I didn’t think this release would come out like this. I’ve been working on Dronan Keating stuff for a while now but I didn’t know it. These edits I’d made were supposed to all come together on a Peak Flow Meter album called ‘A Magic Head Living Inside Another Magic Head’ but things got in the way and ultimately the project was shelved.

In a fit of mania, I grabbed what I could from that and I’ve made these two tracks, comprised of songs from the earlier project.

These songs are built from segments of live recordings (plus one studio production that needed a home) where I performed, mostly in a single take, and remixed previous songs and their stems. It’s been an overly complex journey to be honest but as I kept following each new idea I kept gradually moving in a new direction and so Dronan Keating was born.

This means that everything here is a messy tribute to the almighty drone and is, essentially, a live album, with all the attendant mistakes and magic that can lead to. It was constructed from samples of old media, with a slight fixation on the 90’s (see below), and is a comment on our digital age and how this detritus of the past gets dragged up and examined by our modern eyes. We’re all archaeologists now.

Thanks go out to my Billion siblings, for always inspiring, and Robert Anderson, who rolled an orange into a pizza express while I recorded it.

Judy Call Me contains elements of:

Music for Swimming Pools Industry 1
Clank
Dean Kiss

O Lost Your Mumbet contains elements of:
Grobb
Tuna Fish Prom Dress Reveal Donald Truck
Hearts Under A Hammer The Orange 2
You Can Always Leave
Do Anything
Dean Kiss Reprise

*

The following is a short piece I wanted to include as part of ‘A Magic Head Living Inside Another Magic Head’ but as it didn’t end up happening I’ve put it here. I had to make a few minor edits so it makes sense in isolation. It’s a ramble about the 90’s and my complicated feelings about it.

The 1990’s make me feel weird. I was born in the mid 80’s so you could say I was an 80’s baby but I don’t remember the 80’s. That’s not the decade I feel a pang of nostalgia for. The 90’s is about as far back as my memory goes and so much of it feels hyper real. I was a kid, so I only really knew about what was going on in the UK or when something big happened abroad. I mean, I mostly knew about X- Men but what I’m saying is that I was aware of some world events.

I remember coming into school and at some point in the day, a girl asked me if I thought Michael Jackson did it. I didn’t really have a clue what she was talking about. I remember my mum waking me up to tell me that Princess Diana had died. I specifically remember having to pretend I cared, not really knowing who she was. I feel like moments like that shape you a lot more than people realise. That rising feeling of ‘Wait... hold on... is this... bullshit? I think this is bullshit!’ Those first moments where you’re forced to reject the narrative or even just when you consider that rejecting it is actually possible.

I’m going off topic here, look, the point is, I have these strange complex feelings about the 90’s andlooking back, they might be the last decade when things seemed good. We certainly seem to be heading towards a dystopian cyber hell so maybe the 90’s will be seen as this perfect time, the last drink before the night turned to shit.

I also think they’ll always mean something to me because of my childhood and that’s something we all experience. We can never quite escape the gravitational pull of our childhood years, always dragging us back involuntarily whenever we see something, smell something, hear a name mentioned, hear a theme tune. We get whipped back in time for a moment, synapses fire and we ask ourselves ‘How did I ever forget you?’

I’m following a few 90’s nostalgia pages on Instagram and I genuinely disassociated for a moment when I saw these little yoghurt pots that looked like monsters. I was knocked flat by a memory. It’s starting to feel not so good for my mental well being but that’s social media all over I guess. I should stop following them. You know what they say, nostalgia isn’t as good as it used to be.