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Since my last blog post about my next album, I've done further work on five of the tracks I'd recorded for it, adding additional elements to the music including backwards guitar, e-Bow 9-string guitar, and lots of additional synthesizers and sound effects. I've been tweaking the mixes a lot, too. This is my idea of having fun, by the way. It's what I do these days.
The addition of even more synths was understandable, given that I have just taken advantage of NI's recent "Summer of Sound" sales promotion and splurged. After not buying anything at all from them for the past year, I've upgraded my version of NI's Komplete to the Version 15 Collector's Edition; the upgrade price made doing so a no-brainer. NI have added a considerable amount of new products to their catalogue in the last twelve months and the collector's edition gives you pretty much everything, so I ended up getting more than thirty new plug-ins as well as the full version of Kontakt 8 for not much more than it would normally have cost me to buy the latest version of Kontakt on its own. The download ended up being a ridiculous 679 Gigabytes. I'm very glad I have fibre broadband but even so it took the best part of a day to pull everything off NI's servers and install it (and I've installed the highlights on my Alienware laptop, too).
I'm already very impressed with the Schema: Dark and Schema: Light instruments and the massive forty-piece Choir x Omnia as well as the splendidly atmospheric Arkhis synth provided by Orchestral Tools. There are lots of other plug-ins I haven't even tried out yet. But I will get round to them as well.
So I'm still having fun noodling away at each track, adding drama and enhancing the dynamics as well as getting rid of anything that my ears were telling me needed fixing. It's interesting how coming back to a piece of music with fresh ears the next day can reveal something that must have been staring me in the face all along the day before. The flip side of this is the temptation to never stop tweaking things, of course. Eventually I'll have to declare that the album's done, but I don't think I'm ready to do that just yet.
My mental and physical health (and with them, my mood) continue to be all over the place at the moment. I was supposed to be attending a gig on Thursday evening, but by the middle of the afternoon the gardening session I'd had earlier in the week caught up with me again and I found that I could barely get up from the chair in my studio, let alone hobble out of the room or stumble down the stairs. I felt so exhausted that by half-past eight that evening I'd given up; I filled up with Ibuprofen, flopped into bed, and stayed there. Although the quality of my sleep only marginally improved on the previous night, doing that instead of staying out until the small hours of the morning was the right thing to do.
It's very difficult for me to find a comfortable sleeping position these days, and it's harder still to stay that way. Lying in bed hurts, and how is that even possible?
I've concluded that the main reason why I'm in so much pain at the moment is because I've switched from soaking in the bath for an hour or so each night to taking a shower for no more than five minutes. I'm not allowing enough time for the heat to relax my muscles. And there's a depressingly practical reason why I'm having to do this, and it has nothing to do with the impending drought which this country seems to be facing: after thirty-five years of daily use, the bathroom is well past its sell-by date and the acrylic bath has started to crack. It doesn't leak when I take a shower, but I spotted some water on the floor after filling the tub a bit deeper than I normally do the last time I had a bath, and I'm not taking any chances. I have absolutely no intention of having the bath disintegrate around me and fill the kitchen below with bathwater so for the moment, I take showers, not baths.
Project New Bathroom is already well under way, though. There is absolutely no way I'm going to miss out on bath time for any longer than I need to. It's where I get all my reading done!
As the week progressed and I recovered from my exertions, I noticed that my sleep quality score was gradually creeping upwards; by Saturday I was beginning to feel slightly better. I know that I've been spending too much time on my own and the best thing I can do to improve my state of mind when I'm like this is to get out of the house instead of moping around and getting lost in my thoughts; more than one close friend tells me this at regular intervals and intellectually I know that it's true—but there are days when just knowing that you need to change your behaviour isn't enough to make you actually do anything about it.
However, as luck would have it I'd been asked to do front-of-house sound on Saturday for another band I know who were providing live music for someone's birthday party. The music nerd energy I get from a job like this was enough to overcome my anxiety about leaving the house and the event was being held in a rather nice (and very large) back garden, so I spent a very pleasant afternoon and evening in the fresh air with another tablet controller driving an unfamiliar mixer through its own WiFi network (and as if that wasn't enough to take me to my happy place, while the band weren't playing I spent my time nibbling ham sandwiches and admiring the huge variety of bird life which was hanging around the area, including buzzards, swallows, house martins, and pied wagtails).
