Over the summer a lot of audio files and emails have been flying through the ether as Ingrid, Henry and I worked carefully and diligently on the third album from our ambient supergroup, ICH. Today we've let the results out into the world in the shape of our new album, Alchemy of Differences,

As well as making musical contributions, I also act as ICH's producer, mixer, and mastering engineer. When I got Ingrid and Henry's recordings for the album, I immediately knew that I'd have to be far more ambitious about what we were doing. My editing skills were let loose as I heard how some events which originally occurred at different times could fit together in new contexts. I knew, too, that this piece would need to breathe, allowing time for contemplation and recapitulation. As a result, the final release is nearly twice as long as those original files that Ingrid and Henry sent me.

One of my friends just messaged me saying how much he likes the album, and then asked: "How on Earth did you keep track of a mix when one track is fifty-three minutes long?" but honestly, it never became a problem. Working on music like this is one of those situations where being neurodivergent was a considerable advantage. Hyperfocus kicked in and a six-hour session at the studio desk doesn't just happen, I'll actively enjoy the work of digging down into the sonic weeds. I spent a frightening amount of time getting things just right because I wasn't prepared to declare this one finished until I'd listened to it from start to finish on the big system in the living room and then again on headphones without hearing a single thing that stuck out when it shouldn't have—and the album is almost seventy-six minutes long.

All that effort paid off, though. I'm delighted with how it sounds, and it's already selling nicely!

It's very definitely vaccine season. Today I had yet another one; this one was for shingles.

Get your shots, folks. Don't be an idiot.

If you encounter me socially at any point in the next few months, please understand that I'm in a weird frame of mind at the moment. On the one hand, I guess that this is understandable, given the shaking up my sense of self has been given in the course of the last six months or so, but there also seems to be something else happening that I can't quite put my finger on. This blog post (which, you may have noticed, I've already returned to and expanded several times) is me trying to figure out what it is, and what I can do about it. But let's add a proviso in the form of a random factoid: the brain is said to be the most complex structure in the known Universe so assuming that I can figure out anything meaningful about mine smacks of a considerable amount of hubris and even if I manage that, how can I be sure that there is anything I can do in response which would help? I hate that thought, but I've ploughed on regardless.

I don't feel particularly depressed or unsettled—at least not in any way that feels familiar. I wouldn't consider myself off my game as far as making music is concerned. I'm struggling to find my focus, but it's not quite your typical brain fog, either—although there might well be an element of that involved. "Emotional instability" is probably the best way of putting it, I think. I'm all over the place. I'm still having a lot of difficulty sleeping through the night, and my idea yesterday evening that it might help if I drank an entire bottle of Rioja before bedtime turned out to be a lot less helpful than I thought it would be. I'm struggling with something, but I don't know if it's the same old, same old depression reasserting itself after taking a break for a few months, or if there's something new that's appearing because now I'm more aware of how autism manifests from person to person.

The weird feeling intensified when a strange connection with my old life cropped up on Friday night. I went to see Mark Kermode and Jenny Nelson talk about their new book Surround Sound at Cheltenham Town Hall and while talking to them afterwards as they signed my copy, I discovered that the producer of the movie music show they used to present for Scala Radio was a certain Rik Blaxill, vocalist of a band called the Sound Service which I occasionally used to play keys for, forty years ago...

Yes, that's me on the left, in the red trousers. That band was an aspect of a life which I left behind for good more than thirty years ago. I still have a lot of conflicting emotions about those days but the predominant ones are still grief and pain. The behaviour of one band member in particular is not something I'm ready to forgive, even now; probably not ever. And in writing that, it's pretty bloody obvious that I'm still having a lot of difficulty coming to terms with my life back then. My recent discovery that I spent all of it navigating through the world with the wrong map turns out not to be any sort of consolation. I was struggling so badly but I didn't even know it—I had no idea I had PTSD or ADHD, let alone that I was autistic, so how could I have known I could have asked for help, let alone found somebody to provide it?

