Two and a half years since the last blog post...
I'm great at this blogging malarkey.

What the hell have I done in that time? :S

48hrs from now, I'm going to be on stage with Specimen A in room 2 at Fabric.
Doesn't feel real yet. I doubt it will before soundcheck.
I'll be there to engineer, not perform or anything so glamorous, but it's still very exciting to be part of the process.
24hrs after that, I'll be scratching with Introducing, somewhere in Ladbroke Grove.

So, I've written a sum total of no music in the last 30 months. That wasn't /exactly/ the plan.
My studio gets slowly upgraded (mostly as a side-effect of work), and I have an increasing feeling of guilt when I go into my studio... which has, basically, everything you could ever ask for in a studio. It gets switched on when I want to build a TDM version of a plugin. Either that or HalfLife 2 is calling... the sound effects are great through a pair of reference-calibrated Genelec 1030s. Man. When I think of the kids who're doing nothing but write beats, and would kill for a pro setup, I feel seriously bad. Better not think about that then eh?

Some history... For those of your breakspeople who don't know, there was once a time when Oli FarTooLoud, Specimen A crew and myself all lived ten minutes walk from each other. This was right at the start. I was working with Oli FarTooLoud when we wrote Get Into It in our spare time after work, many years ago. I think I can probably take the credit for introducing Oli to Phil Spec-A. 6 months ago, Phil and I lived essentially opposite each other. Oli moved away... probably a year ago, and I miss him a lot. Sadly he doesn't find himself out this way much any more. Oli and I wrote Blackout not long before he left.

That DnB thing that was getting signed to hospital got unsigned, picked up by another label,
put in a queue, and then forgotten about, which is a bit of a shame, but hey. Phil is so busy with Specimen A projects that he doesn't get time to collab any more. We used to spend a lot of time hacking out DnB, and there was a phase where we did some housey bits! We started a dubstep project with Apex from NZ, which I fear I may have managed to stall through my continual failure to finish tunes.

I can't sleep.
I've played some cool clubs before, but Fabric has always seemed like the pinnacle to me.
One thing I've figured out is that by the time you're playing big clubs, there's no-one around you who doesn't believe you that you are. I can still remember being, like 20, and having gigs, and people actually not believing it. Now, if I tell someone I'm playing X, Y or Z, no-one would question it. I think it's probably a factor of who stays around you, and who doesn't.

It's kinda tough this feeling like I should be doing something, or staying on a level with my friends. Once upon a time, /I'd/ pass tips on to /them/... those days are looong gone.
On the other hand, I've seen how hard they've worked, and what they've had to go through to achieve the success that they have. I desperately hope that Phil gets best newcomer at breakspoll. No-one deserves it more than he does. He's put so much in.

This is probably the exact point where I fail. Phil and Oli are dedicated to what they do all day long. All day long, I sit around making gear for them to use. Wrong focus, I guess.

So, here I go again, committing more of my rambling to the eternal bowels of the internet.
Who knows when the next blog post will be?
Maybe never?