The gig was a success and the band were very happy with how things went. In fact the drummer's wife had recorded each set on her phone, and on Sunday afternoon the drummer messaged me saying that he'd just heard her playing back the recording and thought she was listening to a CD. I got a nice ego-boost from his comment: "What a fantastic mix. How did you do that?" And they did sound excellent, even if I do say so myself.
The weather on Saturday was pretty much perfect. In the morning the humidity outside was sitting at 80% which threatened to make life uncomfortable, but the sun came out and by lunchtime this had knocked it down to the mid 50s. With scattered clouds and not much of a breeze, by late afternoon being outside was very definitely the place to be and the majority of the guests at the party were either wearing shorts and t-shirts or summer dresses. I'd brought a jacket with me, but I soon left that on a chair and didn't retrieve it until well after 9 pm.
Sunday was very definitely not jacket weather, and neither is today. The UK is experiencing another heatwave and at the moment it's uncomfortably hot here with a forecast high of 32°F (90°F) this afternoon. The temperature is expected to be a little lower tomorrow, but it'll still be in the thirties here. That's far better than Europe, which has been experiencing absolutely brutal temperatures. In Portugal, temperatures in the capital city of Lisbon were expected to reach 42°C (108°F) on Sunday. I stayed out of my north-facing studio because even with all the gear switched off it was 29°C (84°F) in there yesterday, and that's too hot to work on making music that you're going to be happy with afterwards.
The problem with leaving the house shut up all day on Saturday was that when I got home, it felt like an oven inside. But after opening all of the windows, taking a shower, and leaving the electric fan by my bed on all night, I ended up having the best night's sleep I'd had in more than a fortnight. Getting out of the house (and having something to do) clearly did me some good. But last night I was back to struggling again. Even with the curtains drawn all day, the house had warmed up a lot and it was much too hot to shut the bedroom door, so the bedroom got light by half-past four this morning and that woke me up again. I struggle with hot weather. I much prefer it when it's cold (after all, this website started out providing resources for skiers, remember?) And I'm at additional risk because heat stresses the kidneys, which are important in regulating body temperature. It's not fun.
For Saturday's gig, Russ (the vocalist and bassist) had decided to wear a bright yellow Dutch Uncles shirt. This turned out to be a rather poor decision for an outdoor gig, but everyone else found it highly entertaining watching him trying to remember the lyrics and play while being chased around the stage by enthusiastic wasps and an assortment of other insects.
The following day I found my buddy David "Bravus" Geelan writing about flying ant day on social media. He was musing about why the ants had congregated on the bright yellow lid of his recycling bin but had completely ignored the lids of his other bins, which were red and green. Replies in the thread provided a lot of anecdotal evidence that things that are coloured yellow attract bugs of all kinds, but I was intrigued by the fact that I've always accepted this as tacit knowledge (which pretty much any kid who spent a large part of their childhood outdoors is going to know) but not once done anything to find out the explicit reason for such behaviour. So I fired up DuckDuckGo (my search engine of choice these days) and set about finding an answer.
It turns out to be about food, of course. Yellow objects have a peak reflectance at a wavelength of around 580 nm. And guess what else has a peak reflectance like that? Newly developing, nitrogen-rich foliage, that's what.
According to research by a UK search engine company which specialises in job listings, the number of entry-level jobs available has plummeted by more than 30% since the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
This does not surprise me in the slightest.
I'm really glad that I'm retired these days, as it limits the amount of garbage I'll be exposed to that companies that have enthusiastically embraced LLMs will no doubt be churning out. Can you imagine running a company by getting the predictive text app on your phone to write all your correspondence and quality manuals? There. Is. No. Difference.
As of yesterday evening, I've got twelve tracks recorded for my next album. I need to listen to them all a few times before I decide that I'm happy with things, but even if it's not taken its final form just yet, the music is there.
It's a relief. It feels like I've been working on this particular album for months. That's probably because I started it back in April. That same month I had already abandoned work on a different project entirely, because it steadfastly refused to ignite my enthusiasm. As someone who has been spinning out at least one album a month for several years now, taking this much time over something feels really weird. I think my slowing work rate is probably as much the result of me sitting down and doing some heavy thinking about what it is that I want to achieve as a musician as it is the poor state of my mental and physical health.
