Last night I went to see A-Sun Amissa at Tough Love Record Shop, with support from local act Cabiria and London-based Ian.

I’ve known Richard Knox for 20 years, which is something I can hardly believe. Over that time, I’ve loved much of what he and his label, Gizeh Records, have been involved in. A-Sun Amissa, the project he formed with his wife Claire, has gradually become the main focus of his own musical output, and it was a real pleasure to once again experience it live.

Last night, alongside poet Lauren Mason, they performed their new work Water Scores. The central idea is a striking one: what if water could remember everything humans have done to it — and keep score?

Mason essentially gives water a voice and a consciousness. It becomes both narrator and witness, moving through its natural cycles while observing pollution, extraction and environmental destruction. The poem touches on oil pollution, plastics, the destruction of marine life, and the actions of corporations and governments.

At the beginning, the sound was sparse and contemplative, with deep, low drones sitting beneath Mason’s voice. As the piece developed, however, the music became denser, darker and increasingly threatening. Feedback, distorted guitar, clarinet and electronic textures gradually accumulated, building into something almost overwhelming.

I haven’t listened to the record yet, so I can’t really comment on how Water Scores translates to a recording. But from last night alone, it feels like a piece that needs to be experienced live. Together, Mason’s words and A-Sun Amissa’s music take you from contemplation, through pollution and human exploitation, towards anger and something resembling nature’s retaliation.

In a live environment, that progression doesn’t just fill the room — it seems to fill the body and mind. It was an intense, immersive and genuinely affecting performance.

I made an album called Fragments from Japan.

It’s a collection of pieces, memories and sounds that came together from a very particular place in my life. The album is also a companion to my tour diary, which you can find on this page — the writing and the music are really two sides of the same journey.

Right now, though, the record means something a little more personal to me.

My mum is in Dundee, Scotland, while I’m down on the south coast of England. Being so far apart is hard enough, but the cost of getting between us has become genuinely ridiculous. Train fares can make even the most necessary journey feel completely out of reach.

I’m a single-income dad, and at the moment things are very tight. There isn’t much spare money to put towards travelling, however much I’d like to be able to get up to see my mum more often.

So, if you’ve ever thought about picking up Fragments from Japan, now would mean more to me than you probably realise.

Every sale helps. Every record bought puts a little more towards those train fares and towards being able to make that journey north to see my mum.

It’s a strange thing to say that buying a record might help me get home, but that’s genuinely where I’m at.

If you like ambient, experimental or atmospheric music, I’d be incredibly grateful if you’d give Fragments from Japan a listen — and if it speaks to you, consider buying a copy. You can also follow the story behind it through the tour diary on my Substack.

Thank you for listening, for reading, for supporting independent music, and for helping in whatever small way you can.

It really does make a difference. ❤️

I have two records coming out that I’m really excited about. One in September and one in October.

They came from very different places, and in some ways that makes having them arrive close together particularly exciting. One began as something I had no intention of turning into an album. The other grew out of a musical relationship that has been developing over time.

Darkness Is Just Darkness is a collaboration with Swedish artist Henrik Meierkord.

It started with my Substack. I had decided to make a piece of music every week and put it out there and did so for 6 months in 2024. That was really the only plan. I wanted to make things regularly, to have a reason to keep working, and to see what might happen if I gave myself that simple structure.

Eventually I had quite a lot of music sitting around. Some of the pieces began to speak to each other. There were connections I hadn’t consciously intended, sounds and ideas that seemed to recur, and gradually I started to realise that something larger was taking shape.

Somewhere in all those pieces, an album appeared.

I find that really exciting. I didn’t sit down to make Darkness Is Just Darkness. I was just making a piece a week. The album revealed itself afterwards.

Henrik’s involvement took that process somewhere else again. Working together on the record gave the pieces another dimension and changed the way I heard them. There’s something wonderful about collaboration when you don’t quite know what the other person is going to bring, and the finished thing becomes something that neither of you would have made alone.

The record still has that slightly accidental quality for me, though. It feels discovered rather than designed.

And then there is The Dead Bell, the new Civic Hall record with Craig Tattersall.

This follows The Trembling Line, which was the first Civic Hall record we made together, and I’m very excited about where this one has taken us.

Making music with Craig is a very natural and rewarding process.

The Trembling Line established something between us, and The Dead Bell feels like a continuation of that conversation rather than simply a second version of the same record. The music has moved on and matured.

I’m particularly excited about the atmosphere of the new record. There are sounds and passages that I keep returning to, even after having lived with the album for a long time. It has that quality I always hope for in music: things don’t give everything away immediately.

