With the year drawing to a close, I've decided to put together a collection of all the demos I recorded in 2019. It's available to be downloaded/streamed for free.
 
I've left it open to 'pay what you want'. Any donations will be greatly appreciated, and will inevitably go towards more music software/rehearsals etc.
 
Some context behind the work:
 
Technical stuff:

  All parts were performed and recorded by me in my living room in Nunhead, London. Except for occasional bits of cornet, performed by Elizabeth Norwood.

  At the start of the year, I was in the rehearsal room with guitarist Marc and bass player Maciej, trying out a few different drummers. Unfortunately none of the drummers worked out, and around the middle of the year, we decided that we would move to all electronic percussion. Although I had a rudimentary understanding of programming electronic percussion (all the 'acoustic' drums you'll hear are programmed, not played, too) it meant pushing myself out of my comfort zone and learning how to write percussion in this way, and also how to structure music around electronic percussion. Through the 11 tracks in this album, you'll hear that shift from acoustic to electronic percussion.

  The tracks are presented not in chronological order, but in an order which I think makes for some kind of pleasing listening experience. I haven't thought too much about this. It's important to note that the first track 'Unfold' is my most recent piece of work. Why did I put this first? A couple of reasons. One - if people open up Bandcamp and just listen to the track at the top, I want it to be this one. I also want listeners going through the whole album to hear this first and understand that that's the level of quality that I was aiming at through the other tracks, and the level of quality that I should be able to achieve if I ever go back and re-work those other tracks. Will I go back and re-work the other tracks? Yes... some of them, at some point. They need to be worked on in a studio, and unfortunately I'm not in a position to do that at the moment.

  Lyrics are all incredibly unfinished, and are mostly nonsense. There's still some sense in the nonsense, but not much.

  Semi-emotional stuff:

  I am just one guy. Sometimes whole tracks, or large sections of tracks, aren't up to scratch. Sometimes I make terrible mixing decisions. I don't really play any of the instruments involved. I can sing, and I can play the guitar to some sort of reasonable standard.

  So many hours go into putting this music together. It's far from the perfect squeaky clean studio recorded music you're possibly used to listening to. However, I can promise you that this is *real* music. As in, this is the product of me putting everything I'm capable of physically, mentally, emotionally, in order to create something that represents what I'm trying to do. All the stuff about waking up at 4am in a cold sweat trying to figure out if the track I've sunk 40 hours into can be 'fixed' ... that's there. Getting into awful mental places because I've had to give up on a couple of tracks in a row, and started to doubt if I'll ever finish anything again... that's there. Getting out of bed at 5am in the summer months before it gets too hot to work. My laptop overheating and completely giving up the ghost during the writing of the title track. Bruises on my hips from playing the same guitar part a hundred times. My amp blowing up. Ringing ears. Whatever happens, I get through it, and I get in front of my laptop and my instruments and I start again. I'm incredibly proud of my latest piece of work (which begins the album.) It represents a culmination of well over a decade of work. I don't get paid for it, and realistically, it's only ever listened to a handful of times. But that's OK. I'm in this for the long haul, and I plan to be doing some variation of this for as far into the future as I can imagine. In 2020, I will start again, and I'll learn more. At the end of 2020, there will be further new music, and it'll be better. Either that or I'll collapse.
 
I hope you'll take the time to stick this on some decent speakers/headphones and turn it up. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to my work...
 

  ...Music is art. It takes longer to listen to a piece of music than it does to click a 'like' on piece of visual art, but I urge you to invest that time now and in the future.