When you have PTSD, any random event in your present life can trigger flashbacks of the past, which are described here as "involuntary, intense and often distressing memories of the traumatic event" which is why I wince when people compliment me on having such a great memory. Having exceptional recall is not always fun because it makes you just as good (if not better) at remembering really bad things as it does the good ones. And you don't get to choose which memories are going to pop randomly back into your head, uninvited.

I've spent a lot of time this summer thinking about thinking (a.k.a. metacognition) and the flashbacks have been coming thick and fast as a result; much more often than they normally do. The word "involuntary" in that definition of PTSD packs a hefty punch; I don't have any control over them, and they can hit at any time. It's been exhausting. Oh, and it also turns out that that people with ADHD can suffer from a condition called Rejection-Sensitive Dysphoria or RSD. This magnifies the distress that most people feel to some extent when they experience rejection to a stupidly intense degree and oh boy, don't I know it. Now imagine combining those two things and watch how they feed off each other. Fun times, eh? Understanding what's going on doesn't help to alleviate the emotional turmoil. The only strategy I've discovered that helps is to not think about the past at all, but those flashbacks make that impossible (as Friday night's experience showed).

You're probably wondering how I managed to make it to the age of 65 without realising what was going on inside my own head. I think the answer is that my experience of autism isn't anything like how it's portrayed in popular media. I'm nothing like Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man. My autism is not about being socially disconnected or emotionless. It's more about being overwhelmed by intense feelings; everything is always turned up to eleven. It doesn't give you a random bunch of cognitive superpowers, either. Instead, it renders you unable to cope with everyday scenarios that "normal" people wouldn't even pay conscious attention to as they navigate their way through them, effortlessly. It's taken me until now to understand why day to day social life is hard for me. I used to think everyone felt like that; they must just be better at coping.

I think the calmness I was feeling back in the summer happened in part because I'd finally managed to figure out something I should have learned a long time ago: I don't have to live like this. When I find myself in situations which everyone else thinks of as mundane and run-of-the-mill but which I find baffling and incredibly stressful, not only can I simply avoid suffering further and just leave, I should be doing that a lot more than I actually do for my own good. I shouldn't be making myself ill by pretending to be the same as everyone else, which is what I have always done in the past in an effort to be polite and fit in. Rather than suffering silently as things push the VU meters on my emotional inputs hard against the stops (even when the situation I'm experiencing ought to be an enjoyable one), I can just walk away. And yes, that realisation feels every bit as bleak as it sounds. That's what I'm dealing with, here.

I understand, finally, why my default state has always been to be hurt and confused and profoundly alone. While I've been in relationships since the 90s which all ended in lasting friendship, there have been many times recently when I've found myself thinking that I simply can't live the sort of life I crave. I don't want to be an outsider. I want to be able to relate to other people in meaningful ways. I desperately want to belong. Instead, it looks like my best option will be to live alone, away from the rest of the world. Which is not the happiest of thoughts, believe me.

I think that's why I've been feeling so weird.

I've been out and about a lot this month, so it might simply be that I'm getting overwhelmed by too much stuff going on and I'm just too tired to regulate my emotions so that I can keep on top of—well, I'm never going to manage dealing with everything, but on a good day I can process enough to get by. I have noticed that I'm less able (or perhaps I'm simply less prepared) to "mask" at the moment so I might need to switch back to hermit mode for a few weeks and see if that helps. But I've already made very sure to take "drinking an entire bottle of red wine in one go" off my list of effective coping strategies...

And while we're on the subject of lasting friendship: Rob and Ruth celebrated their birthdays yesterday. I'm not going to tell you how old they are now, because I can't believe it myself. I still remember them turning sixteen, and that really doesn't seem very long ago at all.

Happy birthday, you two!

