Free Palestine

Plummeting into summer so fast that it feels like we've already come out the other side. Manchester's not great at warmth at the best of times, but even on days it succumbs to the sunshine it feels like there's still a chill in the air. OH NO WAIT that's nothing to do with northern micro-climates it is actually just being alive as we sleepwalk into fascism isn't it.

I'll get on to some music updates in a bit, but here at the top I feel like I gotta try to address everything that's going on right now. I am just a musician, but according to the UK government this week, musicians are so powerful that simply by shouting things at a festival they instantly become more dangerous than the actions of a nuclear state carrying out genocide, and therefore they need to be investigated by the police, and maybe any mainstream outlets for musicians should also be dismantled just to be on the safe side.

This platform I have right here at The K.N.R.U. is obviously tiny. And anybody reading it I imagine is already familiar with 65daysofstatic and therefore maybe (hopefully) aware that we've made our thoughts on what has been going on in Palestine for many years as clear as possible (e.g.) But still! Once again: Palestine must be free! And not only that but right now, Israel is undertaking a genocide while the world is watching and there is no coming back from this, not for any of us, if these horrors are not put to an end as soon as possible. We are watching in realtime not only the starvation and attempted eradication of an entire people but also a green light being given for all of the fascists waiting in the wings of power. A warm-up, an effort to bludgeon a new normal into existence. A normal where not even the pretence of caring about civilian deaths is necessary any more. When it is no longer even necessary to pretend you're not bombing hospitals while bombing hospitals. They can just be bombed openly. And schools. And people can just be shot while queuing for food. And all of this happens in the passive voice. Hospitals evaporate. People disintegrate. Because it is uncivil to say who is actively doing the disintegrating. It is unbecoming to point out that it is the state that has nukes that was bombing the one that doesn't have nukes just in case they might want to have nukes even though they keep saying they don't. It is an unreality collapsing under its own broken logic and yet it is still the only narrative being foisted upon us at any scale here in the UK.

65daysofstatic have always flown (waaaaay) under the radar of mainstream success and therefore never had to worry about taking a principled stand getting in the way of various hopes and prospects. This is not true for Kneecap or Bob Vylan, who are the ones currently in the sights of the UK government thanks to their appearances at Glastonbury.

I have nothing against Glastonbury. I think it is probably the best festival I have ever been to, and as far as these colossal musical gatherings go, its heart is in the right place, or at least more in the right place than most of the other ones. But for a long time I have tried to avoid the coverage as much as possible. Part of that, I'll be honest, is self-defence (this life of making music has left me with quite a complicated relationship to, well, music.) More broadly though, it is because of an uneasy feeling I have about how the BBC so desperately tries to manufacture it into The Major Cultural Musical Event of The Year.

I accept that Glastonbury has always been (at least in my living memory) an overwhelmingly white, middle class festival, kind of bougie festival. Especially in recent years where tickets cost many hundreds of pounds. But when you are actually there you can still find the quietly anarchic or radical gaps in that particular framing, and then wander through them into a world of confusion and adventure.

But Glastonbury™ seen from afar, through the lens of BBC editors, Guardian live-bloggers, Jo Wiley breathlessly describing everything that happens as The Most Important Iconic Moment in Music... it all leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's a kind of gatekeeping, a kind of manufacturing of consent. It makes me feel bad.

And so I think this year's coverage is particularly instructive. They are trying to manufacture an unreality, trying to call out Bob Vylan and Kneecap as untenable, unacceptable abberations, as if all the people in attendance were mindless zombies. As if those many tens of thousands of people (a hundred thousand?) cheering Bob Vylan would just as happily chant 'Nigel Farage For Emperor' if Rod Stewart had incited it during his Sunday afternoon 'legends' slot. As if those hundreds of Palestine flags flying in the crowds of all the acts playing must have been thrust into the hands of mindless punters by secret agitators. As if they are trying to insist that there isn't so much bubbling horror inside so many of us just from witnessing from thousands of miles away the war crimes being carried out by Israel in Palestine that increasingly there is absolutely no choice but to shout it from the loudest platform available to you, no matter the personal cost.

I am writing this on Thursday 3rd July. As far as I understand developments (caveat: I'm just a dumb musician with a blog, but here's an actual source), yesterday MPs voted to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group. (This was handily reduced to a single yes/note vote that bundled Palestine Action in with a couple of literal neo-nazi organisations and asked if they all ought to be proscribed as terrorist groups, just in case any MPs got brave enough to call it out. Breathtaking cynicism.) And unless something radical happens in the next 24 hours, tomorrow this becomes law.

We are headed into extremely dark times. It's apparently not enough for Starmer to be a vapid, incompetent warm-up act to prepare the way for a Farage government in a few years time, he seems to now want to save Farage some time by getting more proto-fascist government overreach up and running for him to make use of once he's takes over.

