Archive for the ‘Info’ Category

Time for the first full update of 2012..

There’s a few things to address in this post, but first off, following its ‘release’ in December, I’ve now added the latest album, Hesitance, to this site. It’s now available to download from the discography section, and you can get there by clicking this handy link right here. Or if you want, you can download the album, for free, by right-clicking and saving the album cover or this link. There’s a few details about the album in the previous post on this site, so you can check that out if you want a bit more info on the album and its production.

So there’s a few things I have in the pipeline for the upcoming weeks and months. Firstly, you may or may not have noticed the new design of this site. I like it when bands reimagine their website with every new release, and I’d love to do the same, but lack of time and creativity usually gets in the way and I tend to get very lazy with the webpage layout. But I found a bit of time to tinker with the layout. The old black and red design was growing old to me and I want something a little more bright, although that’s ‘bright’ in purely relative terms..

In terms of new music, there’s currently a demo of an old song streaming on the Facebook Page for Boys From County Hell, which is a short film about vampires in rural Ireland by a good friend of mine; Chris Baugh. The song is called When I’m Dead and I wrote it after reading an early draft of the film script a few years ago now. The song was never finished how I wanted it and the version that’s available was only really intended as a present to my friend Chris. The plan at the miniute is to complete the song and put it out in conjunction with the final film, maybe in the springtime. Of course it depends on how much people like the demo version. I might just have to leave it as it is..  You can check it out and have a listen here.

The whole ‘song-for-horror-movie’ thing is not that far removed from what I’m planning as my next main project for this year. After the slog of 2011 and really struggling with the last album in pretty much all aspects of its production, it feels time for a bit of a change. I’m so used to working in a certain way for so long, repeating the same routines for creating and producing music, that I feel a bit jaded by it. It becomes a bit too comfortable to fall back on the usual practices and proceedures and I’m thinking about snapping out of that cycle and challenging myself a little bit. So I still hope to stick to my self-imposed deadline of an album every year, but I have a different type of album in mind this time. I shouldnt commit anything more to type, as no doubt I will fail miserably in my endeavours, much like the instrumental album I’ve been meaning to finish for nearly 5 years now, but it will definitely be more story based in its approach, and taking inspiration from places I don’t usually seek it.

In the meantime I am planning to put out a short 3-song ep of covers that I recorded around the Christmas holidays. I spent 2 full weeks at home back in Ireland this year, and planned to spend a sizable chunk of that time playing music with my youngest brother Niall like we used to back in the day. We ended up playing a lot, but the whole recording thing seemed too much like hardwork for the most part. In the end, I had one day left at home and we decided to see what we could get done in the space of an afternoon. So there’s currently a scrappily recorded framework of two songs on my laptop that we recorded in the space of an afternoon/evening. The idea was to do something much more collaborative than I usually do, and we split the playing and performing mostly down the middle, both singing vocals, both playing drums, guitars etc. I need to now go and mix them and add a few bits here and there, which may be tricky as I think the piano is possibly out of tune.. On top of that, there’s another simple little cover tune that I’m waiting to get additional vocals on from Ghostlight’s very own Al White. So all in all, hopefully those 3 songs will be available sometime in late February.

Then of course there’s the issue of live shows. With a lot of downtime from Ghostlight proceedings the last few months, the itch to get back on a stage is niggling me consistently and it may be time to get my acoustic guitar restrung and hit a few pokey clubs around dingy London backstreets to sit on a stool in the corner and play these misersable songs to strangers. My preference for playing with a full band is even further away in coming to fruition so I may have to bite the bullet and go solo. I’m a world champion procrastinator though, so any words, emails, tweets, comments or text messages of ‘boot-up-the-arse’ encouragement would be very welcome.

Any developments on any front will be reported here, and in the mean time, you’ll get occasional musings from me on the Tumblr page, plentiful moaning on my Twitter page, and the occasional tasty morsel on my Facebook page. Check back soon for more updates, oh, and if you haven’t already, go download my new album, it’s free! And you may find the odd bar of music in it that you might actually quite like. Stranger things have happened..