All that contemplation (or was it rumination?) has led to me becoming highly critical (and much less satisfied) with the results I'm getting, even when I don't abandon them entirely. That has led to me going back and pulling things apart and reassembling them in different ways until I'm not quite so disappointed with what they sound like. I've also been trying to improve the "producer" side of how I approach a project, and that's taken me down some unexpected byways that weren't always fun to explore, but which gave me better results in the end.
So I'm not rushing this one out; as I mentioned in my last blog entry there's no Bandcamp Friday next month so I'm going to take my time and polish this one up a bit more than I usually do.
This week the weather has been a little kinder than it's been lately and it's a much more comfortable 21°C (70°F) in the back garden at the moment. I took advantage of the nice day yesterday to get the lawn cut for the first time in weeks, and last night the hedgehogs were taking full advantage of the short grass, with my trail camera picking them up as they chomped their way through all sorts of invertebrates. A short shower in the middle of the night clearly brought a lot of tasty treats within easy reach, and they were tucking in with gusto. It was lovely to watch all the infra-red footage on the computer this morning.
But there's nothing like a spot of gardening to make me realise just how old and decrepit I am these days. By teatime I could barely move. I tried as hard as possible not to, either, because every time I did something else started to hurt.
Did I get a good night's sleep after all that exertion? Of course not. Instead, my subconscious decided to treat me to a succession of anxiety dreams with a choice of subject matter that felt particularly cruel. It isn't easy to defend yourself against your own id when it decides to start bullying you and I woke up this morning feeling utterly miserable, although a large mug of coffee, some fresh strawberries, and a cinnamon roll have helped that mood to fade away a little bit. Trust me: you really wouldn't want a mind like mine, folks. It's not much fun in there these days.
I have just noticed that for the past month none of the handy little "permalink" bookmarks that I include on the header for blog entries here was pointing to the correct URL. Sorry about that.
You can draw your own conclusions about my mental state from the fact that it's taken me nearly four weeks to notice; they will probably be fairly accurate.
The blog is celebrating its twenty-second birthday today. That is just as surprising to me as it is to you, I suspect. I've never run the blog with the expectation that it would ever develop a wide audience (it hasn't), or that I would be able to make money out of it in any way (I haven't). Instead, I write for the same reasons I make music and then release it on Bandcamp: I do it for my own amusement; to get better at the craft; and because I like going back to things I made years ago to see what sort of frame of mind I was in and assess whether my skillset has improved at all since then. And I know that I'm extremely privileged to have had such ridiculous amounts of time and resources available to dedicate to such an apparently trivial task. That needs to be acknowledged right here in the opening paragraph.
But here's the thing: I've never considered this blog to be trivial. The amount of time that I must have devoted to creating stuff for it since I started in 2003 boggles the mind. It's not just the work of writing each entry that's involved, either; there's the hours I've spent drawing the banner graphics for each page and then scanning them in (and I've worn out two scanners since I started doing that; I'm now on my third). Then there's all the photographs I've taken which had to be edited and then uploaded to Flickr and elsewhere so that I could embed them here. And once we add in the amount of effort which I've expended in switching the entire site over from basic HTML to CSS (which took me the best part of a month, back in 2015, and that didn't include the weeks I spent beforehand learning enough about CSS to feel confident enough to attempt the task) I suspect we'll discover that I will easily have spent 10,000 hours keeping the blog up to date, let alone the rest of this website (which first came online in 1996 or so).
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Outliers in which he presented the argument—which has long since been rejected, even by the psychologist who did the original research that Gladwell based his book on—that it takes someone roughly 10,000 hours of doing something to achieve mastery at it. I've got a long way to go before I get to that stage, I think. But I've improved a lot as a writer since I started this blog. I know far more about web coding, as well as a whole host of related technical skills that I learned purely because I thought they might be fun to have. As a result I've ended up with a skillset that I never set out to acquire, but I really enjoy putting it to use.
And apart from anything else, writing the blog has been a way for me to quietly contemplate the modern world and enthuse (and occasionally rant) about how gloriously weird (and often stupid) it all is. I'm not going to make hyperbolic claims about how it's been responsible for keeping me sane for the last two decades, because it very clearly hasn't. But it has helped to take some of the edge off things.
Making music is an even more rewarding experience for me than writing is. I might not write every day, but music is an essential part of my daily routine and it has been ever since I was given my first transistor radio, back when I was a very small boy.
