I still feel quite bad because he very kindly sent me an MP3 CD of his excellent tunes, and I spent so long compiling one of mine to send back to him, but in the meantime lost his address.
Are you there fella? Email me your address if your are.
― Chewshabadoo (Chewshabadoo), Thursday, 4 January 2007 14:28 (seventeen years ago) link
Hello I am still alive and reading IMM, and ILX in general, but I've not really felt the compulsion to post anything for a good while.
The last thing I've done, "Shoot", is on that link above - it's a Sonic Youth cover I did for my old label. They're shutting down and are getting all their acts to cover "Dirty" in its entirety as some sort of final flailing pointless gesture. Unluckily for me my relations with them were/are so bad that I only heard about it when nearly all the songs had been taken so "Shoot" wouldn't have been my first choice. I mostly did it as Mr. Shirokuma was nagging me and didn't really take much time or care over it. The other mp3 on that site is someone remixing me which is beyond dreadful and should be destroyed.
I've not made too much music over the last year for a couple of reasons. Firstly because my experiences with going out in public with it were so mentally, physically and spiritually destructive that it's soured the whole process of making music to the point where I can't really get going without a series of incredibly shitty ghosts appearing over my shoulder.
Secondly, a good friend of mine, Chris Ashcroft, commited suicide this year. He was the singer in a band called Monkey Steals the Drum, who were John Peel darlings and an absloutely awesome act. But mostly he was a big artistic soulmate of sorts - I got him into Nirvana and Sonic Youth etc when we were 16 and taught him how to play guitar and got him into bands. He played bass in my angry-young-man band for a while before setting up Monkey some years later. Although he stuck with the whole guitars and angst stuff and I moved on to bleeps etc. he was still one of the few people who I knew who really "got" the whole creative thing and seemed to be on the same level. We certainly passed a lot of ideas back and forth over the years, to the point where he titled an email to me after I was asking him advice when setting up a new band :- "Imitate my imitations of you". So that's another ghost over my shoulder, a bit more literally though.
What I _have_ found myself doing recently is getting the guitar out and honouring the fire, doing the sort of stuff me and Chris used to do when we were 16. Although it remains as adolescently unlistenable as it was then, which is kind of nice. In fact, for my last birthday I put together a kind of best-of thing for family and friends of things going back all the way to when I was 16, which I should probably host somewhere online at some point.
Here's some tracks then
http://www.bilblio.nildram.co.uk/PORL/Lynskey%20-%20Electroclash%20City.mp3
. . . which is my kind of belated fuck-you to Manchester and all that
http://www.bilblio.nildram.co.uk/PORL/Monkey%20Steals%20the%20Drum%20-%201%20in%205%20caves.mp3
. . . which is my favourite Monkey Steals the Drum song, I'm sure they wouldn't mind me putting it up.
― lynskey (Lynskey), Thursday, 4 January 2007 15:17 (seventeen years ago) link
seventeen years pass...