That’s something both of these records have in common for me.

They weren’t made according to some perfectly mapped-out plan.

Darkness Is Just Darkness came out of the discipline of making a piece every week, and only later became an album. The Dead Bell came from returning to a collaboration with Craig and discovering what was still possible there after The Trembling Line.

I love that they’re both arriving soon.

Making records is still full of surprises for me. You can start with an idea, but the music has a way of taking over. Sometimes the best thing you can do is give it enough time and attention for it to show you what it is.

That’s what happened with these two records.

And now, somehow, they’re finished.

I’m very excited to finally let them go.

I’ve never really sit down to write lyrics.

Usually, I’m making the music and the words just start happening. I’ll be recording a demo, put the mic on, and start singing. I improvise.

The strange thing is that it’s almost always language. I’m rarely singing nonsense syllables and waiting for a word to appear. The words are usually there from the start, even if I have no idea where they’ve come from.

Sometimes I’ll change them later. Often I don’t.

And I find that really interesting, because I’m not sitting there thinking about what I want to say.

I’m saying it.

I think I’ve always been more interested in discovery than invention. I like not knowing what something is going to become. That’s true of the music, too. A lot of songs start with an instrumental, and then the words seem to find their way into it.

Then you listen back and realise you were talking about something before you knew you were thinking about it.

That’s probably my favourite part.

Recording feels a bit like having a notebook, except instead of writing something down, I record it. The important thing is catching the moment before I start thinking too hard.

There’s something about having a microphone in front of you that keeps things moving. You sing one line, then you have to find the next one. There isn’t really time to stop and ask whether it’s any good.

You can do that later.

Sometimes a three-minute demo has one good line in it. That’s enough. That line might become the chorus, or change the whole song, or it might just be a good line.

Either way, you’ve found something.

I suppose that’s why I don’t really think of improvising lyrics as a songwriting technique. It feels more like thinking out loud, except the thought has to fit inside a melody.

The melody gives you fewer choices, which can actually be helpful. Sometimes the limitation leads you somewhere you wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

I don’t want to make it sound mystical. Sometimes it doesn’t work.

But there are moments when something comes out that I wouldn’t have thought to write down.

Those are the moments I’m looking for.

I love listening back to old demos for that reason. You hear the song working itself out.

It’s a nice feeling, being surprised by something you made yourself.

Maybe that’s really all I’m trying to preserve.

I don’t want to know exactly what I’m going to say before I press record.

I want to start singing and find out.

Punching the Clown is a beautiful, strange and quietly affecting record.

Kurt Wagner has stripped Lambchop back to something remarkably simple. The songs are built around his voice, acoustic instruments and a small choir, with the arrangements given plenty of room to breathe. There is very little excess, and nothing feels forced.

The choir is particularly important. It gives the album an old, almost communal quality, while Wagner’s dry, conversational delivery keeps the songs grounded in the present. There is humour here, but also loneliness and tenderness.

The songs themselves are wonderfully understated. Wagner has always been good at finding emotion in ordinary language, and that skill is all over this record.

There is also something reassuring about how unhurried it is. Punching the Clown doesn’t chase novelty or try to impress. It sounds fully comfortable with what it is.

After several listens, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: this is simply a superb Lambchop record. Quiet, funny, melancholy and deeply beautiful.

There is something seriously wrong with the way we buy tickets for gigs.

Going to see live music is supposed to be one of the simplest pleasures there is.

Except it increasingly isn’t.

Instead, buying a ticket feels like entering into a contract where all the responsibility sits with the customer, while the promoter, ticketing company and venue can seemingly shrug whenever something goes wrong.

I’ve experienced this several times now, and every time I come away thinking something has to change.

A couple of years ago I bought tickets for a festival without realising that different days of the festival had different age restrictions. That might sound like something you should check before buying, but when you’re buying tickets for a festival with multiple different days and that info is hidden somewhere on a website but not on the ticket page, you reasonably assume that the basic rules of attendance are clearly communicated before you hand over your money or that you can’t purchase without stating ages - like train tickets etc.

When I realised my mistake, I contacted the promoters and asked for a refund.

They wouldn’t give me one.

That was it. Money taken, problem solved — for them.

I was left with tickets I couldn’t use because of a restriction I hadn’t understood when I bought it and £400 out of pocket. There was no meaningful attempt to find a solution, no flexibility even to refund me for the 3 kids - a reasonable request - and no sense that there was an actual person on the other end who might understand that sometimes customers make genuine mistakes.

Then there was Jehnny Beth.