I've set myself a loose deadline of the end of this month to finish work on my latest album. So far, I've got ten tracks completed and up until last weekend I was going to call it a day and release the album like that, but over the past few days I kept coming up with some more ideas for it. Yesterday I dived deep into making track number eleven, so I don't appear to be done with it just yet. I've been experimenting with different approaches to layering and sound design and aside from a few user interface niggles (dear god, Native Instruments are clueless when it comes to UI design) I've been enjoying myself a lot.
I'm not rushing things, though. It'll be finished when it's finished. There's no Bandcamp Friday in July; the next one is in August. By that point I plan on having the third ICH album finished as well.
It's nice to have things to do which I enjoy doing.
The spell of hot weather that has been making sleeping difficult for me broke last night, and according to my sleep tracker at one point I spent a solid hour and forty-six minutes in deep, uninterrupted NREM sleep before I started dreaming again. I think that might be a record for me, and it indicates just how exhausted I've been feeling for the past ten days or so. Yesterday afternoon the temperature in the back garden hit 33°C (91°F). Further east, the temperature reached 34°C. But outside right now it's 23°C (73°F) and it's just started to rain. I feel so much better. Hot weather can do much worse than just leave you feeling uncomfortable and tired, as approximately 600 deaths are estimated to have occurred from heat-related causes this week.
But 33°C is no longer anywhere near the hottest temperature the UK can experience these days. The extremes have been rising, and they're going up faster and faster (as we'll see in a moment). The first time UK records exceeded 40°C (104°F) was in July 2022 when the weather station at Coningsby recorded a temperature of 40.3°C. That year, the total UK death toll caused by multiple heatwaves was put at 4,500. Across Europe as a whole, there were an estimated 61,000 deaths attributable to the extreme heat.
This week, the UK Met Office published a study setting out the likelihood of such extremes of temperature becoming more common and it's not reassuring reading. The report also found that the current climate makes it quite possible that the UK will experience temperatures that are "several degrees higher" than the current record. That's not the sort of record you want to break.
I mention all this because it was Show Your Stripes Day yesterday, which is an initiative to encourage people to find out how fast warming is happening where you live. Here is the record for the city closest to me, which is Bristol. I bet your closest location has turned red in the last few years. Do I need to explain that red is bad? And that the darker the red, the worse things are? Warming has accelerated rapidly over the last few years, and by much more than climate models predicted it would. When organisations like the Met Office start using expressions like beyond control to describe what's going on these days, it's difficult not to feel a sense of rising panic.
Because panic is entirely justified. If you don't find this utterly terrifying, I don't think you understand what's going on.
This isn't the first time I've mentioned the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) on this blog, and I'm sure it won't be the last, either (for previous mentions, look here, here, here, here, and here). Think of the AMOC as being like your car's cooling system; it transports heat from the tropics to the polar regions and cold water from the poles back down to the equator. It's thought to be one of the most important processes for regulating climate that this planet has, and it's quite probably the most important. As I've written about in earlier blogs, there have been signs that this ocean current is slowing down as a result of anthropogenic global warning, and computer simulations have suggested that it could stop altogether. Obviously, this would be a very bad thing. It would tip the Earth's climate into instability in ways that are extremely unlikely to benefit humanity. But the level of scientific concern that's evident in this report in the scientific journal Nature published on Wednesday is the most severe I've ever seen. Henk Dijkstra of Utrecht University is blunt:
"The effects of an AMOC collapse will be so extreme that it will be difficult for us to adapt."
Apparently this is okay with the world's politicians. And the companies responsible don't care, because they're still turning a profit. Of more concern to me is the fact that it's also perfectly fine with certain factions of evangelical Christianity, because they believe that the catastrophe will bring about the Rapture and the Second Coming. Hey, if you can just float away with a harp and a pair of wings, it's not going to be your mess to sort out, right? This is why I have come to view the charismatic church as an existential threat (something that the UK's Foreign Office have believed since the late 1980s, incidentally, although they tend to keep quiet about such things). The GOP really likes the members of this sort of congregation, because they aren't in the habit of questioning what they're being told. Religions tend not to be too keen on critical thinking skills and you don't have to look very hard to find the most likely suspects responsible for cultivating that cultural connection and using it to their advantage.
