It's Bandcamp Friday this Friday, and once again I've got a new album of music to share with you. When you listen to What The Eye Doesn't See I suspect that it's the bass playing that will be the first thing you're going to notice. I've become increasingly obsessed with improving my abilities on the instrument over the past year, and I set out to really challenge myself here.

But listening to the album again now that it's finished, the thing that strikes me most about it is just how jazzy much of it sounds. I wasn't expecting that at all. This, apparently, is what happens when I take an inordinate amount of time (six months!) to work on an album instead of the usual three or four weeks. This allowed me the luxury of going back to tracks after listening to them for a couple of months and making them better than they were. I ended up obsessively re-recording basslines over and over again until I was satisfied that they had the right groove. Some tracks were completely pulled apart and reassembled in a different way, because I realised that they weren't as good as they could be as they were. And some tracks simply didn't make the cut, because they didn't feel like they were good enough.

By my count, this is the forty-sixth album I've released on Bandcamp but aside from the cover of Paradigm Shift which is blurred beyond all recognition, it's the first time I've ever put a picture of myself on the cover. It's been a tough few months and I wanted to let that show on the self-portrait I used. But when I looked at the artwork after I'd finished everything in GIMP, what I saw shocked me, because I didn't recognise the person looking back at me. Do you?

Yesterday I had to schlep to the Post Office to drop off the broken Ibanez bass so ParcelForce could ship it back to Germany. Apparently spending a four-figure sum on an instrument was insufficient cause to warrant the supplier organising a collection from my house, which would have been far more convenient for me and, more importantly, would have prevented my Autistic brain for devoting the entire weekend to catastrophizing over ways in which my visit to the Post Office could have gone horribly wrong. I haven't been getting much sleep for the past few days.

What really pissed me off, though, was that in the email instructions for how to send the bass back, I was told that in order to reduce the risk of anything being further damaged in transit, "We would kindly ask you to return devices not only in the original packaging but also ensure to put additional packaging in the cardboard."

Is it just me, or is that a tacit admission that Music Store don't pack their goods adequately when they send them out to their customers? It damn well reads that way to me, and the state the Ibanez arrived in is ample proof that the packaging they use isn't up to the job. I used up every sheet of bubble wrap I had in the house sending it back, and no doubt I won't be compensated for the expense, however insignificant it might have been. So I won't be shopping with Music Store again.

And now I have to wait until the refund is credited back to my account before I can set about buying a different 6-string bass from somewhere else. You may have already noticed, but I am absolutely fuming.

But yesterday was the first day in a month when I didn't feel the need to retreat under the duvet for a nap by the middle of the afternoon. I stayed active and awake all day. Not only did I get the bass dispatched back from whence it came, I also paid a visit to the garden centre and then spent a happy couple of house repotting plants in the back garden. The weather definitely helped, as it was an absolutely gorgeous day.

The acer that my sister gave me for Christmas is now looking splendid in a new, bright blue ceramic pot alongside the two acers on the patio that I've had for several years. I love acers.

I replaced the bird feeder by the kitchen window with one which has an exterior cage that—I hope—will deter the local starlings from descending on it en masse and emptying it of suet pellets in less than two minutes.

I repotted the umbrella plant in the conservatory. I brought it with me from Milton Keynes, so it's well over thirty years old at this point and it was very potbound; hopefully with more room it will start sprouting new shoots and stop looking quite as straggly as it does, although it's definitely well past time that I gave it a decent prune to tidy it up and give it a better shape.

I was really looking forwards to sharing my delight in playing my new Ibanez 6-string bass with you this morning but sadly, UPS had obviously had other ideas:

It looks like they dropped the thing on its head. What were they doing, playing soccer with it? Whatever the cause, the bass is trashed and I've already been in contact with Music Store to organise returning it for a refund. Given the very poor build quality of the thing, some weird design choices that Ibanez had made and the way the bass had been set up, I'll be buying a replacement that's made by a different manufacturer. And it'll be one which comes with a hard case, not a flimsy gig bag that was too small to provide adequate protection.

