Hooeey. And on a day so troubled by my own mistakes I am happy to make some time for this. The third entry in the Robert and Justin do collapsed pop category.

This a little collection of pieces I have been working on from just before Wilfred was born until today. They pretty much have been my musical release through a fairly bonkers three months as I think you'll be able to hear.


I have to thank Simon Hopkins for his guitar activity on 'my hot ghost', it was exactly what it needed and there was no way on earth I was going to be supplying it. So I shanghaied him into a bit of completely unprepared for improvisation when he was supposed to be working at mine. Thank goodness I did.


They are all quite long, I decided to let myself go with the structure of these things. I wanted something you could get lost in. I certainly did. 


'my hot ghost' is about Bertie rather than Wilfred. He has been a real companion to me as I have re-learnt the facts of living. It sounds way sadder than I meant it to be. I simply wanted to point out that no matter how close a being is, they are always separate, themselves, unknowable - he is my hot ghost.

If you have ever spent a very hot summer evening in a city thinking about where else you should be, perhaps missing someone, then this is the music for you.


True I find it a terribly sad music, but in the best of ways. Not melodramatic, but a quiet resignation.


I think Roland is a great composer. I will be putting his albums up here shortly, in the meantime you could go visit last.fm to get the full experience.

I'm pretty damn excited by this one. I think I mentioned that I was working with Jim Noir on a little group of tracks. Well this is the first one off the line. Feels just right for a hot day like this. 


Don't blame Jim for the singing, he hasn't suddenly got all rubbish that's me. I thought he'd appreciate the extra little bit of human-ness that singing tends to bring. 


Anyway this started life as little bundle of loops and bits sent from Jim to me, including the wonderful fuzzy bass foot you'll hear throughout. I then added all sorts of melody lines, way too many in fact and then spent the rest of the time editing them back until something smaller and more sensible emerged. 


Now to my skewed ears it sounds like a bona fide pop song, minus the singing and more usual verse-chorus thing. What d'you reckon?

True it has taken quite a while to sort out (four years) but I managed it in the end. A finisher completer me. The final push was that Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz both mentioned it in the last week or so. That was when I realised that had forgotten to put it on the new site. Did a new graphic for the cover (can you even have a cover anymore?).

Back to the dirty sound. I have been working on and off with this track for quite some time. I'll admit there was a chunk of time that I really disliked it. I think I broke it through overuse. This is an Anstar track through and through but I wanted to add voices to add some kind of warmth. Sylvie and I ended up singing this strange wordless concoction that made it sound less human than ever. We even tried to get it together enough that we could play this track live, with me on laptop and buttons and both of us singing, we even practiced. Thankfully we came to our senses.

That was of course when going out was an option. Maybe that time will come again and we will perform this as two 60 year olds, an act of nostalgia, on dusty old technology when we thought the future was made of soft metal curves.

I am putting this track up because I think it sums up something about the last few weeks. It has been all hospitals, NHS debating, and finally a rather splendid and simple birth of my new son Wilfy by Sylvie. 

So it is handy that this has both me and Sylvie singing on this one. It feels like a something of a bumpy journey, clouded with some anxiety but also run through with some happy turns. And I am probably reading too much in to it but somehow I can hear the long journey from night to the first peep of light.


As usual it has a completely incoherent structure as no one is whipping me in to shape on this number. But then I am a fan of continuously unspooling structures. 


I have had not much time for this music thing of late, but I am doing a little bit of collaborative track building with the fabulous multi talented Jim Noir, which is great fun and I think likely to produce some very odd, in a good way, results. I am looking forward to sending over my first reworking of his material soon.

Right then. This is a completely different collaboration, which has resulted in a different kind of music. This is me working with the heavily talented Roland Taylor. Roland is a great improvisor / composer / player and consequently I had to raise my game, quite a bit. And in the end we switched instruments so often, neither of us is quite sure who is doing what in these tracks.


I think we intended to make some kind of gentle, lilting lullaby music, but as you can tell from the first piece we went off track almost immediately. I do think 'First Light' and 'Last Point' are well on the way to being soporific.


We have actually performed some of these tracks live - I think it was 'Try' - and I have been told that we looked fairly crazy, both hammering away at keyboards and singing. I remember that strange woosh of absurdity come over me as I looked at a room full of people while making very strange facial expressions.


I'm also going to be putting up some of Roland's lovely solo piano music up here soon.

Well, I managed at last to get this album up. Recorded a while back with a guitar, a laptop and a fair few kitchen utensils.

Some tracks were played on Radio 3's Late Junction while I was very far from the UK, and out of that came some new relationships. In fact it was how I met Robert Popper, who I am now making music with.

Recently Robert has been letting the world know about this album, so I thought I'd better make it available here. I should note that Robert plays Walking and Talking much better than me. 

I listened to Blood and Bones with headphones the other day and it really made my head swirl - I really had gone overboard on trying to make it minimal but ever changing.

I am still trying to make a short run of lovely physical versions of this, to be made available right here, but I am a real hard task master when it comes to packaging, so it is a bit of a bumpy ride.

This is the second track from the recent session with Robert. Very sunny feeling, with perhaps a little bit of the seventies in there. I particularly like the theme that emerges at the end, I can almost feel a whole new section coming on.