strandline finds by Simon Aulman

It's all very ramshackle, the music every bit as much as the artwork, and that's the way I like it, so it's lucky that it seems to be the only way I can do it. The album is a precarious mix of nice lofi ambient tracks and very rough guitar fumbles. That's not the way it was originally planned. Ha - "planned" indeed ! This started out as a 100% guitar album. But even I would struggle to sit thru a whole album of my own guitar music - and that's me making it, let alone bloody listening to it afterwards. Mind you, the worse I am at the guitar the more I like myself. And I will warn you that I like myself quite a lot on this album.

And I do like this album overall - a lot. I can't imagine anyone else wanting to play it - at least, not a second time. But that might just be because it's oddly memorable the first time, and what's the point in re-hearing something that your brain is still taking a lifetime to reprocess and get over.

Even with the knowledge that I've been swimming in sewage this year, I still go back. Mainly very very early in the morning to the end of that narrow lane that runs out of Milford On Sea toward Hurst Spit, the area at the end where the camper vans stay overnight - one of the few areas left in the UK where they're unmolested by our awful authorities.

I suppose it's my memory playing tricks, just as it plays the trick of making me think my childhood was full of a million different butterflies every day - but I remember childhood beachcombing mornings with my grandparents, mainly along Lepe and Calshot, as being full of cuttlefish shells and razor shells and all the other shells, mermaids purses and plastic carrier bags with the writings of countries that no one I knew could ever dream of visiting - the big ships passing, their wash smoothing the driftwood.

But it's all still there. Beaches solid with cuttlefish bones and the beautiful plastics of every nation. The progress-needers have destroyed so much and the air in this city is killing me and the sea nearby might finish me off, but the seaside can still resist all their efforts to turn it into another mall, when the holiday season is over I shall drive up to huge-smooth-rocked desolate beaches in Scotland and there won't be anything there, and things will be slightly disappointing because I'm no longer able to see them with a feeling that I can see them again for many more decades, so things now become too important, it's almost like I want everything to be perfect because anything could be the last time.

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recorded over the past week or so