All these years & all this STUFF!

Sketches of songs, productions-in-progress, melodies in search of lyrics, chords in search of context, sounds in search of home, middle-of-the-night mumbles, choral & orchestral compositions, old bedroom-floor 4-track adventures, morning coffee-walk insights, dreambeats, textures, musical zoomies, characters, spontaneous outpourings, searchings, findings, playings ..

And so much of it just gathering dust!

In essence, simply because of all the things it isn’t yet

E.g. the beat sounds bad / the lyrics aren’t right yet / it could sound way better / that bit’s good but that bit isn’t / not sure what happens here / where does this fit? / needs editing / it’s only a sketch / it’s only a demo / don’t even know what on earth this is / it’s too ____ (INSERT NEGATIVE ADJECTIVE) / it’s not everything it could possibly be yet, so people shouldn’t hear it)

So it sits there on the virtual shelf, awating the call to - maybe - one day be turned into something which the jury (i.e. “me”) deem “releasable”

But what even is “releasable” ?!

The world of “releasing music” has gone through a seismic shift in my lifetime. As a teenager, and even for a lot of my 20s, if I wanted people to hear my music, I needed to find a record label to put it out (or start a label myself, which felt way beyond the organisational capablities of my soft lad young self)

And by “put it out” - in these days - I mean pressing & distributing copies of the record, on cd / vinyl / cassette.

This was a big deal! This cost money!

And so, to even stand a chance of getting to this stage, first you had to make some kind of demo tape.

So which tracks should go on it? How to represent yourself? How to best portray “you”?

The urge to impress others would filter through, drip by drip. To be yourself .. but also to hopefully catch the ear of one of these record company gatekeepers.

Then you had to choose who to send the stuff to .. and wait to see if you got a response .. and even if you did, then it would be a case of maybe meeting to have a conversation, play them some more stuff ..

Basically, an audition process.

And I think that all of this - for someone like me, anyway, who can be prone to overthinking - meant that “releasing music” had a certain weight attached to it .. if I was putting a record out, I needed to make sure that what was on the record was “right” - that I got my statement right .. because once it was out, it was out .. that was it.

But, gradaully, as my 20s turned into my 30s, this changed. The internet became the main medium.

And there was no longer this need to impress someone at a record company enough that they would spend money on making your music available to people. You could just upload it now, for free.

And then, in theory, anyone in the world could hear it.

Of course, getting them to hear it is a whole other riddle, one I’m still unravelling now. But still - this was a HUGE gamechanger for me.

Slowly, it dawned on me that up to this point in my life, there’d always been a tiny, ever-so-subtle threshold that I didn’t feel I could cross when it came to recording music - because ultimately, someone at a record company still had to hear the music I was making, and have enough faith that this was in some way “sellable” that they’d then sign off on releasing it.

So, whilst I was never really conscious of toning my music down .. there were certain things I just wouldn’t do.

If, say, I wanted to release an hour long piece consisting simply of a string orchestra constantly playing long, slow glissandi in a field full of braying goats .. I might struggle to find someone to sign off on this. So on some level, that idea would be knocked back by my subconscious before it really even had a chance to be considered .. maybe not knocked back for good, but certainly for the time being .. into the big tin of “maybe one day”

But by the mid 2010s, I started realising - I can literally make anything on earth that my heart desires, and make it available for people to hear.

This was massive for me. Exhilirating, thrilling, a magical realisation - but also pretty overwhelming & daunting. Because, in a sense, now there was no excuse! Okay - maybe I couldn’t afford symphony orchestras & top studios and all that .. but I had ideas and a computer and some recording equipment, and this was enough.

And so for the next few years, with my band Guillemots having (for the time being) moved into a long-term hiatus phase, I started making all kinds of stutf, allowing myself to just go wherever my intuition took me.

And so travel I did, into all kinds of unfamiliar territory, forwards, upwards, sideways, downwards, and backwards too, returning to some of the rough ideas & sketches that I’d made in the previous years, when I’d still be in the midst of Guillemots-world.