Thanks for reading,

Thomas

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Thought I’d write a quick blog post for general news and update purposes. What’s going on, and what is coming up in the world of this little musical project.

First off is the new EP. I’ve been banging on about this for a while now, throughout the laboured and lengthy production process. It’s taken a lot longer than originally expected, for a whole host of reasons, but it’s now pretty much finished. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, I’m deciding to finish it. I could go on for weeks more adding little bits, subtracting little bits, tinkering with the songs, but it’s got to the point where i’m starting to write new songs, and so it’s time to get these ‘old’ ones out of the way.

So with that in mind, I’ll make it available in two weeks time at Halloween. I’ll try to post up a new song this weekend, and the following weekend, and then the EP will follow in its 5-track entirety the week after. It’s called the Falls Apart Ep, and I’ll try to post up some finished artwork when I have it.

Until then, taking up time will be some extra-curricular work for these guys, and a few fun bits and pieces with Ghostlight, including a couple of music videos and maybe some stripped-down acoustic tracks.

So in order to stick to these self-imposed deadlines, I had better sign off and go and finish this EP. New song upload this weekend…

Thomas

The actual video for the song was made over the course of a fairly boring weekend, and was basically undertaken with the idea that I have a camera phone, an empty house, and myself, and nothing else, so what could I do within those basic restrictions.

I knew I wanted the video to be creepy in some way, something quite dark that would contrast with the ‘jaunty’ nature of the music, but reflect the slightly darker themes of the lyrics. In my head my reference points were handheld horror films like [REC] and Blair Witch Project (my favourite horror movie), and somewhat more loosely I was thinking about old black & white surrealist films like Maya Deren’s Meshes Of The Afternoon. Basically a handheld horror film that made little to know sense was my working idea.

My original idea was to have the entire video as a chase scene from the perspective of the victim. So the video would start with the POV of someone frantically running down a quite suburban street, occasionally glancing back to check on a seemingly non-existent pursuer. They’d get to my front door, panic with getting out the keys, before letting themselves in and slamming the door. Then the rest of the video would be checking throughout the house, before noticing the basement door open, and then being attacked and the camera dropping to the floor.

I knew I wanted the video to end with that classic Blair Witch dropping-the-camera device, but that whole idea involved me sprinting up and down my street without anyone else being there, which wasn’t likely to happen.

So my ideas turned slightly more surreal. I was then planning to make the video like a surrealist time-loop, of a repeating pattern of movement through the house, ie running from the back garden through to an upstairs bedroom before disappearing into a laptop screen portal and repeating the route over again. But every time, something would be different in the house, things would have moved, objects would be visible, and it would build up to something quite sinister. But to properly make that idea work, I’d ideally have needed someone else, to stand eerily and barely noticed in the background of shots. Something I couldn’t achieve with just I alone.

So I thought more about it and decided it would be pretty cool to have various shots of me lying dead around the house. I also wanted to include our creepy basement in some way. So I started shooting some random stuff around the empty house and pieced together the final video around a very vague concept of multiple personality, time-looping, death and suicide.

It doesn’t really make a great deal of sense in a linear way, I find I can sit and watch it and come up with a few different interpretations of what exactly is going on in it, but I’m going to maintain that’s a good thing…..I think..

The whole thing was shot and edited over a weekend. I shot most of it on the Saturday morning, with my increasingly crap and irrelevant mobile phone and a chunk of blu-tak as a tripod. So I guess it just shows how you can put something together with the minimum expense and equipment (whether it’s good or not is another thing..) or it basically just shows that I have way too much time on my hands, to think, and to lie down playing dead around the house.

Fun times.

Thomas

So a few weeks back I posted up a couple of videos for songs off the new album. One of these was for the song Bliss and the video was a weird little black & white short film. I’ve had a few comments and feedback about it, what it means etc. so not to miss an opportunity to write a new blog post, I thought I’d put up some words of explanation.