I had bought a ticket to see her in London, but realised I couldn’t make the date I’d booked. There was another London date that I could attend, so I tried to do the sensible thing and contact Ticketmaster to ask if my ticket could be transferred to the other date.

Ticketmaster told me to contact the promoter.

The promoter told me to contact Ticketmaster.

And so began the great circle of responsibility.

Nobody wanted to help. Everyone apparently had the authority to tell me who else I should speak to, but nobody had the inclination to actually solve the problem.

Except Jehnny Beth herself.

She stepped in and helped me.

She absolutely did not have to. She had no obligation to sort out a problem created by ticketing systems and corporate policies. Yet she did it anyway.

It remains one of the kindest gestures I’ve experienced from someone who had absolutely no reason to go out of their way for me.

And that experience is what makes the rest of this even more frustrating. Because if an artist can show that level of humanity, why can’t the companies taking our money?

And now we come to a different ticket avenue that claim to be all about the fans.

I have a ticket to see Wilco. I now can’t go because my mum is ill and I want to go and see her. This is not a normal situation. I live 600 miles away. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask for my money back. I’ve supported Wilco so much. Seen them about 10 times, bought all their records. I simply cannot attend any longer.

This isn’t me changing my mind because I fancy doing something else. It’s not me deciding that the gig doesn’t appeal to me anymore. It’s life happening. Something considerably more important has come up, and I want to be with my family. If I could simply offer my ticket to a friend I would but again, I live 600 miles away from where I grew up and don’t have any friends here that love Wilco.

But apparently I can’t get a refund in this kind of situation. I, as a single income dad, cannot afford this particularly since I have to somehow afford trains in the UK!

Now, I understand that ticketing companies need policies. I understand that allowing refunds for every single reason could create problems. I understand that promoters need to know how many people are attending and that tickets have financial implications.

But surely there has to be some humanity built into the system?

We’re not buying sweets. We’re buying access to experiences, and sometimes circumstances change.

The maddening thing is that there are obvious solutions. Allow refunds when a ticket can be returned to the pool and sold again. I can’t imagine Wilco will be struggling to sell tickets.

Instead, the current system often feels designed around protecting the transaction rather than looking after the person who made it.

And that is what is so disgusting about it.

The moment the money changes hands, the relationship seems to change. Before you buy, you’re a valued customer. After you’ve bought, you’re an order number. If something goes wrong, you’re passed between the ticketing company, the promoter and the venue until you eventually give up.

The most depressing part is how normal we’ve allowed this to become.

We accept ridiculous booking fees. We accept dynamic pricing. We accept queues that feel like online lotteries. We accept tickets disappearing and reappearing at different prices. We accept convoluted resale systems. We accept being told that a ticket is non-refundable even when the circumstances are entirely reasonable.

We shouldn’t.

Live music is an industry built on people. Without fans buying those tickets, none of it exists.

So perhaps the people selling those tickets should start treating fans like human beings rather than transactions.

I don’t expect every ticket to be refundable. I don’t expect companies to bend every rule whenever someone asks.

I do expect a little common sense. A little discretion. A little compassion.

And if the companies running these systems can’t provide it, perhaps the artists and the wider music industry need to start demanding better on behalf of their audiences.

Because I’ve now experienced the full spectrum. A promoter refusing to help, a ticketing company and promoter passing me back and forth, an artist personally stepping in to solve the problem, and now a ticketing platform refusing to recognise that sometimes family comes before a gig.

One of those experiences showed me what the system can be like.

One showed me what people can be like.

I know which one I would rather have at the heart of live music.

Donn/Dubh, the collaboration between Arun Sood and Angeline Morrison draws on their shared Hebridean heritage and ancient Gaelic texts. The album takes fragments of traditional song and lets them drift into something stranger and more contemporary—drone, dub, ambient electronics, distortion, field recordings and beautifully heavy bass.

What makes it so special is that it never feels like an exercise in updating folk music. There is something much more mysterious happening. Old voices and melodies seem to exist alongside new ones, rather than being labelled as heritage. Morrison’s voice can feel impossibly close one moment and spectral the next, while Sood’s production gives everything room to breathe.

‘Òran Molaidh’ is particularly beautiful, built around a recording of Sood’s great-uncle singing and playing in 1952. The presence of someone recorded decades ago, surrounded by cello, synth and industrial weight, gives the piece an extraordinary sense of time collapsing in on itself.

Elsewhere, ‘Tha Mi Sgìth’ becomes something darker, with the voices of Sood’s daughters transformed into an uncanny folk-horror lullaby, while the gentler songs shimmer with an almost dreamlike warmth.