(Through all this time, I’d been accumulating all sorts of randoms that didn’t seem to fit into the band’s zone .. and so I’d just filed them to one side for the time being, not really knowing what they were, or where they all fit .. )

Now, truly, anything was on the table. The sounds I’d been hearing in my heart & head all these years - I’d always done my best to capture them, but now, creating alone, and with no time constraints upon me, I could really go after them whole-heartedly.

With a lot of patience (and navigating a lot of that old internal sherriff, self-doubt), I gradually got better at using Logic, the music-recording software that I’d had installed on my mac a few years back. And I did begin to start bottling some of those sounds & textures & energies that I’d been hearing for as long as I could remember. And there were plentiful eureka moments of “I’m doing it, I’m doing it!! This is the sound I’ve been looking for!!”

BUT .. coins have two sides .. and the flipside of this situation was the same one that people often face where there’s limitless time .. the more music I made, the less ready I felt anything was to put out there.

Because I could hear what it could be! And I hear such detail, and precision, such tiny brush-strokes .. and I know that, with enough diligence and perserverance and resolve .. I can realise them tangibly enough for other people to hear too. I know I can do it. But it takes TIME! Time upon time upon time.

And so to the start of 2018 .. I’d ended the previous year concerned that, if I carried on in this style, I’d end up never releasing any music again for my whole life, because I had such high aspirations for all of it. I’d be eternally climbing the ladder rather than ever arriving at a place where I felt ready to share my journey’s harvest with other ears ..

But then, in another of those lovely eureka moments - I had a delightful realisation ..

Even though, in my mind, I know that this music I’m working on can be so much more than it is in its current state - so much more celestial & layered & luminescent - that still doesn’t mean that I can’t let people hear it right now, as it already is.

If a friend visits the studio and asks to hear some of the music I’m making - I’ll play them stuff. Admittedly, for quite a few years I’d have to make a 5 minute speech before I played them anything (e.g. “I mean, loads of the sounds here are going to better when it’s finished, and I haven’t figured all the lyrics yet, and the sound of it is pretty bad, it’s really just a very basic sketch .. it’s more just about capturing the feeling of the idea at the moment” etc etc) .. but even that side of me was starting to mellow now, with the softening of age.

I was begining to care less, in a good way.

And so, almost instanteously, I went from believing that virtually none of my unreleased music could be shared with the world, to feeling that, actually, most of it could be.

Because it’s just where it is right now. That’s all. And I can keep adding to it & refining it & taking it higher for as long as I like.

In short: if a piece of music that I have already makes me feel something, then surely it can make other people feel something too?

Even if it’s still a long, long way from my interstellar dreams of what it could eventually be, how it could eventually sound .. still, in the meantime, if it already has emotion & energy & atmsophere & mood to it, it can already give something to other people.

So this was a BIG pivot for me, which ultimately led to my series Birdwatcher: a surreal mix of music, songs, sounds & characters, split into 12 weekly episodes, each put together in fairly frenzied real-time in the days ahead of transmission, in the final months of 2018, with accompanying artworks & menus for each instalment.

Birdwatcher was such a big deal to me. Suddenly, all this STUFF (there’s that word again) had a home, in this instance, in the form of episodes.

I was aware that I didn’t just want to do a massive filedump of work-in-progress mp3s online .. that just felt a bit unromantic!

But once the idea dropped down of an episodic series, I had just the format that I needed .. there was enough form to it (with the idea of episodes, all being roughly 25 minutes long or so) to anchor it down, but there was also total freedom to put anything in there I liked .. the only logic I saw applying to Birdwatcher was dream logic .. the way that, in dreams, things can suddenly shift, but yet somehow still make sense

But the other big decision I made at that time was to found Channels May Change. Something told me that Birdwatcher needed to live in its own place on the prairie web. I kept thinking of the image of a busy street market, with everyone’s individual stalls, everbody pedalling their goods.

And then, one day, up on top of a hill in the distance, this mysterious gigantic multicoloured marquee appears, with no explanation, no big adverts appearing outside .. except perhaps a simple banner saying “all welcome” ..