These days I'm painfully aware that when something like this happens in my life, it affects me far more severely than it would do if I was happily allistic (i.e. a neurotypical person). Yesterday evening I was in the depths of despair, I really was. Knowing that this reaction wasn't just exaggerated, it was completely overblown made no difference to the situation at all. For me, it was the worst thing ever; a total calamity. It wasn't, of course—but all the same, I think that I'm completely justified in being extremely pissed off about it. I was planning on using the bass next week as I want to start work on my next album and I was really looking forward to getting to know what my capabilities on it were going to be.

This morning I've noticed that now that I know what's going on with me I've been able to recover my equilibrium (well, most of it, at least) far faster than I would have managed before. I didn't sleep particularly well last night, but I did manage to get back to sleep whenever I found myself awake. Previously I would have been lying in bed wide awake and stewing in my outrage until the small hours of the morning. I think that's probably an improvement.

On Saturday night I managed to get a sleep score of 100 out of my watch but since then my scores have been in the seventies. I'll admit that my dismal score on Sunday night was self-inflicted, because I stayed up to take part in the 2am #Monsterdon online watch party for Philippe Mora's bonkers adaptation of Whitley Strieber's tale of alien abduction, Communion over on Mastodon. I couldn't resist, because it features a performance from Christopher Walken which is unlike anything else he's ever done; it borders on the unhinged and it's highly entertaining to watch. But when I woke up this morning, my left ear was blocked again so I think we can conclude that I've not got over the bug that I came down with last week just yet. I'm still feeling very tired.

So this morning I'm sitting quietly in front of the computer, enjoying typing on the new keyboard I got for it at the weekend. It's backlit, of course. And not just with a single colour, either. I have to say that the latest generation of multicoloured LEDs are extremely impressive, particularly when you set an array of them to cycle continuously through the entire spectrum.

And yes, I finally learned my lesson after the incident where a glass of red wine ended up in my treasured Microsoft Natural Keyboard and killed it and the one when I managed to tip a full mug of coffee into my Fnatic Gear and killed it, and for the first time ever I've got myself a keyboard with an IP32 rating for spill resistance. I don't intend ever having another beverage-related accident at my desk but if I do, at least my keyboard will have a fighting chance of surviving.

For the past few days I've been eagerly tracking the progress of a delivery which is currently making its way to me from Germany. At the moment it's supposed to arrive tomorrow, when I shall reveal all...

The weather has been all over the place this week (I even heard a few rumbles of thunder a couple of days ago) and my mood and energy levels have been fluctuating wildly in sympathy. The last month was much busier than normal for me, and my introvert batteries are very depleted at the moment. That leaves me susceptible to any bug that's going around, and almost inevitably I have now come down with a cold. Worse, my left ear is blocked so not only am I unable to work on music, I'm even finding it unpleasant to just sit and listen to it. The same applies to firing up my home cinema system and watching a movie. And that sucks. At least I got all the tracks from my recent recording sessions mixed and mastered before I went partially deaf.

I'm still feeling very down. I spent most of yesterday in bed. I think I'm just going to chill out at home this weekend. And I'll probably do the same for the rest of the month, to be honest...

I've been banging on about the weakening state of the Sub-Polar Gyre, a.k.a. the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) on this blog for well over a decade at this point and each time I blog about it, it's because the news has gotten worse. As I've explained before, the AMOC has a profound stabilising effect on the planet's weather. Among other things, the AMOC is responsible for the Gulf Stream, which gives the UK its relatively benign climate (compare it with the sort of weather you get in Saint Augustin in Quebec, for example: at 51° 13'N it's a smidge further south than Bristol is at 51° 27'N but the winters there are much, much colder than the ones I get here—on average, they get more than half a metre of snow each January).