I don't know what to do about any of that other than say it out loud. Free Palestine. Donate to Medical Aid for Palestine. Go to the Saturday protests whenever I can. None of it is enough. I'm not brave enough to be part of non-violent direct action. There's a line in Omar El Akkad's recent, superb-but-punishing book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This where he strips everything down to a simple, clarifying idea:

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?"

Same as it ever was. Socialism or barbarism. The centr(ists) cannot hold. Look at them - they're the ones in power, the supposed 'grown ups in the room'. They've fucked it. You can't both sides a genocide and that's what they attempted. And there's no going back from that.

MUSICAL RESPITE

I should probably save the rest of this for a separate post, but I'm not going to. This is, after all, a dispatch from the Komoy Noise Research Unit, and so let's talk about something that is the good kind of noisy.

As mentioned here and there, I am currently involved in a longterm project that I cannot talk about that takes up a whole lot of time and creative energy. This is not great for these K.N.R.U. dispatches, but is good in all other respects. This project continues unceasingly. It will all come out in the end but until then, the K.N.R.U. will just have to put up with being in slow-motion mode.

Outside of that, and outside of making sure the 65daysofstatic pilot light keeps flickering, I’ve finally built a new live solo show. But like, properly, which I’ve been putting off for years. I'll be debuting it in Köln next Tuesday and, hilariously given how much work I’ve put into it, I have made zero plans to perform anywhere else and have no real way to easily change that.

So hopefully Köln will be good. And if nothing else I have achieved my main aim of building a laptop-based show that doesn’t rely on Ableton. Not that I have anything against Ableton, but ditching it was a particular obstacle I felt I needed to put in my way in order to escape the clutches of linear timelines.

(An aside - last summer I remember chatting to a much more successful composer friend of mine about my pains of trying to learn how to use the glorious Dirtywave M8 tracker, and he said 'why do you keep putting obstacles in the way of writing music? Why don't you just write it the way you're already really good at?' This is a great question I continue to be unable to answer.)

So. My show is running in Max and has a visual component running in Unity. I would have loved to have used non-commercial software, ideally get stuck into live-coding using TidalCycles/Strudel for the audio and perhaps Godot for the visuals. But I’m not there yet.

I continue to be in awe of the live-coding scene. I love the community, the liveness, the way it frames things so that improvisation is an inclusive, collaborative process rather than an indulgence undertaken by the performer. But for me, old habits die hard. I can’t summon the courage to take the stage and not have a good idea of what is going to come out. I want to be sure my intent is clear.

Still, I want to unshackle myself from concrete structures as much as I can. If the live coders are building up songs from the foundations on stage, then my show is more about chipping away at already-made sculptures, discovering what lies beneath, seeing if any other shapes are lurking in there.

It is a little similar to Wreckage Systems. And actually (I can’t remember if I said this before), this new live show system is a fork of my attempts to re-make Wreckage Systems within Max. I.E - a framework that produces songs that will always be recognisable as themselves, but won't necessarily manifest them the same way every time.

All that being said, I don’t mind admitting that a large part of the set next week will involve songs that are ‘on rails’. Songs that have a beginning, middle and end, in that order, and that my contribution to it as it plays will be adding or removing sparkles here and there. I think that this makes for a better, more intentional and therefore more effective show. The important two things for me are:

• when I am performing linear songs like this I have the ability to take them off the rails should I choose to
• linear songs can exist alongside much more open-ended generative/deterministic/weird experimental systems-as-songs

I have definitely achieved the second of these, which is good and something that I know I wouldn’t have been able to pull off in Ableton. The first… well, it is almost there, to a limited degree. But in truth, if I have a song that I know works, then I’ll have already tried it in any number of different arrangements and settled upon what I feel is the best one. So even if I can change it, it’s unlikely that I will.

A long time ago I read about this concept called chronotypology that critiqued 'performances' of video game playthroughs and teased out this idea of a kind of composition that combined elastic temporality with certain sync points. So in the context of playing through a video game, there might be these points of synchronicity (like a boss fight for example) that would always happen at the same point in the overall composition of the game's structure, but for every player their ‘performing’ of levels before and after might vary wildly, especially in terms of time but also in terms of substance or perhaps even whether certain events occur or not.

And I thought it would be a neat idea to think of writing songs this way. To be able to have these elastic structures where there are musical anchors scattered across an atemporal landscape that will lock everything back together when reached, but then parts inbetween that have a kind of stretch to them, a kind of unpredictability. I still do think this is a neat idea, and probably somebody somewhere has written about live jazz or improvisation more generally in these terms, and certainly there must be writing out there about how video game music leans into this.

I am still not sure how well it works in practice for me personally. I guess I'll get to test it out in some small ways next week in Köln.

I'll try to report back before too long.