I had my annual flu shot yesterday. As I'm now 65 years old (and how did that happen, eh?) I was also eligible for a pneumococcal infection vaccination, so I had that as well. Not only does it protect against some very nasty diseases like sepsis and meningitis, it also helps to prevent some types of ear infections, and I really hate getting those. Next week, I'm having the first of a pair of vaccinations for shingles (I'll be getting the second one early in the new year). This month is very definitely vaccination season and I'm totally on board with that because I'm not a fucking moron.

I'd also like to get vaccinated against Covid again, but our stupid government doesn't take the risks of the disease seriously enough to make that available on the NHS. I'll have to take my chances with everyone else.

I felt hot and a little bit groggy yesterday afternoon and I didn't have a particularly good night last night, but this morning other than both my biceps feeling sore (I had one shot in each arm) I feel absolutely fine.

Has it really been an entire decade since I started work on converting the whole of this website to CSS from the basic HTML layout I'd first created it with, way back in the last century? If you'd asked me before I'd noticed that fact earlier this morning, I'd have told you that it couldn't possibly have been that long ago, but apparently, it is.

The site was in dire need of a facelift. When I first put everything together I'd used tables to respond to every single design challenge I encountered and while that worked, it felt clumsy. And it looked clumsy, too. It was completely unresponsive to different platforms; pages didn't scale at all, which was unforgivable. So I taught myself the basics of CSS after buying a couple of books and anything I couldn't figure out from those was usually explained on the extremely helpful website run by W3Schools.

Since 2015 I've made occasional tweaks to the site to further improve scaling on mobile devices and as I learn more about what I'm doing I've identified and fixed some of the sillier mistakes I'd made earlier. There are still a few pages built around HTML tables which I'm loath to change, but the code still runs on the skeleton framework I chose back then and I'm still using Netbeans to edit it all.

And I still enjoy doing this, which is kind of the point.

Last week Henry sent me some more recordings for the next ICH album, and I've been working on the mix this weekend. I picked up a few bargain VST plugins from AudioThing a few days ago, so I played with adding their Things: Texture granular reverb to the new audio and it was just what was needed. I love it when that happens.

I gave the entire album another listen yesterday afternoon. Unlike last time, when I used my immersive audio system to check out the emotional impact of the work, this was a forensic listen with headphones, checking out the fine detail of the mix and the good news is that I think it's pretty much there. Once I've made a few very minor tweaks to the volume levels of a couple of things, I'll be sending the completed mix off to Henry and Ingrid for their comments. After I've addressed those, we should be ready to release it on Bandcamp and we'll organise a listening party for it, too.

At over 75 minutes, it's turned into quite an epic. I think you're going to be very surprised by how it's turned out.

I've had a lousy few nights recently. I was still awake at 4 am this morning because I just couldn't find a sleeping position where I wasn't in pain. My hips might not be giving me problems any more, but my lower back appears to have decided that it's its turn to take centre stage.

Eventually I gave up, and went downstairs to take a couple of ibuprofen tablets. That did the trick, and the next thing I knew it was quarter to ten this morning. But right now I feel exhausted. Even my morning coffee hasn't been able to shift the lethargy that seems to have taken hold.

Let's see if another mixing session can blow the cobwebs away.

It's Bandcamp Friday once again, and my new album has already been uploaded and is ready for you to give it a listen. This one is called Paradigm Shift.

I suspect that this one will become known as my autism album; I know I keep going on about my recent discovery, but when something completely turns both your identity and your ideas about how you relate to the rest of the universe upside down, then sets them on fire and throws them out of the window, it does rather tend to dominate your attention, you know what I mean?

This album came about as a result of thinking about the experiences I've had during the summer. I found myself making an unexpected, metaphorical journey through my psyche. Metaphors are always creatively interesting, particularly when you attempt to set them to music, so I asked myself: what would an ADHD mind sound like? I reluctantly rejected my initial concept, which would have consisted of constant buzzing together with loud, incoherent screaming, interrupted by occasional explosions, as having limited commercial appeal. Instead, I expanded my meditation on the subject so that it didn't just cover the revelatory aspects, or the profound change I've had to make in the way I think about myself. I ended up examining how I've interacted with people (for good or bad) during my life from childhood onwards. It was a challenging exercise and it gave me new insights into whatever it is that makes me tick. The album's called Paradigm Shift for good reasons. The world might be going to going to hell in a hand basket, but these days I'm dealing with it on my terms.

