EP is finished, but for some final mixing tweaks. Four songs and various interludes.

It sounds great, I'm really excited about it!

The first song (to be track 2 on the EP) is tracked but for the main vocal part. I have an adequate vocal in there, but I think I can do better. The second song (track 3) is tracked but for a vocal. And a third song (track 4) is in progress. I have to re-record two guitar parts cos they sound rubbish. Despite not a massive level of productivity and going drinking at lunchtime on Monday* the EP is well on its way after less than a week of recording.

I've been reading some earlyish Phillip K Dick short stories - you know the type, the ones printed in 50s magazines called "Interzone" and "Starshine" and that, rooted firmly in the atomic age. But it's amazing how politicized it is. You have a parody of Scientology (The Turning Wheel), a critique of pure reason, Buddhism and violence (!) (Null-O), the insidiousness of [anti-communist] paranoia and xenophobia (Shell Game and The Crawlers), all in the course of one collection. I can't imagine he was the only one (Ray Bradbury certainly did the same). This really suprised me, because I've always thought of science fiction writing as quite socialogically concerned, but never really about how that extends from generalisations to specific political point-making. This all seems rather obvious in the light of H G Wells' The Time Machine, and drifting increasingly close to mainstream political novels, we get Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. But most people would argue that these aren't science fiction, rather pointlessly, in my opinion.

What I do find interesting is the way that science fiction has been marginalized for the best part of fifty years, and how that ties into its politicization. The nay-sayer will say that majority of science fiction is crap; however, "99 percent of science fiction is rubbish, but then 99 percent of everything is rubbish". (Theodore Sturgeon - Science Fiction author). It's also dichotomic how a perfectly escapist medium can be heavily politicized; it seems almost equivalent to the traditional understanding of the terms "myths" and "fables"; allegorical tales with fantastic events illustrating a moral truth of the society.

People have written PhDs on this shit, and here I am, rattling on.

*following my shopping trip for percussion. I got wood claves, a guiro, a set of drumsticks and a shakey egg. Some of these have made an appearance on the EP, some will not.

I just came off stage, playing as the house band for a comedy night in sarf London. The Wonderful Robin Ince was opening, and I think I like his sets more and more each time I see him perform. I think I love him nearly as much as Chloe from 24 (played by performance artist and comedian Mary Lynn Rajskub [pronounced "rice-cub", I think this might be a Polish name]).

I'm not convinced that unemployment is good for my OCD.

I've started on track 2 of the EP. Track one still needs a retrack on the vox and I need to buy some woodblocks. Yes, woodblocks! Fuck you, percussion fascists! I might even put some vibraslap on if I feel like it. I spent yesterday morning recording and re-recording a ridiculous falsetto part ripped off the mighty "Bill Jocko" by Mark "Cheddar Gorge" Mulcahy.I've never had so much fun in my life.

Not a blog for a week. I am slacking. I've started work on my EP and played two gigs since my last blog so it seems there was no need for the creative safety valve. Currently debating either walking the route of on old London canal (a pointless exercise, but it is a lovely day) or having a cup of coffee and trying to puzzle out the percussion track on my latest recording.

Recording has been more fun this time than in the past, I seem to be getting better at it, so the process is less akin to headbutting a wall and trying to gauge how good it feels after three hours. When I started recording it probably took me half an hour to set up a condenser mic, place it, and initialise all the DAW stuff on my iBook. This week I am mostly using a rather wonderful valve mic which has its own power supply and it still only takes a minute or two for me to get ready. "Experience is the name one gives to one's mistakes" my arse.

As I say, I'm having issues with the percussion track because my bumlord housemates won't let me have a drumkit. I may have to smuggle one in...

Hmm. Since that last post I've actually finished work. I went in on Tuesday and they told me to work to the end of the week and then go away. I dared not blog again in the interim in case they barred me from the premises and stopped me from stealing their excellent biros. But that's it, now I can get on with blogging about smgs and that. And recording an EP. Yay!

I have been listening obsessively to a Jake Thackray compilation which is musically sophisticated and and the work of a lyrical genius. Jake Thackray was yorkshire singer-songwriter who sounds like a cross between Tom Lehrer and a classic French chanteur (sp?). He died a few years ago sadly. He has a way of mixing high and low art in an effortless and beautiful way. The line

"I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day
For me it is palpable proof of God's existence a posteriori"

has become my favourite ever lyric. A line which can make an arse pun on a correctly applied philosophical classification of experiential evidence (for the existence of God!) is pretty much my benchmark of genius. My number two line is still

"Chains are clinking, ropes are fraying down to thread-
Maybe it was made wrong, rubbing on the wrong thing
Or is it just the natural decline of our body sister?"

For fairly similar reasons. The use of such clumsy language and yet such a perfect metaphor to explore the massive concept of material corruption is more apposite than I can express. You can see these lyrics appearing in a song of mine some time soon, possibly contiguously.

Well, the previous post was remarkably prescient, as I will be leaving my job by the end of the month. I was planning to leave anyway, at the end of February, but my boss told me politely that I should tidy up and fuck off as soon as possible. I can't say I have any complaints about that.

I have had some ideas about the EP. One of these is "If I were Godspeed You! Black Emperor I could put four or five tracks together and call it an album because their songs are so fucking long" but that's not terribly useful. Another of these ideas concerns segueing together quite a good track and a less good track together in a very impressive interlude section with feedback, noise, etc. By reading that sentence back you should immediately spot several obvious drawbacks to this idea. But I'm still toying with the concept, assuming I can make the less good track better. I need a bit of studio time monkeying around.

Back to 24 for a bit. Die, Audrey, die!!!

I managed to avoid a great party last night with people I really like. In the end I didn't really need to hide under the duvet. I am an idiot. I am bad at parties in that, given enough energy, I am brilliant at smalltalk. This means I have very trivial conversations with everyone, while my friends form lasting bonds with total strangers by virtue of their inability to talk superficial crap forcing their hand into saying something worthwhile. "I just lost a lung" is a much better icebreaker than "how long have you lived in London?". Time to get smoking.

Back to work tomorrow and I know that a world of shit is going to greet me. Having had over two weeks off over Christmas, I'm not sure that I can even rememember the vaguest detail about what my job involves. Let's hope that's the case and security frogmarch me from the building in order to enjoy the rest of the week in peace.

I'll 'fess up and admit I've been going through a lame creative crisis for last few months, pretty much thinking that my output to date is derivative, slight and worthless. You might think that this is lame because 1) it really isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things 2) I have nothing riding on its success or failure. You're wrong (again). 1) It's important to me, so fuck you. 2) see (1). Basically, if I am ever to be in a position where things do ride on it, I need to have succeeded in the first place, and that's something that I really want to make happen. I do want to be doing music professionally, or at least producing music which people care about and which gets some kind of critical recognition. That's pretty much my dream. So that's why it's so important.

Now, the simple solution is just to write some great stuff, in the same way that the solution to having a stressful PhD is to write up or the solution to having cancer is to get better. Therein lies the rub. So as an interim project, I'm going to write an EP. Hopefully this will give me a bit more of a focus for writing, it will be a bit more coherent and sound more like an EP I wrote rather than a covers medley. The pitfalls are now making an EP I can't play live or which is nothing like what I want to do in the future.

More despatches from this gripping story as it breaks.