Planets In The Wires

My new album ‘Planets In The Wires’ is now available to preorder from Bandcamp.

To me this feels like a big moment. I began making this record in 2013, just as I was finishing up Dinas Powys. I knew I wanted to make an album with lots of synthesisers, and I wanted to go back to something quite big, high concept and ambitious. So I did.

Planets was written and mostly recorded between 2013 and 2018. Modular synths played quite a big part in its creation. Creatively they can be amazing, but they can also be a rabbit hole of absolute bollocks. My hard drive is filled with hours of noodling loops.

But Planets is absolutely a song album. Ten tracks documenting the fracturing of politics, and to an extent the fracturing of my own mental health in response.

I’m not sure it’s a happy record. It’s angry in parts, sad in others but I found some humour and some good lines in the place I was in.

I think it’s the best album I’ve made. I really do.

Think of it as the third part of a trilogy with European Monsoon and The Signal And The Noise and it will probably make sense.

It also exists in relationship to Defunct Devices. Not least because DD stole a song from it: ‘Embrace Dunning-Kruger’. I decided to include it on DD because it fit sonically, and also because at that point I just wasn’t sure Planets was ever going to get done. My approach to making DD was a direct reaction to (at that point) failing to get Planets finished.

Why did this record take so long? (Is it really interesting to talk about this stuff?) I think the answer is perfectionism. I have always worked around my shortcomings as a singer, musician, producer etc. But for this one I really wanted to push myself creatively, and have it come out better than good enough. I also wanted to mix it myself. And therein came the biggest problem.

After I finished DD, I felt unblocked. I’d once again made a record I was proud of even though it was imperfect and you could see the joins. This is always what I’ve done. So I went back to Planets with more forgiving ears. Mixed it again from scratch and got it done.

The preview song is called ‘1984 (Is Not A Manual)’. It’s a big state of the nation type track. Builds slowly from some simple bleeps into a fairly epic track with a synth meltdown at the end. Quite wordy and dense, taking a scattergun approach to all the things it’s angry at. The rest of the album calms down a little after this. I’ll do some more track by track thoughts in the coming weeks.

For now, this feels like a big liberating moment to get this record out. I’m looking forward to you hearing it.