That was, and is, how I see Channels May Change. A fun & light-footed, open-hearted safe haven for anything - no matter how big or small - that had found its way into form via my imagination, or the imaginations of my loved ones, friends & family.

It could be my own production house, record label .. it could be anything! A clothing brand, a perfumery, a publishing house .. but unifying all these infinite forms, it would have its own style, its own aesthetic, its own outlook.

And at the heart of that would be three light tenents that, increasingly, I aspire to live by, not just in creativity, but in life as a whole: *

Open-ness
Playfulness
Freedom

(* not saying that i actually manage this all the time, just to be clear! far from it .. but still .. this is my golden aspiration)

So Channels May Change was born in 2018 too, initially as a place to host Birdwatcher online, but with all sorts of fun designs beyond that ..

And the biggest clue to my future dreams for it was in the name .. CHANNELS!

I loved the idea of creating all these multiple channels .. with different moods & styles, so you could just flick from one to the next, depending how you were feeling.

But at the heart of all this was one basic idea, a 24/7 broadcast channel, always on, always beaming stuff out in the world.

Operating like a true old-style radio station: i.e. everyone tuning in will hear the same thing, and you can’t pause it when you leave the room & pick up where you left off, or repeat play things .. anyone listening will only hear what it is broadcasting at that exact moment.

In a way, this would almost be the inverse of Birdwatcher: drawing from the same well of ideas, but .. where Birdwatcher was curated with very precise detail, meant to be played over & over, repeated, and to reveal more on each listen, this would be the opposite - always changing, never the same, constantly evolving .. eternally in motion.

It excited me so much as an idea .. but trying to get this & Birdwatcher ready all at once felt like too much .. so for the time being, Birdwatcher became my focus .. and Channels Radio put its feet up in the background, safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t forget about it.

Now - if you’d have told me then that it would take me seven years to actually make this Channels Radio thing tangible, and to finally start expanding the scope of what Channels May Change was all about .. well, you can invent your own analogy of flabberghasted disbelief ..

“I’d have poured soup over my very head” etc etc

But then, my whole life is full of “if you’d have told me thens” .. across the whole emotional spectrum, from delighted to disappointed. I mean - this is just life, right?!

Rarely linear, and usually full of twists & turns & detours ..

And at the age of 45 (as I write this), I’ve also definitely come to accept that my journey through life is probably somewhat closer to the tortoise than the hare.

Elements of both, for sure .. when I’m in my zone, or flow, or whatever you call it, I can fully embody & emanate all the frenzied action of the mad march hare .. but still, in general, things take their time with me .. and me with them.

And I’ve come to trust that now, though it’s taken me a while.

Since the last (to date) Guillemots album in 2012, I’ve often been asked “are you working on a new album?” .. and I never quite know what to say.

What I want to say “YES!”

But usually my answer is more like “well, yeah, I’m kind of working on loads of albums, I guess”

Because, again, I’ve come to accept now that, unless I impose very firm boundaries on myself, my creative way isn’t linear.

I rarely start one song and keep going until I finish it.

And I rarely have a phase of my life - a year say - where I work on a particular collection of songs / tracks, see them through, and then feel like I have an album.

Rather .. I flit around, a lot!

For better or for worse, this is how I am. I seem to thrive on variety. I gulp down as many different colours as I can! It’s almost like the more different creative stuff I’m juggling, the more energised I get by each individual strand.

Whereas if I try to just work on one track for days - I can do it, but I tend to get totally submerged & stifled. I need to come up for air. Otherwise I start taking it all waaaay too seriously (over-seriousness being my personal creative nemesis), fussing about details that really don’t need to be fussed about, somatically feeling that a decibel’s change in volume of one instrument is equivalent to a life or death decision.

And in the intervening seven years since making Birdwatcher (which, for context, have also involved a lot of change, many highs & lows, and - hopefully I can say this without sounding too namasté - a lot of learning & growth), my perspective on all this STUFF that i’ve been gathering all these years has really opened up, and also lightened up.