Cold salt water is denser than warm seawater, so in northern latitudes it sinks down into the depths of the Atlantic, where it flows south to be warmed in the tropics. Warm water rises to the surface, where ocean currents carry it back north again; it's this circulation of salt water which drives the Gulf Stream, cools the tropics, and keeps northern latitudes warmer than they would otherwise be. The problem is that climate change is making the seas at northern latitudes much warmer, so less salt water is sinking south. The rise in temperatures is also dumping a lot of fresh water (which is less dense than sea water) from Greenland's melting ice sheet into the North Atlantic. As a result, the AMOC has been declining in strength since the 1950s and is now around 15% weaker than it was back then. Scientists know that the AMOC has shut down before, back in the geological past, and concerns were first raised about it doing so again as long ago as 1961.

This week the release of the latest research shows that the collapse is much more likely to happen—and happen sooner—than was previously thought. We are probably much closer to the critical tipping point where it shuts down than anyone should feel comfortable about. It looks like it's already well under way to me, although you'll notice that the news media are being very cagey about suggesting that that might be the case.

Fossil fuel companies have played down how serious it will be if the AMOC does shut down. Of course they have; after all, their products have been chiefly responsible for the emissions that are causing it. Warnings about the consequences of not doing anything about it have gone unheeded so far (because the fossil fuel companies have a vested interest in preserving the status quo) and I doubt that anything is going to change until it's too late and the shutdown actually happens, because that's how capitalism works, kids. Capitalists get annoyed with science when it flags up things going wrong; so, rather than fixing things, the current administration in the United States has adopted a rather novel approach to inconvenient facts by cancelling research on the relevant subject and simply pretending that the problems don't exist; if nobody's watching what's going on, it can't be happening, right?

That's not how reality works, obviously—but that does not appear to be an issue for Mr Trump and his "post-truth" pals.

If the AMOC goes away completely, the planet's climate will change and that's not likely to be good for us. And I'm trying to be calm and not at all alarmist when I say that; unfortunately, discussions of the consequences in the scientific community tend to use rather more evocative words like catastrophic. A disruption of the planet's thermohaline circulation system could result in the release of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the southern oceans, which would dramatically accelerate the rate of climate change. The results of a shutdown are also likely to include a marked cooling effect for winters in the UK with significantly more (and more powerful) winter storms—which I would argue we're already seeing—but also greater extremes of annual temperature with stronger summer heatwaves in southern Europe. Researchers also predict radical changes to rainfall around the globe but particularly in the Amazon rainforest and droughts taking hold in the African Sahel. In an area where geopolitics are already shaky, that's not going to turn out well.

Do you remember when the people in charge used to behave like grown-ups? I miss those days.

There was a quite violent hail storm here at the weekend, the hailstones blown by a strong Westerly and clattering noisily against the kitchen door. Last night, the temperature dropped down to -1°C (30°F) in the back garden. Today, the sun is shining intermittently—right now the roof is generating 4.3 kW—but it's not very warm outside at all. The forecast for the next few days is for heavy showers, with the temperature barely making it into the teens.

But spring is definitely in the air and as I made my coffee this morning I noticed a very fat wood pigeon sitting on the conservatory roof with a twig in its mouth. We made eye contact and it flew off and I didn't think anything more of it, but five minutes later it was back again, still carrying the same twig. So this time I stood still and waited to see what it did.

...which was to flap clumsily into the tall, but rather flimsy Euonymus growing by the garage's back door. And at that point, I noticed that its partner was already sitting in there, at just above head height. They are clearly in the process of building a nest.

As nesting locations go, it's precarious. During the weekend's gales the wind was being funnelled between the house and the garage and the shrub ends up flailing about violently. It's also a quick hop across from the garage roof for any of the neighbourhood's more adventurous cats. But in my experience, wood pigeons are absolutely the most stupid members of the bird kingdom. They're slow and dim-witted and I once saw one get run over by a car that was doing no more than two miles an hour because the pigeon hadn't figured out that that the car was moving faster than it was walking. It could have flown out of the way in a moment and the driver was obviously expecting it to do so, but it didn't, so under the bumper it went with a loud "clonk". I saw another one fly head-on into a van on the motorway and disappear in a cloud of feathers. And judging by the regularity with which little piles of grey feathers appear on my back lawn, they're equally crap at getting out of the way of the local cats and sparrowhawks.

