Memory Palace

A memory palace is a way of helping yourself remember things. A mnemonic. But in lockdown my mind started building its own palace.

It kept spontaneously presenting me with sequences of memories from random points in my life. At the time I attributed this to a reaction to the imposed monotony. There weren’t enough truly new memories forming so my brain was flicking through the archives for something to do. Did this happen to you?

Musically… well it’s a bit of a random jam really. Written around a looping bassline. Some messy drums. Long glitchy guitar solo using a Hologram Microcosm re-edited into something in dialogue with the vocals. There aren’t any keyboards or synths on this. It’s a mess but I think this sort of thing is fine for a track 10. 

Defunct Devices (the song)

If Planets (actually finished in 2019) ends with a moment of stillness in ‘Norway’ then Defunct Devices (finished in 2022) begins with probably its most restless song.

A title track. One of only two in my discography of eight albums and seventeen EPs. Like the other occasion when this happened, it was the title of the album before it was a song or song title. I felt the shape of the words emerge. I knew it had to be alliterative and the cadence of the syllables – at one point it would have been called Default Domestic. 

A theme emerged for the record, and the theme was ‘Men’. Again I talked about this in this interview. So in the song the defunct devices are the junk we throw away, and they are the men. I’m not sure I actually think men are junk we throw away – but I suppose there’s a part of the old way of being a man which is junk, and which we should be throwing away. I suppose it’s part of the ‘culture war’ at the moment. A lot of men see that the old roles are dying and double down on them instead. Incels. Jordan Peterson. All of that. 

I’m not sure this song is about that though. We’ll come back it when we get to another song. I think the devices in this song are fairly content to find a place where they can go rust.

So the restlessness is musical. Jumps somewhere between a bit of sub-Field Music funk, and a vaguely ballady Terror Twilight middle section. This is what happens when my hands write songs rather than my head. I’m still quite enjoying finding this out. 

The fuzzy outro happened because I realised I’d made a mostly electric guitar record without really rocking out much. Gratuitous.

Norway

Lyrically, I’m not sure this song gains a whole lot from being explained. 

Musically… I think something I sometimes struggle with is to allow songs to just be still, stay in one place. Most songs you’ve ever heard don’t constantly fight and subvert themselves. Most people don’t do this to themselves either. I imagine that sort of peace is nice to spend time in. I think I found it for a few minutes in this song.

Listed Building

Ah finally we get one from Defunct Devices.

Here’s a chance to point you to this interview I did with my close personal friend Spencer Segelov where I attempt to make ‘I started writing songs by playing the guitar until there was a song’ into something interesting. But there we go – that’s what happened. I picked up the guitar during lockdown way and played in a way I hadn’t before. I wrote lots of songs and finished an album quickly – ‘Listed Building’ was one of the first of these.

Its working title was ‘Jazzmaster Song’, because that was the guitar I wrote it on. I didn’t really think about guitars for a long time, but suddenly I started paying them as much attention as I had been paying synths and electronic instruments for years. I had treated them as if they were basically all the same, but reader they are not. 

Indulge me for a moment… The Fender Jazzmaster is the pinnacle of electric guitar design, and when I played one for the first time I felt like I was home. The shape and feel are just perfect. A good Jazzmaster pickup contains all the sounds other pickups somehow omit. But oh, the tremolo system and bridge. The musicality of these is everything to me now. A Stratocaster tremolo is far too twitchy and lends itself too easily to those whammy / boing! sounds that dickheads use in their guitar solos (for example the guitar solo on ‘Overthinking’). 

The Jazzmaster tremolo system is now a fundamental part of how I play. It doesn’t feature massively on this song, but this is where I first began to discover its charms.

What else is going on musically? A really quite odd, mildly atonal riff. A middle section which I believe is in 7/4 and a chorus which someone said sounds a bit like Placebo – which I can see, but wasn’t intended. As I was going full ‘Jazzmaster Song’ I also threw in some fairly obvious MBVisms in the background of the chorus. Why not? In the past I’d have resisted obvious references, but a mantra for Defunct Devices was to ‘let the songs be what they want to be’. 