There is a lot going on here, but Donn/Dubh never feels crowded. It is a record about memory, landscape, ancestry and belonging, yet it doesn’t need to explain any of those things. You can simply disappear into it.

One of the most beautiful and unusual records I’ve heard this year. Give it time, listen loud, and let it take you somewhere.

There are these strange stretches where there is just… nothing.

A project ends, and for a while I have no idea what comes next. No direction. I can spend days with nothing arriving, wondering if the ideas have finally dried up.

And then, suddenly, it all happens.

Music comes in floods. Something starts, then another thing, then another. I need more Google folders. More project names. More storage.

I’ve learned not to worry too much about the empty periods, because they’re part of it. I’ve had days where I’ve made nothing and then hours where I’ve made enough music to keep me occupied for months.

Back in 2024, I decided to make a track a week for six months. At the time it was really just an experiment but looking back, that period became much more important than I realised. The work, the experiments, the things that didn’t quite work, the things that did all led me towards Darkness is just Darkness, the new album I’ve made with Henrik Meierkord.

That’s the strange thing about making music for me. I’m never really sure what’s next.

I don’t have a map of where everything is going. I rarely know what the next project will be or what it will sound like.

They just sort of appear.

Sometimes nothing appears for days. Sometimes everything arrives at once.

And when it does, I just try to follow it.

So, for now, I’m making folders. Naming projects. Filling up hard drives. Trying to catch the ideas as they come.

I have no idea what any of it will become.

But I suppose that’s the point.

Since coming home from Japan, I keep thinking about whether there is some way to bring a little piece of it back with me.

More specifically, I keep thinking about Satomi.

I would love to bring her to the UK and put on something here that feels a little like the tour we experienced in Japan. Small venues. Real connection. People coming together because they genuinely want to hear something different. A tour where the music is important, but so is everything that happens around it.

I can picture it so clearly.

And then reality gets in the way.

I don’t really know where to start.

I don’t know the right people. I don’t have a list of contacts I can suddenly reach out to who can make something like this happen. I don’t know the promoters, the venues, the people who might be able to help make the logistics work.

And the more I think about it, the more I realise that the biggest obstacle may simply be money.

Flights. Accommodation. Transport. Venues. Equipment. Promotion. All the ordinary, unavoidable costs that suddenly become enormous when you’re trying to bring an artist from the other side of the world.

That could be the thing that stops it.

And I really don’t want it to.

Because Satomi deserves to be heard here.

I came away from Japan feeling that very strongly. There are artists you enjoy, and then there are artists who stay with you. Satomi is one of those people for me.

I keep thinking about the people here who might love what she does if they were given the chance to hear her.

I keep thinking about small rooms filled with people. About introducing her to a completely new audience. About doing something that isn’t necessarily designed around making money, but around creating something meaningful.

I know how difficult that is.

I also know I can’t make it happen on enthusiasm alone.

So I’m putting this out there, partly because I don’t know what else to do.

If you’re involved in music in the UK — if you promote shows, run a venue, organise tours, work with artists, know someone who does, or simply have experience of bringing international artists over — I would genuinely love to hear from you.

I’m not asking anyone to promise anything.

I’m just hoping that perhaps someone might know something I don’t.

Maybe there’s a route into this that I haven’t considered. Maybe there are people who would be interested in helping. Maybe there are venues that would want to be part of it. Maybe there’s a way of making the numbers work.

And yes, I know cost may ultimately be the reason it doesn’t happen.

But I also know that sometimes you have to try before deciding something is impossible.

After Japan, I’m finding it difficult to settle back into ordinary life. I think part of that is because I’ve been reminded how incredible it can be to take a chance on something and see where it leads.

So I want to try.

I want to see if there is a way to bring Satomi here.

I want people in the UK to hear her.

And, selfishly perhaps, I want to experience a little bit of that feeling again — the music, the travelling, the small venues, the conversations, the sense that something unexpected might happen.

I have absolutely no idea if I can make it work.

But if anyone reading this thinks they might be able to help, point me in the right direction, introduce me to someone, or simply tell me where I should begin, please reach out.

Because I would genuinely love to make this happen.

Satomi deserves to be heard.

And I think it would be incredible to bring her here.

Deer Meadow’s decision to build these pieces around unedited field recordings from northwest Scotland gives this whole album an incredibly immediate sense of place — you can almost feel the weather, distance and isolation within the sound.

There’s a beautiful looseness to the improvisations, as though the music is responding to the landscape rather than trying to impose itself upon it. The ambient drones and textures drift in and out of the environmental sounds, creating something deeply immersive without ever becoming overly polished or predictable.