And, as much as I’ve still passionately wanted to put out a definitive new ALBUM .. its goalposts just keep shifting. It turns from a single into a double album, then a triple one, then 5 collections of 11 tracks .. then it goes back into a double album, then two separate single ones .. then 3x11 .. and so it goes on.

And then the VERSIONS! There’s the version I’ve been working on for months, with all the tiny sounds & details .. but then there’s the one I did the first night, when the idea just arrived out of nowhere .. aaaaggh! I love them both ..

Plus it also sounds nice when I just play it on the piano or guitar, like I would in a gig ..

Choices! Choices! Choices!

And the pressure to “make the right decision” bubbles up more & more fervently, and I spin out, and more time passes by, and I’ve still (for the most part) not really released anything .. save for a few little bits & pieces over the last few years **

** And I’m aware that this is not nothing!

So at some point towards the end of 2023, having once again thought I’d finally found the perfect collection of tracks, only to find the rug under the idea’s feet turn into another errant magic carpet .. I kind of threw my hands up and surrendered.

Okay - I give up. I’m just going to do this Channels Radio thing first. It’s the one idea I never grow tired of .. the one idea that always makes me beam.

I’d kept putting it to one side because I felt the responsiblity to put out some “proper” releases first - proper in the sense of, you know .. “on Spotify”, or whatever streaming service you use.

Partially because I learnt through making Birdwatcher that - for most people - recorded music doesn’t really exist unless it’s on those big, ubiquitous channels that everybody uses.

I remember in the aftermath of finishing Birdwatcher - which had about four & a half hours of stuff in it acrsoss its twelve episodes - people would send me very well-meaning messages along the lines of “when’s there going to be some new music?!”

To which I kind of felt like falling to my knees and crying “WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!!!”

But it was important to experience & understand that - and to be clear, this is not any kind of criticism of anyone that asked me that, because I totally get it.

A lot of people just want to experience music the “regular” way, just as a lot of the time, people don’t want to visit some little organic boutique village store, they want the east of going to the supermarket, doing the weekly shop quickly & efficiently, getting what they need & going home.

This totally makes sense, and is completely relatable, and it was important for me to understand that any music I shared with the world that wasn’t on those big channels would inevitably reach a much smaller audience.

But still!

I have to trust my gut. It’s always the gut & the heart over the brain for me these days ..

Not to belittle the brain .. what an incredible, generous, hard-working, lightning-fast creature it is.

But I’ve got better at knowing what the gut voice is. And the gut voice kept saying .. just do the radio thing. Everything else will flow from that. Trust me! Trust me! Trust me!

And so that’s what happened.

I met with Gavin Bush at our traditional idea-chat HQ, London’s South Bank Centre.

Gavin has been one of my main collaborators since 2018, from the moment I sent him a collection of random drawings, photos & suchlike, saying I liked the idea of making pictures that somehow looked like dream landscapes, and he sent me back the exact image that became the artwork for Birdwatcher Episode 1 (and that you also see on the Channels “enter” page)

So right it was, i then became obsessed with not wanting a fraction of it to change, much - I’m sure - to Gavin’s frustration, as - like me - he’s someone that can pretty much always see potential improvements in a thing ..

We’ve since made various music videos together, as well as all the visual aspects of Birdwatcher & Channels May Change, and I’ve also done photoshoots with him - and, really, here is as a good a place as any to say clearly & loudly that he is such a delight to collaborate with, and, more than anyone else, has been absolutely instrumental in bringing Channels May Change into being, with his brilliantly inquisitive, forensic & curious mind!

Anyway!

Gavin & I met up, and I told him it was time, I wanted to do this 24/7 radio thing - and in the midst of our conversation, a beautiful little thing happened which - though I won’t describe it in here for fear of somehow cheapening it - felt to me like a very definite, loving sign of approval & encouragement from friend of all, The Universe.

And so 2024 hit, and after a little more procrastinating on my part, and various technical logistics, we were on!

