I’ve not been writing lately. It’s felt so hard to find the time or the headspace to get into anything at all almost. I pulled out my notebook a few weeks back and it had been months since I’d scribbled anything down, and as I got to flipping back through, I briefly had an overwhelming sense of both futility and yet inescapable need. Amongst the various fragments I’d squeezed out like some surly dehydrated lemon from the back of the fridge, a line jumped out at me:

Nothing feels too much, while too much feels like nothing

It’s weird to talk about life being so full – more so this year, perhaps, than it’s ever felt – whilst it paradoxically seems as though there’s something missing. Worse still, that this fullness pervades the lulls so much so that when it all does fall away, the moments of quietude hum too, and I can’t escape what fills me in those reflections.

Every time I sit down to make sense of this, nothing comes out. I’m filled with anxieties I can’t even define let alone shake off and I exist as though in a dream or a fugue, turning up for the people around me as some spectral facsimile of self which, upon close scrutiny, loses all detail, has no purpose.

This alexithymic existence is scarcely consoled through music, and it’s felt difficult to set this mood to sound: how could it? I caught myself drifting back to McBride’s 2005 debut solo release on a few occasions lately, its nascent acoustic chords and bleary drone ambiences paint a gentle picture of loss or absence, of space between. The likes of opener “Overture (For Other Halfs)” has been a presence in my periodic listening habits for many years, and its slow evocations of strings and piano settles something in me that I can see but can’t quite reach.

Sophomore “Piano Abg” as well as deeper “The String to Light Feed Frenzy”, pulse along with reversed arpeggios at their heart. They seem to run counter to normal flow, moving against the current in these flickering abrupt inversions as dainty piano otherwise moves about them, the light tread of friends and loved ones circling at the periphery but unable to walk the same path for integration.

Mid-way “Retenir” caves to this loneliness, retreats into it: the slow drag of violin is eked from the darkness, a thin wind heard blustering across the surface of its glassy heart as its slides off and out into vacuum. There is nothing except perhaps the vague promissory glimmer of a few distant stars a thousand light years away across a gap that precludes contact.

Towards the latter end of the album, the likes of “The Guilt of Uncomplicated Thoughts” arise in mournful horns and naked guitar, a curious realm of haunting tones dragged through a space brighter and more energised than themselves. Its heaviness ploughs the ground for genteel “For Those Who Hesitate”, all thin strings and wafting airs that just can’t seem to gather enough momentum to coalesce into inertial action.

That time when I sat down to write in my notebook, that first time for several months, I wrote: “Have I not paused here a hundred times before? And in doing so, where have I gone? A line; a circle; a knot”. It seems likely that some part of who I am is simply predisposed and destined to be this way and feel this way, in moments and cycles, forever. Sensitive enough to oscillate to life’s frequencies but to remain static as the antenna is, who’s true curse isn’t the reception and detection of these wavelengths but, rather, the inability to not receive them.