The recordings remain the focus of the music rather than just serving as background atmosphere. It gives the pieces a wonderfully human, fleeting quality — like catching a particular moment in a particular place and then watching it disappear.

Quiet, spacious and genuinely evocative. Single Track Roads is the kind of ambient record that rewards listening with headphones and plenty of time, and somehow makes you feel as though you’ve travelled somewhere without ever leaving the room.

There’s a particular kind of record that just exists, patiently, until you realise you’ve started filling your evenings with it. Tsuioku slipped into that role for me almost by accident.

Tokyo Bedroom Orchestra is the solo project of Hiro Nakamura, and Tsuioku feels completely at ease with its own quietness. The guitars never swell just because they’re supposed to, the electronic textures stay gently in the background, and every melody seems to arrive with the understanding that it doesn’t need to overstay its welcome. It’s an album that feels completely comfortable with silence and negative space.

The title, Tsuioku (recollection), ends up describing not just the music but the way it moves. These pieces don’t unfold in straight lines. They loop back on themselves, hesitate, blur at the edges.

What lingers isn’t a single melody so much as the album’s sense of pacing. It unfolds with the quiet confidence of someone who isn’t worried about holding your attention every second. Tiny shifts in harmony or texture end up carrying surprising emotional weight simply because everything around them is so carefully measured.

I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with the idea that ambient music is somehow at its best when you stop noticing it. Brian Eno’s famous description has become so embedded in how people talk about the genre that good ambient often gets reduced to good background music. I’ve never really bought that. The records I return to most don’t disappear into the room—they change the room. They ask for a different kind of attention, one that’s softer and less analytical, but attention all the same. Tsuioku sits firmly in that space. Hiro Nakamura isn’t filling silence so much as reshaping it. The beauty of the album lives in details that only reveal themselves if you stay present. There’s warmth in the guitar tones, a lived-in quality to the production, and enough movement beneath the surface that the record rewards listening rather than simply existing in the background. The details are never flashy, but they accumulate. A faint synth line, a lingering chord, the way one motif quietly returns in a different emotional context all leave a deeper impression than first expected.

Tsuioku never mistakes melancholy for depth. It’s undeniably nostalgic, but not in a way that longs for the past.

By the end, I wasn’t thinking about standout tracks or technical achievements. I was thinking about how completely Hiro Nakamura had altered the atmosphere of the room without ever demanding my attention. That’s a difficult balance to strike, and it’s one Tsuioku manages with remarkable grace.

If you use Spotify, here’s an hour long playlist of stuff I’ve been loving in July.

Tatemono is the third collaboration between Tomoyoshi Date and Stijn Hüwels, following hochu-ekki-tou and A Distant Fire, A Distant Cloud. Recorded during a residency at Berlin’s Galiläakirche, it takes the anatomy of a building as its loose framework: “Facade”, “Door”, “Corridor”, “Window” and “Roof”. But the record is less concerned with architecture itself than with what spaces hold onto over time.

The church is impossible to separate from the music. Its long decay, soft reflections and natural resonance shape every sound, so much so that it feels like another presence in the room. Guitar, piano, field recordings and restrained electronics all settle into the acoustic rather than sitting on top of it. The pieces don’t so much occupy the space as reveal it.

Date and Hüwels have always worked comfortably with absence. Earlier collaborations found a balance between acoustic detail and near silence, but Tatemono pares things back even further. Notes are left to disappear completely before anything replaces them. Nothing feels hurried, and nothing seems included without reason.

“Facade” opens with fragile guitar harmonics and faint textures that seem to emerge from the room itself. There is no obvious beginning, only the sense of arriving somewhere already in motion. It’s a quiet introduction to the way the album unfolds, where attention is drawn less to individual sounds than to how they relate to one another.

The architectural titles gradually begin to make sense, not because the music describes physical spaces, but because each piece subtly shifts perspective. “Corridor” extends time through long, suspended tones and distant resonance, while “Window” allows a little more light into the palette without changing the album’s measured pace. The music rarely develops in a conventional sense. Instead it circles familiar materials, allowing small changes in tone, resonance and texture to become significant.

One of the strengths of Tatemono is its trust in small gestures. Field recordings merge almost imperceptibly with instrumental tones. Piano overtones dissolve into the room’s natural ambience. Tiny changes in timbre carry as much weight as melody might elsewhere. The record asks for close listening, but it never insists upon it.

There is a generosity to that restraint. Date’s and Hüwels’ music has never felt interested in dramatic emotional statements, and that remains true here. Instead, Tatemono creates enough space for the listener’s own associations to surface. Memory enters almost by accident.