<<EDIT: I’m gonna split this post into 2 parts, cause I started writing and went off on a bit of a tangent. So this post is about the song, the next one will be about the video.>>

First, the song – The song itself was written a few months ago, and it was written in reaction to finding out about the news of Mark Linkous’ suicide. Mark Linkous was the man behind the ‘band’ Sparklehorse, and after years of drug-abuse and depression he killed himself on the 6th March by shooting himself in the chest, in an alleyway outside a friends house.

I was lucky enough to have met Mark Linkous, and had the massive and completely unexpected and surreal honour of touring with him as a support band back on Sparklehorse’s 2007 UK tour, as part of Ghostlight (or Smdge as we were known back then). We were big fans of his and so to get to meet him was quite amazing. Something that didn’t quite sink in until a long time after as the months passed and I became more and more of a fan of his music. He was a strange and quiet man, and very intimidating through sheer scale of who he was and what he meant to us. I barely spoke with him other than on the first day of the tour, and on our final night, when we were able to let go of our flimsy professional facade and revert to the geeky fanboys we really are, asking him to sign our t-shirts and gig posters.

I remember one night, post-show in Reading. Upstairs where the dressing rooms were, there was a little emergency door way that lead onto a flat roof part of the building. It must’ve been open to let in some air or something, but sensing a cool photo-opportunity of the Reading skyline (is there such a thing?) I ventured out onto the roof. There, off to one side, sitting on the edge of the roof, feet dangling over the edge, having a quiet drink and taking it all in was Mark Linkous. I was a bit taken aback to see anyone else out there, let alone Mr Linkous himself, and I was again quite intimidated, not being quite sure what to say. I went over and we exchanged a few stilted sentences about how good a show it had been that night and how cool the view was from up here, how nice and peaceful it was. I walked around a bit and took some photos, and stood and enjoyed the peace and quiet there for a minute or two, before saying words to the effect of “well I’d better be off and stop interrupting your post-show chill-out”, and made my way back inside. He was clearly an introverted and reflective guy, and was clearly shy and uncomfortable around other people he didn’t know.

But the thing that amazed me and what has stayed with ever since, was how he transformed when he was performing on stage. It was amazing, every night, standing there at the side of the stage, free beer in hand, watching a Sparklehorse show, and seeing Mark transform into this super-confident front-man with presence and a remarkable capability of holding the audience in the palm of his hand, even bantering between songs, joking and laughing. And I’ll also never forget standing there watching one night. him owning the room and rocking out onstage, and his wife Teresa was standing beside me, and I asked her, surely he can’t be as downbeat and depressed as a lot of his music suggests? It seemed so far removed from his stage persona, and her expression changed slightly, the look of a woman who had been married and stood by an obviously troubled man for so many years, and she said he was only ever truly happy when on stage, or on his motorbike.

And that has stayed with me ever since. And that is one of the many things I thought about when I found out about his suicide. It seems he couldn’t out run his demons, as much as he attempted to exorcise them through his art, and the happiness it seemed to give him to share that art with the world, it was too much. You always want to believe that people will find a way through, that things will get better and good will prevail in the end. We listen to sad songs and we feel and relate to the pain the singer is singing about, we share all that sadness, and we believe that through acknowledgement and understanding we’ll come out better the other side. But it’s just not always the case unfortunately, which Mark Linkous’ death reminded me. I listen to his music for comfort and solace, yet in the end, there was no happy ending.

Or maybe there was. And this is where the song Bliss is coming from. The idea that death can be as welcome as another minute, hour or day alive on Earth. Whether you believe or not in an afterlife, what could be more blissful than the complete release of not existing any more? Maybe those artists that take their own lives after years of not being able to come to terms with whatever haunts them, in doing so achieve what they so desire, to be ‘happy’ (in a sense), to be free. If life offers no consolation, then they feel there is only one way to turn. I’m intrigued by the idea that Death, the source of the ultimate dread for some (most?) people, can become the only salvation for others.

