Direction of travel and track notes

Direction of travel - track notes

Vauxhall

I wrote most of this in one take, scribbling on my knee on the tube. I don't often take the tube, at this point, pre covid, about once a week, otherwise riding my bike. This was a wet day early in 2020 on a packed tube that was where there was no one talking at all.

At that time of year everyone is pale. The outside world is cold but the tube is hot and everyone is a bit overheated. They sit or stand almost universally looking at a phone or listening to music. The silence used to strike me as weird, now I find it essential. It's socially constructed rest, a quiet moment in the ongoing onslaught of London's busyness. Well London's pre-pandemic busyness.

But just because we all seem alone we are very much not. That sense of vaping in others breath, the whole thing of standing for forty minutes closer to someone you don't know than you do your family, the patterns of the collective, where fashion becomes both a way to standout and a way that binds you to another group of people. Tattoos are the same. Same only different. Different only the same. Of trying to be different from each other but still subject to others presence, and directly partaking of the same air.

The Lakes

These pieces were written during the pandemic but we didn't go there in that period. We had been a lot in 2020/21 and one of the things that stands out about The Lakes to me is the idea that somehow it is a perfect England.

The Lake District is Natural in a way that really means 'Parts of it are in the same shape they were maybe 200 years ago'. Which is to say not at all Natural. They would probably be better called 'Postindustrial theme parks'. Old mine tailings, quarries, stone fences, grazed hillsides, whole farms, whole towns. So the idea that they are Natural is weird. Which is why the English often call them 'areas of outstanding natural beauty' because that gives you the wiggle room to put in buildings and farms.

The pandemic did very strange things to time, or the perception of time, and in my head The Lakes kind of elongated forward and backwards into time layering into a place that was both full and empty, that embraced us and then ejected us. And would one day stop being 'The Lakes' and just become a series of hills and waters, slowly regenerating away from us because they are 'The Lakes' only when there are people around to look at them.

Pembrokeshire

We had a much needed mid-pandemic break in Wales in the summer of 2020. It is a beautiful coast and we did the things you do - visit a mill, take a RIB tour of the islands, walk the paths. It was on the RIB tour that the guide told us about the light house keeper. That became the counterpoint of the pleasantness of the trip for me - yes this is great but somewhere out there someone (you) could also be going mad at the same time.

Yorkshire

This sequence has a lot of found or observational poetry in it. Sections (the tower) lifted from Wikipedia, notes from a visit to the Sculpture Park plus some work around birds - canaries of course to match with coal mines. Thematically it's about longevity and missed opportunities. So probably a contemplation of mortality in a time where mortality was a graph that I looked at most days.

Derbyshire

This is a single poem about a trip to a stone circle and how we tend to think magic is a bit bonkers but technology is ok when really what's the difference? My artist friend Adam looks at this a lot in his work and it's kind of a nod to that, since it was his enthusiasm for things like ancient monuments and cell phone towers got us there.

Norfolk

Norfolk is great but it is also a bit weird. Maybe it's great because it is a bit weird. I always feel like you are about to hear something that is really important but you always just miss it. That sense of dislocation went very well with the pandemic where the 'landscape' of everyday life kept shifting.

London

The London poems are about London when no one was going out and the city was completely empty. It was deeply uncanny being able to ride down The Strand on the wrong side of the road. And historically London has always been so directed - so many arrows shot from London to the colonies - so these poems riff on the idea of stasis and the ambition of movement.

Production notes

This work took a long time to produce. I had the majority of the words ready, and I had made some rough version of some of the pieces during the pandemic but I wanted to make these works endure and have a bit of weight - and one of the best ways to do that is is make it a high quality recording.

This meant I had a lot of learning to do, particualry when it comes to vocals. Previously all of my vocal recording was done in the house and there were inevitable compromises - rumbles, fridges, small rooms with bouncy walls. No amount of post-recroding processing convinced me that I would ever find a good clean speech recording in my domestic environment.

So I did what any aspiring teenager middle-aged artist in East London does and I booked in three hours at PIRATE studios in Tottenham in a podcast booth. PIRATE is pretty infamous it turns out due to a recent fatality. My approach to avoid a shanking was to go in early on a Saturday morning when the kind of people who go a shanking are still in bed.

Turns out three hours was about 45 minutes too long for my voice at the moment. Yes I used to be an actor but that was a very long time ago now. But it was the right thing to do. The silence was one thing, but also their podcast studios have Rode Podcast recorders and decent enough mics for spoken word. The recorder took about 5 minutes to master and had the advantage that I could record both a dry and wet (with effects) track at the same time. I used the Podcasts plugins, which had a strong bias towards spoken word, and they worked well. It's amazing what even a simple vocal gate can do.

From there I went back to some of the originals that I had made and threw out about 75% of the material and started slowly reworking the tracks.

Part of this was working on the recorded voice track. I went back to basics and read a lot about mixing again and tried to find some simple and repeatable vocal treatments that would yield the kind of results I was looking for. The common tools for this in the cheapish range would be Izotope or waves plugins but I wanted to understand a bit more than turning the AUTO knob so in the end I settled on some very classy SSL plugins which happened to come on sale at just the right moment. Their vocal strip was the magic ingredient - it has just enough parameters that I could more or less understand what it was doing without getting into infinite stacks of plugins with one undoing work of another. When someone like SSL says ' this is a good set for voice' then you can trust it and work within its boundaries. I also ended up using their Bus compressor and de-esser.

I also finally managed to get my head around basic eq and side chaining. It's a really obvious thing to say but there are good (sonic) reasons why things like 4 piece rock bands and orchestras with distinct sections exist and that is largely because those arrangement of frequencies and tones all tend to avoid each other (or complement each other) in the audio spectrum.

This process is a little less clear in electronic music because there is no formal agreement or limit of what the right number of synths or samples are. But with better awareness I was able to make better decisions about what sound would sit in which audio spectrum and use eqs to carve out the right spaces for sounds.

Compression and sidechaining I also started using more consciously. I am aware that my voice is quite low so whenever it was in the same sonic range as a synth or drum sound I used some simple modulation in Bitwig to drop the volume of the 'other' sound when the voice was meant to be prominent.

All of this is pretty much Audio 101 and none of it is revolutionary or in any way made my ideas any better but it did result in a good leap in the quality of production which - as intended - makes them easy to listen to.

Which is not to say I didn't then make some mayhem along the way, and do a fair amount of mangling, distorting and bending....