August 2025
I've been getting to know a network of artists, promoters and producers in Birkenhead and Liverpool this past year. I was talking with one at the weekend about how I've always used music — playlists or, before that, mixtapes — to help me process experience and feelings. How sometimes the richness and subtlety takes time to emerge. And how I don't think I'm alone in that.
So I dug out this piece I wrote in 2018, reflecting on my time working in AI in Silicon Valley in the first part of that year, and a relationship that overlapped and to some degree overwhelmed me. It touches on themes that still fuel my imagination today. It was about starting to come to terms with the end of two dreams, at once. You might enjoy the music. Sometimes it seems our most interesting work can come in times of great pressure, loss, trauma.
Over California
The wild west begins. On a Delta 757 heading east, out of California. 26 March 2018 · View on Flickr · Photograph by Mark Charmer
and the Sahara
Some years ago, my friend Fiona, an environmental journalist of some note, described her sense of wonder as she stared from her aeroplane window, as she crossed the Sahara Desert, in a low sun. How she tried to take in its breathtaking scale, remoteness and beauty.
San Francisco
I had a related experience at the end of March, as I left America after some months in San Francisco. As my Delta 757 turned right, out over San Francisco Bay, we routed toward Atlanta, reaching a cruise height as the plane headed eastward over Modesto, a city in Northern California.
I bet there have been mail planes rumbling back and forth over Modesto for not shy of 100 years. The city's roots are in agriculture, as it sits in the heart of California's historically fertile farmlands. It's the home city of a good friend of mine, whom I love, and its confirmation on the moving map was a vaguely amusing end to a very complex experience in 2018 Trump-era America. One I think it will take me many years to fully understand.
begins
Speeding east at 600mph, it's not long from Modesto until you leave the farmlands behind, cross mountain ridges and head into the wild west of America, for proper. With its canyons and ravines and ridges. The stuff of cowboy movies, for me. And it just goes on, and on, and on. A landscape from my childhood imagination.
This is the track list of 21 songs, for a related upcoming 2019 concept note, called Songs To Overfly Modesto. It's part of a new project I'm developing this winter, as a component in a Morning Sofa 2 art-science programme here in Amsterdam, earmarked for May. It explores the beauty of landscape and nature and settlements, when viewed from a transcontinental airliner, and the movement of the aircraft in relationship to that landscape. And how music can enhance and steer that experience, and how different songs can bring through different feelings and stories that speak to many people.
I hope you enjoy the songs.
Merry Christmas.
21 December 2018