At this point, I was reckoning that the process of selecting & uploading tracks for the radio wouldn’t take more than a few weeks .. with the vague notion that this Channels “radio station” would, at first, probably just have a few hours of stuff in it: work-in-progress mixes of the “main” tracks that I’ve been concentrating on over the last few years, supplemented with a few more random bits & pieces .. with a more general long-term plan to start adding in more & more stuff over the coming months & years ..

But - having first uploaded this “main” bank of tracks, something told me to be methodical, and just open up my iTunes library, and work through from the very start to the very end, from A to Z and to the symbols & numbers beyond ..

And instead, what transpired was a slow, delightful, immersive safari through a huge slice of my life in sound to date, which ended up taking over a year to see through ..

At first, at the beginning of the alphabet, I was more nervous about sharing certain things, for all the aforementioned fears, that can all essentialy be distilled into “it’s not good enough”

But gradually, a new selection critieria emerged instead: if I’m enoying listening to it, if it makes me feel something, if it moves me or makes me laugh or move or think or sets off any kind of energy in me - providing this feel or energy isn’t deep embrassment or disgust or hate or somesuch! - then I’ll put it in.

It doesn’t matter if it’s unrefined, if it’s lacking precision or finesse, if it wavers in quality & execution .. all that came to matter to me was: does it have a mood? Does it make me feel something?

And I started to realise that the whole point of this thing was to celebrate moments. Rather than craft.

And - to be clear - I love the craft of songwriting, of arrangement, of production .. and I’ve spent loads of my life diving deep, deep into all of this, doing my best to get every note & word & sound just right

But, increasingly, over the last few years, when it comes to listening to other people’s music, I’ve found myself more & more drawn to the stuff that often wouldn’t get heard .. rehearsal room tapes, sketchy demos, voice memos, abandoned mixes, half-finished songs .. all the stuff that could loosely be labelled “behind the scenes”.

In fact, this realisation has been bubbling up in me for years.

A key point for me in this was, years ago (way before any “official” release came out) hearing all the outakes of Brian Wilson making the album that was intended to become “Smile”

I mean, just Good Vibrations alone - there were so many different versions!

But in all of them, I was hearing a musical visionary, totally radiating with magic, trying out all sorts of ideas with a bunch of beautiful musicians

And I remember it hitting me that it didn’t really matter that he never actually “finished” the album at the time. Because we still get to hear all of this STUFF. Music which is absolutely glowing with love & joy & freedom & playfulness & inspiration.

If I’m listening to that music from the perspective of “listening to something unfinished” then, sure, part of me may yearn to hear the “finished” thing.

But if I’m just listening to it as music, as sound, as a recording .. then all of that is irrelevant. It’s just like a photograph. It captures a moment. And it makes me feel stuff. And in a lot of cases, the feel & mood & energy actually seems to be even more raw & potent in some of these behind-the-scenes recordings .. maybe because there’s less self-consciousness & over-thinking at play .. which usually only comes into full effect towards the end of the “making” process, at the point that a thing has to move towards being “finished”.

Let me give you another example to illustrate the same point:

Imagine you’re out walking, and as you pass by a building - a village hall, say - you hear music, live music coming from inside. And you really love the sound of the music. It energises you, touches something in you that you’ve not felt in a long time. You see the front door is ajar. Curious, you tentatively wander in .. and you see a band playing at the end of the room. The band clock you standing there, but don’t seem to mind. So you sit down on a rickety old chair & you listen, and you love it.

Eventually, the band stop, and you find yourself asking out loud “what was that you were playing?”

And someone in the band says “aah, it’s just a new idea we came up with today .. feels like it could turn into a cool track, but who knows”

Now - I find it very hard to believe that at this point, you’d suddenly cover your ears and run out of the hall screaming

“AAAGHHH! I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE! LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU’VE FINISHED WRITING IT AND THEN, AND ONLY THEN, CAN I LISTEN AGAIN!”

What you were engaging with was something that was in a state of becoming. It hadn’t “arrived” yet .. it just was. But it made you feel something.

Well .. all of this is to say that, over the past few years - really since 2018, when Birdwatcher got born, I’ve started realising that I feel the same way about my own music.