Lyrically, this actually constitutes the first part of a series of songs about ‘lost places’. Originally I envisaged doing a short EP early in lockdown which would have that name, and where each track would focus on a ‘lost place’. What am I getting at with ‘lost places’? Lost in what sense? Here I think we just mean ‘abandoned to the ravages of history’. I’m thinking about a place where children used to play. Now maybe due to be redeveloped into something more mundane – maybe helped along by a suspicious fire. 

That idea is maybe abandoned as a binding lyrically concept, though it’s still the working title for the next album. Musically, ‘Listed Building’ didn’t fit the other songs that are emerging for that record, so onto Defunct Devices it went. 

Alice & Bob Through The Looking Glass

[I am choosing the order of this track by track blog using a random generator, and not necessarily loving the order it’s coming up with….]

Digging quite deep into the memory banks to try and talk about this song. As with Theory of Everything I can remember this song floating around when I was working on Dinas Powys. Probably even earlier. I believe it was recorded and mostly finished in around 2014.

Musically where are we? Somewhere between Broadcast, Field Music, and the theme tune from Pugwall. I reckon I was listening to Summer Camp a fair bit around then too, which could explain some of the sounds on here. 

Let’s not overlook the elephant in the room, the structure of this song is downright odd. Whilst there are repeating sections, they never repeat in the same way. This made it very difficult to teach to the band I was playing with in 2019. There’s also no obvious reason why anything happens the way it does.

I don’t remember trying to make this song odd. It all just made intuitive sense for it to flow this way. I will often start out with an intention to make something odd or straightforward, long or short, or whatever, but in the end intuition always wins. 

Lyrically where are we? Alice and Bob are the names given to particles in explanations of quantum entanglement. The most commonly cited use case for entangled particles is absolutely uncrackable encryption. If Alice encrypts a message, she can give Bob the other particle in an entangled pair as the key. 

I suppose in this song Alice and Bob are in love. Bob sees Alice as she passes through the looking glass, and maybe starts to move away from reality. Because they are connected by entanglement, messages from the other side can still get through. No one else can understand, even as they intercept them. We all know Lewis Caroll’s Alice books are, on some level, about madness. We all spotted the Cheshire Cat reference in 1984, right? (and Light Pollution?).

Another reference in this song is to Permutation City by Greg Egan – a very dense sci-fi novel where competing computer generated realities vie for dominance. What kind of reality is Alice disappearing into? 

I also feel this song forms part of the continuity from Spy Numbers / One Time Pad and onwards into another album I hope to complete someday with a working title Bletchley Park. If being incredibly difficult to finish is any kind of indication of quality within the PWL canon then that record should be the best thing I ever do. 

Theory Of Everything

Next up in the track by track, Theory of Everything. 

Probably the joint oldest song on the album. I seem to remember the idea for the chorus coming out when I lived in Dinas Powys, and parking it because it clearly wouldn’t fit the sound world of that album.

Musically this is probably an attempt to land somewhere between Hot Chip and John Maus. 

The main synth on the track is a Dave Smith Prophet 12, which I kind of wish I hadn’t sold. The drums are all individually made from scratch in the modular – including that lovely watery wobbly sound that comes in the second verse. You start to see why this album may have taken so long. Hours of work could have gone into something which you hear for just a few seconds. 

At the time this would have felt ridiculous compared to my usual pace, and would have contributed to this feedback loop of anxiety about the album taking too long, and therefore needing to be even better when it finally came out. So work even harder, take even longer! 

Now it’s out in the world, it feels absurd to worry about this stuff. It’s worth trying to make every second of a track the best it can be. No one listening hears any of this. They just hear the gestalt. 

So I like this one. It has a good silly chorus. It’s lighter hearted than many of the songs on this record. I don’t think the chorus (the ‘gods own song’ bit) necessarily even really ‘means’ anything. It was just an amusing image that I couldn’t get from my mind. 

