Saturday 17 December 2016

HOW TO MAKE AIR ITSELF - STONE


STONE 


Contrary to popular belief and common sense I've always thought, to a certain extent, that writing oneself into a corner was an important, even necessary, thing to do. Not just because a corner is often the territory of your own peculiar obsessions, desires and fears - but because the implied negativity of that act is something that people tend to avoid or overlook - in both cases it's a rich resource for writing. Not feeling entirely comfortable with what one writes seems a quite an important part of the process.

I do feel like a lot of the writers that I admire are writers that explored their personal corner of the room long enough for one of those walls to yield another room  - or at least by confining themselves conceptually, they were able to illuminate their obscure territory sufficiently to make us re-interrogate that overlooked area in ourselves - like the point at which a microscopic image begins to uncannily resemble a telescopic image (and vice versa).

Sometimes I feel like songwriters are the most promiscuous people, their muse is drawn from all kinds of sources in a way that would seem dilute most other art forms and make them seem rather scatty, anecdotal or superficial (of course this is also the pleasure of them as well - that they sometimes get away with it so marvellously). Perhaps it’s my ‘education’ that inclines me to write in the opposite way (and I confess that sometimes I hate it -  my position and the writing) - but I’ve also felt a degree of gratitude and surprise that my own corner keeps yielding something to me, it keeps surprising me and occasionally that barren territory seems to get replenished against all expectation.

So in short I see this song Stone as giving the illusion of movement, it feels like a song of distances and of a journey - but it's actually kind of jogging on the spot or standing still. Or perhaps it's a dance, albeit a slow dance in a corner, but a dance nonetheless.

Vince (Kokot) played some wonderful damaged cymbal on this track as well as the glockenspiel and ukulele. Yan Fabre provided the otherworldly voice of the musical saw. Together, they feel like the air or the weather of the whole song. 

EVERY WEEK OVER THE COURSE OF THE CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN I'LL BE POSTING SOME THOUGHTS ON EACH SONG THAT FEATURES ON THE RECORD AND HOW IT WAS MADE.


IT WOULD BE MASSIVELY APPRECIATED IF YOU SHARED THIS SONG AND SUPPORTED THE CAMPAIGN TO TURN IT INTO A BEAUTIFUL 'REAL' THING OF THE WORLD (ie: a packaged LP/CD)