So here we are, the Spring Edition of Sound & Country Magazine, by me, your fave sonic ecologist: Grasslands off of Swindon.
With this issue, we are back to the well-tested formulae of promotion of music-related matters. I’ll try and make it interesting, I promise. The focus is on the imminent release of my new LP: ‘The Safe Places We Make’. I’m gonna do a bit of an extended ramble about it and how it came about, I hope you enjoy it!
Please do share it if you enjoy it and subscribe if you are yet to, it makes many things in the life of Grasslands easier if you do.
New Ambient LP Launches on March 24th
Yes, that’s right, after working on this little slice of approx. 49 minutes of power ambient chilled sonic vibes called ‘The Safe Places We Make, I am finally at a point to let it leave my little Neon Meadow recording studio and send it off on a journey into listeners’ ears (hopefully).
It’s no easy feat I can tell you, even when you are trying hard to not make an industry out of the whole thing. I guess it is great in some ways that there is plenty of technology and online assistance to help complete all the various steps required to make the music, distribute the music and promote the music, but the downside is certainly the effort required to do what was once done by an entire industry of music bods, but here we are, I guess.
Artist and Illustrator Bexrah has done excellent work on the artwork for this entire ambient project and I’m so, so happy with all the work she has put in. I’m blown away by how cool the LP cover artwork is.
I finished work on the final track recently by laying down some accordion and final vocals for the 7th track ‘The Circuit Breaker’ which firmly fits its title in the broader LP narrative.
I was then able, for the first time, to sit back and listen to the whole LP from start to finish (always an exciting moment). As tends to be the way, this was probably at 2 in the morning after having done stupid amounts of work on both my main job and some freelance wildlife stuff and I started to drift off while listening to the final nearly 15-minute-long track, which is exactly the vibe I was after.
The ability to snapshot periods of life through music is quite powerful, I can’t be the only one that captures memories via listening to music, but for me when making music, it has some extra weight and meaning. The amusing thing to me is always how the broader theme and story of a collection of songs tends to make the most sense right near the end of the creative process: when the track list and songs are all done and the artwork is in place. At these times I tend to find myself looking at the whole, with some distance, and seeing how obvious the themes really were all along and that I was just the last to find out.
After this listening experience with all the art in place, I felt it was worth making something ‘physical’ to go with the release, even if it is just for me and Bexrah’s benefit. So I’ve decided to make this a CD release for the launch, but only of a limited run of around 30 (seen as I still have some copies of my 2018 LP). Foolish? Certainly. Necessary? Yes.
Get in there kids, you can pre-order the new LP today:
The Theme of ‘The Safe Places We Make’
These songs were made during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 and were part of my way of coping with the ongoing madness of that time. I’d just started my new job about three months before all the Covid stuff started. I was working in a huuuge office for the first time ever and it was like being at school, which was novel and exciting. It was great to see and chat with different people or sit in the canteen (an actual canteen, at work!) and just look out the window. I could also catch the bus to work from my house (also for the first time in a long time), it was great!
In Swindon town, me and my friends Brendan and Marcus had just started running an ‘Electronic Music Open Mic’ night and we were getting all sorts of cool people turn up to play that we’d never met and it was all feeling bohemian and exciting…
…
…but, you know the rest of this story, right?
Hard stop!
The world goes on pause for the best part of 2 years.
…
As talk of lockdowns started to come up more at work, I decided to read the Imperial College London report on modelling the potential pandemic and the effect of various societal controls and, honestly, I was in a depression for about two days as I realised how long this was all going to last. While the news was talking about weeks and months, the report was clearly modelling the impact to last one year or more. This was gonna be a long haul!
Once my head had come to terms with the whole horror of the thing we now had to face, I did what many of us did: I ordered a load of musical equipment and nearly maxed out my credit card, under the assumption that such tech might not be available or at least would be in short supply in a couple of years time (well-forecast past-Tom, a gold star for you). My inability to travel anywhere, see anyone and mostly do anything, would mean there was plenty of time to pay off the debt in the next year or two.
Unlike many, I was fortunate to stay in employment throughout the pandemic and I switched to working from home early on. This perhaps was unfortunate in the fact that there was never much time to process fully what was happening to the world, but my employers were excellent throughout. They would allow us time to rest through the day and the like, which for me often meant:
finishing a meeting where we discussed the latest death-toll statistics, what rumours of upcoming ‘rules’ were about to be vaguely committed to at a podium in London;
switching off the virtual meeting in a vague state of worldly panic; and then
going for my government-sanctioned leisure walk around the nearby suburban fields.
This feeling is what ‘The Safe Places We Make’ is about. Those rather panicked, but much-needed walks, where I could easily switch my mind between the most ridiculous globally impossible problems that come with a virus running rampant across the planet, and then also looking over out at the Sparrows feeding on the grass and going ‘awhhh, that’s nice’.
As we started learning an entirely new lexicon of strange phrases and sayings associated with viral outbreaks and last-minute rules designed on the back of a napkin (soaked with wine and cocaine, as it turns out), I decided to cut off from the social media world and started listening to the now very quiet world outside and the interesting bounce-back of bird songs. I also started playing along with them at sunrise and sunset, to see how my music experiments differed between these times of day.
