I shouldn't be blogging. I should really be tidying my room so that I can use it for recording next week. The room will get done eventually, sure, but I'd rather have it done now. Such is life really.

This week has been eventful. My brother left for India this afternoon. He's going to a village called Ladakh to do charity work for 16 days. He'll be in the mountains. The Himalayas to be exact. My sister did the same trip a few years ago. I am now the only one of my siblings to have never been to Asia. Give it time, I'll get there!

I presented a Life Time Achievement Award to the family of Alex McCaulay on Tuesday night at the annual Strathclyde Youth Achievement Awards. This involved me giving a speech that I was terribly unprepared for. Apparently I was good, I definitely beg to differ.

My room is still a tip. Jesus, I'm lazy!

Just knocked over a large box of colourful straws. There were prettyc olours everywhere, and it kinda cheered me up for a bit. Then I realised I had to pick them up. Happiness gone.

How can two people in one room gather so many wires? TV, Wii, laptops, PS2, phone chargers, my guitar gear, hundreds of assorted SCART cables... it's an awful existence... so many wires. I should write about them, maybe I will...

Am I rambling yet? If so, stop reading now. It's only going to get worse!

Having an interesting with Dave about how we're both striving to be good performers. We've basically decided it's something we're always going to be working for throughout our careers. Something you have to be constantly adapting as you go through. Adapting your performance to the audience is the tricky bit for any gig. Hecklers are tricky, too. Something you have to learn to deal with is hecklers. They're awful, especially when they're constantly shotuing "AIDS!" throughout the gig. That was an awful night, that...

Songwriting has become one near surreal experience after the other as of late. Subject matter ranges from ice cream to girls I played in bands with to aliens trying to teach us to recycle to random pseudo-love songs involving conceptual space travel... I'm messed up! Going to record a bunch of new demos over the next few weeks while Bob's in India (having the room to myself will be ace), hopefully with more than the usual guitar/vox combination. I've decided to experiment more with vocal textures in recordings, just because I can. David Scott at UWS (AKA The Silver Fox) has had be wondering about the different ways to use voices in music. I'd like to try making whole tracks of just voices doing everything, I believe Bjork has a whole album in that style. The voice is brilliant. My voice is awful. No one will notice, hopefully.

I'd like to try my old plan of performing with the laptop at gigs some time. After seeing MC Lars, I wondered if it was possible. I tried and got bored very quickly. Hopefully I'll be able to do more now that I'm out of uni and unemployed. I have way too much free time on my hands lately. Hopefully the peace and quiet will help the creative energies flow a bit better here. I'm famously unable to work in this room cause of all the noise in the house, but with everyone going away everywhere, maybe I'll be able to pull something off.

Speaking of uni, finally got my semester 2 results through (after an annoying trip to Paisley to get them). Three Bs and an epic fail from MAD (damn you, Theodore Adorno!). Needing to do a resit in August, which means dramatically improving the presentation we did. I hate cultural theory. It is just a bunch of over paid intellectuals deciding what's true and what's real. That's not how reality works. Or is it? I've never really been able to figure that out. What an awfule existence we lead, eh?

I'm rambling too much, there should be more pictures... damn lack of my camera!

So. Many. Wires... help!

Brian Wilson. Brian Wilson does some awesome things with the voice. I could just be him for a week, couldn't I?

I finally have my speakers set up again. This makes me happy in ways that are unimaginable to other human beings (except maybe me and Sazi). I can finally listen to music in the way it's designed to be heard: with quality! Goodbye, laptop speakers!

Ok, enough of this crazy blogging habit, I'm off to tidy!

Hope you've enjoyed my rant today :)

JR x