Good news everyone! My festive new single is out, just in time for the holidays. My new composition is the perfect thing to put your family in the mood for four years of an orange maniac being the most powerful man in the free world. Put it on at your office Xmas party and enjoy the suffocating mood of oppressive doom which will settle over the gathering. It's available now for pay what you want at the link below. The single is over 45 minutes and it's as a recording of a curse I've placed on Donald J Trump.
This year with the topical theme I've chosen for my Xmas single I wanted to explain in a little depth the thinking behind the record and the process of creating it.
Like many people I was appalled by America’s decision to elect a man with obvious and crippling mental health problems to the highest office in their land. It was an act of self-destruction that requires a response no matter where you might be in the world. Unfortunately, like the majority of the citizens of this globe I am absolutely powerless to materially influence the ramifications of this disastrous decision. I knew that I wanted to create a piece of music that reflected my ambiguous feelings of antipathy and powerlessness in the face of a global catastrophe. I’ve produced Christmas singles in the past and Trump seemed like the perfect antidote to the mood of enforced jollity that pervades over the winter period.
There is something uniquely hideous about Donald J Trump, he exerts a kind of grisly fascination, a curious reverse charisma that makes it hard to look away from the ongoing car wreck of his public persona. This dark attraction was very much part of the problem during the election cycle; his limitless reservoirs of spite and bile, his constant willingness to demand attention in ever more strident terms, his strange relationship with objective reality, all conspired to create a kind of circus of the obscene. I wanted to create a piece of music that also reflected my own compulsion to keep staring at the nightmare. The outcome was a piece of music that lasted more than 45 minutes and has more than 4000 words of lyrics, the perfect metaphor for how Trump has been able to generate content around himself in ever more expansive fashion. Has there ever been a modern human being who has generated so many opinion pieces, so many talking heads, so many fucking hot takes?
I settled on the idea of a curse fairly early. It seemed to me to be the ideal mixture of vituperation and futility. A curse is an occult declaration of war, a sincere wish for the total obliteration of an enemy, a chance to cathartically wallow in absolute negativity. It is also objectively pointless, an empty psychodrama with no real chance of effecting actual change on a macrocosmic level. I love a good curse but I’m all too aware that the laws of physics don’t look too kindly on people trying to influence events out there in the real world by altering their own inner reality. There was also something appealing about the idea that Trump, and a certain subset of his more reality impaired and paranoid cohorts, might be genuinely annoyed by the idea of someone harnessing occult forces against him, in the unlikely event of their actually finding out about it. In the end there's well over a thousand words of the track that consists of me wishing ever more baroque harm and misfortune on that most baffling of modern political phenomena. It won't actually achieve anything but it's still more effective than the average 38 degrees petition.
The music for ‘Let’s All Put A Curse On Donald J Trump’ is palindromic, something that came about almost by accident. I had recorded the music on my tablet and uploaded it to my computer. I then deleted the original recording because I’m always short of space on my tablet. Due to some unforeseen fuck up I’d somehow only uploaded half of the original track which meant that I was a good twenty five minutes short of material. I considered re-recording the entire thing but then it occurred to me that I could simply play the first half again backwards and see how it sounded. I was delighted by the result and I defy anyone to work out when the soundtrack flips from moving forwards to backwards just by listening. It creates a nice sense of structure amid chaos which is something that always appeals to me, I like the idea of the structure being there but hidden from casual attention.
The ritual alluded to in the lyrics was completed on 12/12/16 at the sight on a neolithic hill fort, one of the very few examples of the local geography being permanently changed by our ancient ancestors. It’s located in a country park and rounded by trees which create a natural barrier to sight and sound above and beyond the raised earthen walls of the fort itself. It’s often a quiet place, the steep slope ramparts and the ditch moat do a good job of funneling dog walkers away from the interior of the fort. The psycho-geography of the place continues to function just as it did all those thousands of years since. It is something sequestered, something private, something serene, the very antithesis of everything Trump stands for and therefore the ideal place to call down meaningless imprecations upon his head.
View of the raised mound of the fort from the bottom of the ditch
The ritual itself went well. The weather was dreary and drizzling which imparted a fine layer of moisture onto everything. I was not disturbed, in fact I didn’t see another human being the entire time I was in the park, the rain and the gloom seemed to have serendipitously kept people away. I wanted to have the freedom to invoke without having to explain to passing strangers that I was engaging in a piece of performance art with an intended audience of zero in order to validate the contents of a conceptual noise composition.
The sigil adulterated with blood in preparation for the ritual
The sigil destroyed after the climax of the ritual
So there you have it. A Christmas gift from me to you. One man’s attempt to make sense of the senseless, to dramatise the churning riot of negative emotions into something that has meaning and which can provide a brief, fleeting sense of illusory agency. Just remember that every time you play the track you are in a sense repeating the ritual and calling down fresh curses on the man who is soon to lead the free world. I’m not saying it’ll be down to us if he drops dead of a heart attack before taking office but I’m also very clearly not saying that either. I’ve also made the instrumental version of the piece available as a bonus track. I find it a pleasant composition to put on as background music for meditation. Ho Ho Ho. Merry Christmas.
