The artistic corner of my life continues to feel a small part of a large room, draped in shadow and cobweb. Which might sound a bit melodramatic a mere 15 months after last releasing an album. That’s less than an 8th of a Chinese Democracy. But it’s been a frustrating period. I did manage to spend a chunk of last year working on an album that I’m hoping to get out sometime this year but I haven’t had nearly as much time as I’d have liked. It didn’t help that I abandoned that project for a while after being driven insane by Ableton. Which wasn’t the DAWs fault – the gaps between sessions got so long I lost track of what I was aiming for. So I’d spend so much of that precious time making tracks marginally shorter and then longer again, quieter and then louder again, adding big bassy undercurrents only to cull them a week later, that I needed to run from the whole project and take solace in hardware. I don’t really have the best set up to work exclusively out-of-the-box but I decided it was time to go to war with the army I had rather than the one I wish I had.

Since then I’ve been tinkering at the edges of some work I see as being destined for release under The Being Afraid banner in some form or another. Mostly the tracks I’d prepped for a live stream back in November – I’ve managed a few test broadcasts to no one but haven’t mustered the courage to try and do one where I invite people to come see what I’m up to. I expect the number of people who would take up the invitation to be close to zero, and yet somehow the idea of even an imagined audience fills me with dread.

I’ve always been a solitary creature, riddled with social anxiety and with the social battery of a decade old iPhone. I’m currently writing this partly as an exercise in distraction from the phone call I need to make to the energy company to query my parents’ currently exorbitant bills. I have a firm memory in my head I return to often – taking the train to university early in my almost entirely useless media degree, bleary eyed and probably still stoned from the night before, holding a cheap CD walkman to try and stop it skipping, staring at the winter dulled cold beauty of the South-to-West Yorkshire countryside, accepting that I was always destined to be an observer of life more than a participant. It’s an acceptance I’ve tried to shake many times in the following decades that followed but it’s stuck to me like wet jeans. Clingy and uncomfortable. I’ve released several albums now under the understanding that I could hold a certain distance from them. That I could stand off to one side in the shadows, arm sticking out from behind a curtain, nervously holding them out into the light for people to look at. As a marketing strategy it’s hardly ideal. You’re supposed to be selling yourself more than anything in this fragmented online world. You need to have a personality people want to be happy to pull out of their pockets and shove into their eyes while they’re doomscrolling the day away. My music offers accompaniment and mood lighting but rarely distraction.

So my sudden impulse to change track makes some sense as a vehicle for trying to get people to come listen to my music. But absolutely no sense for the personality and the accompanying anxieties behind it. Which perhaps explains why it’s taking me so long to really get started. I tell myself it’s better to improve the techniques, learn the machines, fine tune the visuals. But the whole idea was to be messy and work-in-progress, to invite people into the process of crafting something. In the hope the finished thing might make more sense to people. Every track I have released has a story to explain it that I believe might enrich them for people. Abstract sounds can be injected with meaning from outside, context changing the lighting on each strand that runs through them. Or so I believe. Perhaps I’d be better thinking of them as soundtracks to spreadsheets that merely need to create a vague vibe and leave the listener alone. I don’t know.

Life continues to be tough in 2026. I’m constantly being pushed up and down the arteries of the M1 and M4 between Yorkshire and South Wales to live two lives. One in a bubble of caring duties, trying to maximise the comfort of my parents in these vulnerable years. The other in the home I’ve built with my wife and unreasonably shouty cat. I’m trying to keep what has ultimately turned out to be a vanity project business selling hot sauce despite a lack of time and business acumen. I’m studying to try and eventually earn more money to add extra layers of comfort to what is – in global terms if only barely in local terms – a privileged life. All of which means I seem to be in constant motion yet achieving very little. And somewhere along the way I seem to have hitched my sense of self worth to the progress of whatever musical endevour I’m hyper-fixated on at a given moment. Which is not something I’d recommend at all. While working on a piece does at least focus my ever chattering internal monologue on a single point, which is something of a relief, it’s not quite the state of zen I’d like. I haven’t managed to sublimate the ego that way as yet. I fear dissolving my ego is akin to eroding a cliff face with a hosepipe. It can be done but you’d need thousands of years to see any effect.

Which finds me in need of new focus. Something to direct my energies towards. Finally pressing ‘start streaming’ and being forced to work through a live set is one such focus which I’m determined to start doing very soon (though knowing myself as I do I daren’t dream of doing so on a regular schedule). This morning, just before writing a version of this rambling screed that I elected to just not bother saving or uploading for reasons I’ll never understand, I decided on another: mixtape diaries. It’s an idea inspired by those Loula Yorke released over 2024/15. And by ‘inspired by’ I mean ‘shamelessly stolen from’. I’ve tried to think of my own unique spin on the idea but I’ve had to conclude she achieved the platonic ideal of the form: a mix of field recordings, jams, samples, demos, revitalised old works and sonic miscellany. I feel doing something on the same lines will help gather my current ragged artistic ideas and draw them together into something somewhat coherent, as well as to experiment in a low pressure way. Jamuary normally fills this function somewhat but my schedule made doing that this year, even in my usual truncated fashion, totally impossible. So instead I’m going to try and spread that energy across the whole of 2026.

And I’m currently absolutely exhausted. I’m at home and every bit of news from my other life floors me. I found myself hiding back in Ableton last night, adding layer upon layer to already dense drones. Trying to bury the noise with noise. I’ve been in counselling lately (which hasn’t helped but that’s another story) and I was complaining about how I’m eating well and managed dry january no problems and still feel physically and mentally lousy. He pointed out that I’d given up all my coping mechanisms. They weren’t healthy coping mechanisms and I’d be better off without them but with no crutches to lean on life is bound to feel wobbly. These dronejournals will be a slightly healthier crutch. A nice hiding place to get out of the rain.

The first one will be up at the end of the month on Ampwall and Bandcamp as free/pay-what-you-want releases. Then if I can achieve a rare bit of consistency there’ll be one up at the end of the month till next January.