The Cliffs of Autumn

I am clinging on to my modest goal of getting these little dispatches out at least monthly. Much like we're all clinging to the cliffs of autumn as winter's tendrils creep upwards towards our ankles, ready to drag us down into half a year of grey misery.

Here's a things-from-September update.

ALPACA FESTIVAL

I played a show at Alpaca Festival a couple of weeks ago. It was a lot of fun and it seems like a really great festival, I wish I could have stayed for the whole weekend.

Sheffield has a really lovely live coding scene and so much interesting work seems to be growing out of it and constellating around it. (Is constellating a word? I think so?) There's something about that city that feels really invigorating in this particular way - spaces for small, arty projects and their communities. It felt like that all the way back when 65days were starting out making our glitchy noises, and while most of those spaces seem to have been swallowed up by the buy-to-let flat plague, it's reassuring that new spots continue to find gaps to squeeze into.

I played mostly new material. It all felt pretty good and I think it could feasibly become a short new EP. But who knows how fast that will get finished. Let's hope it doesn't turn out to be an album because with everything else going on I think that would take about a decade.

NEW 65DAYSOFSTATIC ALBUM IS OUT

A new 65daysofstatic record came out! Well, a 65daysofstatic & Paul Weir album. It's called No Man's Sky: Journeys. Find it on your terrible streaming service of choice or on Bandcamp. Or Soulseek.

I wrote about this already both here and over on 65daysofstatic.com so won't go much into it again. Whereas the first NMS album was the soundtrack to No Man's Sky but also a new 65daysofstatic album, this new one is more comprehensively 'a No Man's Sky' album. Maybe this distinction doesn't matter to anybody else, and it certainly shouldn't be read as me wanting to create distance from this record—I'm really happy with it!—just that it is trying to do a different thing. It is a score to a massive, beautiful, sci-fi universe. Whilst that kind of sound overlaps 'the 65 sound' in a lot of ways, I think left to our own devices we've been moving into somewhat different territory since that first NMS album back in 2016.

MISC. GOOD THINGS FROM SEPTEMBER

I stilllllll can't talk about the massive project that takes up most of my time and has slowed this blog down to a crawl. I am not complaining though, it's a thing I get to sink my best creative efforts into and I am having a great time. But I'll make sure The K.N.R.U. keeps ticking over, so when the next window for obscure noise experiments too-weird-for-65 eventually arrives, I'll still have somewhere to put them.

Other than that... I finally got to the heartwrenching ending of Clair Obscura: Expedition 33. What a triumph! Not since Baldur's Gate 3 has a video game pulled me in so deep. Great music too. If you play video games and like your melodrama off the chain (and if you're reading this then I assume you do), it is well worth seeking out. If Jim Steinman had been French and made a video game, I think it'd probably have been this one.

I hit a pretty unlucky streak of bad books throughout all September, so I will have to go back to August for a couple of standouts. It Lasts Forever and Then it's Over by Anne de Marcken was one. A lot of the pull quotes talk about it being funny, and it is funny, but it is also heartbreakingly sad and somehow gets to the core of some really raw stuff about being human and being alive, despite it being about zombies. A unique piece of work.

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters I also mostly enjoyed. Not normally a fan of short stories but Peters' last book Detransition, Baby was good enough that I didn't want to skip this. I wasn't that taken with the other stories in this collection, but the centrepiece (also called Stag Dance), is novella-sized, excellent, and goes hard enough to shake off what I felt were its less assured companion pieces.

I also read Sally Rooney's Intermezzo (absolutely fantastic, obvs) and Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake (absolutely fantastic, obvs). Big, big fan of both these authors (I wrote about Kushner before) but I don't really know how to start writing about how these two novels in particular affected me. And also how by reading them back to back I accidentally gave myself this powerful one-two punch of... some kind of existential glimpse into something (??). I dunno. But smashing through two masterful novels like this, both of them moving at very different velocities with different intentions, but with similar prowess and insight... it was great tbh. (Also, unending respect to Rooney for her ongoing support for Palestine.)

Now I've written all that, I realise that it didn't occur to me to mention any music that I've been listening to, but I haven't really been listening to much recently. And in terms of making music, it is things like novels, video games, communities surrounding festivals like Alpaca, and, you know, the world that tend to inform what I make. Not so much other music. I'm not sure if that's always true, but that's how it seems at the moment.

I did finally get around to checking out Lady Gaga's Mayhem because those first two singles (Disease and Abracadabra) are TOP CLASS BANGERS and her whole thing in general I am a big fan of, so I thought I'd be into it. But I ended up being disappointed by how much of the rest of the album was disco-tinged filler. Oh well.

I still need to check out the new Deftones. I bet it sounds like Deftones.

That's it for now. Keep your eyes on the heroic act of humanity that is The Global Sumud Flotilla the next few days because as terrifying as the world currently is, I imagine being on those boats is even scarier.

Byyyyye.