BoC

I had some time to kill the other day, so went for a pint and popped my headphones on. "Ah yeah, Music Has the Right to Children!" I said, queueing it up for the millionth time in my life. 

This band, and these albums... just fucking amazing aren't they?

MHTRTC was probably the first electronic album I properly got into. Back when I first heard it at the start of the 00s, I was still a bit of a guitar guy - granted it was more the weirder side of guitar stuff, and was less about the britpop I'd grown up listening to, but I'd not branched out into the wider world of weird electronica just yet. 

Kid A hit the suburbs like a freight train btw - we were all middle class nerdy kids living in small villages in the north of England, and not exactly clued up on what was happening outside of Melody Maker and NME, so when Radiohead came along and starting citing people like Autechre, BoC, Aphex, Squarepusher, etc. it led us all down the path to disover what this stuff was for ourselves. 

I'd been exposed to my fair share of electronic and dance music through being a kid in the early 90s, and having a brother who was a budding DJ - I'd hear stuff like Underworld, Cassius, Hybrid, all that Roule stuff, etc. it was fun, but there wasn't anything that quite matched my unabashed love of the melancholic in all that, until that is I downloaded 'Kaini Industries' from some file sharing network I've now completely forgotten about.

That first compact hit - I'd chosen that one to download as it was super short, so wouldn't take very long to download on a dial up modem - crept up on me. I'd always thought it had a nice little sound, but it took a while to investigate further. Once those wobbly, fluid synth lines has embedded themselves in my skull, I was ready - I remember listening to their first albums on repeat. Think it was Geogaddi I got first, via CDwow.com, which shipped tax free from Hong Kong, so you could get CDs on the cheap. What a time.

I loved everything about it, in and outside of the actual music - the way the band operated was so special, the fact you didn't know much about these dudes, but snatched glimpses of their process, the fact you had to rely on these albums as transmissions. 

I remember I used to put 'like Mogwai and Boards of Canada' on early satan press releases, as I wanted to fuse a sort of bastard child between them both. Creepy synths and glacial guitars, packed into 2-3 minute tracks, that was how satan went in the early days.

It's also hilarious that for a band that prided itself on mysterious analogue gear, every new plugin going has something or other that makes things sound exactly like BoC.

That's just a cheap cop-out though, you can't force yourself to sound like Boards - it has to come from somewhere, and where they were coming from was a deeply personal place, indebted to fading childhood memories, that old nostalgia for something you barely remember. The past truly being a different country. The mixture of emotions that brings - something you cherish, but can never repeat ever again, something so beautiful, but you have to leave behind forever, fits perfectly into their chosen sound of bitcrushed hip hop beats, TV samples and all those LFO heavy woozy synth lines.

But the best thing about it all, is that you can just jettison all that if you want and just enjoy it on a very surface level. You can just sit and enjoy the melodies, the shimmering guitars of Dayvan Cowboy, the pummeling rhythms of Gyroscope, the skittering madness of XYZ. They're like Lynch movies - you can remove all the context if you like and just bathe in the weirdness of it all, and you can do that here - just enjoy it, no need for any extra detail if you don't want.

But ah man, what a fucking band though eh? What a fucking band.

Subtle Manoeuvers

It's a weird one, grief.

People deal with it in different ways, but it doesn't stop it being a hard thing to process. My mum rang me back in June to say that her brother, my uncle, had passed away whilst on a break to Skegness. He'd been dealing with cancer for the past 5 or so years, but it still came as a shock - my mum was obviously really upset, I was gutted - my aunt and uncle on my mum's side had always been there, always there with a card every birthday, always there with a smile. 

After the initial shock, and then the funeral a few weeks back, I decided I wanted to do something to honour him, to do something nice in the face of something so sad. The only thing I know how to really do is make silly little tapes with my stupid band name on, so that's what I did and that's what is out today. It's an album called Subtle Manoeuvers (s/o Franz Kafka for the title inspo) and it's a pretty laid back atmospheric dub techno sort of thing

It's funny, because I wasn't planning on releasing much this year- I wanted to do The Future Can Wait, then take a bit of a break from everything, but the universe obviously had other plans in mind. 

Around May and June, when the weather was super nice, I was inspired to just sit in my studio room after work and wind down by putting some very languid sort of golden hours stuff together, and before long I had 4 tracks done and dusted - just keeping it all relatively simple and relaxed - all the guitars and synth were done in one take each, save for a few bum notes here and there that I ended up chopping out, it's on the record how I played it originally - just messing about over the track. It fit so well! 

