Circles I

A lot of you will think "two albums in one month? Are you mental? And the answer to that is probably 'yes'.

But, you have to believe me when I say that I actually never intended for so many records to all come out at once. Circles I is only happening now, because Providence has already been and gone - that was already delayed anyway, so everything has been squished into this mad pile of stuff that will be chipped away at during the course of 2021. 

Anyway, Circles I.

First off, here it is for pre-order (or regular order if you're reading this after Friday)

I feel I should write something about it, as it's quite a strange record. It all started back in the glorious summer of 2020 *Scooby Doo style flashback* - I'd just moved house (for the second time in about 6 months - not recommended), to where I am now - a little terrace in Saltaire. It's really nice here, and the weather was also really nice, so I sat down and thought about making some new stuff. I played around with a few bits, and before long I had two sort of sounds going: loop station guitar ambience, and jittery electronica stuff, aided by the purchase of several sample packs. Now, if you don't know what sample packs are, they're sort of a cheat code for anyone who doesn't have thousands of pounds (or dollars if you want to get American about this) to throw at vintage gear - why pay for the machine, when you can pay considerably less for some wav files of someone playing the machine? I opted for the latter, as the former would've broken my bank, but the upshot is I was playing around with all these samples - slashing them up, pitching them all over the place, speeding them up, slowing them down, y'know, just generally fucking with them. It was great fun, and inspired me to keep making more and more stuff.

After a few months, I had so much new material (I blame the football season being delayed - you'd be lucky to get a two track single out of me if it hadn't), I aimed for a double album. I sequenced them, and then had a brainwave. Why do just a regular album, when you can be really difficult and do a sort of mixtape/ unskippable album, like that weird dEUS thing! 

I'm a bit enthusiastic when it comes to doing weird things, especially with music. I like the idea of resurrecting older technologies and techniques, as nothing really matters anymore in terms of music biz stuff. Certainly not at my level anyway - it's quite liberating to be able to do any mad thing you like. Although I suppose the trade off is you never get big or make any money, but that's by the by for now.

Anyway, one of my favourite bands, dEUS, did this album back in 1994 called 'My Sister = My Clock' - it was a stop-gap release, especially for fans signed up to their mailing list, to tide them over until their second album proper 'In A Bar Under The Sea' came out the following year. For some reason, they decided to sequence it all as one track, so you couldn't skip anything and had to listen to the whole thing if you wanted to get the full experience. It reminded me of those CDs you'd get back in the day, where you rewound the first track and got a secret song. So I thought, sod it - I'm gonna copy dEUS and do this thing as one big mixed song, one big track, and see what happens. It might be stupid, it might not work, or it might be a cool bit of fun. I guess you'll decide that, but I liked the idea, and so sequenced two albums worth of material like this. Circles II will appear at some point in the year, but for now, enjoy Circles I. 

Oh, and those field recordings interspersed between songs on the album are made by me - I walked around Roberts Park and recorded it on my phone. I thought if I was taking you on a little journey with this one big track, I could also try and take you somewhere by recording the sounds on my doorstep.

ENJOY!