Fossil fuel companies are very obviously in the driving seat these days when it comes to organizing efforts to mitigate climate change. That's why nothing is being done. I have given up any hope of action being taken in time to prevent the awful catastrophe that some of us can see rushing towards us. And it will not be any consolation to me when the people who were expecting to drift gently up into the sky and be saved from the consequences of their actions discover that actually, they're going to have to deal with what they've done along with the rest of us.
Meanwhile, the media would rather laugh at Greta Thunberg than pay any attention to what she's trying to tell them. The world's leaders keep pretending that the house isn't already on fire.
Is it any wonder people tell me I don't smile very often these days?
While I was installing a new 4TB NVMe module on the motherboard of the studio PC this week I finally caved in and "upgraded" the system to Windows 11 at the same time. I have to de-authorise the DRM software on a number of my music instrument libraries when I make any serious change to my hardware in case it decides that I'm running the software on a different PC rather than an upgraded one. If it does that, it stops my plugins from working any more. As it's an absolute bloody faff to get everything working again (yes, Waves Audio, I'm looking right at you, and that's why I haven't bought anything else from you) I try and avoid making system upgrades any more often than I absolutely need to.
And yes, I used those inverted commas to denote sarcasm, just in case you missed what I was getting at.
It took me fifteen minutes to install the new M2 drive. Installing Windows 11 and getting it to run properly took me more than a day.
It took nearly two days before I could get the firewall that's built in to Windows Defender to work rather than generating an error message of 0x800706d9 (and if you want to know how to fix that particular problem, this is what worked for me).
I'm still working through a number of other issues that the install created, but at least I can report that yesterday afternoon I was able to record, mix and master a new piece of music. So I'm going to take that as a sort-of-win.
But Windows 11? I hates it, I does.
I had a splendid time drinking coffee and setting the world to rights with my friend (and fellow Ibanez RG9 player) Anthony Garone on Wednesday morning.
Amongst many (so many!) other things, we talked about my recent experiences as a musician and the resulting crisis of confidence I've been going through, and the insights which he provided have given me lots to think about (in a good way). I think the simplest way I can put his advice into words would be that as creators, we should just get on with it. "Don't worry about being recognised as a musician," he said. "You make music. So you are a musician; why would you tell yourself that you aren't?"
When they're framed as eloquently as that, the mental knots that I've been tying myself in for the past three months just all seem...
Silly.
And after spending two days utterly engrossed in getting my studio back to the point where it'll do what I want it to do once again, I realised that I hadn't had time to be distracted by feeling sorry for myself, by negativity or ruminating thoughts, or even by the pain that has become my constant companion these days. Last night I also realised that the depression that has been weighing heavily on me recently seemed to have disappeared. Today it feels as if it had become bored with being starved of attention and had moved on to bother someone else instead.
There's a lesson to be learned there, and I intend to learn it.
Last Friday would have been Nita's 65th birthday, and over the past week I found myself thinking about her even more often than I usually do. She was my best friend and confidant for most of the 1980s. We grew into adulthood together; we would spend hours together trying to figure out the meaning of life; we went to gigs together; the many glorious meals we ate together in the local Indian restaurant with the rest of her family kindled an enthusiasm for curry that I maintain to this day; and one summer we scandalised the friends we'd gone on holiday with when one of them caught us in bed together (fortunately I didn't find out just how many people ended up hearing about that particular incident until decades later, because back then I would have been absolutely mortified). More than anyone else I've ever known, Nita taught me what it meant to be a human being.
Every moment we spent together was lived on borrowed time, and we both knew that. Nita had a congenital heart condition. Her doctors hadn't expected her to survive to her tenth birthday but against all the odds she made it to the age of 31; she died whilst visiting her father in Australia on March 12th, 1992. I never got to say goodbye. I was much too upset to go to her memorial service back then, and I still regret not doing so. The older I get, the more I realise what an important part she played in my life. She could be a person of fierce convictions (to the point that some of our male friends admitted to me recently that they had been scared of her) and she opened my eyes to a feminist perspective by challenging me gently but firmly on the views and preconceptions I'd picked up from my father (which were outdated, even back then)—but she was also intensely passionate and kind and I'm absolutely certain that without the love and support she gave to me, I would not still be here today.
And my life has now been twice as long as Nita's. I've been struggling to process how that has happened, because it feels like only yesterday that we were hanging out together at her mother's house in West Wickham or my place in Milton Keynes. I wish I could spend another day with her and tell her how special she was, and how much I loved her. These days, I understand how important it is that, whenever it presents itself, you take the opportunity to tell those people who are precious to you just how much they mean to you, because one day those opportunities will run out and the chance to do so will be lost forever.