Anyway, it's all done and it's out now and I'm donating every last penny to Cancer Research UK in the memory of my uncle, Brian Davis. 

If you don't buy tapes, or whatever, that's fine and understandable - just go donate something to the charity here and tell them I sent you haha.

Dance, monkey!

I stopped posting anything to social media the other week, more as a little experiment to myself than anything deeper, but I gotta say: absolutely nothing happened lol.

Did I feel better? I'm afraid to say, yes I did. Instantly, to be honest with you. 

Now I'm not stupid. I know I can't just come off social media, especially as a DIY artist- stuff like Insta is still a big channel, but is it the be all and end all? I don't think so, funnily enough.

 

I don't know of a channel to reach people that's as useless as Insta. Most Meta websites are lousy these days. I've never had as many existential breakdowns and long nights of the soul as I do with Meta products. What's the real point of Instagram? Bands were told back in the early days that social media would revolutionise everything, and reaching fans had never been easier, so we jacked in everything and moved on these apps. It's been almost two decades of this shit now, and not once have I heard anyone try to stop and reconsider whether this was a good thing or not, or whether we should maybe come up with a new idea. 

I'm not doing stupid fucking dances on tiktok, and my body reacts with visceral hatred everytime I see a slick 'comedy' skit on Insta reels, and I think I just reached a breaking point where I sat and thought 'what the fuck is any of this anymore?', like seriously - what's the fucking point? What is it doing? Why does it never even come close to reaching all my followers? why do I have to constantly perform for it, despite the fact it doesn't do the one thing I want it to: reach fans with news.

Meanwhile, my Bandcamp mailing list just bulldozes its way into all my fans' inboxes with non-flashy text based emails telling everyone what I'm doing or what I have coming up. No need to find funny pictures or do fucking videos of me talking, none of this 'oh you have to show your face to game the alogrithm' shite. Just 'bam - here you go, have some fucking news'. Haha.

That's not to say that all social media is bad, or that I'm jacking it all in and leaving to live in a cabin in the woods, far from it - I like stupid memes as much as the next person, but perhaps being mostly offline from it rather than constantly online is the way to go. For my own brain at least.

It's just stuff, stuff, stuff, constantly, all the time. Stop with the stuff! I'm fed up of the stuff! haha, I just want to put little tapes out and sit with them for a little while. I don't want to get lost in an endless sea of slop and 'content' - I want to just sit with things and let them sink in for a little bit. It's nice! It's lovely, just not feeling like you need to constantly do stuff all the time - I'm not a fucking youtuber, I'm a musician. I'm not getting the tiktok AI voice to narrate an unboxing video. I'm not talking into the camera with a 'whats up guys?!' - I'm going to sit in this room and make some tunes and you're going to listen to them and then decide if you want to buy them, that's it. 

what. is. social. media. doing. for. me? WHAT IS IT DOING FOR ANY OF US?

Answers on a postcard lol.

Go Real Slow (again)

Had a new release out again didn't I?

Forgot to update this blog again didn't I?

Oh well.

Here you go, a little single thing. It's two tracks - Start Again (Go Real Slow) - £10 store credit if you know where I paraphrased that title from, and Sleep With The Light On - £10 store credit if you know where those hi-hats are from.

There's also a remix by LDLDN, of NTS fame, on there! He's great, and so glad he agreed to mangle some of my stems into something a bit more dancefloor orientated.

Currently working away on some new stuff, just in case you wondered where all the albums were this year. I know, I know - we're 6 months into the year and I've only done *checks notes* 1 album. Very poor showing from me, but don't worry - I've plenty of stuff in the pipeline I'm working on!

 

I do have a gig coming up though, if that counts? August 9th at the Loading Bay in Bradford, supporting Richard Dawson. Should be great, although it's sold out now, so tough cookies if you fancied coming and don't have a ticket yet.

Oh, and one more thing - the Brad Flag bags are back in stock! If you missed out last time and want to show Bradford off to the people of the world, you can do so now:

Anyway, stay tuned for more fun from satan very soon.

Go real slow

I remember hearing on some football thing ages ago that no matter what team you support, football is all about moments - nothing will probably last forever, things can always get worse, so just remember those good times, celebrate them accordingly, but always remember that it's just a moment in time that's brought you some joy.

