The project name Bleach For The Stars (BFTS for short) that I utilize for my website and - primarily - for one of my musical solo 'bands', was picked as a sardonic wordplay on the showbiz idiom "reach for the stars" which means to achieve something difficult, but which also evokes mercantile qualities that I find rapacious and that I associate with the crass, sell-out attention-seekers of the music industry. Capitalism, internationalism, corporatism, and indeed Conservatism all cause me great displeasure - not that I have any patience for Communism, Bolshevism, Marxism, and all the rest of those universalist and utilitarian dogmas, the vulgar authoritarianism of utopians. You might assume a sympathy for nationalism, or the petit bourgeoisie of the right-wing, marching along like Bavarian burghers to personally deliver a handbag's worth of someone else's litter to the council dump, or indeed presume a modicum of patriotic reverence for the society of the country I inhabit, and the national project altogether. You'd be wrong on that. I despise the lot of them. I've given up trying to explain my position to most people. It's not ideological. Politics, of any stripe, of any faction, infuriates me, and I take no interest in current affairs, party movements, or activists, no matter what they'd like to root for or call themselves.

Much as the NSDAP was the German political movement of the National Socialists - a genuinely national folk community enterprise in opposition to all aspects of greed, corruption, and international capitalism, neither right-wing nor left-wing - the principle of National Socialism itself is distinct as an all-encompassing eternal worldview, in essence far pre-dating 19th Century Prussia and the Third Reich of the 1930s. A spiritual principle of life and beauty, based on the fundamental physical laws (and near fundamental, if one considers structure, form, and multicellular complexity) laid out by Nature. If anything, I have the most political sympathies for socialists.

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There's something saccharine and banal about the original motto also, especially in overuse. Not everyone can attain mastery. As both Alexis de Tocqueville and - with a life-time's torturous precision - Friedrich Nietzsche have pointed out quite well enough already (let alone Murray Rothbard), egalitarianism is for slaves. There are plenty of them about to promote it, certainly, or at least to unconsciously act out the principle daily, regardless of an awareness of the linguistic terminology or an investment in the texts of this philosophical religious doctrine, a creation of Paul the Apostle, given over one thousand seven hundred years of deep pedagogic introjection in a civilization brutalized by Christianity, and the secularized Christian values of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. A genuine European civilization favouring the lives of physical European bodies, and not simply their ideological soundness and conformist orthodoxy, did not really outlast the Fall of Imperial Rome. The West itself is a theocratic construct, carried on too long, even as that alien desert god is jettisoned for an atheist's holy 'reason', and the humanist determinism and reductionism of soul-dead materialists, a terrible nihilism that jeopardises our science and voids us from the spiritual, and the awe-inspiring.

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My project title was also intended as a serious reflection on what I personally deem "psycho-cosmology", with a recommendation to clean up and whiten our perceptual universe – to think clearly, and purely, in bodily health, and to pursue truth; to find our fundamental conscious purpose within the vast, cyclical aeons of the physical realm; the only reality. The stars, looking down coldly on us, a blinding light appearing brighter than the Sun, would be as good a place to start that cleansing Renaissance as any. Under their dazzling glares, we can observe ourselves, near indistinguishable in our servility. It's good to be optimistic generally.

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I regularly attempt linked concept albums, each building somewhat on the previous, so there are a few common themes I return to. Musically, I compose bleak Electroacoustic and Post-Industrial experiments, ominous Dark Ambient, morose modernist Neoclassical and even a varying selection of fairly accessible Folk-Industrial (or perhaps electronic drumming Neofolk) crossover pieces, as well as synthesizer based 'vintage' soundtracks, with an eye to history. It's quite hard to categorise, as many of the albums are completely different from each other, and freely mix different styles of European music, from ancient pre-Christian rhythmic influences, to Germanic and Celtic motifs, to the traditional Western harmonic style and the genuine, and to the primitive Bacchic decadence of the contemporary, the latter unfortunately affected at times by the African drumming utilized by folkish rock music, albeit with sequenced drumkits. Some tracks have poetic spoken word lyrics, delivered in a rough, acerbic speaking voice, rendering them better understood as "songs", and some don't. Some instrumental pieces too are driven social observations, cautionary warnings, mournful reminiscences, and memorials, and some remain ephemeral, numinous, or reflective, almost opaque, but never entirely so by active design. I have never been interested in writing commercial lyrics, so do not make any conventional popular music theory concessions. Most of the verses began as structured poems, with formal metre and rhyme, re-arranged slightly later when I set them to music.

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I refer to my project as 'middlebrow' in that it's too intense and serious in concept for casual listening, and more elitist than is generally expected in the mass of low IQ gibberish that passes for 21st Century lyrical popular music and yet is still a very long way below the beauty of Classical music, the real, only, music of Western civilisation. There is no compare. I'm working on bringing it closer to a Classical structuring, or at least proper Folk, minus any aspect of the soiled, degenerate modern world. I think I take too much pleasure in unorthodox scales and live improvisations. In my home, I listen solely to Classical music, and am quite selective within that even, and simply compose these amateurish pieces as timewasters and pot-boilers, having progressed with violin only as far as grade 5.

I despise autotune manipulation and look at the much-lauded quantizing process with near-total contempt, seeing yet another sterile, mechanical gimmick, the go-to artifice of spoilt, trammelled snobs. Much of what is deemed as professional modern production merely serves as an uninspiring corporate tool for the psychoacoustic marketing of bullshit to asinine minds, bolstered by advanced computational linguistics research, a brightly spray-coated polystyrene packaging for the ear, prepared by factory robots, just more white noise despite it all.

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I favour live physical instruments and have a violin, autoharp, ocarina, and acoustic guitar to work with, plus a few others occasionally, as well as utilising an M-Audio Oxygen 25 keyboard running piano emulation software such as PianoTeq7. I compose most of my rhythms from scratch using the Re-drum software drum programmer that comes with Reason 12 but am also fond of implementing found sounds & field-recordings, and home-made percussion picked up on Dictaphone. I am extremely fond of Goldwave, and would be totally unable to complete 85-98% of my song-crafting process without it

Note: if you click on the small crotchet symbol with the three horizontal bars to the right corner of each album player below, you can listen whilst reading my personal notes.​​​