But it’s taken some time, I’ve had to kind of peel away the layers bit by bit. Because the more “imperfect” the thing I share is, the more the nervous part of me (you could call this The Waiter, if you’ve listened to Birdwatcher) worries that I shouldn’t let people hear it, that it’ll be dropping my quality control, that people will think less of me for it etc etc

But, year by year, I’ve understood more that

1. No-one is thinking anyway near as much about my recorded creative output as I am
2. Whatever I put out, there’ll be some people who won’t like it - but by the same token, there’ll probably be some people who will
3. Maybe, sometimes, the very things that you think are showing you up as imperfect, or not good enough, or bad .. maybe these might be the very things that actually really move some people.

 

That last point is really key. I think that, for as much of my life as I can remember really, I’ve had such a high bar set in terms of what I feel like I’m capable of achieving in music, that I’ve carried around with me this enormous pressure to always try and be brilliant.

Now this looks a bit weird written down, and I hope you’ll take this as a vulnerable admission rather than an arrogant one!

But, whilst having high ambitions for what you do is wonderful, and I continue to have them .. it can also be exhausting. Every little creative thing I do somehow being pitted against “is this literally one of the best things you could ever make?”

And so I’ve begun to relax in this respect.

And some of the small amount of music that I have actually released officially in the last few years has acted as a stepping stone along that path for me.

“Ludlow (August 2013)” was a collection of gently strange piano & vocal improvisations I recorded back at my parents house, on our old piano, in August 2013. I’d held onto these recordings for years because the idea had always been to create a beautiful, subtle sonic tapestry that would sit in the background of them, always pretty distant, but just adding a whole layer of dreaminess to the recordings.

But eventually I had that same old chestnut thought - why not still let people hear the raw piano & vocal mixes in the meantime? And then you can release another version when you’ve made it. And so that’s what I did ..

“Piano Drops Vol One” is literally the audio of phone video recordings I made through 2022, when I was posting piano improvisations on instagram. I got towards the end of the year and realised that if I colledated them, I’d have an album. And in fact, posting the improvised videos on instagram itself felt like a leap of faith. I do that kind of thing in private all the time, but don’t usually share it. But I’d seen Shabaka Hutchings posting some lovely videos of himself playing various flutes & pipes in all sorts of different spaces .. and that kicked off the impetus in me to do my version of that, with the piano.

“Pygmalion” was a random improvised loop-pedal playover piece that I made one night in 2011 after getting back from a Guillemots show. Again, as soon as I made it, I started thinking how cool it would be to score this out for a whole orchestra. So it sat on the shelf. Again, eventually, I realised .. ou’re not negating the existence of other permutations of this idea by letting people hear the rough original sketch ..

And “SFJ” too, was a lovely one to release. This is another improvised piano & vocal piece, just recorded on one mic. No lyrics to speak of, just a mixture of some distinghuisable words and others that I’ve been fishing for retrospectively!

So sharing like these gradually gave me a bit of courage that it was okay to release music that I hadn’t obsessed over ever micro-second of.

But, moving through my iTunes library letter by letter, and pucking up the courage to upload more & more of what I heard into this thing that I would start to refer to as “The Stream” became such a salve for my soul!

So many of the mp3s I found in my library were things that I’d not listened to since I made them, or if I had, it was only occasionally, maybe if I’d set my laptop player to shuffle mode.

And the vast majority of the things I heard were things that - when I made them - I would have viewed as a failure.

So often over the years, I’d sit down with the intention of “writing a single” - or something like this. A gleaming pop song, a big ballad, something universal.

And instead, what I’d end up conjuring up was maybe 11 minutes of meandering chords & half-formed vocals.

So what would usually happen is that I’d bounce it down as an mp3, just to have something to refer back to .. usually I’d have some sense of “I guess there’s something in there” .. otherwise I wouldn’t have been excited enough to start playing whatever I played in the first place.

But it certainly wasn’t I was intending to create that day.

And I think, especially coming from a background where, with Guilelmots & so on, I was aware that people knew me for relatively succinct, carefully crafted melodic songs, quite often upbeat ones too .. well, stuff like this wasn’t that!

