Hi Reader,

I spent two days last week mastering an album.

Album 13.

The artist is Martin and he records as After Daylight, shoegaze/ambient/post-punk, the kind of guitar music that sits somewhere between beautiful and deliberately uncomfortable. He was in a band that used to record and rehearse at Psyrex more than twenty years ago. The Death Notes if anyone remembers them. Now he works alone, at home, plugs straight in, uses emulators for his amp sounds, a drum machine for the rhythm, and puts out roughly one album a year.

No live room. No obsessing over microphone placement. No waiting until the setup is right.

Album 13.

I sat with it for two days, listened to it the way you listen when your job is to hear everything, and I kept coming back to the same thought. Not about the music specifically, though it's worth your time, but about the fact of it. Thirteen records. Made in a room, with what he had, one a year (roughly), without waiting for better conditions that were probably never going to arrive anyway.

He isn't chasing algorithms or industry approval. He's just making things. Which sounds straightforward until you realise how many talented people spend years getting ready to create instead of actually creating.

My dad understood that instinctively. He picked up guitar and bass after he retired, he'd played a little when he was much younger, but not during the years I was growing up. No grand plan. No announcement. He just decided it was time and started. Now he jams once a week with a bunch of his mates. No gigs. No recording. Just doing it for the fun and to be in the same room as likeminded people.

Two people in my week who didn't wait until everything was right. Neither of them making a big deal of it. Both of them making things.

I think about the musicians I've worked with over twenty-five years, the ones who built real bodies of work versus the ones who were always nearly ready. The difference was rarely talent or gear or time. It was the decision, made quietly and without fanfare, to treat imperfect and done as worth more than perfect and imaginary.

If something in this landed and you've got unfinished music of your own waiting — the Finish Line Challenge is here.​

Martin's catalogue is here if you want to hear what thirteen albums of just getting on with it sounds like: afterdaylight.bandcamp.com​

Take care,
Mark
The Quiet Rebel

P.S. I also wrote another chapter of the book this week, which counts as making something even on the weeks when the studio stays quiet. Progress doesn't always look like what you expect it to.