Above is one of the original album cover ideas for Gilded Cage by photographer and visual collaborator @zomtographer after a day spent building, cladding and furnishing a retro living room set, long before pink carpets and orange curtains became the dominant decor.

On the subject of which, I recently answered a few questions for the brilliant We Are Cult about small town peculiarities on film and wood cladding. Those with strong opinions on tombstones and ugly crying are also in for a treat. ⚰️

Spent my Saturday with a gold marker in hand. Only a few hundred records to go! ✨

My Bandcamp was looking a little drab so I put down some pink carpet to spruce it up a bit. Hands up who likes Pepto-Bismol?

Head over there now to admire the new carpet.

Words like violins, break the silence. ?

Nipper can’t talk, but if he could, he’d tell you that I’m supporting the excellent Empathy Test at the Talking Heads in Southampton (UK) on the 21st March 2018. Bork your tickets here.

This leads me to believe that all of the gold is probably under a hovercraft.

First transmissions of 2018. ✨

As well as being a super world indie tune, ’In Your Neighbourhood’ has made Dope Cause We Said’s end of year playlist! Go here to lend it your ears.

Nice picture of a building found on this person’s Twitter.

Taken by Dublin-based photographer Shane Lynam, here’s a fitting image for the period between Christmas and New Year.  

Have a luminous one (and thank you).

Tasteful blowmolding. Borrowed from here.

If you’re wondering about the availability of a physical version of ‘Gilded Cage’, then you’ve come to the right update. Currently, vinyl is still in production, but as soon as it’s here it’ll be going up on Bandcamp and, if you’re a subscriber, you can get 20% off. 

Secondly, a few of you have asked for CDs and whilst a record is a beautiful object, you’re right, it’s quite hard to listen to in the car, so I’ve had a limited number of CDs made and they should be here within the next two weeks! Thanks to @zomtographer for the artwork for those.

Lastly, thank you for your patience and encouraging comments. I took this picture a few weeks ago, as both the sticker and the context seem quite fitting for anyone doing a creative project or making music independently. We are all this motorhome.

For desert island doom, Simpsons characters as musical references and a sad tale about my dashed hopes of becoming a sign painter, head over to More Than The Music to read the questions that I answered for their Fast Five feature.

The picture is from Flashbak. It’s like looking in a mirror.

“It was against what the department said music was; they said I was dehumanizing music!” laughs Chowning. “My response was, ‘Perhaps it’s the humanization of computers.’”

Fascinating read about John Chowning, the inventor of FM synthesis here.

Bears do other things in the woods, y'know.

Tees available now from Bandcamp (with free download of In Your Neighbourhood).

From Colour Work by Steven Taylor Photography.

Thought I’d post this today because Xune Mag and Pavillonn really know their onions. In Your Neighbourhood features on both of their Spotify playlists! You can listen here and here and think about onions, if you like.

I've gathered together some of my favourite @youtube documentaries about creativity over here. Expect singing postcards (pictured), weird art, melting crayons & electronics.

Hiding behind the letterbox in the dark because I’ve already eaten all of the sweets.

From For Your Consideration: Los Angeles as a Cinematic Mirage by Gianluca Galtrucco.

A good summary of today from Hiller Goodspeed.

Along for the Ryde. I took this at the International Classic Car Show a few weeks ago because it reminded me of the kind of thing you see in Twin Peaks and Fargo.

More of that sort of thing in the Neighbourhood.

Seeing as yesterday was Friday the 13th and there is a puppet king for that, I thought I’d share some thoughts on one of the more obscure inspirations for ‘In Your Neighbourhood’. If you watch the video and listen to the glockenspiel melody, they might summon to mind elements of the US children’s television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. It wouldn’t be a completely wild connection to make.

Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood wasn’t a show I ever watched as a child (although I did avidly watch fellow PBS network show Sesame Street which of course has its own neighbourhood-based song) but something I stumbled on by accident when reading a seemingly endless feed of grim news. It was the “look for the helpers” quote which caught my eye and led me to clips of the series on YouTube. I’d sat there ready to roll my eyes at a bunch of naff characters making flutes out of vegetables or laugh at some stuffy presenter, but to watch it is to feel like you have momentarily stepped inside an entirely different world, with its charmingly bizarre puppets and unparalleled, deliberately slow delivery, which gently encourages its young audience to be present, tolerant, engaged and visible, without being patronising. In one episode, Mr. Rogers talks about managing feelings, acknowledging and dealing with them constructively, as opposed to the advice erring on the side of suppressing them (which although relevant now, is a whole other conversation). His speech at an awards ceremony where he times the audience in near silence whilst asking them to think of someone who has “loved them into being”, is capable of disarming even the most militant of misery guts. Even if you can’t get behind any of that, he successfully sued the KKK for targeting children with racist messages, rallied for VCR taping of programmes, gave George Romero his first filming job and introduced musicians such as Wynton Marsalis and experimental pioneers Bruce Haack and Esther Nelson to an audience of kids who may not have experienced jazz or electronic music otherwise.

Where the song ‘In Your Neighbourhood’ differs though, is in the erosion of belonging and highlighting the creeping influence of pure nostalgia, which brings so much into conflict, often without any good rationale behind it. A few months before I moved from my hometown to a more remote hillside, I felt like many people in the UK, weirdly unsettled and like I didn’t really understand people’s motivations for things anymore. I couldn’t find the helpers. My sense of place felt warped, because of a negativity I couldn’t quite comprehend. If only the ‘good old days’ we’d alluded to were the good old days of ‘the neighborhood’, where, seemingly, everyone and anyone was welcome.

Ahead of the release of single ‘In Your Neighbourhood’ this Friday (06.10.2017), I’ve designed a few Curxes x Mercht t-shirts featuring The Captain, Flamingo (constructed by Mitchel Wang) and Herman the Cat from the accompanying video. 

They’re available online for a very limited time and you can browse all of the designs here. Mercht also offer worldwide shipping options so you you can be part of the neighbourhood wherever you are.

P. S. If you’re a Bandcamp paid subscriber who’d like to purchase a tee - please drop me a line and I’ll still honour the physical merch discount by email once the tees are posted. Thanks!

Nothing says October quite like this photograph, taken from a selection by William “Billy” Cress.

From Places by Aaron Ruell Photography.

Here’s The Captain, dropping in to give a big thank you to the Brooklyn-based Vehlinggo, who had this to say about ‘In Your Neighbourhood’.