I also ate a lot of pizza, which was great fun, but I was quite a chunker come August 2020.
While many were struggling with spending so much time on their own, I felt a bit of an outlier while diving headlong into my various hobbies and some much-needed DIY jobs in the house. I missed not being able to see my family and friends, but I’ve spent plenty of time on my own in the past doing all those coastal surveys, so I can generally cope quite well. I meditated often and just focused on the relative safety of my immediate surroundings. This was where these songs were made, with samples of rain and bird song from the garden and various live jam sessions recorded as the sun went up and the sun went down, focussing on the calm rather than the chaos, as we were already surrounded by enough of it.
That doesn’t mean chaos doesn’t play a part in the song collection though, ‘The Circuit Breaker’ is a bit of a purposeful outlier in that it isn’t really that ambient and is more focused on the strange governmental double talk of the time.
So there you go, that is what this whole ‘power ambient’ LP is about, really. At the moment, it is strongly symbolised to me by a video I have found of the 15-minute-long spontaneous performance of the LP’s closing song ‘Amaterasu (Everyone Is The Rising Sun)’ where a rather chonky Grasslands sat in his underwear on a hot summers morning, as the sun rises, perhaps drifting a bit too far into mandated exclusion, ends up making a rather bloody lovely racket…
A Small Meadow Act - Music Video
Remember what it used to be like in the olden days?
Birds chirping, wildflowers abound, A.I. generated cows with multiple jaws?
That’s right folks, I’ve made a music video like MTV is still a big deal or something.
I must admit, I’m really, really happy with it. It has managed to capture the essence of the song perfectly to me. Not only does it have all those beautiful farming landscapes that you can only really imagine now, but this is the waking dreams of artificial intelligence; dreaming these meadows on my behalf. What fascinating times we live in.
I know there is a lot of discussion about the role A.I. will take in art (and our broader lives) in the next few years/months, but I think it is here to stay now, so I am happy to be asking these proto robo-babies to be looking deeply at grassland systems in the early parts of their lives.
I love how the video has come out a bit like the animation style of Dianne Jackson for ‘The Snowman’ (that wasn’t exactly a purposeful decision).
I’ve added in a few frames in the middle instrumental that start to lean more into Grasslands character narratives rather than meadow management stories (I’m sure you will spot them), but I tried to keep the influences fairly straight, as a lot of AI-generated art you see at the moment, can just look far too much like someone lumping a load of scrapbook phrases together.
This is the product of quite a few hours of work, to be fair, so although the clever chap that did the programming of the core code deserves the majority of the credit (hats off to David Marx), I did have a fair amount to do regarding the shaping of the video and the edit.
It’s amazing what you can do now, and what more we will be able to do as the years go by. Perhaps I’ll come back to how I made this video some other time, but for now, please enjoy watching it and share it about if you like it.
Are you a cow bot?
On an amusing related note to my music video, I thought you’d all appreciate this excellent BOT detection prompt I received recently…
To finish this odd interlude: Do you know I once wrote a song about a cow that got squashed by a giant copper ball? No? Well here it is:
The seasons behind
Looking back at the year in Grasslands gig action (so far)
Look!!! It’s our first returning feature, how exciting! This is where I talk a bit about the gigs you have missed (or you were there and hopefully had a great time). Here we go:
11th March 23 - The Cube Microplex (Bristol) - Ambient set for the Spoonie Rave
As mentioned in my previous edition of the newsletter, I was kindly invited by Charlie Miles to attend the spiritual successor to Liquid Library’s ‘Blanketfest’ that took place in Swindon, I think back in 2019(?). The premise being: a musical festival for sensory-sensitive people on the lower capacity and quieter side of music event life. It has the nice extras of having blanket forts and mattresses and bedding all over the place and the audience wearing big hoodies and PJs. It’s a great idea and I found it really interesting how different the sonic textures can be when there are so many quilted surfaces around.
I’ve also wanted to play in Bristol again for quite a while, but I’ve not really had the chance, and when I got the chance The Cube Microplex was always top of my list. It is a great alternative venue. I know that my pal Stereocelia is a fairly frequent helper and performer at the venue and that The Cube has some long-standing roots in the ever-evolving history of the KLF. I think the venue is the birthplace of the KLF/JAMMS dollar notes, based on an event that took place before their 2017 re-emergence. I bought some of this money from (I believe) Mr Hopkin’s Computer, while he was part-dressed as a badger and TV test-card in Liverpool in 2017 (another frequent presence at The Cube). Anyway… So yes, I was very happy to play there.
Oh, and I also went to a great gig at The Cube (some years ago, now) where Rough Fields played. He played some great soundscape stuff including some field sound recordings of the Northern Lights. In fairness, at the time I was kind of expecting him to be playing similar stuff to his more melodic LP ‘Edge of the Firelight’, but I was suitably mind blown and have probably drifted into similar ambient experimentation as the years have crept on.