It fits this wider idea of the whole record, about how people respond to the breakdown of certainty by leaning into One Big Idea Which Solves Everything / grand meta-narratives. It doesn’t matter what idea this specifically is. The most perniciously incorrect is probably the idea that efficient markets either will solve everything, and / or that there’s some sort of intrinsic morality to the outcomes they cause. But a theory of everything could be anything – it could be socialism, or religion, any time you think you’ve found a magic bullet. 

The references in the song are mostly to theories in physics, where ‘theory of everything’ means something different. Much more about the pursuit of a single theory to unite the quantum and newtonian realms.

What’s the analogy in the social world? Maybe something that unites the economic and the socially just? I’m not persuaded people are actually even trying, but they sometimes act like they already cracked it. 

1984 Is Not A Manual

We’ll see if I stick to this, but the plan is to do a track by track for both Defunct Devices and Planets In The Wires over the coming weeks. I’m doing this using a random generator thing, and unfortunately it’s chosen ‘1984 (Is Not A Manual)’ as the first one. So track one of the most recent album. The one I’ve already written about, and which – if you had a passing interest – you will probably have checked out already.

So what else to say? It’s always tricky to try and write something ‘definitive’ and ‘important’ but that’s very much what I was attempting with this song. I had visions at one point of it being 11-12 minutes long with multiple sections. In the end it came out a sprightly 6 and a bit minutes. Though there’s a four minute ‘radio edit’ in there if you looked for it.

What is it about then? I think the key line is ‘we’re haunted by power we cannot control’. I was using ‘haunted’ as in ‘hauntology’. I’ve been dipping in and out of the work of Mark Fisher over the last few years, and I think there’s a lot of that ‘mourning the loss of what the past thought the future would be like’ type ideas in this record.

So 1984 is I guess just about struggling with how we change things. Things need to change more than feels realistic. And why do we feel that way? Fisher has a book called Capitalist Realism. When socialist dictatorships used art to try normalise socialism and make it part of the unquestioned fabric of what is going on, they did so overtly. This is certainly what happens in Orwell’s 1984. 

But I think Fisher is arguing (and I would agree) that capitalism does this too. We constrain our own options and vision of what is possible, but I genuinely don’t think it’s the result of conspiracy – it’s just what happens when you step back from intervening in the world. The mistake is to assume that either intervention or non-intervention is the default state, and that whichever one you instinctively or ideologically reject is the aberration. 

The line ‘Kyoto protocols are going to drown us all’ is an example of this. These were an attempt to set out a legal and economic framework for emissions trading, and this was essentially a negotiation with a mindless counterparty – nature itself. I’ve come to a more nuanced and positive view of what carbon trading could achieve in the short term, but the fundamental intellectual error still troubles me. 

Others have called this space of what is deemed to be possible the ‘Overton Window’. I was disappointed when I realised someone had already come up with this concept, otherwise it could have been named after me.  🙂

Then I think there’s some stuff about communications technology in the mix too, and the role it plays. Orwell’s view of how a mega-state would control everyone is almost quaint now. Lots of human beings finding and manually ‘correcting’ history as the party’s stance on the forever war changes. Far more brutally efficient, rapid and mindless means of rewriting reality have emerged since the internet arrived. And the recent rise of ChatGPT promises more to come.

The voice speaking over the outro is Marshall McLuhan – of ‘the medium is the message’ fame. When he codified that idea – that means of communication shape what is communicated – he was seen as an evangelist for it. What he’s articulating in this clip is that he was actually more of a sceptic / scaremonger. 

These changes move faster than our ability to understand and therefore control them. We’re increasingly unleashing powerful forces that are emergent rather than designed. What looks like conspiracy to a certain kind of left winger is – I think – just some unscrupulous people being willing and able to ride the chaos and profit from it. 

I wish this song had a ‘happy ending’ in terms of how we’ll address this. Back to my previous post about the overarching direction of the ‘trilogy’ – I think the hope lies in the next generation. Digital natives who, I hope and believe, will actually be better at navigating this shapeshifting landscape of truth. 

The other voice you hear on this song is my daughter, aged 2, protesting the closure of our local library.