By the time “Roof” arrives, the idea of moving through a building has become increasingly abstract. Interior and exterior no longer feel distinct. The final piece opens outward rather than building towards a conclusion, leaving the album suspended somewhere between enclosure and open air.

There is no shortage of quiet ambient records, but Tatemono distinguishes itself through patience and clarity of intention. Rather than chasing immersion through density or pristine production, it finds depth in resonance, careful listening and the subtle ways that sound continues after the note itself has ended. Like a well-lived space, it reveals more the longer you remain inside it..

A friend told me recently that they’d started a poetry class.

I loved that.

Not because I think they’re about to become the next great poet, and I don’t think they think that either. I just liked the idea they spent an evening making something with words, with no obvious outcome attached to it other than joy.

It got me thinking about how strange our relationship with creativity becomes as adults.

Somewhere along the line we start believing that if we’re going to do something creative, we should probably be good at it. Or at least have a plan for where it’s heading.

It feels like we’ve become obsessed with outcomes.

But creativity doesn’t really work like that.

People sometimes assume that because I make music, every time I sit down at a piano or open up my laptop, I’m working on something that might become a record. The truth is, most of the time I’m not.

I make a lot of things. I try out even more things.

Little piano sketches. Half-finished ideas. Things that go nowhere and live on a hard drive for six months before I realise I’d completely forgotten they existed.

Most of them never become anything.

They never make it onto an album.

They never get shared with a friend.

Sometimes I don’t even listen back to them.

They just exist because I made them.

It would be easy to see that as wasteful. Surely every creative act should be moving towards something?

But I think that’s completely backwards.

Those unfinished ideas aren’t failed pieces of music.

They’re how I stay connected to making things.

And, perhaps more importantly, they’re how I eventually find the ideas worth keeping.

Not everything is good.

The act of making all those ordinary things is what allows the good ones to arrive. Or maybe it’s what allows me to recognise them when they do.

Which is why I loved hearing about the poetry class.

Because I don’t think the value is in writing an incredible poem.

The value is in becoming someone who writes poems.

There’s something restorative about making things that have absolutely no commercial value.

No expectation that anyone else will ever see them.

Just you and the thing you’re making.

It feels increasingly rare.

But some things deserve to stay small.

Not everything has to become content.

Sometimes creativity is just a conversation you have with yourself.

I think that’s probably why it makes us feel better because, for an hour or two, we’re participating instead of consuming.

There’s a kind of freedom in being bad at something. Or at least, in allowing yourself to be.

Children happily spend an afternoon making something wonky, uneven or completely nonsensical without questioning whether it’s any good.

Adults are different. But maybe we’ve got it the wrong way round.

Maybe being creative isn’t about talent at all.

Maybe it’s just about showing up often enough that every now and then something wonderful surprises you.

And even when it doesn’t, the time wasn’t wasted.

You made something.

That’s enough.

One of the strange things about music is how rarely it finds its way into the world on its own.

We like to think that if a record is good enough it’ll somehow reach the people who need to hear it. Most of the time that’s not true.

Music gets around because somebody cared enough to mention it.

A friend sends you a link. Someone sticks a track on their Instagram story. A writer gives an album a couple of lines in a newsletter. Somebody drops a recommendation into a group chat. It all adds up.

For smaller artists especially, that’s how things spread. Not through massive marketing campaigns or playlists with millions of followers. Through people.

Through communities.

Through those who decide not to keep it to themselves.

The funny thing is it takes almost no effort. A like. A repost. A text message saying, “Have you heard this yet?” A recommendation made over a pint.

But for an artist making music in a bedroom, releasing records on a small label or playing regularly to thirty people those small gestures can make a real difference.

People talk a lot about going viral, but most artists don’t build audiences that way. It’s usually much slower and much more human than that.

One person tells five people. A few of those tell a few more. Somebody buys a record. Somebody comes to a show. Somebody writes about it. Before long there’s a little community forming around the music.

The artists that stick around often have that support long before anybody outside their circle notices. They have people rooting for them. People spreading the word. People showing up.

That’s the bit that algorithms can’t really replicate.

Algorithms might help people discover something. Communities help people stay.

It’s easy to forget that as listeners we play a part in all of this. Most of us aren’t journalists or DJs or industry people. We’re just people who love music.

But that’s enough.

If something genuinely moves you, tell somebody about it.

Share it. Repost it. Send it to a mate. Put it in a group chat. Mention it in conversation. Make a little bit of noise.

Music doesn’t travel alone.

And if you do find something you love, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it. Shout about it. Help that artist without them ever knowing. Most of the time they’ll never see the repost, never know about the message you sent, never realise you mentioned them to a friend.

