The final part of a weird, wintery trilogy, and hopefully a bit of a hint at the future of the Club.
This album is a love letter to a number of things. At its most basic, it is an ode to a synth - the Bastl Kastle 1.5. There are a lot of drone/ambient records about the EMS VCS3, and a frankly upsetting number about generic modular synths, with good reason. I went for the more brutalist, affordable option. Something about the lack of a keyboard, and the difficulty of chromatic tuning for these synths, gives them a more natural, almost tectonic feel, as if the valleys behind your eyes are rolling out of an oscillator and through your ears. There's a simultaneous intimacy and vastness to them that conjures emotions it's real hard to reach with normal, tuned, instruments. I don't really understand how the Kastle works, but I love it all the same. But there's also mellotron, mutilated drum machine, Volca Keys and a £10 reed organ on there, so clearly it's about more than just a synth.
This record sort of ended up becoming a love letter to the specific kind of yearning implied by the letter aspect - writing something for someone that isn't there, maybe because they're elsewhere, or just because that relationship doesn't actually exist. There's no specific person I had in mind, just the sort of abstract longing for love in all its forms, and the strangely static melancholy when it isn't immediately to hand. This kind of desire is weirdly beautiful, and weirdly optimistic - just by having it you have the implicit assumption you can return to love, eventually. A love letter to love, and a love letter to lovelessness, it's a love letter to you all.
It's this sense of spectacle - on the inside looking out - that these drones are meant to capture. Communication is hard, and it's easy to feel trapped inside your skull rather than out in the world, blocked by barriers you can't see or understand, limited by the inability to truly know what someone else is thinking or how you come across. But hey, I'm learning to accept that's ok sometimes. And rain, rain is good for soft sadness, whether you're inside or out. So sit down, press play, and think of all the people you love that are elsewhere, whatever that means.
I have no specific plans for the Club coming up, but its albums tend to burst from nowhere, so who knows. It was super fun making something a bit more textured and structured this time round though, so perhaps that'll be explored more in the future.
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