Guess I'm writing a lockdown piece.......Fucks sake!

Originally wanting to sit out of online collaborations during the entirety of the pandemic, my ego got the best of me and I decided to work on a piece in an vein attempt to keep some shred of the creative community still active, no matter how fragmented. Taking influence from Henry Hills' extreme use of jump cuts in the film Money (1984) and the in-your-face attitude of Soundcloud rap, I explored how improvisation and spoken word could work within the environment of working online that we appear to be damned to for the foreseeable future.

I asked musicians in the Birmingham experimental scene to be a part of this as a way of documenting who was around before everything got shut off. It documents a handful of my key musical collaborators and people I've been playing music with since moving to Brum, whether that was in person or via more abstract forms such as in this piece. I asked several Midlands-based improvisers send me short recordings based on descriptive words, graphic scores, riffs, bits of sheet music, yknow, stuff like that whilst also asking some vocalists to record themselves doing spoken word speeches, dialogue, wrestling promos or song lyrics that I happened to find joyously off-kilter in some way with, ultimately, the connection being that there was no connection between any of them. I then constructed short pieces based on each of these texts using short jump-cut style edits (many less than a second) searching for "little pockets of sound". Then to really fuck it up, I spliced them all yet again and put them back together using chance methods. Nothing is in order and the state of chaos triumphs over all.

Everything Sucks reflects on a time period where so much has been overwhelming and can only really express it by saying...well....everything sucks. The franticness really capturing the mood where your brain is moving at 300mph yet your body barely has enough strength to even the climb the stairs. A place where panic attacks start getting more severe and mental health spirals out of control yet without the resources to help with positive change, all one can do is sit into the abyss and let fragmented sound bytes wash over you. This feeling is what this piece was trying to replicate.

So, ultimately, what does this piece achieve?

Does it unite different branches of the Midlands experimental community to create a shared musical language? No, not really.

Does it offer any comfort at the whirlwind of the pandemic spiralling out of control? Again, no.

Does it give hope for the new year that some fragments of our tribal rituals can continue again? Again, no.

But I was able to get my friends to make sheep noises for my own amusement......and that has to count for something!