But those small acts matter.

In fact, they’re often how everything starts.

In Search of Calm

I’ve realised over the past few years that I spend a lot of my life looking for calm.

Not happiness, necessarily. Not excitement. Just calm.

Calm places. Calm people. The sort of environments where nothing seems to be competing for your attention. I don’t think that’s an accident. My mind has never been particularly calm, so I find myself drawn to anything that offers a little respite from it.

Music has become one of those places.

People tend to call it ambient music, although I’ve never particularly liked the term. It’s useful, I suppose, but it feels far too broad to describe what I actually mean. Ambient can be almost anything now, and maybe that’s why I don’t spend much time worrying about where the boundaries are.

For me, Taylor Deupree sits comfortably alongside Marcus Fischer, Deaf Center, Ryuichi Sakamoto, KMRU and Tomoyoshi Date. Equally, so do Grouper, Satomimagae and Julianna Barwick. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that ambient has to be instrumental. A voice can become texture just as easily as a piano or a field recording. Sometimes it’s the voice that creates the stillness.

What connects these artists isn’t genre. It’s intention or, perhaps, feeling.

There’s a generosity to their music. None of it seems interested in demanding attention. It simply exists, quietly, leaving enough room for me to meet it where I am.

That’s probably why I keep returning to it.

People often describe this kind of music as background listening, but that has never felt right to me. If anything, it’s the opposite. It’s music I disappear into. Music that seems to lower the volume of everything else.

I don’t really listen to it to relax. What this music does is regulate. It slows things down enough that I can hear myself think again. The noise doesn’t disappear, but it becomes manageable.

That feels like an important distinction.

I’ve always admired calm in other people. Those who don’t seem hurried by life. Who speak softly without disappearing. Who make you feel as though there’s nowhere else they need to be. I suspect I’m searching for the same thing in music.

Not perfection but presence.

Maybe that’s why I find myself less interested in the mechanics of how records are made and more interested in how they make me feel.

Stillness.

Not silence, because silence has never really existed. There are always birds outside, distant traffic, floorboards settling, someone breathing in the next room. Stillness is something else entirely. It’s a feeling.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been looking for all along.

Not music that asks me to escape my mind, but music that helps me live with it a little more gently.

I have always loved the way people move.

Not in the sense of performance, though that can be beautiful too, but in the simple fact of being embodied. The body in motion fascinates me.

Someone sent me a film recently. There was no sound attached. At first I was confused but after a few moments I realised the silence was deliberate and was allowing me to experience it differently. I was watching for rhythm.

The woman in the film moved with such elegance that I began to hear music anyway. Not actual music, but the sensation of it. My mind composed a score around her gestures.

I could feel it as I watched.

It reminded me how much movement conveys. The body knows things language cannot quite reach. There is emotion in the smallest adjustment of posture. I remember a particular scene from There Will Be Blood. Daniel Day Lewis says nothing. His face says everything. No words are needed.

With this film what held my attention most was the detail. The meeting of skin and fabric. The way cloth responded to the body beneath it, catching and releasing light. Everything seemed connected, each gesture creating a response in the material around it.

Without sound, movement became the entire conversation.

I found myself thinking that perhaps music and movement are not separate things at all. Perhaps music simply makes audible what the body is already doing.

There is something profoundly moving about that. The body is never still, even in stillness. It is constantly communicating. A language older than speech.

And perhaps that is why I love watching people move. Not because movement is beautiful, though it often is, but because it is evidence of life itself. The body thinking. The body feeling. The body becoming visible in time.

Nearly a week since I left Japan and my emotions are all over the place.

Part of me feels like I never really came home, like part of me is still there.

One thing I have noticed is how calm I feel.

For the first time in years I don’t feel like I am racing against life. I’m not worried that if I stop moving for a moment everything will pass me by. Somehow Japan seems to have slowed something down inside me. Nothing feels quite so urgent anymore. Things can wait. Life will still be there tomorrow.

I’m not entirely sure what that country did to me.

I miss the people most.

I miss Satomi. I miss Taichi and Iriguchi. I miss the conversations, the kindness, the laughter and the feeling of spending time with people who seemed so comfortable with themselves and their place in the world.

I miss the pace of life.

I miss the food.

I miss the trains.

I miss wandering through places with nowhere particular to be.

And I miss Hiroshima more than I can really explain.

I’ve travelled to places before and enjoyed them. Hiroshima felt different. Something about that city got hold of me. I think about it every day.

Physically I seem to have adjusted back to UK time.

I’m sleeping from around nine until six most nights and waking up without much trouble.

