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We've had a whole series of things go 'not according to our favour' in the last 12 months. It's part of the rich tapestry of 'aww ****' that seems to be going around at the moment.

Q1 we got Juggernaut out, Q2 I tried some marketing and hooo boy is it weird out there. I've done some deep think and it feels like one of those grindy wheel things you see on youtube. Keep your fingers inside the vehicle at all times.

Q3 we had multiple 'ploofs', the noise you make when your souffle souffloppes. But to borrow from JJ Cale, 'well you gave me de bidness, but i dint mind, cos i got a lotta patience, and i gotta lotta time'. Rather than shaking a fist at the sky in my best Cleeseian homage, I am looking at things variously spin out of control or go amusingly wrong. As fren of the band Dion W. says 'when taking a pie to the face, go 'mmm, lemon'.

Our plans are at best, guidelines and hopes. We get done what we can. Also, I am cool with not pushing it. Organic practises.

Thus with the last sigh i make over my sunken pudding, my exploded rocket and my imploded sub, I blank the page with a handrub of chalk dust and draw a new thing.

Having a very good moment in set-refreshing, the logjam finally broke and more of the recent album stuff is coming into the set, a blessed relief. I felt a change in the weather recently and I expect to see more work out before the end of the year. No pressure other than what naturally arises. I seem remarkably calm in a strange time, maybe that's the most helpful thing we can do.

If I don't blog anything do I really exist?

I took some downtime recently, just cos.

Ok maybe more than just cos. When we started out, we adopted what we called the 'content rich' strategy. Imagine our surprise when content itself became automated. Robots dreaming is for another discussion, but what occurred to me today was that it no longer matters.

Amongst all the how-to, do-this, music related 'you're gonna score now bro trust me' advice running around is the need to feverishly pumpt out content.

Which everyone else is doing. We have become a hive mind of the need to share, to be validated, to prove we exist. Our social dopa-mines.

Myspace? Facebook? Endless streams of posts, micro blogs...the more i list the more fatigued I become.

Social media is a one way mirror owned presently by oligarchs. I reckon that will change in time to distributed peer to peer networks, it's kinda more rational.

Meanwhile, we strut and primp and preen for our micro audiences in our lives, fulfilling Crowley's 'Every man, every woman is a star' at the hyperspeed version of Warhol's 15 nanoseconds of fame.

Thing is, there's nobody watching. 'Security through obscurity' is a tech term, the equivalent of hiding your keys in your garden gnomes hat. Our surrender of privacy becomes moot when the stream is a sea and there's so much water you cannot tell one droplet apart.

Those who use these services against us commercially, for now, have begun to make the process a one way mirror. We see out, but no one looks in.

Pundits beg for likes and subscribes because it tells the robots we are worthy. We fight to rise above the each other by pleasing robots, not considering that an algorithm is no living entity and that each choice is made somewhere, by a person.

The robots carry it out but some one chooses whether to talk about 'things' before or after an election, as if to discover the bottom of the tree after living in the crown for so long. Too many oogla nuts indeed.

We are not thrust upwards from below, we beg the gods for the right to be seen, to be heard, to matter.

If we do not post, we do not exist. But then no one's listening, because they're all posting. Add in the commoditisation of awareness by choosing who and what you see at which rate and you have...where we are now.

Dear reader I assure you that silence may not equal death, rather it might simply mean you're doing something else and sharing it only with yourself. I've found myself opting out of filming a moment so that instead I may experience it. Being present in your own world instead of outside of it, not seeing it as the Auteur filming and curating the movie of your life.

I have long considered Youtube the place I keep my videos, not some sort of slot machine to try and game, and yes, between all the dopamine dealing content engagement human rat maze creating efforts of thems-what-likes-to-rule-the-world, the simple things remain truer than their capacity to change what truth is. History reverts to physics after the narrative is no longer maintained.

So maybe for some folks out there, they gotta keep talking to make things the way they are, by creating a world and going LALALALALA with fingers in their ears to drown out the unpleasant reality of, well, reality.

Change upon change is too big for even the mighty to command, it gets too hairy. If we were living in a simulation it woulda crashed by now. The Hallmark of reality is the rich smell of earth and compost, as the sages say, the way of things lies in the mud.

Beyond a brief mornings philosophical rant, this marks a giggly moment of self contradiction by virtue of this being a...blog post. We've already decided what we are, we're just haggling over the rate at which we do it :)

Thus i end with what a wiser unit might have commenced with, quietly listening to the rain fall outside my window and the chimes from a truckstop in the mid west gently toning.

Oh yea we're still doing stuff just didn't feel like yapping about it. Mr Wizard is working up one of the new tracks with Ed, we're moving happily and slowly. New tunes next gig :)

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Remembering Peter J Lowry today.
Pete passed a few years back, he remains with me in the car, on the cd of original mid-east local blues players he recorded. Listening back today I was struck how good some of the harp playing is and how grateful I am to have made Pete’s acquaintance.

Pete was the patron of the Sydney Blues Society and a name that still rang out with the OG’s in Blues land when we toured.
Pete earned his stripes in the thousands of hours of field recordings of original unknown local Blues players he made in the 1960’s and 70’s, a collection he eventually gifted to an Ivy League school somewhere upstate in New York.
It comes as a bit of a surprise when someone you only know by rep gives you a tip of the hat and from Pete that was some tip, writing about us in Living Blues, in the same sentence as the Mighty Reapers.
Later on, when I got to know him, Pete would send me CDs of stuff he had recorded and each time I got another note and disc or tape, I felt some degree of impostor syndrome. Why on earth would he rate us, especially after all he’d seen and heard?

I think I know why now. He was passing it on to the next person who might carry the memory, the melody, a little further into the future.

Listening to Pete’s recordings I hear the unvarnished honest folk blues of harp players who grew up rough, poor, black, and learned to make a buck on the corner singing, stomping and playing, holding down the space with every noise that they could make to put another coin in the hat; the exuberance of it, the braggadocio.

And like all successful thieves, I hear each gem of an idea and start working out how to practice it, to make that sound.
And so, it carries on into the future, as I can hope it will each time someone else hears those ideas and follows them to their roots.

Pete was one smart mother…individual and I am remembering him today 😊