INTRODUCTION

This is not a usual thing for me, I’m not a smoker or someone who would sacrifice a part of their body for the sake of art. But, this is an idea I’ve had and the stubborn part of me is screaming to stick to it. I guess an explanation as to why is a good place to start.

This EP is a summary of a life-changing abusive relationship I went through in my second year of university. The cover is the last image I captured inside my ex’s house in East London and the cigarette burns are from a packet of cigarettes she left in my house (hidden in my t-shirt drawer) the last time she visited me at home. In this (stupid) act of smoking this packet and releasing this EP I aim to finally put the pain and trauma I’ve felt behind me. It’s almost a year since the breakup and I still find it incredibly difficult to talk about.

A few days ago a photographer for this project, and a good friend, Jeanine, asked about the relationship and it still filled my body with the burning static of anxiety. Hopefully, through this process I can write about other subjects in my songwriting and reduce the intense power it has over me.

As a result of this, I want this blog to be as free as possible. Some posts will be a stream of consciousness, others will be a description of the songs, and some may just be poems. Attempting to summarise and lump together everything good and bad I felt during that year of my life.

Whilst thinking about this I think it’s very important to include the changes of perspective I’ve had since that year of my life. I’m writing all of this with the advantage of hindsight and of being fundamentally different from who I was before. For example, I used to crave returning home from London, now I’m living at home again, in a sleepy village on the south-east Kent coast, I crave the activity and openness of the city again. People here are more generous but far more shut off, strangers look at you with a tangible hostility at times, and I feel a general air of defeatism. This place is completely devoid of life. (How much of this is true, I’m not sure. This could just be a product of the mindset I was writing this with.) The extremes of London are far more welcome these days. I no longer crave or search for love, I simply feel attachment to those people for which that feeling is already established, without that feeling being a driving force I desperately lean on. So my motivations for my actions that I’ll come to detail are almost completely forgotten to me and nonsensical.