Its funny now really (I am writing this about a year and a half after this was first released), but it took me a long time to dare to put this out. Even after I put it out I was afraid to really promote it. This is because the songs on this EP all felt intensely personal to me and I had never released anything personal before. I was used to putting out more 'ravey' tracks (for want of a better word) under different pseudonyms. The pseudonyms hide you, and in 'ravey' tracks you are allowed to put on a mask, put on a performance that happens when you wear that mask, therefore shields you from any of it mattering that much.

I decided to write a better description for this EP, a more honest one, one that is less a sales pitch and more a frank assessment and explanation now it does not feel as tender to write about because time has passed.

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This has come together in some short fragments and some long paragraphs

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A lot of these tracks come from bad places in my life, but they are not necessarily negative, many are me trying to be optimistic. However the tracks generally come of a bad time in my life and are spawned of specific events. I am not going to go into these much because it does not make much difference to your listening, some of them are composite (they maybe started from something then mutated in light of something else) and would make no sense and mainly a track should be allowed to mean what it means to a listener, too much explanation ruins this.

The Kurt Vonnegut sample at the beginning reflects this, about how we shouldn't look back on all the bad shit but sometimes we are compelled to. Read the book if you want that bit to make more sense.

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This EP is designed to be listened to through from beginning to end and you will get the most out of it that way. Try listening to it like that.

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A producer joke:
Producer A - "I made 100 tracks this year"
Producer B - "Cool. How many of them were a different track?"

Some people have criticised the tracks on this EP from being too different to each other, I disagree with that. I feel they all go together to make a whole, a mood formed of opposites and contrasts. I am probably never going to make a collection of music where all the tracks sound the same. That bores the crap out of me and is lazy.

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Some of the religious imagery in it has lead people to ask me about what my beliefs are, I am not religious. Most of it is not directly religious though I can see why it would be interpreted that way. The Pillar of Salt in the title is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse 5. The track 'The Thought Of You Arguing With St. Peter Makes Me Smile' is titled as such because it is about a friend who died. That friend was very argumentative, or always challenged authority figures (sometimes it was right, sometimes everyone groaned because this again). It is called that because I can completely picture him getting in to an argument on dying and meeting St. Peter, and that makes me smile.

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The process for getting this EP to sound right was painstaking but I doubt anyone notices. Probably why I feel the need to write about it here. I re-recorded every sound used with real instruments after I was done because I felt some of the synth instruments were letting down the 'sound world'. This involved me doing things like recording Glockenspiels note by note and piecing together my terrible playing, or getting cello and piano parts re-done.

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The next one will be better.

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I hope you enjoy this EP

Kinsugi - January, 2021