treating by katharine eastman

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My third and final release today after my five-day holiday to nowhere - this one is very different from my usual stuff - and yet in its length and minimalism and the fact that it just goes on and on and on and on it is really almost identical.
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Eagle-eyed fans (please allow me my delusions) will have noticed that my older albums have a price and that when I first publish an album it is free, but after a few days it goes up to a pound. It's probably my age and that whole punk bloody rawk upbringing that makes me feel a bit guilty about this - especially as I have grabbed literally decades of free music off the internet. Possibly, many years ago, I might have accidentally stumbled on to an illegal music site and inadvertently clicked on a download link to Mediafire etc etc.

But most of my music of the last decade comes from Bandcamp and indeed I've done several blogs over the years where every day I'd find and rave about half a dozen or more new Free/NameYourPrice albums that had come out in the last 24 hours.

Sometimes the musicians would later email me and thank me very much for the ""publicity"" and it was sobering how few people there are on the planet who are adventurously searching, however casually, for new musical experience from unknown musicians. Often, it seemed, I was the only person who'd played their music and downloaded it. And some of that music was bloody brilliant.

Almost all now virtually forgotten - just as today and yesterday and tomorrow there will be scores of new albums that will go unheard and vanish forever - and meanwhile many second-rate dullards get all the attention. It is totally understandable. Who among us/we fans has the time to venture outside our comfort zones ? Not me. Not now.

Well, that's not totally true. Most mornings for a few minutes I do (almost-)force myself to go to the Bandcamp New Releases thingy and skim thru a dozen or so pages picking out anything with an appealing cover and then listen for a few seconds, and then download anything simple and beautiful one way or the other. And yes, no sarcasm, I am always delighted to see that according to the stats page a couple of people seem to manage to play the whole of a brand-new hour-long track within ten minutes of it first appearing.

I'm still a long way from troubling/breaking the 200-free-downloads. But occasionally, back when everything was free, someone would discover me and download all my albums (and that pleased me very much, don't get me wrong), but once you have a back-catalogue of 50+ albums that can become a bit tricky. And if I do go on a proper holiday and leave this site untended (I don't have a smart phone and never look at the internet except on this stay-at-home laptop) and then the 200 limit is broken then everything goes to $7 or something and it takes forever to reverse stuff blah blah blah ..... but what I'm trying very ineptly to say is that regardless of whether it's a punk or a hippy trait or just good manners or over-preciousness or whatever, I will always try to keep things as free as possible.

At this lowest-of-the-low level of musical fame (and oh how true is that emperor's comment: "how fortunate the woman with none") a few pee here or there is as nothing - I'm still finding that making music is just about the most boring thing I ever do, except for all the other things. As such, I can't see any way of ever stopping or wanting to.
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(recorded May 2021, this is a remix of "Dowland Evening Replicas" by Simon Aulman, photo Chichester Cathedral behind the water treatment works May 2021)
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