SHIP CANAL: "PLEASE LET ME BACK INTO YOUR HOUSE"
Maryhill via Manchester, though we could be anywhere: Airstrip One has turned into Asset-Stripped One.
Cold streets, tarmac-abraded hearts. Rusted wire fences. Crushed cans. Dry dog shit, shop windows misted with Windolene.
Scorched Kit-kat foils abandoned beside the swings in the play-area. A carrier-bag with a Lidl logo blows past a Betfred shop. We could be anywhere, but we’re not. We’re here.
A winter sun hangs low over the skyline. A bloated golden onion. A pendulum, a penumbra, a flash in the pan.
It’s 4:32 here in The Tick-Tock World and I’m watching the sun turn into a smear, watching it melt into the trees, become a bad Athena print of a Turner sky turning into shit.
This world’s a fake. A bad copy of something else. Something better.
It’s 4:36 now in The Tick-Tock World and sometimes everything sounds like an early Cure single. It feels like my heart is broken and I don’t know why.
“I think you need to, you know...you and me, sometimes we’re....” Her voice trails off.
Sometimes, you don’t mean to do things - you’re not a bad person; oh, no, no, you’re definitely not - and sometimes, well, things just...happen to you. Stuff happens; shit happens.
Sometimes, you wake up all wrong. There’s no lead in your pencil. Sometimes it’s you, but sometimes it’s the world. The world can turn wrong - feel wrong – all of a sudden, all by itself; it doesn’t need any help from you, me or anyone else.
Sometimes, it’s not your fault. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. Blame cannot always be apportioned. There’s no value in pointing fingers.
“Just for a couple weeks,” she says and somehow her eyes look different to how they used to. “We need a break from one another.”
Sometimes the world takes a wrong turn. Sometimes it turns into something wrong, but maybe - sometimes - things happen for all the right reasons.
Sometimes you just wake up.
This is supposed to be a Press Release. I’m supposed to be selling you something, I’m supposed to be telling you how good a product is, how authentic the artist is, why you should buy his work.
“Yeah, well, stuff this self-indugent, impressionistic crap,” I can hear you saying. I can see your lips moving, your mouth opening on the other side of the internet, like a goldfish in a fish-bowl. What was I saying? “Stop showing off,” that’s what you’re saying (I can read your lips, see them through the screen), “stop bloody moaning. This isn’t about you....”
Actually, it is.
I’m putting out this CD because I believe in it. I’m putting out this CD because I love it, because it captures a feeling – because it encapsulates something – no, because it takes hold of the world and rubs your fucking face in it...I love it for its raw honesty, because it doesn’t pull any punches, because it doesn’t flinch from the ugly truth it sometimes sees in the mirror. I love it because it catches / encodes / ‘paints’ a series of moments – an emotional landscape - so intuitively, so instinctively and seemingly without caring what you, me or any other fucker thinks of it. It says what it thinks needs to be said, but it’s wise enough to know when it might be wrong. This music has a strange, rough, precocious, awkward, almost belligerent beauty to it: it is melancholy without being sentimental, meditational without naval-gazing. Sometimes, it makes me punch the air because it’s so spot-on, so right. Sometimes, it almost makes me want to cry with longing.
I’m putting this out because I want to put something back in.
He’ll hate me for saying this, but: Daniel Baker – Ship Canal – is a natural. He says he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and if that’s true, then - fuck my old boots! - it makes the music he’s created in the last few months even more special, more magical. And it makes a mockery of those who claim they do know what they’re doing. It makes a joke out of 98% of the stuff I hear.
Call it: DIY coping-strategies, home-brewed digital contrariness. Sterling-neutral ingenuity, emotional salvage. The elevation of the dismal into an artform. Fractured MeTube mulch made with a dodgy hard-drive and a broken Dell.
“Dole Noise”.
Daniel demonstrates how the flimsiest, most minimal of found-material and the crappiest, most-freely available tools – a YouTube ripper, an mp3-player, shareware, a stolen mic - can be turned to your own advantage. An artist’s greatest assets are imagination, intelligence and a fierce, unquenchable desire to create. Once you find that need within yourself and start to adjust your worldview, then everything becomes a potential tool - a sonic or visual possibility. This is how we turn the world back round. This is how we change things.
Maryhill or Manchester. You could be anywhere.
“I may be skint, but I ain’t broke.” I can see your lips moving on the other side of the screen. You’re coming into focus now. Sometimes you just…wake up.
Buy this CD / Don’t buy this CD: it’s your call entirely.
Daniel’s not a young Bob Dylan and I’m not Albert fucking Grossman. That game’s done, dusted and gone; it’s old; time to move on: “Keep movin’, nuthin’ to see here, folks!” Nuthin’ there but yr own face staring back in the mirror every morning.
The world doesn’t need any more product, but it does need more people like Daniel making music and doing stuff. It needs more of...this. More vitality, more truth. More people DOING, BEING and BECOMING. More of you.
If you don’t get that, then fine - though I suspect that if you’re still reading this, then you already do.
Daniel doesn’t have all the answers. And I certainly don’t either. But I like the questions his music has started to frame.
I love his music and I really hope you will too.
Fix yourself and then fix this stupid fucking world. This bad, broken copy of what it could be.
