all things are delicately interconnected. everything that has ever happened is a perfect storm, endlessly caught up in the things that came before it. a combination of perfectly balanced influences are the links in a chain that thread together to make a necklace.
i wrote an ep about makeup, music, celebrity big brother four, causality and determinism. for most of two thousand and nineteen, I skimmed between academia, The Music Scene and a soul destroying job in retail. it was a time in which these seemingly disparate modes of living seemed to coalesce: constant crediting, referencing, explicit tracing of ideas; learning to be creative again, making songs, sampling; a strict routine working shifts, cyclicality, repetition.
i worked early shifts for most of the summer last year. my route to the bus stop went down moss lane east, through to whitworth park. partway along the road, I passed a discarded piece of paper that stood out from the moss side debris every day until it turned to pulp and washed away - it had TESTIMONY written across the top in a baby pink serif.
the same summer I meditated on the outing of two old friends as abusers, who were both cancelled because their testimonies differed so much from the women who had accused them.
i tried to find solace in literature but the rhythm in natasha stagg’s welcome to the doll house evoked not only the slow cancellation of these people that i knew but also the trudge of that everyday routine and the walk down moss lane east every morning.
the holy bible from memory is a coffee table book which contains a crowdsourced recollection of the events of the bible.
biblical names is mostly comprised of youtube audio rips of people playing drums, and a woman hitting a table. i liked the idea of outsourcing rhythms, even if they were to people i had never met before.
on her 1987 tape piece ‘amazonia dreaming’, annea lockwood develops snares and voice for their mysterious and erotic characteristics. her vocalist dominic donato purrs like a cat on the track, amongst scraping textures and falling drums.
“now, would you like me to be the cat?”
in celebrity big brother four, the housemates are set a task to see if animals can communicate with humans. labour party mp george galloway surrenders his body to being feline. he crawls on his knees, purrs in a way to evoke annea’s donato and pretends to drink cream from rula lenska’s hands. she rubs the cream from his invisible whiskers, scratches him behind the ear.
the twelve word poem from sara sutterlin, sexi death, explores animal imitation as intimate submission. she writes: “you surrender into arms. mimic animals that are easy to love”.
i believe the other works collected on this website to be part of the chain reaction to making this record. they are the things I can pinpoint that I know made me want to make this music.
but this is not a record about nostalgia. references is about links and circles, the cyclical energy that these documents, pieces of music, places and cosmetics have given me to make music myself. in that exists no beginning or end and therefore no past or present. in designing the artwork for this record, jamie hudson gave me the vocabulary to talk about it as jewellery: if this ep were a necklace, the references would be the links in the chain, the tracks would be a pendant, only appearing when the clasps are holding one another.