The latest update on the Royal Mail's tracked 48 hour delivery service website for a book I ordered last week still shows no delivery estimate, 132 hours after they received the parcel.
But hey, at least it appears to have arrived safely back at the central sorting hub—which is nowhere near me—where it first arrived, five days ago...
The post-Real World crash is upon me, and the last few days have been pretty rough. In fact this week has been pretty miserable. I spent most of yesterday in bed, and I haven't done that for a very long time.
I've been off anti-depressants for eighteen months now, and this is the worst bad patch I've experienced since I took that decision. But I am going to grind my way through this because I'm not ready to admit defeat just yet. Even though it made insomnia a thing of the past and enabled me to fall asleep at will, I hated how much less sharp I was mentally when I was on Mirtazapine. I always used to put on weight with it too; today, when I stood on the bathroom scales, I was pleased to discover that I was well under fourteen stone. I'd prefer to keep things that way.
I still feel lethargic, and I never feel like I got enough sleep when I wake up in the mornings. But this morning I made myself take a shower and I shaved for the first time in nearly a week. I don't feel quite as spaced out as I did yesterday and I even spent a brief moment just enjoying the smell of my aftershave. I've had my "slug day" ration for this month; staying in bed again today isn't going to get me anywhere.
So TeCAs be damned; instead, I'm about to distract myself by downloading three gigabytes of software and installing Ableton Live 12.2 on the PC in my studio. Yes, the latest big update to my favourite DAW has finally hit the public servers. There are plenty of UI improvements in the release notes and the completely redesigned auto filter effect looks like it could be a lot of fun to play with.
You know Ableton have put a lot of work into an update when the format of saved files changes and you have to use "Save As" to update an existing set, and that is the case with this release.
I have albums to work on. It's time I did something about that.
When I said in last month's blog that I hoped my upcoming musical adventures would shake me out of te funk I was in, I didn't expect life to take things literally. But on my way there, a lorry driver decided he was going to move into my lane and the fact that I was already sitting there in my car was clearly just my bad luck. That's a story for another time, but as a result I really wasn't in anything remotely resembling the frame of mind I'd had planned for the Producer Camp I was attending at Real World Studios.
I wasn't prepared for just how intensely emotional an experience I ended up having over the following few days was going to be. As I said to more than one person during the weekend, "I hadn't expected there to be so much crying involved" but the most powerful thing I learned was how necessary it is to let your emotions steer the music you make. You can't be cold or clinical if you want to connect with your listeners on a personal level.
I had told myself beforehand that I was going to commit to the process, even when it took me out of my comfort zone. So I had to open up. And when I did so, the floodgates opened and I found myself completely out of my depth and utterly overwhelmed. A lot of what happened has affected me on a deeply personal level and after thinking about it for the best part of the week, I've decided that it just isn't appropriate to write about it here. I've learned a lot about myself and evidently I've got a lot of stuff to work through.
If you've been reading the blog for any amount of time you'll know just how much I love Real World and the wonderful people there. This past week confirmed just how lovely they all are and I would not have made it to Sunday night without a lot of encouragement and support from all of them.
It was a roller coaster of a weekend. But I wouldn't have missed a single second of it.
And when you're sitting in the Wood Room during a session where Dan Neale (Massive Attack), Jim Barr (Get The Blessing), Adrian Utley (Portishead), and John Baggott (Robert Plant) are recording a piece of music that you helped to write (and played a guitar solo on) then you know that it's not a normal Saturday night by any stretch of the imagination.
It was a delight to catch up with friends from last year, particularly these three lovely people. Thanks for the kind words about this blog, GG—they were very much appreciated.
And thanks to Katie for taking both the shot above of me with Mr Utley and this one, which makes me smile every time I look at it.
But I think I need to go back for another producer camp before I can feel like I've done the event justice. If I do, I'll approach it very differently next time, I think. I know I can contribute more than I feel like I managed to do this time around. And hopefully I'll be in a much better frame of mind when I do.
Despite all the weekend's wobbles (or, more likely, because of them) I came back home thoroughly motivated to sort my act out. As a result, I can now issue my own ISRCs for my releases, which is something I should have sorted out years ago.
Now all I have to do is put it to use!