So where did it fit?

Likewise, some of the strange dark bits & pieces I’d been making with glitchy beats & weird pitch-shifted vocals and suchlike

What is it all? Where does it belong?

I had no idea. So onto the shelf it went.

But, in slowly moving through my music libray and listening to this stuff, years removed from whatever expectations I had for that day’s writing / recording session, I could just listen to this music for what it was .. and I found myself really, really enjoying it all.

And I guess I have now got to an age where I trust my self-awareness enough to feel that, if I like something, I don’t need to over-complicate things & start cross-questioning why I like it etc .. if I like it, I trust that, and I trust that most likely, someone else out there will like it too.

And so, piece by piece, hour by hour, The Stream started filling up!

Why “The Stream”?

Well .. who knows, really. I found that I started calling it that privately, but for a good while, I felt, at the very least, it needed some kind of adjective between “The” & “Stream” to make it sound less ordinary, less general.

But eventually “The Stream” alone just felt right. I like that it’s simple. I like the small-river-meaning of it .. the association with flow, and continual movement.

But then it also makes me think of stream-of-concsiousness .. this mysterious creative field that we can all tap into, The Stream that is always there, whizzing through spacetime ..

I like also that it quite technically describes what this thing is .. a broadcast stream, that is constantly streaming

And in fact, writing this now, I’ve just twigged another link: my son’s name, an old Scottish word, actually means “a small stream running from a moorland loch” .. so in the same way, this makes me think of birth, the birth of ideas, that beautiful magic of creativity whereby one minute there’s nothing, and the next there’s something ..

Anyway .. this piece of writing itself has turned into quite the stream, and I should probably attempt to start winding this down.

So what to say as I near the end of this epic ramble?

Well, firstly I would like to thank anyone on instagram (or other sites) who has posted encouraging words any time that I’ve posted clips of unreleased music over the past year or so.

Usually this has been when I’ve been sitting at my studio in the evening, tuning into The Stream, just feeling this delight of “Fyfe! You weren’t wasting time all these years after all! You weren’t lost! You were making this!!”

But still, even the little step of putting a music clip up can require a few brave breathes beforehand.

Doing this, though, with clips of - in some cases - very random pieces, whose filneames were simply the date on which they were made, and having people leaving comments like “please release this track!” .. this really, really helped strengthen my faith that I was doing the right thing, rather than losing the plot and putting together what could be seen as the most self-indulgent vanity project known to humanity!

Because I was certainly well aware this could be a criticism! And I think it can be quite helpful when you’re making something to imagine what the worst things people might say about it are.

And with The Stream - well, it would be something along the lines of

“Why do you think anyone’s interested in hearing your half-finished ideas?”

“Do you honestly think anyone is actually going to be interested in listening to this?”

“Why are you wasting time sharing musical breadcumbs with people, instead of choosing a few tracks and making a proper album?”

But I’ve digested those questions, and my truth is still that I have to do this! It just feels right. And I trust that.

And, also, in terms of what happens next, outside of The Stream .. just the act of sharing this, and knowing that these hours & hours of stuff are now broadcasting out into the world, rather than just sitting on my laptop, or drives .. this feels so good, but also clears up a massive space inside me.

I felt so waterlogged until now - I’ve barely even made any new music in the past year or so because I just can’t, not until I start letting people hear all this stuff that I’ve already made!

So, already now, it feels so much easier to focus on actually putting some more conventional albums out, on the conventional platforms.

And, whilst I have all kinds of ideas for all kinds of albums - the initial starting point for these will be “Stream Drops” .. Volume One, Volume Two etc .. which will basically be like tuning into The Stream for 45 minutes or so.

That way, more & more of these songs, tracks, recordings, pieces etc can start finding their way out into the world beyond The Stream, without me having to (just yet) go into the Matrix of the perfectly-sequenced album and so on .. so these releases will be a celebration of scattershotness, in (hopefully) a lovely way

I also just want to make clear that The Stream does not only contain music.

In here are all sorts, which I all consider a music of sorts - the music of sound, of life, of - that word again - moments ..