It’s a pretty scary idea to those of us living in fear of the day our number’s finally up, and one you would most likely not want to contemplate. To listen to the music of Sparklehorse, or Elliott Smith, or Vic Chesnutt or any of these guys who’s music I love that saw reason to take their own lives, is to come face to face with that idea. They saw no way out. They saw no light up ahead other than the light at the end of the final tunnel, but that’s not something you maybe want to think about when finding comfort in their music, and so ignorance is bliss in that sense. Finding out about Mark Linkous’ suicide was almost made more painful by being aware of his demons through all that fantastic music that chronicled them over the years.

The singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt released an album last year. And on it there was a song called Flirted With You All My Life. Vic was bound to a wheel chair for most of his life after a car accident and was paralysed through most of his body, and in that song it’s ‘Death’ that he’s flirting with. It’s a beautiful song that centres around the refrain of ‘I’m not ready’, it’s uplifting and touching. Yet a few months later he killed himself. I love that song, and though I find it inspiring to listen to, it will always be tinged with that jet-black darkness that to some, the relationship to our ultimate destruction/salvation will always be one of flirtation.

Thomas.

I thought I’d write a blog post explaining exactly where the name ‘Down In Autumn’ actually came from. A few people have asked me this over the years, usually in the form of an assumption, the assumption being that it simply meant ‘depressed in autumn’. I suppose this was due to the general nature of the music, or perhaps my generally ‘sunny disposition’, but apart from a passing acknowledgement that this would be an acceptable and expected misconception, it wasn’t what I meant when I chose the moniker for this little musical project.

I used to record music as ‘Freshly Dead’. This name was taken from a menu in a Greek restaurant in Cambridge the first time I went there. They served some sort of shellfish (can’t remember exactly what), but they described it as ‘fresh’, and what with it essentially being a dead creature, I thought this was quite interesting, in a paradoxical kinda-way (if that makes any sense). So Freshly Dead seemed like a cool band name. Plus it kinda played to my more ‘metal’ leanings, I envisioned intricately painted, Dio-esque album covers of snakes coiling out of the fires of Hell etc etc.

But after a while, and after a few people had expressed an opinion, Freshly Dead seemed like too much of an aggressive name for what was fairly soft music. So I had to think of something else. I can’t remember any other real contenders, they’re probably all scribbled down in a sketch pad somewhere, but I remember after a few weeks of mulling it over I found myself in a Caffe Nero on Charing Cross Road in central London. I was on my own and was reading a book. The book was The Inferno by Dante (the Robert Plinsky) translation, and I was reading it again from the beginning, or rather, flicking through my favourite parts.

I started to think about scanning it for potential band names, like ‘The Circles Of Hell’, or ‘Hope Abandoned’, or ‘My Mate Virgil’, or something like that (not really contenders), and I was reading a particular part that I’d always liked from the first time I watched a fairly ropey made-for-tv video-art interpretation that I’d been recommended to watch whilst studying animation.  And all of a sudden the line just jumped out of the page at me (I think it’s at 112) ‘…as leaves in quick succession sail down in autumn…’  and the down in autumn part just caught my eye, seemed to make sense, and seemed to fit with the sort of music I was producing.

That actual part of The Inferno is quite near the beginning, and the line is referring to how just as the leaves in autumn leave the tree they fall from and are scattered and taken by the Earth around it, the dead gather at the bank of Hell’s first river Acheron before being taken by the boat across to the other side and into Hell proper.

So in a weird way, I was still sticking to my wishful ideas of lakes of Hellfire with snakes and other cool, metal-related imagery, but in a much softer way… But I never thought of the name as a reference to the Inferno, or Hell or anything like that. I just liked how it sounded, and liked the softer connotations and images it invoked.

I briefly considered ‘Fall In Autumn’ as not-so-clever play on words, but realised that was a pretty stupid idea.

So Down In Autumn it was, and Down In Autumn it still is. Oh and the three dots at the beginning and end are purely because it’s technically a quote, and because I thought it looked alright and doubled up as a quick and easy ‘logo’. So there you are, that’s the name cleared up. Fairly straightforward, no crazy story or idea behind it, but I suppose most band names come about that way, simple random everyday coming together of words that suddenly go from making no sense, to being something you attach to nearly everything you produce for years and years and years.

Simple as that really.

Thomas