I'll keep you apprised of this pair's progress here in the blog. But I'm warning you now: don't expect this to go well.

I got drawn in to a synthesizer-based mystery a couple of days ago and as any fule kno, those are the best sort. In this toot on Mastodon, user cazabon explained:

In the mid- to late-80s, I used to spend a lot of time in music / #instrument stores (not selling CDs, selling guitars and amps and drums and whatnot). Synthesizer tech was advancing rapidly at this point, with digital starting to overtake analog by leaps and bounds.

At some point, one of the stores got a new #keyboard model in. I can't swear to it, but I think it was either a #Roland or a #Korg. This one had a floppy drive built in, on the side of the #synth. And they had a demo on a floppy disk that was incredible at the time.

It wasn't an official #demo disk. It was a normal consumer floppy, presumably copied far and wide. Hand-Sharpied on it was the name / title "Amin Phone". It was a musical, bright and upbeat piece, rock / pop, maybe 30s long, and included digital samples of a person's voice.

The entire thing was a ridiculous #answering machine outgoing #message. I think there was even a sampled voice at the end taken from someone leaving a message, commenting on it being over-the-top or something.

Reader, my search-engine skills were frustratingly not up to the task. Surprisingly, nor was the collective memory of my synth-nerd friends. But I had faith in the Power of the Fedi and it was well-founded, because sure enough this morning I now know not only that the Amin in question is Amin Bhatia, but also that the demo was commissioned for the Roland S50, and best of all, that Amin's selling an album on Bandcamp which includes the full version of that very demo, which is called Answering Machine Song.

Sometimes, I love the Internet.

After a few days decompressing, this afternoon I'll be back in front of my DAW. I'll be there for the rest of this week, editing and mixing the recording session I engineered and produced at Keynsham last month. It's nice to focus on getting something done in the studio for somebody else for a change and that has also given me a helpful dose of motivation (which I've been struggling to find when I've been working on my own material lately, as you may have noticed).

In listening to the results of these recording sessions, I continue to be delighted with the performance of my Austrian Audio OC818 microphones. They weren't cheap. But they've been worth every penny.

Yes, it's been a while since I last updated the blog. I've had to focus what little energy I had on preserving my mental well-being, which I'd managed to get into an extremely precarious state. By the end of last month I was about as low as I've ever been, experiencing lots of very unpleasant suicidal ideation and wanting to do nothing more taxing than lie in bed all day and sleep. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess. But much to my surprise, leaving Meta's platforms of Facebook and Instagram (which wasn't my decision, but that's a story for another time—probably shortly after the heat death of the Universe) was a turning point.

The greatest help, though, was being asked to get out and about working on other people's music projects. That's what I've been doing for the last three weeks, and it's been glorious. It's had a tremendously positive effect health-wise and it was also a much-needed shot in the arm for my ego. I'm still not out of the woods by any means, but I'm in a much better place than I was and I'm not ready to give up just yet.

The first request I got was from Function 246's singer Michaela, who asked me to run two more recording sessions for the kids at Razzamataz on the last two Saturdays at the end of March. I had great fun setting up my mobile gear, acting both as studio engineer and producer, and capturing them singing numbers from a wide selection of musicals. I've already mixed and mastered the session we recorded at Yate and I'll be working on the results of the Keynsham session next week.

Then over Easter I found myself staying in Melksham in Wiltshire and spending two days as a bona fide session bass player at NAM Studios (which is the studio where K T Tunstall recorded her debut album Eye To The Telescope).

Chris's "Geddy Lee" signature Fender Jazz bass in the control room at NAM Studios, Wiltshire, April 2026.

Jay, Robert Brian, Alan Pinder and Chris, NAM Studios 2026.

It took more than a day for the impostor syndrome to wear off, because I'm me, so of course it did. But when it did finally leave me I had a lot of fun. And very importantly, my client is very happy with what we did (with six tracks in the can!)

My mood has been noticeably better since I got back home. I just need to work on sustaining that, and building on it. It's not going to be easy, but I feel like the foundations I'm using this time are much more solid than they used to be.