I've had this stuck in my head for months now (primarily due to supporting Aston Villa, and having them toy with my blood pressure all season), but I thought it's such a good jumping off point for being a musician, whether for a hobby or for your job, in 2025.

Ollie Watkins: fan of the satan. Maybe. Probably.

 

Satan's always been a very driven outfit, quite literally. Back in the early days, we'd jump in the car and play anywhere we could, we'd try our luck with promoters, writers, booking agents, labels, managers, blogs, magazines, you name it - if it was a position in the music industry, we probably had a conversation with someone about it. You can do all that stuff when you're young, because you're bulletproof when you're 20 aren't you? Nothing sticks, you can just reset and start again if it all goes to shit. And there's nothing wrong with relentlessly trying to push a band on in whatever way you can - a good work ethic and ambition is mightily important, but I also keep thinking what did all that really do for me, what did it do for the band?

 

It gave me some amazing experiences, sure - it gave me some brilliant moments I'll keep in my head forever, but in terms of what we wanted to achieve with it - cold, hard industry success, well... the jury's out. These days, I like to think the opposite of what I used to, and I think going slow and taking your time is probably the best way to go about things. Oh, sure, if you're in your 20s reading this, you'll already have that 'old man yells at cloud' meme in your head, but I think it's worth swishing around your brain for a bit. 

In the broader scheme of things, being 'successful' means different things to different people. If you judge it on industry success though, then there's a good chance you'll fail. But then, aside from like 1% of any given scene that gets even close to big industry success, we'll all fail. That though, doesn't mean your art is any less special, or your endeavours any less worthwhile. If you put 1 gig on in a local venue, you've already done something that very few even attempt, let alone pull off. If you put just one thing on Bandcamp, again, you've done something there that most people will never, ever do, so I think it's always worth remembering these moments, and not getting too tied up with 'the biz'. If it's meant to be, that stuff will come eventually.

I see young bands shilling for streaming platforms, trying to get people to come save their song for reasons that are unclear. What are you getting out of that, champ? You can't get your hands on any of that data, there's no real money involved in it and if it went offline tomorrow, you'd be back to square one immediately. There's no clout in it, there's no 'exposure' in it, it's just a way of getting artists to do the tech company's dirty work. It's 2025 my guy, chill.

Just take a breath, sit back and figure out who you are, what it is you want, and why you want it. 

There's nothing wrong with just taking it easy - book a few gigs locally, see if you like it, see if you meet some new people - shake a few hands, listen to some new bands, interact with some likeminded people, get some ideas. It's magic! You don't have to tour right away - it took satan 2 years to even get to London, so don't worry about that 20 date mega tour right away. Make some friends, play some music, that's all it's ever been about. Listening back to a record you've made with your pals is one of the most invigorating experiences any human being will ever have, honestly - it's fucking beautiful. So don't feel pressured to boil that down to just pointless 'content' for some stupid fucking website. Your music will outlast all these stupid fucking websites - never forget that.

You don't need branding right away, you don't need PR or a label or a booker, etc. All that shit comes in time if it's meant to be, so for now, just enjoy it - enjoy the moments you get given and stop worrying about fucking Instagram or your arbitrary numbers next to your name on spotify. None of that shit really matters when it comes down to it, but you'll always remember that one Saturday when you played a good gig and you met someone cool.

The Future Can Wait

God I'm getting worse at updating this blog aren't I?

Anyway, on Friday I stuck out the 18th worriedaboutsatan album, The Future Can Wait. 

I've been doing this band for a huge chunk of my adult life now, and with the 20th anniversary of starting it coming up, it got me thinking about all the usual existential stuff: time, where it's gone, where does it go, holy shit I'm an adult now but when does being an adult start? why am I still thinking 2002 was like 'a few years ago', etc. 

That was the background hum to making this record, which I did in my tiny box room studio up here in Saltaire. I wanted to make three really long tracks and see if I could do a Tangerine Dream: piece it all together without it sounding too jarring or horrible. Hopefully I came close to cracking it, but that's for you to decide I guess.

Anyway, it's out now on digital, CD and streaming (apart from Spotify, because fuck Spotify). Have a gander at it here:

The artwork is a photograph by Marc Leighton of the Caroline Street Social Club in Saltaire.