This album contains thirty-five recordings I made between 2008 and 2012 (ages 14-17). The dates are approximate, as there is little documentation of the recordings’ production, bar the fantastical (and yet meticulous) scrawlings found in a series of moleskine journals. Enough time has now passed that the recordings are foreign to me in some way - that is, they aren't my own works but those of a child of the past.

All of the recordings were made primarily using a Boss Micro BR 4-track recorder. Some of the 2012 recordings also include MIDI arrangements made on the demo version of a DAW called Mixcraft. These arrangements were then dubbed over the 4-track recordings. I played every instrument on each recording, regardless - as you will hear - of whether I could actually “play” it.

Accompanying the recordings was an extensive world of artworks, notes and plans. In my imagination (and on the pages of my journals) the recordings were fleshed-out, fully-realised songs, ready to be received by the indie music community, to be critiqued by journalists and performed live by talented bands of musicians, admired by fans and canonised as serious works of art. In reality, the recordings merely represent the half-sketched blueprints of these fantasies. I was far too anxious and lacking in confidence to ever turn them into anything more than crude sketches, let alone actually share them publicly. They are often out-of-time, out-of-tune and performed hastily. Some of them are incomplete and have missing parts or abrupt endings. They also, however, include the semiotic cues that identify them as potential-pop songs. They are the wildly creative but fundamentally stunted attempts at engaging with a greater world of independent music production and reception.

The album is intended as a reflexive, auto-ethnographic study. It’s an open exhibition of amateurism and child-like creativity. Naturally, the later recordings are ‘better’ (at least practically) than the earlier. But all of the recordings, I hope, are valuable and provide insight into the mind of an imaginative and highly anxious teenager.

Some of the songs are covers, some are pop songs, some are noise/ambient pieces, and some are just plain weird. These recordings are the tip of the iceberg. I've chosen 35 of the most diverse and interesting to publish here. Hundreds of others remain on dusty memory cards.