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...

2. Firem

Firem is the name of a planet in Nintendo DS puzzle game Meteos - which inspired me to swipe an online computer simulation of Earth being hit by a meteor and use it for accompanying visuals. So there's definitely some kind of album-themed, interstellar, apocalyptic angst type-thing going on...

That low-slung seven-note riff has more than a whiff of Black Sabbath about it. That's because Black Sabbath were one of my formative musical influences. Growing up in a dog-rough, drafty old terraced house, alive with creaks and clunks and fleeting shadows (I later found out it was overdue for slum clearance) led to a spooked-out obsession with 'the paranormal'. So, Mr Tony Iommi's growling, reverb-drenched doom-rock was the ideal soundtrack to those twilight trips to the outside toilet.

By glamorous contrast, the remixed version, on the 'Stay At Home' EP, was partly written in downtime in a posh hotel room at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

1. Square Leg

John Carpenter, really. His movie soundtracks always had that ominous, pulsing, relentless feel - something wicked this way comes and there's nothing you can do about it. Pretty much how I felt about nuclear weapons in the '80s. I used to speculate on where would be the best place in the world to hide from a nuclear war. I thought Patagonia (after reading Bruce Chatwin's 'In Patagonia') but my pocket-money could never have covered flight and accommodation.

The samples are from Barry Hines' extraordinary Threads. My favourite horror films - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Halloween... - they're all 'horrible' in their own twisted fantasy-worlds, but Threads is the horror of the possible; the thought of all those cosy provincial mundanities - milk bottles on a doorstep, the local pub, factory chimnies - being incinerated in an instant.

'Square Leg' was a "home defence" exercise in 1980 that calculated the result of an all-out Soviet nuclear attack. The (conservative) estimate was 53% of the population killed, with a further 35% short-term survivors and 12% suffering serious injuries. Obscene enough, but we'll get to Mr Oppenheimer later...

Protect and Survive - Side Two

Up now.

Individual track blah in a bit...