Learn to Churn.

Tomorrow Mothermouse is going back in time to a land of wooden houses and picket fences, sheep and dairy farms, where even the Earth is still erupting like a youthful cheek: New Zeeland. I will be ever grateful to our NZ ski chalet rep for mercilessly taking the piss out of my pompous English cohort. Skiing is a recreational sport not a sign that one’s antecedents lived in Downton Abbey. Anyway being on my own for three weeks I will turn to music. I decide to internet shop for a new USB audio interface for use with my DAW. A DAW is a computer program that lets one record and manipulate a multitude of audio channels, add reverb, chorus, cut and paste, auto-tune, etc and add anything from a drum track to a full orchestra via a synth controlled by MIDI. So far so much the ultimate creative tool, at least so goes the blurb. Unfortunately this ultimately creative tool is so desirable it seduces even the moderately creative to use it, not to mention those that can’t even use a spoon imaginatively. As a result a pop record can be made in twenty minutes by cutting and pasting a 4:4 bar a hundred times, gargling over it and auto-tuning the result to resemble Three Blind Mice. Add a mildly pornographic video and rap section by a black person using a preschool rhyming dictionary and ca-ching. If only I were a digitised automaton I might enjoy it. But I’m not. Or said equipment used by a twenty something bemoaning the fact he’s still in nappies or is in, out, lost, found, over or under love, a word he has yet to define adequately. I’m not that either. So I sit with my guitar wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do with it now that music has been wormed to the core. It reminds we of meeting a newspaper writer who on asking said he was a ‘churnalist.’ That about sums it up.