But I am exhausted.

Not sleepy.

Just bone tired.

I suspect the last few weeks are only really catching up with me now. The travelling, the shows, the emotions, the constant movement. Adrenaline carries you through these things and then suddenly it’s over and your body starts asking questions.

I also find myself longing for things.

For Hiroshima.

For tours.

For shows.

For train stations and soundchecks and strange little venues hidden in basements.

For travelling somewhere with people you barely know and returning feeling like old friends.

For adventure.

Normal life is hard after something like that.

Not because normal life is bad.

Just because for a little while life became very small and very simple.

There is a clarity in that which is difficult to replace.

I know these feelings will settle eventually.

But right now, a week later, part of me still wishes I was sat beside a river in Hiroshima with a coffee in one hand and nowhere particular to be.

Looking back on the tour now, I think what stays with me most is the feeling of movement.

Trains. Stations. Airports. Coffee shops. Venues. Constantly arriving somewhere and then almost immediately leaving again.

And somehow, after a while, that rhythm starts to feel normal.

Japan felt unlike anywhere I’ve ever travelled before. Busy almost all the time and yet never overwhelming. There seemed to be a calmness underneath everything. People quietly getting on with things. I found it strangely peaceful almost everywhere we went.

I think I needed that more than I realised.

I loved travelling there too. Watching the landscape through train windows. Wandering through cities. Sitting in coffee shops in the morning. Everything felt slower somehow.

And then there were the people.

I think about Kamata a lot already, for various reasons. Sitting in bars and cafes talking to people I’d only just met but somehow feeling immediately comfortable. Everyone was so welcoming, curious and kind. Music seemed to open doors instantly. Conversations happened easily.

That happened throughout the whole tour really.

Every venue owner, engineer, DJ, promoter and person who came to the shows treated us with such kindness. In music you become used to things being transactional quite quickly, so to experience the opposite so consistently felt very special.

And Hiroshima completely stole my heart.

I still can’t fully explain why.

There was just something about it. The rivers. The quietness. The pace of life. The feeling of calm that seemed to exist everywhere. I loved walking there more than anywhere else on the trip. Early mornings with coffee and music, wandering without really knowing where I was going. Sitting by the water listening to Mono.

Even now, thinking about leaving Hiroshima makes me feel sad.

The music side of things reminded me what I actually love about all of this.

Not chasing bigger and bigger things. What mattered most on this tour were the people and the spaces. Small venues run by people who genuinely care. Promoters who looked after us. DJs playing strange and beautiful music to rooms full of people who were really listening.

Some of the shows felt difficult on stage. Strange sound, tiredness, mistakes, trying to adapt constantly. But often those ended up being the shows people connected with most.

I want music to feel human. I want to make things slowly. Play places with atmosphere. Meet good people. Travel more. Collaborate more. Spend more time thinking about how to actually connect with people.

And I want to come back.

I want to tour Japan again. I want more long train journeys, tiny venues, record shops and late night conversations after shows. I want more mornings wandering unfamiliar streets. More time in places like Hiroshima.

And I want more Yoal.

There’s something about what Satomi and I do together that feels genuinely special to me. Something difficult to explain but very easy to feel when we play/are together. The shows reminded me of that again and again. Even when things felt difficult technically, there was still a connection there that felt real and instinctive.

That feels worth continuing. But I’m not the boss.

I also realised how important the people around you become whilst travelling.

Spending so much time with Satomi became one of my favourite parts of the whole trip. Walking through cities together, getting lost because she can’t read maps, eating meals, talking endlessly (me), moving through stations and airports. After a while people stop feeling like collaborators and just become part of your everyday life.

The same with Bias and Relax, Taichi, Iriguchi and everyone else we met along the way.

I think that’s what I’ll remember most in the end.

The feeling of being welcomed into small communities built around music and creativity and care for one another.

It made me want to keep travelling.

To keep making music.

To keep finding these little rooms full of lovely people somewhere on the other side of the world.

Thank you for following along

xo

There are albums you love, and then there are albums that become a moment of your life forever. Snowdrop by MONO is now inseparable from my trip to Japan.

I first listened to it sitting by the river in Hiroshima, with the city moving quietly around me. Then it became the soundtrack to the Shinkansen, watching entire landscapes blur past the window, and then to the long sequence of flights home.

It’s an incredibly beautiful record. Patient, overwhelming, delicate, and enormous all at once. MONO have always made music feel like memory, but Snowdrop feels especially human.

Years from now, I know I’ll hear it and immediately be back in Japan. Some music becomes part of your life. Snowdrop became part of a journey I’ll never forget.