End of year 2023. Shit eh.

It’s very nice to be back in the studio room, even though there’s precious little time to use it. We are in family time, which means more cooking fowls than anything creative (yes I hear chefs complaining – but not all cooking is art).

The last two videos for Severed Séance 2 are quite complicated and laborious. The title of Exploring The Secrets of Treating Deaf Mutes was taken from a pamphlet published in China in the early 70’s. To expand on this theme I’ve located copies of the 70’s magazine China Reconstructs – cut out all the pictures and then recoloured them in the style of the pamphlet.

Fun Fact – it’s the same source for Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. Another fun fact – this was the source of the cut up insert artwork in Ear Bitten. I’ll explain why I had copies of China Reconstructs some time in future. Anyway it takes many hours to repaint all those damn pictures.

The sound has been very carefully pulled apart and e.g. the screaming rant that Garry Bradbury did at M-Squared is now on its own channel in the mix. Where fun can be had.

The other clip for Casey’s Ion is also laborious as it involves manual morphing in-between frames for two dancing women created in machine learning. They are of course utterly terrible in the way only computer generated people can be. Their transitions are also ugly and inhumane. Each transition takes about 20-30 minutes to create and there are about 50 of them. So it’s a long time coming.

Although the last séance was based on 1982, this time it’s just tracks that have never been able to be performed before – so there’s a fair bit of bouncing around. You won’t mind.

Summing up 2023

💩It is most notable that anything happened in 2023, given as things have been in a gentle decline for so long. Last year ended with the surround sound residency half way done. This year a fair whack of Dolby ATMOS reissues came out – trying to balance the old and new.

💩A re-issue of Bad Mood Guy appeared – much to my surprise as I thought that one was a dead album walking. Maybe it still is – there’s not been much follow up about it.

💩I finally got the two computer games and wedged them into one confused horrible mess. Months later it’s not fully playable but it’s working.

💩Two live small shows were delivered and can be downloaded on BandCamp.

💩The second séance started to roll out – with a demo of Adolf A Karrot?

💩The Nilamox label quietly died, as it had been born at the wrong time and could not find a footing in music as it is now consumed. People are more likely to discover old music than new – simply due to the amount of material on offer. Nothing new seems to prosper, and time is running out. I am sad because I think it was much better than the old music – but there you go.

💩In the real world we had to shut down for more than two months while we got a place to live properly. You can’t live in the Young Ones house for ever.

💩Dead Eyes Opened got re-issued. Yeah. Again.

Here’s the end of year from 2021.

Here’s 2020.