BrokenZeroFour is Euan Me by Dirty Hope

I had toyed with the phrase 'Dirty Hope' for years before I applied it to this project; it was meant to symbolise the only kind of hope of which I'm capable, a sort of beaten and bedraggled positivity that flies in the face of all logic, abiding through crises personal and metaphysical; it clings to life when the other options might be a more sensible choice. Not long after, I read a passage in William Burroughs' 'The Western Lands', itself a work that simultaneously suggests a passive acceptance of fate and stoic defiance of the same:

''Rested from his sojourn in the trains, cleansed by emptiness, Neferti is ready now to resume the endless journey over the hills and far away. His clothes are an intricate arrangement of pockets to accommodate tools, drugs and weapons.''

That phrase,''cleansed by emptiness'', really resonated. Neferti is prepared to take on whatever comes his way on an eternal quest, nourished by recognition of, perhaps even respect for, the void.

Later, I found another parallel in Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus' where he speaks about the essential absurdity of life, in which we should nonetheless revel. I'm therefore either in good company or a pretentious blowhard. Take your pick.

It seemed, though, to be an important notion for which no simple term applied, so I made one up: Dirty Hope.

In April 2007, I became an uncle. My nephew, Euan, was a source of joy and hope, and, driving back from my sister's house one Sunday, I realised that I felt inspired to make him some music that he could sleep or play to; Savath & Savalas were on the car stereo and seemed to fit the mood almost perfectly, so one of the musical touchstones was identified immediately.

That night I fired up Audiomulch and started work on what was to become 'To Care, Divine'. Partly bearing the Savath & Savalas influence, partly Tortoise's percussion-heavy work like 'Ten Day Interval', with elements of the big Thelonious Monk style chords that Cinematic Orchestra used on their first couple of albums, I surprised myself with how much I liked it; it's common for me to feel something between disdain and despair at my own creations. It was certainly different to the beat-heavy stuff I was doing under the Production Unit name.

Without really planning anything else, other pieces came together. Some, like 'Actors' (featuring a voice-over, from a human perspective, read by a robot, wherein the narrator laments the fact that he feels like his life is spiralling out of control and he's becoming a robot), weren't the happy, sunny sounds that the brief suggested, but I kept them in, firstly because I didn't think Euan cared what the sentiment was behind the music, and secondly because I thought that they fitted with the downbeat sound and honest ethos of the project. People forget that childhood isn't all playparks and presents; there's a lot of darkness experienced as a child, and to omit that would have been to render an image incomplete.

A ''micro-independent'' label called Sounds Asleep agreed to release it after I was put in touch by a mutual friend. As far as I know the CDs were just made and printed on an ad hoc basis whenever one was ordered. The label seemed to disappear soon after.

It's a pretty personal album, and in truth I don't know how much that tends towards its being myopic or vain. No-one else could have known that 'Durness' is so titled because my abiding memory of my honeymoon is of listening to the waves boom off the beach in the town of the same name; it might have been naïve to expect my memories of billowing childhood bedsheet that I wanted to evoke with 'Cotton' to translate across the zeroes and ones. I was happy with that. I had hoped that people would connect with it on a purely sonic level and...

...

...frankly, they didn't. The project came and went with nary an eyelash batted. No reviews, no sales, no love. Dry your eyes. It happens. As a result, Dirty Hope the project is dead, consigned to the dustbin of bad energy.

The notion prevails though, emboldened by another hard-won lesson. I'll keep hoping, even if I have to do it alone. That's how Dirty Hope works. ”

Download here as seperate mp3s or a RAR file containing all the tracks