I got a bit caught up in prepping my ‘Grasslands Merch’ before this gig and the day of the gig kind of revolved around that quite a lot, but I was also looking forward to having a browse around the Bristol shops, but bloody hell it was busy! I was hoping to write this entry while sipping on some sweet coffee in a cafe somewhere in Bristol, but most places had queues sprawling out of the doorways and onto the streets. However, I did manage to find a place to sit for a bit where I ate a rather nice couple of doughnuts which were a bit fancy.
I got to the cube fairly early but continued to do some art and crafts merch creation while chatting with Charlie and others near the blanket fort. It was then time for bingo(!!!) and I went into the main stage area with my bingo sheet, realising I had mostly forgotten anything meaningful to say about grass and as I was next on, I should probably try to remember. I looked through some previous notes and unhelpfully stumbled across these ramblings, which combined with the bingo numbers, didn’t really help me remember anything.
Gene from the Cube had a quiet word with me while I was setting up about how it would be good if I didn’t perform as loud as she’d heard I can perform. I do like this reputation I have for decibels :). Things were starting to run a bit off schedule, so I tried to set up relatively quickly and I just dived into performing. The set went really well in the end. All my devices behaved or reacted unexpectedly at the times I roughly expected they would, so that was good.
I played the first three songs off my new LP ‘The Safe Places We Make’ which amounts to about 30 minutes live and all seemed to tick along fine. I had a small group of the audience on stage with me curled up in duvets around my feet, which made it extra entertaining.
Some of the chats I had with people after were very interesting. I had someone ask me questions about my ambient influences, which I can’t say I’d thought of much before. They also asked me how I generated the visuals, which I promptly replied ‘there were visuals???’ The visuals were actually by a chap called Hoppo (wait a minute… is that the same guy I bought the KLF money off of???). The visuals were excellent to be fair, there was this great visual remix between sets that featured brick re-grouting, which was wonderful (you had to be there).
I also had a chat with someone that entered the venue while I was performing ‘Mantranome’ and she told me that she found the repeating lyrics really profound (awhh, isn’t that nice). I told her how I wrote most of this stuff during the Covid lockdowns and she said how she has suffered from long Covid and how that made it all make more sense to her. Another person I spoke to was one of the sleepy stage audience members and she said how she loved closing her eyes and being fully immersed in the sounds. All in all, I’m very happy with all these comments.
Some of the general chat from the whole event was pretty interesting to listen to really. Someone was talking about how the Spoonie Rave was focused on people trying hard to look after themselves. Someone also very lovingly stroked Bristol the Badger at some point while I was walking by, which I’m sure he very much appreciated.
The mixing was also really great too, and the chap behind the desk managed to get a really sweet sound out of the PA from a tiny guitar amp.
12th November 2022 - Baristocats (Swindon) - Zero Gravity Grass Ceremony for Liquid Library Presents…
This was another great event put on by Charlie, one half of Liquid Library (you should really sign up to their mailing list so you can keep abreast of all these cool events).
This was a fun collab session between me and Charlie as ‘Zero Gravity Grass Ceremony’ where we riffed on our previous collab on Mantranome, but made it an even longer-form piece which included snippets captured on various tape machines that were distributed around the Baristocats cafe creating a lovely surround-sound cacophony. My pedal board totally gave up on me for some reason, but to be honest, I’m quite glad it did as it became a very vocal-focused performance with just the faintest bit of clean guitar chord-age as a fade out. I think I also messed about a bit with the vocal lines from ‘Amaterasu (Everyone Is The Rising Sun)’.
I’m also very happy that Charlie wore green dungarees for the collab, excellent stuff.
I’m pretty sure Charlie included a recording of the performance in one of his Liquid Library Radio sessions for CAMP.
The whole event was great with some really blinding sets by Wendy Miasma and Electric Bone Chapel (who would clearly do an excellent gig alongside my other band No Side Effects). I was pretty gutted that I missed my friend Rob’s set as RRS, but we will no doubt talk street fighter and model trains some other time.
Oh and there were some great moments from the incredibly loud Autotistika who appeared like some demonic goat with a broken circular saw blade, but the kids seemed to love him (again, you had to be there).
The seasons ahead
Where can you next get your Grasslands fix?
Did all of the above sound fun and you are now full of regret that you missed it? Well, there is hope, my friendly reader:
14th April 2022 - Baristocats (Swindon) - Grasslands LP Launch
That’s right, I’m going all in on a little LP launch party over at my fave place of Swindonian weird: Baristocats Cafe. I’m still sorting out all the details, but I’m hoping it will include:
a live performance of the new power ambient album in its entirety and perhaps some other numbers with a little help from Grasslands & Friends;
the first live rendition of Mantranome in its proper collaboration format of Grasslands, Zero Gravity Tea Ceremony and Sotoyoto (it could be long and will likely be a bit different);
Solo sets from ZGTC and Sotoyoto; and
Bexrah who designed all the artwork will also have some stuff to show off and answer arty questions.
There will be CDs and miniatures for sale, cake, coffee and maybe more too. Who knows?! I don’t!
This will be a free event, but you can join the event group over on facebook.
Darn it, I’ve run out of space, and I was gonna talk books and mini-me’s. Oh well I’ll be back in your inbox again soon, then.
Grasslands Out