On Making Things
Decided to do a bit of slightly freeform writing today, reflecting on the various processes in and around making art and music.
We put out the most recent Blue Lake record a month ago, and during various release events and hang-outs at shows, I’ve been talking to some of the other musicians who played on the record, reflecting on how records come together.
The reality of making albums is that they inevitably come out several months after the actual recording process has finished. In my case, I often start working on new ideas pretty soon after a record is completed, trying out ideas, new tunings, and just generally enjoying the open-ended possibilities of writing and playing. This often means for me that I’m both thinking forward and backwards, reflecting on some of the things I’ve made while speculating on potential things that will be made in the future.
In the past month, we played some small release shows at record stores like World of Echo, re-visiting the material from The Animal and getting to know it again so we can start to play it live. I’ve also been working on new music and making demos for future studio work. And I was part of organizing a small residency here in Copenhagen for an international / local meeting of some different musicians, which was really powerful and revelatory in terms of seeing how people work and how the connections forged during the recording process can be really transformative to one’s sense of how to make things.
A few months ago, I was in NYC working with the musicians Madison Greenstone and Robbie Lee, preparing for a small east coast tour. I had a day to myself, and spent some time in the Metropolitan Museum, which I think I first visited as a 12 year old, and have visited subsequently over the years. As a 21-year old, I lived in New York for a few months, and had very little money - so I spent loads of time in the museum.
I was really struck by a lot of the paintings, which I had seen many times before, but somehow also felt like I was seeing them for the first time.
One of these paintings was “A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers”. One of the things I’ve always liked about this painting is that it feels uncertain if Degas is more interested in the flowers or the human figure. The flowers dominate the picture and are really beautifully rendered, but the seeming casualness and off-centre position of the figure also creates a curiosity about who they are.
But what I really took from seeing the painting was just a feeling of return. This was one of the first artworks that I really loved in a powerful way. When I was a teenager I would have said that I loved it because it was beautiful, and maybe not had much else to say. I can perhaps come with a more “complex” take on the picture now, but actually what I was more interested in was re-connecting with that initial meeting with the work when I was younger, and didn’t “know” much about art. It occurred to me at the Met that those intense feelings at that age that I had around art or music - which in many ways weren’t something I could put into words - were precisely the impulses and feelings that kept me making things.
I was at a concert last night, and was speaking to a cellist about working on new music. We were both in the place of developing new ideas, making rough recordings, just trying to give form to some of the ideas and sounds in our heads. That feeling of chasing after something, being in the hunt for something new, is a really persistent and deep feeling that keeps me going.
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We’re going to be playing some shows in the UK in March 2026 in support of The Animal. Some of these shows will be with Memotone, which I’m really excited about.
The dates are:
March 4 St. Pancras Old Church, London
March 5 Strange Brew, Bristol
March 6 The Glad Cafe, Glasgow
March 7 The Lubber Fiend, Newcastle
March 8 Yes, Manchester
More info and tickets here:
And finally, while we were in the studio making The Animal, a photographer named Lars Engelgaar came and took some photos while we were working. There’s a few of these below.
