After many years playing around with pedals and VSTs and also many years of commuting by train I have a very confused relationship with the word ‘delay.’ It could mean some delicious dubby chords drifting off sonorously towards a beautiful horizon. Or it could mean hours huddled in a small waiting room listening to the rain hammering against a train platform while balking at the price of vending machine crisps. My brain has no idea what to do when it comes across the word. Dopamine release? Blind panic? Maybe both?

Sadly this post is not about the fun kind of delay. Last week I was all set to have a nice time polishing the first entry of the dronejournals ahead of a planned release on Saturday. The last day of the month seems like a good release point for these things so I was going to quietly launch the thing with some lengthy pontifications on what it all means and some nice Instagram videos which the stats tell me around 300 people will watch on average 3 seconds of. But instead I spent the week a couple of hundred miles from music production laptop fulfilling caring duties between trips to the hospital. The whole point of the series is to stage a rebellion against the way I’ve been denied the ability to work on music so much over the past couple of years due to family circumstances. So I should probably have anticipated those circumstances staging their own counter-rebellion and brought the laptop with me. But I also had car troubles and had a frantic last minute (though thankfully delay free) northwards train journey. And my laptop is the size of a small family car – ain’t no way I’m lugging that across train stations trying to meet a connection and risking the laptop bag pulverising any passing small children or dogs.

So I’m pencilling the release for the 13th March to give me time to whack it into shape. After that I’m not sure whether to then revert to original plan and drop the second one at the end of the month or to do them all a couple of weeks later and give the first one some breathing room. I don’t suppose it matters – oversaturation is inevitable when you’re planning to essentially release 12 albums in 12 months. Yet these are the things I choose to worry about when my brain is tired of more serious worries. It’s nice to have some recreational worries I find. Takes the edge off the real ones. And after all what with World War III kicking off as I type this the precise landing points of a hyper-niche drone series is probably not all that important.