Hey again!

Thanks to everyone who read the last one and those who reached out with thoughts, reassurances, lovely tunes, and news from yourselves. Feel like email is usually such a dead format but I'm finding this quite lovely and intimate compared to socials.

Quick shoutout to Manchester ppl! The way I've organised my existence since moving back here has had me stuck in Eccles throughout the week and only able to see anyone on nights out, which I'm not doing at all atm while PhD application deadlines rush dizzyingly close. I'm gutted to be missing all your parties, but I'm gonna start working in town a few days a week so anyone about for lunchtime coffees or evening pints give us a shout, I'd love to see you.

I mentioned this before, but in my head it more or less took accepting the idea of never being booked for gigs again to me make the leap off instagram, but sweet irony, I have a couple of things to tell you about :)

One isn't announced til next week, so I'll send out details along with a little bump about the party next Friday with Nick. The other...

Kantos Chamber Choir at The White Hotel - Sun 14/11

I won't go into my thoughts here on where medieval plainsong and early modern church music fit into what I'm increasingly seeing as a 'psychedelic continuum' in the music I collect - though will happily chat endlessly about this if u ask... - but Toby, who's extremely familiar with my obsession for the old celestial voices, has hooked me up with a DREAM set, closing up at TWH after the Kantos Chamber Choir this Sunday. They'll be singing works by Meredith Monk, Henry Purcell, and Hildegard Von Bingen (the patron saint of rave), whose canticles of ecstasy echo across early UK acid house and the work of David Lynch. I'll be on my usual bullshit after.

If you want an idea, I have a lot of love for this ritualistic mix for Evening Mass, I recorded by candlelight last summer after a mushroom fuelled stomp around Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery.

Music from a past life

After my dad recently avoided a near-data disaster that almost lost him his music library, I found he had a small collection of music I made aged 17/18 sat on a hard drive. For a long time I thought the tunes were lost and also that this was definitely for the best. Having discovered cooler music, postmodern irony (the classic misunderstanding of it as manifesto rather than diagnosis), an increasingly guarded helplessness in the face of crisis neoliberalism, and an acute depressive cynicism, I found it soooo embarrassing to think of myself as someone who once made earnest singer-songwriter electronica as a way to process my teenage angst.

Listening back I've been surprised to find that not only is it not terrible, but there's a sense of naive uninhibitedness and assurance that I'm finding quite compelling. It's had me nostalgic for a time when I could write unironic songs about Jacques Lacan, Kerouac and William Blake (but mostly about my feels) and share them too, without any sense of shame or self-consciousness. I've also been surprised to hear how much of my sonic sensibilities are already there, moody, atmospheric, and ethereal - what Alex T always called 'deep and weird'. Still playing weirdo sad boy tunes in 2021, just slightly cooler ones...

The writing's sometimes on the nose and the production's rough around the edges, but in the spirit of reclaiming uninhibitedness, I've put a selection together here.

I stopped making music for nearly a decade, but I'm slowly, quietly getting back into it :)

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Tapes are in!

Getting the inserts through this week, so I should have a Bandcamp link I can share next week (tho as I say, hit me up here for discount!)

Be back next week.

Lots of love!

Mike x