And it's also been a great opportunity to mangle sounds with my new Hologram Electronics Microcosm which I bought last month, of course. The glitchy, chaotic nature of its effects fitted my plans (and my feelings) perfectly.

My hips have been aching a lot in recent months. Well, if I'm honest about it, everything aches a lot these days. But lately I've noticed that the pain gets worse after I've spent a long session in the green chair in what passes for my "office" downstairs in the living room. If, instead, I spend the day in my home recording studio I'm fine, because I treated myself to a Herman Miller Aeron chair for it a couple of years ago (you may remember me getting annoyed after the "heavy use" chair I'd been using up until that point literally disintegrated on me). The Aeron has been a godsend and despite it being ridiculously expensive, I haven't regretted buying it for a single moment.

Life is too short to spend much of it sitting in a chair that makes you feel like someone's put your legs on backwards. And as I mentioned last month, after spending time sitting on one of Herman Miller's other chair designs this summer at a certain well-known recording studio near Bath and really being impressed by how comfortable it was, and then finding out that Herman Miller had a sale on with hefty discounts, I couldn't resist. Yesterday the new chair was delivered so I've moved the Aeron downstairs and installed this baby in the back bedroom:

Yes, my home recording studio now has the same chairs as Peter Gabriel's does. God, I'm such a fanboy.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon sitting in it as I prepared the new album for release, and I think it might actually be even more comfortable than the Aeron is. My hips don't hurt at all.

Once I started looking for interesting links to add to the post above about my new chair that weren't just a link to the manufacturer's web page for it, I soon realised that a lot of the pages I visited weren't very well written. Some, like this one, which tells us it was written by a "weekly contributor" to the site it's published on, read as if they'd been written by a kid who hadn't done the reading for his homework assignment until the deadline and had then hastily thrown any old garbage together. For a start, the picture that's being used at the top of the article—which is about the Aeron chair made by Herman Miller—shows chairs that not only aren't Aerons, they aren't even made by the right manufacturer. They're Herman Miller wannabes.

Was this an example of LLM bullshit, or AI slop, as it's become widely known? It certainly felt like it. I got curious, so I put a chunk of text from that article through a couple of AI checking websites. GPTZero was 72% confident that the text was generated by AI; ZeroGPT was 79% sure.

Compare the inept writing style and the lack of any original-seeming thinking on display in that article, with this one written by Beren Neale. Even before GPTZero and ZeroGPT both told me that was entirely human-generated (with results of 0% AI) I knew that it had been written by a real person. It just lands differently, somehow. LLMs tend to have distinctive tells in the way that they construct things, at least for the time being. The biggest, of course, is that what they produce is very often wrong, and occasionally completely nonsensical. The more you start examining text for these habits and clichés, the better you'll get at spotting them and quite frankly, you can't start soon enough.

And just so you know, I would never use AI to generate anything on this website and I will proudly continue to use em-dashes with wild abandon.

I spent yesterday working on my next solo album, and I think it's done.

Which is rather convenient, because it's Bandcamp Friday once again this week! I've got ten tracks completed, lasting fifty-two minutes. And I decided to take a different approach for this one so not only are there no vocals, there are also no drums on any track.

Today I'm doing some more session work and it feels like there aren't enough hours in the day any more. How did I get this busy?

Rather than demonstrating penitence over their recent treatment of Jimmy Kimmel, Disney+ have obviously decided they're too big to give a toss. Yesterday I got an email from them informing me that the cost of my monthly subscription would be rising to £15 from the beginning of November.

Stuff that. I'm out. Feckin' Nazis.

I've cancelled my subscription and removed their app from my TV and my computer. And I feel much better.