner and am stuck in the doledrums. I can’t complain about unemployment since I haven’t made that much of an effort to get out of it (fired off a couple of CVs, had one interview for a job I didn’t get) - yet. I’ve been reading a lot instead, something like a book every two days on average, and I just brought back another swag of them from the library (non-fiction mix of mythology, ecology and investigative journalism this time). And I’m listening to a lot of Cecil Taylor – great complex music that demands close attention to work.
I just hope that once the albums are finished and the gigs lined up I can get into a job with a minimum of hassle. Unemployment eats away at the soul, it would be dangerous to not work and besides I need funds to travel. There’s also the element of isolation that it brings. It’s my birthday next week – hope I don’t have to spend it alone…
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