Like this fox I saw back in Nottingham a couple of years ago I’m faced with a choice of which road to follow. He seemed in no rush to make a decision however…

A little background…

Until recently I worked in Education as a Curriculum manager, basically running the university level games provision at a creative institute. I’d been there ten years and worked my way up from course leader to this high level role, and it took up a lot of my time and energy and was at times very intense and stressful, as education management roles tend to be. I was quite comfortable in the role but after a takeover and restructure found myself cast aside and had to look for a new role.

Finding one in a university was quite tough, and I also wasn’t sure I wanted to be working at that level again, with all the added pressure and inevitable stress.

So ultimately I managed to find a teaching post in York, with the intention that a less stressful and time consuming role would allow me to work on more creative aspects of my life a bit more.

I currently find myself in a new (beautiful) city and with an effective new start in life. I’ve been here around nine months now and have done a lot of thinking and reassessing during that period as plans and futures inevitably change. This blog is the first step in trying galvanise my creative endeavours into something more organised and tangible.

What do I do?

I often get asked what do you do, and I normally answer “I’m a musician”. I’ve worked on various things over the years, initially I was a guitar player and lead singer for an alternative rock band called “Children of a Lesser Groove” we did quite well building a following in the early 90s across the UK, recorded a few demos and even got a KKKK review in Kerrang! magazine for one of them. We were getting quite good.

Here’s a picture of me in action in Leicester from a review in a magazine called “Clag” that was around at the time.

We were a “power trio” and made music that sounded similar to the kind of music Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age would go on to make a number of years later, I guess we were ahead of our time.

We were just about to head out on our full first UK tour when my fellow band mates dropped the bombshell that they were leaving to work with a Black Sabbath covers band as there was “more money in that”.

All very Spinal Tap.

I was gutted.

The tour was cancelled, blackening our name with the promoter and venues, and the band disappeared overnight.

As a result of this, in a terrible sulk, I decided I’d never work with other musicians again, and ventured down a purely electronic music route. Learning midi and sequencing, and diving into sampling and synths headfirst. Machines were to be my reliable new friends.

It proved to be fortuitous timing as the early 90s was a boom time for electronica with local Sheffield based label Warp records leading the electronica charge and artists like Aphex Twin, B12, Fluke, Underworld, The Black Dog, Plaid, Plastikman, Banco De Gaia and many more all putting amazing records out.

I went through a long period of not listening to guitar music, which again turned out to be quite fortuitous as I missed the whole Nu Metal thing completely…

Inspired by the music I was listening to I started making music using my old Amiga computer, eventually settling on the Kosmischeboy name as I started to play live after buying some synths and samplers in the mid 90s.

I still produce remixes under the Kosmischeboy name now although I only do a few live performances on special occasions.

For the last ten years or so I’ve rebranded my music as DUTY and taken a more cinematic and pure electronic route, playing live now without a computer at all and building a little following for my quirky music among the great DIY electronic events across the UK. I’ll talk a little more about DUTY later.

Along side these solo projects I’ve worked on several other projects, mostly as a synth player for hire, appearing live with Black Tempest, Orchis and Temple Music at various festivals in the UK and Europe. here’s a video of me performing as part of Black Tempest at Supernormal Festival.

https://youtu.be/s-wahditzzs?si=U3LL7qwMGRO3mq1z

Another long term project has been Quiddity which I formed with my best pal Graham, who is also carving a name for himself as electronic artist Gribbles.

Check him out here: https://gribbles.co.uk

Quiddity is a joint project where we work on music together and invite collaborators to input too, mostly in terms of visual elements. We have never played live but one day we may. Here’s one of my favourite collaborations for the track “Float” which we received a fantastic video for from Elizabeth S from the band Eyeless in Gaza.

https://youtu.be/tUCJ_Gx3vLA?si=oHb13B0QEEbrwJZk

So while the “musician” term is true, as a lot of what I do is music based, I’m beginning to realise that perhaps it’s time to rethink my work.

The Lincolnshire Project

The project I’ve worked on for the last year or so under my DUTY artist name has been the rather pretentious sounding Lincolnshire Suite.

