>>Nostalgia For Infinity

So, yeah. It’s been a month since my last proper update here on NFI and this has given me plenty of time to think about what I want to do with the blog. I’m still not 100% sure; I’m a fickle man and I tend to drift between my hobbies, moving focus from one to another every few months. But all the same I think this short break has given me the confidence to accept something I’ve been deliberating over for a while.

I don’t find writing about music very fun any more.

Quite possibly I burned myself out by trying to pump out so many reviews. 172 reviews over the course of two and a bit years is a lot, especially when you consider that they tend to be 500-1,000 words each. Call it an average of 700 and that’s 120,000 words, which is the length of a fairly chunky novel. Most of those reviews were pretty hard to write, too. It usually takes me a while to figure out an angle to come at a record from.

This is not to rule out my writing about music ever again. PRs and bands are still sending me stuff and on the off chance that I’m struck by a desire to write about a particular thing, I will do so. In the future I may even get past my burnout and start enjoying it again, as I did with writing about books. Hell, if I ever find myself going the freelance writing route, it might even be a way to earn some money for my writing. But now we’re getting into pipe dream territory and there are plumbers and goombas everywhere.

NFI as a music site ain’t dead. Like old punks, it just smells that way.

I do have a few things coming up in the near future. I’ll be posting my picks from 2011′s fine crop of music soon and I should also have a short review of the late 70s punk rock doc’ Shellshock Rock for you too. I may dabble in quickfire shortform music roundup reviews; I still listen to loads of new records every month and I like to recommend things to people. I will continue to post things here, though they will be more intermittent.

For the most part, however, I’ve decided that I want to focus on what I find most fun, namely writing for Arcadian Rhythms and playing music with my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic. Writing about games has turned out to be an immense source of pleasure and has generated more interesting conversations than any of my writing about music ever has. Similarly playing music in front of people, getting up on stage, travelling around and meeting people, writing and learning new songs, hitting the studio – all of this is also a lot more enjoyable and creative than writing about records made by other people. So I’m going to focus on these things and get better at them… or at least that’s the plan.

Put another way, the route to happiness is to do what you enjoy most. Since I no longer particularly enjoy writing about music, I’m no longer going to force myself to do so. Since I enjoy doing other stuff instead, I’m going to go and do that. The only real source of sadness is firstly that this feels a bit like the end of an era, and secondly that I feel like I’m letting down the folks who read my reviews regularly (I know there are a few of you out there). I hope you find something to like in my other projects.

Chock full of additives and artificial flavourings: Nostalgia For Infinity!

I’ve started posting the occasional piece on Saturdays in addition to the usual Tuesday/Thursday review schedule and Sunday link round-up. I’ve got a buffer of two months of reviews now and have decided to step up my posting schedule.

There are a few reasons for this, the first of which is that there are some records I’ve been wanting to write about but have been sitting on for a while, the second of which is that I’m being sent more material for review these days, and the third is that I’m considering posting more opinion-style pieces about this and that (e.g. the I Live Sweat highlight I did a few weeks ago).

With that said I’m pretty busy these days between the day job, writing reviews for NFI, writing for and running Arcadian Rhythms and playing in Wrecktheplacefantastic, so please forgive me if I miss a Saturday or two. Those Tuesday and Thursday reviews are going to keep on coming the foreseeable future, though, you can be sure of that.

And yes, in case anyone wasn’t aware, it is just me who writes for NFI. A one-man band if you will. Oh, and I still write about books and film occasionally, just less often these days…

As always, readers: thanks for reading!

Esteemed UK indie publisher TTA Press have been getting into the festive spirit with a flash fiction advent calendar on their blog. I was away at the 10 year anniversary ATP so unfortunately I missed the day when one of my stories went up. Chances are regular readers of NFI will have seen ‘Some Kind Of Superhero’ before, but if you haven’t why not give it a read? I can guarantee you will like it more than the shitty, powdery chocolate you get in a Tesco’s advent calendar.

A few weeks back my band spent the day in Studio 284, Brighton’s number one seafront-based DIY punx recording studio. I figured I’d write a little diary-style piece to celebrate our first crack at proper recording.

Why were we there? We wanted to record a three-track demo for two reasons: firstly, so that we could acquire a new bassist once Jake heads off to spend three months in Japan, and secondly, to try and convince promoters to give us more shows. Sans bassmonkey that second point might prove tricky, but hey, we’re thinking ahead.

Unfortunately I don’t have any mixed and mastered copies of the recordings as yet. We ran over the slot we’d paid for by a couple of hours and still didn’t quite get everything done. The only really problematic bit of what we got was in the vocals, which aren’t great. Ben (singer and lead guitarist) is planning to re-record these but it may be a few weeks before this gets done. Some of the guitar and drum parts were also a bit sloppy, but the drums don’t matter since we were playing to their rhythm anyway. It’s just the guitars, really, which are occasionally slightly out during the faster parts where both Ben and I are palm-muting. I’ve always sucked at palm-muting really fast. Still, fingers crossed this can be ironed out in the mix, and hopefully then I’ll be able to at least get some vocalless masters to put up here soon so you can check those out.