There are some strange monologuing personalities that I’ve been entertaining with myself over recent years. There’s a few things that I guess you could poetry or prose (using loose definitions of those words!) There’s little snapshots of life, there are plentiful cameos by my son, by birds, and by odd sounds that just generally demanded attention. So some of this is not about “creativity” per se.

But more about the magic that can always be revealed when we just pause for a moment, and listen ..

And as for The Stream itself?

Well - this is just the start. I have been viewing this soft launch as very much being a back-door-opening, rather than a grand unveiling.

There’s so many places we could go, and so many ideas I have, and I’d love anyone’s input & ideas too .. so as it says elsewhere on the site, if there’s anything Stream-related that you’d like to get in touch about, then you can email [email protected]

I can imagine that some listeners may be keen to play tracks on demand, rather than having to go with whatever The Stream decides to play next.

And this would be the foundation of a membership / subscription scheme, which I still haven’t figured out the nuts & bolts of yet .. but the basic idea would be that if you pay a small amount per month, you then get to access all the individual tracks.

So this is very much part of the plan.

But, at the same time, the main level of The Stream will always be free to listen to, and it will always be truly live & uncontrollable. And I love this! In an age where more & more gestures are made towards convenience & control, it feels good to put something out which takes the opposite approach. You don’t tell The Stream what you’d like to listen to: it tells you! You have to surrender to it! This way of being is at its heart.

And what else is coming on The Stream?

Oooooofff! Where to begin?

Currently, whilst a large slice of my life’s recorded output is swimming in there, there are still considerable ommissions.

I’ve not yet included any of the huge archive of unheard Guillemots rehearsal room recordings - “yet” being the operative word here - and there are various collaborative projects that it felt more appropriate to leave in hiding, for now.

A key one of those would be the record that began life as the Guillemots 2012 Summer Album, and now, 13 years later, is still maturing, evolving & gestating like some kind of cosmic wine!

It’s nice to still hold some things back from you!

I’ve also still got countless old tapes, cds & minidiscs to go through, plus all sorts of Logic sessions where I didn’t even get round to bouncing down a reference mp3

And also, needless to say, from this point onwards, I have The Stream to add in anything I like!

No longer do all the newly bubbling up ideas have to languish unheard by all by my ears!

And The Stream is very much intended as a portal into collaboration.

If you hear something in here that you have an idea for, get in touch! Maybe there’s an instrumental playing and you hear a melody .. or a track where I’m trying to figure the lyrics and you think of some .. maybe you want to record your own version of a song in here?

Any ideas & suggestions & proposals are welcomed here, with open arms & hearts.

Beyond this, it’s also important to say that The Stream itself is also just intended as the baseline transmission for this broadcast channel.

My intention is that there will be all sorts of programmes to follow - playlists curated by mood, various characters presenting their own shows, featured guests playing things from their own stream equivalents .. the possibilites are endless.

I can also intercept The Stream at any point from my phone, so there is the opportunity for spontaneous transmissions, whenever the moment presents itself.

I would also like there to be all sorts of physical products - and this relates to Channels May Change in general too - but with relation to The Stream, people will be able to create their own bespoke albums, tailored to them, limited edition of one!

Now, as I am writing this, we are in the extremely early days, and much of this stuff will require some time & money to execute .. but we are in forward motion now, and this is what counts!

As you can probably gather, if you’ve made this far (!) - this is a huge, huge deal to me. It makes my heart beam & grin & sing.

I finally now have a place to celebrate those silly little moments where I’m just playing around on the piano, or a daft keyboard sound, or singing an old Beatles song, or making weird noises with my mouth - whatever it may be.

And maybe, in their own little way, these little nuggets, that were never originally intended to be heard by any other ears, have just as much joy & solace & companionship to offer people as the recordings I’ve spent days & weeks & months working on.

But then, these tracks in The Stream too! One is not being raised higher than the other. It’s all equal here!

The Stream is a place where opposites get to chat ..

The Stream is a place where ideas go to swim!

Thank you so much for reading xxxx