Finishing records sometimes takes us years; as many as 18. Like the Komodo Dragon, our timeless creative process leaves unfinished tracks lying around until the right moment for completion.
[The following text & images are taken from chapter 1 of the article ‘What We Do Not Forget,’ first published in the zine accompanying our 2024 We Do Not Forget mini-album / EP release]
The songs contained in this ‘mini-album’ were mostly written and produced between 2022—2024, apart from Sustain which began its journey a bit further back in 2019. If I’m completely honest, the backing track that became Dark Matters evolved from a sketch born in a North London flat circa 2006 (that’s before iPhones, kids). The way we make records is a bit like the hunting methods of the Komodo Dragon, described as follows by the late Douglas Adams:
“They don’t actually eat you sort of straight out, they sneak around and give you a bit of a bite. Because their saliva is so virulent, your wound will not heal and after a while you will die. So one of the dragons will get to eat you, it doesn’t matter if its the same one that bit you. They just have a strategy of having as many dead and dying creatures lying around the island as they can manage.”
Douglas Adams
Much like the Komodo Dragon, I too have a strategy of leaving as many unfinished tracks lying around the studio as I can manage. Eventually one of them may suddenly become particularly resonant to a moment in time, inspiring me to finish it and finally end up on a record.
This odd method can be partly attributed to my own particular brand of neurodivergence in that I lack an internal sense of elapsed time. I can remember sequences of events and work timings out by association. My memories don’t tend to feel young or old, they just float around in a kind of pool surrounding my mind. The longest time between starting and finishing a track probably was Dark Matters with an 18 year gap. It could just as well have been 5 minutes.
The idea of recorded media has always fascinated me. We not only capture moments in time like flies in amber, with audio we can literally hear the voices of the dead as if they are in the room with us. Some see old recordings as merely archival but I see them as the thoughts, ideas and expressions of people long ago waiting to be released from their confines. Some recordings are too far removed from today’s world to bear relevance but I’ve found that they can often provide uniquely poignant perspectives backed by historical arcs.
Given these observations, I suspect Fold would never have existed without my internal sense of timelessness.
[To be continued in Part 2: Why Shit So Crazy?]