I took my camera down with the intention of taking some photos but ended up not bothering. It turned out to be way more fun to drink and listen to / play music. Who knew? So anyway, I turned up later than everyone else as I had to work the morning, but when I arrived we were still getting the drum tracks down. Jack has only been drumming – with us and at all – for about four months, and thanks to Jake skipping town we’ve not practiced as a band in the last two. So, it figures that those would take a while, but eventually they were done. Then Jake mocked us all by recording all of his bass parts in the first couple of takes. The bastard.

Ben got his guitar parts down in about an hour, including setup, and then it was my turn… I took about two hours, most of which was spent on our fastest and most complex song, ‘Like Corpses’. The final recording of it wasn’t perfect but it was about as tight as I was going to get it in the circumstances. Fortunately, after spending an hour repeatedly trying to get that bastard perfect, I went back to my favourite song (‘The Bus Song’) and nailed a perfect take. Woohoo! Fortunately Austin, 284 recording chap and he of Flatpig, convinced me to play with his Les Paul which was a damn good call. It is a nice guitar and for the first time I want something to play instead of my Epiphone SG.

The vocals took a while to get going since the first pair of headphones Ben tried were screwed up in a weird way: the recording came through fine, but his own vocals were entirely inaudible. So the first few takes were pretty bad! They got better once we switched out the ‘phones for another pair, but we didn’t have time to get them spot on as we had just 10 minutes to get some backing vox down for ‘Like Corpses’ (which has a three-headed shout at the start of the chorus) and ‘Down With The Ship’ (which I do some backing gruffness on during the chorus, and which Jake busts out his finest scream crunk screeching for the bridge). As luck would have it I got the broken headphones so couldn’t hear myself, but apparently my policy of “if in doubt, max the gruff” worked out.

It was fucking good fun and honestly, I can’t wait to get writing more songs and get back in the studio… it’s a helluva lot less pant-wetting than playing live, hahaha.

Okay, okay. I’ve been terrible for the last few weeks. Without even the del.icio.us round-ups this blog’s been looking like a ghost town. Here’s the thing: I’ve been torn two ways between sleeping really badly (insomnia is no fun) and being really busy with the day job. I know no one reading this gives a rat’s ass about excuses, but that’s yer lot.

I also need to shake up what I’m spending my time on. Project 365! has been fun, but it’s also quite intense and I’m routinely leaving it a fortnight between posts. I think I’m going to knock that little experiment on the head unless anyone is really enjoying it. As in masturbating whilst reading and unable to achieve climax without an update. Project 52! I’ll probably keep going because it doesn’t require such regular updates, and this allows me to think a little deeper and write a little more broadly about the books I’ve read.

I’ve enjoyed the few music reviews I’ve done recently and I want to start doing more of those. Every time I listen to a new record or attend a show I’m thinking about what I can write about it. The actual writing it up part is a bit trickier, but I’ll work something out. Even if it means taking a little notepad to shows and looking like a bit of a dork.

Friday flash fiction: as you’ve no doubt seen there’s been very little of this for a while. I’m pleased that the few people who got back to me about ‘Funeral’ had positive things to say as that was an interesting one to write. Going back a bit further, however, to the week where I posted four stories in five days, I realised that I was pushing myself to achieve quantity rather than quality, and often I was writing up half-formed ideas. ‘Heralded By Iron’ isn’t even an idea: it’s a collection of vaguely cool images. I don’t want to be sharing sub-standard fiction. Or at least, sub-standard for my own meagre abilities.

So as far as the flashfic goes, I’ll post one up when I feel like writing one. No promises. I get the most readers and feedback for my short stories, though, so don’t think this is me abandoning the Glorious Experiment altogether.

I also want to get back into writing longer fiction. In fact I have a couple of novel ideas floating around that I’d like to try and make a start on. It’s been some time since I attempted a novel (not since ’07, I think). This is not even mentioning the dozens of longer short pieces that I need to rewrite and try to get published. Did I mention that I’m lazy and poorly motivated?

Here’s the plan: I’m not going to force myself to meet any sort of schedule. I react poorly to deadlines and very quickly grow to resent them. What I am going to do is write what I want, when I want, as often as I want. This may be a music review or flash fiction or a P52! post or even one of my intermittent political ragebursts, and you folks will see these. Or it may be some work on something longer, and you won’t see these, but if there’s something interesting about the creative process, my mistakes, or my successes, I will probably share these anecdotes. I may even write occasionally about my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic, because our new drummer has pretty much nailed all our old songs and we’re looking to write new material and start gigging again.

Sound fair?

Thanks to everyone who regularly visits this blog: you make it all worthwhile.