This originated in a discussion with Graham, one of those super catalytic conversations where ideas just seem to fall into place, and we just spark off each other. We ended up talking about our shared history growing up together in a small town in rural Lincolnshire and how it would be good to make some music based around that theme. We both went away from that afternoon discussion in the pub quite fired up, a few weeks later we were at a record fair together in Chesterfield and Graham found these amazing ten inch records of Lincolnshire dialect readings which were put out by a Lincolnshire based record label in the seventies.

This was the start of a project for both of us, Graham wrote a set of songs based on these records and other dialect recordings he found and I decided to follow a slightly different route for my Lincolnshire project.

I’d been reading a lot of Mark Fisher’s work at the time and had developed a strong interest in the idea of Hauntology, and in particular the idea of lost futures. So my search took me to the BFI archive where I found some amazing promotional films for Lincolnshire itself, aimed at getting businesses to come to Lincolnshire and invest in the county. I’m sure most other areas had these type of films too, they follow a similar pattern and have a very 1970/80s style voice over that was just crying out to be sampled. They also held that strong Hauntology feel; a very different future had evolved from the one those 1980s narrators envisaged…

I formed the idea of my project being an audio travelogue through the county of Lincolnshire, taking in the many memories I had of places from my childhood. So I decided there had to be a track about Gibraltar Point for example as a trip to the nature reserve there was a right of passage for every primary school kid in Lincolnshire I’m sure. That track became “Cool Clean Light”.

I started to assemble snippets of audio from the films and then arrange them into my music software (Ableton) to create songs from them. They came together quite quickly and before long I had around six or seven complete songs.

Meanwhile Graham had got on well with his project too and had been working behind the scenes to get us a little gig together to perform both our Lincolnshire sets in our old home town of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.

As I started to put the songs together for live performance I realised I would need to create some visuals for them to make the set more appealing to an audience and give context to the spoken words. Revisiting the original promotional films I was able to chop them up and create new videos to match the music. Without really intending to I had created a multimedia performance.

The gig ended up a bit of a calamity and the PA system in the old theatre we were hosted in unfortunately gave up the ghost in the middle of my performance which was hugely frustrating for everyone but most especially for Subphotic (another Gainsborough born musician now based in Whitby) who could no longer play.

We reconvened around six months later and eventually played the full Lincolnshire sets in Whitby at the Wavelength electronic music night, followed by another joint performance at the Ambient Leeds event a few months later.

I really enjoyed putting this set of songs together and the associated visuals seemed to resonate with people in an unexpected way, creating a nostalgic yearning for a lost future.

I’ve uploaded the videos to YouTube so you can watch them all on this playlist:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlTigiYRr_qP9d2Ao48uDEPTQsRbTS0qb&si=fS2ki_fFheK2kg3Y

The great conundrum

I am now here in York, a Lincolnshire evangelist, in deepest darkest Yorkshire.

As I mentioned at the start of this post I feel I’m at a bit of a cross roads now, partly due to circumstance/ opportunity and partly because after my experience making this project I’ve had a bit of a realisation that I’m not just a musician now, I come up with concepts and visuals/multimedia elements for my projects, and they have always been as important as the music to me.

From the black circle on my original DUTY releases…

To the artwork inspired by British rail timetables for the Lincolnshire Suite…

I have realised that visual identity was an integral part of my creative process. Video work too formed a big part of what I do. Both in terms of the music and also other projects; I’d been employed to make short documentaries a few times as well as experimenting with my own film making.

Assembling the Lincolnshire Suite allowed me to explore all these areas in one project, which probably explained why I liked working on it so much.

In fact the only thing I wasn’t keen on was the performance aspect of the project simply because it’s so tricky getting this kind of music across to an audience.

Which road…

So what would my next step be?

I think I need to reframe what I do.

I think if someone asks me what I do my answer will be adjusted.

I’m an artist…

I probably always have been, it’s never just been the music for me it’s the whole package. Thankfully I now have the ability, and with this new job and new found creative impetus the TIME, to be able to develop things further.

I’m also building links with other artists in the York area and am keen to meet more. So do get in touch.

I already have an idea for my next big project but the Lincolnshire project isn’t over yet. Donning my new found artist persona I’m intending to reframe the whole thing to be more exhibition based, and develop an installation that could be moved around and reinstalled relatively easily.

That’s to be my focus for the next few months, alongside the initial ideas phase of the next project.

But more on that later…

So how best to do this? That is the question!

And how do I combat the inevitable imposter syndrome I will feel?

Answers on a 1980s rural themed postcard please…