the machine starts to sing

it is february now

The Machine Starts To Sing EP - out today

I came back to my substack after three weeks on tour in the US and Canada to a list of the books I read last year in my drafts. I never posted the list because I wanted to write my thoughts about each book, but instead we announced an EP that will be the end of the band and it felt wrong to post this without addressing that. And then we went on tour, played some incredible shows and I unravelled a lot of thoughts and I stared out of the window and couldn’t listen to music or write anything because I had to think my thoughts all the way out. And now we’ve been back for a week and today our new EP has come out, and I still haven’t posted anything here. Time is slipping away from me, but you can at least listen to this now whilst I figure out how to say the things I want to say.

Something about the tour felt like retracing my footsteps and healing something old and battered with every step. Every show felt like the right way to end this project that has grown into my entire life. This past month showed me how much I love what I do and how it needs to change. This week I found out that everything is a fractal, infinitely spiralling out and repeating itself. A band created around heartbreak, that makes songs about heartbreak, could only ever keep recreating heartbreak, needs a clean break to make space for anything new to happen. Suddenly there is potential again.

And then I went to the sauna in the gym a few days ago, and there were a couple of geezers in there talking about how everything is a fractal. And I thought wow, everything really is a fractal.

The UK is very grey and cold at the moment. I got home a week ago and spent a few days sleeping, finding myself at 3am wide awake inserting lyric booklets into one hundred cassette O-cards, packaging orders from our bandcamp gently dissociating. Hopefully they get where they’re going. If you managed to order one of the 100 cassettes, it is finding its way to you now. Currently merch orders are being sent out by me so I am sorry for being a bit slow. I need to be slow. I am attempting to lean into slowness.

And after a weird week of being bad at being slow in London, I’ve come back to Frome in Somerset where we recorded Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me and The Machine Starts To Sing all as one session that didn’t distinguish any of the songs from each other. I didn’t plan to be here now, but a few days ago a friend invited me to stay for a while and it felt right to not be in London and to have some space to breathe and to write away from everything and everyone. It’s only just dawned on me how cyclical it is to be back here on the day we release the last of what we made here.

Driving around England always feels like getting a grip on it, like I haven’t fully landed back home until I’ve spent a few hours on the M3 or the M23 or the M4 or the M1 (some of my favourite motorways). And I love to come back to a place after a while and find out it is mainly the same, at least in how it feels to me.

The Machine Starts To Sing EP is made up of 4 songs: Machine Starts To Sing, OK, Don’t Want To Dance and I’ve Got A Feeling (Stay Lucky). OK was a song I wrote ten years ago, before Porridge Radio was a band, when it was just me learning how to play guitar and unsure what the fuck I was doing or if anyone would care. Playing open mic nights on my own to some old men in some pub in Brighton. That was around the time I met my bandmates, which meant that a couple of years ago Sam would remember the song and ask me if I wanted to play it again because they really loved it and had an idea for how it could sound as a band. Sometimes you plant seeds and years later they grow into trees. Sometimes they don’t, but that’s also fine I think.

Machine Starts To Sing was written in January last year, just before going into the studio. Stay Lucky was from a year before then, and Don’t Want To Dance from the year before that. Everything is cyclical, fits into patterns I keep finding.

Thanks for reading and for listening and for coming to our final shows, we have a few more tours this year and then we’ll call it a day on this project. You can find the announced shows here, and there will hopefully be a few more: porridgeradio.com/tour

and big thanks to my friend Karo who has just started her own substack and wrote this very thoughtful post about our album - I was touched

and fuck it paid subscribers here’s the original demo I made for ok in 2015: