December thoughts

An EP is born, I talk a bit more about perfectionism and creativity, there's a lot of "not knowing"

Hello!

I’m back here again to try and continue this Substack with some degree of consistency.

I wanted to put this pink grid, created by Agnes Martin in 1963, in at the beginning of this post. I have been thinking about her and her work a lot recently. Olivia Laing writes wonderfully about her in her book “Funny Weather”. I find Martin’s work deeply soothing.

Somehow it is suddenly winter in England again, and it has come with full force.

I am addicted to/deeply reliant on my hot water bottle, sometimes sleeping with two or tucking one into my trousers and waddling around the house. I am writing this from bed, with my hot water bottles bracketing me. Again, soothing.

Things are happening. The world turns. The days are short and grey again in the Northern hemisphere.

I’ve been making things this summer and autumn. I have recorded an album, with an amazing team of people lending their talent and time and enthusiasm and kindness and creativity to the project. I cannot quite believe that it exists to be honest. It will come out next year. It feels very weird and very exposing, as well as exciting and bewildering. To be honest mainly exposing right now but I know that is part of the process and I accept it & I’m just grateful that the album is a reality, not just an idea in my head that I have no idea how to actualise, which is what the idea of releasing any music was to me for about a decade.

I have also made an EP with my wonderful and ridiculously talented friend Sam Beste, aka The Vernon Spring.

It’s called “This Weather” and it was released yesterday, on Blue Flowers Music. I wanted to write something in depth about the process but I don’t know if I can right now. But I can say it was a healing process for me. Without using too much pseudo-psychological talk, it felt like a good outing for my inner child, who knew nothing of meritocracies or rules or scales or grammar or what makes art ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or or worthy. I think a big part of this amongst other factors was the speed with which Sam & I made it, with no time for second guessing or even analysing what we were making was. Another factor was the way we worked together: a lot of improvisation, conversation and a kind of neutral/kind curiosity towards the ideas. Seeing what organically developed, almost saying “interesting” and following the thread instinctually and non judgementally until something defined, with soft edges emerged.

I have been thinking a lot about music and perfectionism and how it can inhibit creativity to the point of paralysis. I already touched on perfectionism in a previous post but there is so much more to say. It is a recurring theme for me (and I’m sure many others too).

Something that I have been I have been holding in my mind in relation to this is that I want to treat music in the way that many visual artists treat their practice, which obviously varies but I think that there is an acceptance that ones whole body of work across a lifetime doesn’t necessarily need to be cohesive, that the work you make at different points will be defined by where you are in your life when you make the project. And that you can change mediums, change style, spend five minutes on a pencil sketch or twenty years refining and redefining a sculpture. Essentially that you can keep evolving and not have to explain yourself too much, or be worried about creative a cohesive creative narrative or front. I’m sure that this is a major over-simplification, as I’m sure many visual artists feel the pressure of cohesion but I do think there’s something slightly different in the way we think about music and musical artists. Though having said this, many of my absolute favourite musicians have embodied such fluidity and flexibility in their output which I find endlessly inspiring. Talk Talk and Bowie immediately spring to mind.

This thought, which has been with me for the last few months whilst working on both projects, feels liberating, something to hold on to when I am feeling vulnerable or embarrassed about putting my ideas into the world, worried that one single moment of expression will feel definitive. I think I am maybe the only person putting these restrictions on myself, but these are internalised notions that have come from somewhere societal I think.

I think that humans relentlessly want, and need to some extent to categorise and define things in order to understand them. I know that this is in some areas a useful ordering tool but I also think it can be extremely restrictive most of the time. There’s something deeper there for exploration about the illusion of a cohesive self/ true “You” but again, that’s for another time.

To be honest I haven’t been feeling my absolute best recently and I haven’t really had any articulate way to express it. I love writing but I don’t really feel I have much to say, I love reading but I can’t seem to get through a single sentence for the last few months. I feel quite mentally saturated but I spend a lot of time looking at my phone for quick and sugary stimulation (yawn).

The world is heavy. Yes, there’s so much beauty, as always, but recently it seems harder to say that. This time of year is always bizarrely juxtapositional, the doom and joy held up against each other in a number of extremely jarring ways, each state making the other feel more acute. But this year feels more jarring than usual. I feel this peculiar mix day by day of festivity and doom, swinging randomly between the two without a reliable rhythm. I feel lonely and connected, free and claustrophobic, in love with the world some days and on others completely stumped as to how we can all carry on living our lives whilst unbelievable atrocities continue relentlessly to fellow human beings. The level of detachment and cognitive dissonance needed to go about your daily life, and the subsequent guilt for being able to do that at all when you can.

I seem to think and talk a lot about duality in my day to day life, the knowledge that we have to be able to hold seemingly oppositional ideas, that that is the key to being able to keep going, to exist in the tension. It sounds good but sometimes it feels impossible. Sometimes it’s not enough.

It is a strange time to be making art, an arguably luxurious thing to be doing. But I do think it’s important too. I don’t know. This post is full of not knowing, but I think to sit in the not knowing is sometimes just as important as wrapping everything up in a neat bow and trying to make it make sense. There I go talking about duality again, eek.

Anyway here is our EP, “This Weather”. I love it for lots of reasons and I am grateful to have made it with Sam. I hope you enjoy it.

Yx