How To Shirok-n Roll (director's cut)

A fairly directionless ramble about what music means to me

Time is important. It is precious and it slips away. Voices, ideas, you can lose them forever. You know this. Sometimes you can only understand how special something is when it's lost…often you know just how special it is and are terrified of the time when you will lose it. Time kills everything, as extreme cinema classics like Requiem For A Dream, Irreversible and Hanabi don't flinch from reminding us. Of course, the Back To The Future series does put in an argument to the contrary, and I don't want to drift off into a haze of hollow yearning without remembering that the passing of time does also gives birth to the new. Listen to Maypole Song from The Wicker Man for further details. (Sorry, I'll quit the movie references now).

Anyway, being a sentimental sort of young-ish fool, I get nostalgic for half an hour ago. Or at least, I do if that half an hour ago was special to me.

I want to keep things.

I wish life had memory slots like a Nintendo game for saving your progress. We all do. But you can't go back. Not yet, anyway.

Music for me is, partly, at least, memento (sorry… that wasn't a movie reference, although it is a damn good film). I kept a diary nearly every year until I was 16. When I started writing songs, scribbling about my Tuesdays became secondary, and I think that recording has slowly taken over my obsessive need to archive (it's also become my kind of scrap book, sketch pad, science folder and little red songbook).

Writing songs and recording sounds is a way to document the most passionate, personal, angry, funny, sexy, sad, obtuse, broken, surreal, invincible, moments and emotions experienced. Music isn’t just useless mystery… it helps. Even if no one else gives a shit, I think, if you want to create, you should… it's important to record what you experience, what you dream about, what's missing, what was there… at the time. It's lovely if people like it, it's just as valuable if only you like it (yada that old cliché…if anyone else likes it, it's a bonus…). And, yes, there has always been a dance element to my music. This applies to any art but since this is supposed to be a "how to Shirok-n roll" guide, I'll stick to songwriting.

Music = memory.

I often record material that becomes a Shirokuma track when there are people around me whose voices and spirit or mood are important to me. Audio (rather than finished music, and in this case I mean the raw material I use to put together a Shirokuma song) isn't quite as powerful as smell as an aid to nostalgia, but it's immediate, warm and readily usable when composing music (which sadly isn't yet the case for smells… although I did once write a track called "Scent Recorder" by way of an open letter plea to Mr Sony). I guess I really want to quit music and remix smells ideally… maybe I should become a perfumer.

Maybe I will…maybe I will…

Like writers are want to do, "I carry a pad and pen any place that I roam" (cheers Bomb The Bass, and I love the idea of a writer as "someone who just wanders round and occasionally jots down a few things") and ideally some kind of recording device like an MDR or Dictaphone. This isn't necessarily to record your own voice, but more the timbres of other people whose voices are special or interesting in some way to you. Also like most Autobahners, I like to tape the usual found sounds and atmospheres from places I go to (or want to go to…).

I usually construct the track alone, and then either sing on it myself, or use pre-recorded samples of my lyrics by whoever the vocalist is to the best fit and effect. If anybody is around who wants to do a live vocal, either with me or alone, that's even better. I'm always up for collaborations and new people to work with. I like to keep things simple and flexible. I only really use 3 programs to construct and record everything… the same ones I've been using for the last 3 or 4 years now. I have a lot of raw material lying round, sometimes from months ago that I dip into and pull bits that suit the songs and paste in.

Note about…Raw Material.

I write a lot. A LOT. Big deal. It just means my head is full of crap and I don't want to lose things. (At least) my surface memory is pretty dodgy. Emotional memory is immaculate but vast and labyrinth. (I'm interested in muscle memory too… like remembering how to play tennis or ride a bike… but, I digress…). A very good friend who taught me a lot of what I know about composing music (stand up Mr Lynskey) would always write and record so fast I'd be astonished. I kinda got the knack now to do things on the fly and improvise quickly on the sketchiest of ideas and premises. It's just my modus operandi now and I can't seem to change it, even if I do want to spend longer over things. I like glitches, mistakes, fluffed lines, laughter, first take's the best anyway!

Ideas are perfect… but nothing ever turns out exactly like you want it to, so you may as well just revel in the fact and open yourself up to a bit of random. I love intimacy, warmth, wit, spontaneity, sadness and originality in music and it honestly doesn’t bother me if the bass isn’t EQ'd properly or the samples are hissy as long as I've captured something that I think is at least a little engaging and fun to listen to.

As far as music style goes, of course, it’s a broad church. (Is that a band?) It's a cathedral. It could, literally, even be the metal band Cathedral (who I've never actually heard, but it's a nice name). It hasn't yet been a Charlotte Church, but it was once a Charlotte Sometimes. Eclecticism just means that you sound a bit like Beck's old stuff (which I do, some of the time, but then, some of Beck's old stuff was pretty good in its way). I'm more into trying to stamp my "sound" on things. I like the Shirokuma sonic elements of things like cut n paste spoken word female vocals. I know it's a glitchpop cliché, but I'd been doing it before that anyway, and I prefer the sound of female voices and spoken word readings of my lyrics. I use a beat-up old Spanish acoustic guitar that I got when I was 13, I just sample myself and then make more loops over the top of it. Lyrics can be anything… meaningful or abstract. Tea and mice or anxiety and decay. Life has all. I like readymade drum loops if possible, and small snatches of ambience from movies as well as orchestral hits, synth stabs and organ. Also noises from old electronic games. I don’t really go in for bass that much, to be honest… I find it gets in the way a bit. I like I like a more brittle, spacious sound. I have a very 1995 way of working at the moment, I guess…

Blunder the Influence

Music has different functions… some people can maybe find all they need within one genre (or even artist)… I don’t think most people can, though. If music becomes your passion then you filter through and find ever deeper and more twisty avenues to explore. Most of the ideas I had that I thought were pretty original I've since found were previously made by some old Mexican guy in his basement in the 50's, but then that's kind of cool. I'm just a J Edgar Hoover for anything interesting musically, and I always want to hear new stuff, from the most mainstream pop to the most freeform jazz. Always have been that way. These days I mainly listen to non-English language music. Languages like French and Japanese are especially beautiful when sung, and it's nice to concentrate on the music and the flow of a track even if you aren't able to pick out the intricacies of the lyrics.

Anyway, to wrap up before I go any further up my own arse, I just think that writing and listening to music is a perpetual apprenticeship and adventure. Every year is the best for music there has ever been, because you still have all the old stuff, plus the new. Sorry if that sounds a bit simple, but it's true. The past is just as relevant as the present and the future, but everything is past in the end, so record what you can while you can.

"He asked me how many songs I'd wrote. I'd written none… I lied and said 10. He said "You won't be young forever… you should have written 15… that’s work"

Lou Reed & John Cale about Warhol from Songs For Drella

How To Write a Shirokuma Song (edit)

Just throw down any old shit and tinker about with it for a couple of hours then move the fuck on. Then play it back a few days later with glass in hand and think either "that's quite good, actually" or "hmm…think I was just on autopilot there". burn some CDs of it. Repeat.