Hello Spiral - Especially Baulking

[hello spiral]

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Part three in a trilogy after 'You Have Never Properly Misunderstood My Intentions' and 'System Preferences'

Here I have recorded multiple takes of guitar drone, aided by an electric milk foamer augmented with knotted picture-hanging string.

Each take was played alongside a 45 minute recording of a train journey from Arsenal to Wimbledon on the 18th of March 2023.

Myself and my partner were travelling to a dinner party hosted by her friends. It was a fairly fraught and tense journey, with us falling out with each other a number of times and not speaking. My partner was very anxious about getting there on time and being pleasant and sociable. I didn't particularly want to go and was especially baulking at having to navigate The London Underground for an hour.

I am told I was a drunken mess at the dinner party and managed to embarrass my partner and put the other attendees on edge.

Arguably this episode was the tipping point in our relationship, which ended two months later.

According to the instructions that came with my milk foamer, extended use should be limited to 3 minutes maximum. During these multiple 45 minute long takes it got very hot and the batteries ran low and required changing multiple times. This proved to be an interesting and unexpected development and introduced tempo changes into the layers of guitar drone here. Quite a few takes got slower and slower towards the end and in some instances the motor stopped altogether and had to be manually coaxed back to its feeble spinning.

After hours of recording I fell asleep during one take, at around 2am, and woke up to find my trusty milk foamer had carried on in its duties for 19 more minutes past the 45 minute field recording.

My options were either to incorporate this extra audio into the rest of the track somehow, or allow it to remain as an extended outro. I went with the latter and it's now the 2nd track here 'Somnambulist (Works on Paper)'.