NFN Preview & Mailing List

Hello!

The 'Nostalgia For Now' preview microsite has just gone live, featuring song snippets, choice quotations and the transcendent imagery of Mr Hollis Brown Thornton.

Have a look at the Credits page/'Buy' link for details of how you can sign up to the Redpoint Mailing List and snag a free mp3 of one of the album tracks - right now!

Good. Productive day, that.

We're off outside now to sponge up the embers of summer...

Andy/Ian

New album - finished!

The new Redpoint album, 'Nostalgia For Now', is done, done, done. Written, mastered, agonised over, remastered... DONE.

Ian and I are both very happy with it and excited to get something that's so far only been experienced by four pairs of ears (including our partners) out there into the wider world.

The plan is to release it on September 16th - the second anniversary of our Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker gig. Depending on how our label/distribution options pan out, that might change, but one way or the other, it *will* be available very, very soon...

5. Lonely Water

It's a vague lament; a chilly-fuzzy melody that seems to waft by
on the breeze.

The PostSecret website was an inspiration, for the way it reflects the gulf between our outer actions and inner lives. We wanted Lonely Water to hover right there in the divide, like emotional insulation.

The title comes from a terrifying '70s Public Information Film about the dangers of drowning in stagnant water, leg snagged in the spring of an old bedstead, with only Benny from Grange Hill available to help.

4. Nevada

One of those mini-tunes/half-riffs which develops slowly, taking on extra layers and mood-shifts, before suddenly, the sun breaks through, the structure clicks and it's a song.

For me, the catalyst was the queasy unease of travelling around London in summer 2005: the initial twitch that life might end at any second gradually giving way to a background rumble of low-level paranoia.

I cope with pressure by pulling back from the picture. This time, I took the image of my vulnerable, cramped body jammed between a clutch of potentially lethal commuters and lifted myself out of there: up over the top of the train, through the earth and high into the sky, hovering over a complete view of the Tube network.

It was soothing to think of the process as purely mechanised: trains creaking and hauling themselves out of the stations, gently gliding in to predetermined stop-points; doors obediently sighing open and bleeping shut; circular routes carefully carved out to either double-back or return on themselves.

Nevada feels like that to me: a benign, cycling, mantra-like riff acting as a kind of turbine to propel the hulking drums; a fragile synth underlay enhancing the sense of being carefully transported by some gentle giant.

I also went a bit mental in Nevada in early 1995, but that's
another story.

3. Smell Of Music

Synaesthesia, that is. Interconnected senses swirling around in a kind of mass symbiosis. Something you hear evokes a colour, a texture... Something you taste conjures sound, mood...

Mostly, though, smell... There's a purity to the idealised flash of memory that smell can stimulate. It's as though an experience
inhaled - as part of the instinctive rhythm of survival - rewires and transports more profoundly than any other sense-memory.

And, of course, for a synaesthete who makes music, smell and sound meshing and colliding... That can be downright mystical. Magical...

Soon come...

New single - The Unexplained

Breaking off from the extremely occasional updates of our thoughts on the Protect & Survive album tracks, here's a new song. We hope you like it. Download from the usual Hidden Music website via the 'Music' link over on the right.

The Unexplained was a partworks mag produced in the UK in the early '80s. Ghosts, UFOs, Kirlian photography, out-of-body experiences, the Cottingley fairies, spontaneous human combustion... A monthly fix of paranormal paraphernalia tagged "Mysteries of mind, space and time".

Being far too young for it, but also being far too phoney-brave to tell my parents to stop having it delivered because it was scarring me deeply, I went through a long phase of trying to sleep with the light on and my eyes wide open, listening for things under the bed. Wonderful food for the imagination, terrible for attention span at school the next day.

Worst were the reader letters on the back page. The anecdotes, with their sign-offs from provincial towns, seemed more plausible for their intimacy. I remember a story about the ghost of a haggard old man sitting in the bath which made me terrified of going into the bathroom without reaching around and making sure the light
was on first...

Now I'm all grown up and sensible and sceptical, I miss the part of me that could be so profoundly affected by this kind of stuff. The song is a sort of tribute to those mysterious formative forces - and more...