Five years ago, before The Kubrick Stare had really become The Kubrick Stare, I made this.
Time Is Precious.- The Instrumental Tapes was the first release to carry the TKS name. Recorded in 2021 and released in early 2022, it was uploaded to Bandcamp, sold about four copies, and then gradually disappeared into the past.
At some point, I lost the original files entirely.
For a long time, I assumed that little piece of TKS history was gone for good.
Well, I've found it.
A Rather Unexpected Discovery
I've recently managed to recover all four original recordings, exactly as they appeared on that first EP.
Not the revised versions I've made since. Not approximations reconstructed from old projects.
The actual recordings.
Which is quite a strange thing to get excited about, considering I made them myself.
Listening back to them has been an interesting experience.
There are plenty of things here that I would never release today. The production is rough, inconsistent and occasionally held together by little more than optimism.
I was nowhere near the producer I am now, and some of these recordings are very obviously the work of somebody still figuring out what they were doing.
But there's something about them that I don't want to lose.
Before The Kubrick Stare
When I started making these tracks in 2021, I had a very different idea of what The Kubrick Stare was going to be.
There weren't going to be any vocals.
I wasn't particularly interested in writing conventional songs, either. I wanted to experiment with guitars, synthesisers, drum machines and whatever strange noises I could persuade my equipment to make.
I'd spent years playing guitar in bands, but recording music by myself presented a completely different challenge.
Suddenly, I wasn't just responsible for the guitar parts.
I had to work out how everything else was supposed to fit together.
And, perhaps more importantly, I had to decide what I actually wanted the music to sound like.
These recordings were where I started finding those answers.
The identity of The Kubrick Stare wasn't particularly concrete at this point, but listening back now, I can hear the foundations of what eventually followed.
The atmospheric guitars. The distorted textures. The electronic arrangements. The slightly uneasy feeling that seems to find its way into so much of my music.
It's all there.
Just considerably less polished.
Four Little Recordings
The EP contains four tracks: shapes and colours, dreaming, false surroundings and clocks.
They come from different places, both musically and chronologically, and listening to them together is a rather strange experience.
Some of the ideas eventually became recognisable parts of The Kubrick Stare. Others went in directions I never really explored again.
And some of them probably should have stayed on my hard drive.
But here they are.
01 - shapes and colours
The biggest surprise of the whole thing.
shapes and colours is probably the track that sounds least like what I'd eventually associate with The Kubrick Stare.
It's a much more dance-oriented recording, built around drum and bass influences with ambient guitars layered over the top.
The guitars are rough.
Very rough, in places.
But the synths are surprisingly polished, and there's something about the combination that still works.
Listening back to it now, I think this is actually the highlight of the EP.
Which is quite remarkable, considering it's probably the last track I'd have expected to enjoy nearly five years later.
There's a confidence to parts of the arrangement that I don't think I fully appreciated at the time.
It's not really the direction The Kubrick Stare ended up taking, but I can hear some of the same instincts behind it. The combination of electronic rhythms and atmospheric guitars, the emphasis on texture, and the idea that an instrumental can develop without needing to follow a conventional song structure.
It's a glimpse of a version of TKS that never really happened.
And I rather like it.
02 - dreaming
This is where the history gets a little more significant.
dreaming was the first track I ever recorded as The Kubrick Stare.
It's an extremely early version of the composition that eventually became Dreaming, released as the instrumental B-side to Where Did The Time Go?.
I've spent years returning to this track, changing the arrangement, developing the production and generally spending far too much time trying to get it exactly how I wanted.
But there's one particularly interesting thing about the original recording.
The guitars are exactly the same performances.
The finished version was slowed down, which completely changed their character. Hearing those original recordings at full speed again is surprisingly strange.
The solo, in particular, has an energy that I think was actually lost when I slowed the track down.
Not necessarily better or worse.
Just different.
There's something imperfect about the original performance that I really like. It's less controlled, a little rougher around the edges, but there's a certain magic in it.
And despite everything I've changed over the years, that original guitar recording is still sitting underneath the finished track.
I find that quite satisfying.
Incidentally, dreaming was the one recording from this EP that never completely disappeared.
The original version has been sitting on an old Kubrick Stare YouTube account for years.
Unfortunately, I forgot the password.
So for quite some time, I was in the slightly ridiculous position of being able to listen to my own recording on YouTube while having absolutely no access to the original files.
Technology is wonderful.
03 - false surroundings
This is probably the weakest recording on the EP.
But it might have the most interesting history.
I originally wrote false surroundings in 2015, six years before I started The Kubrick Stare.
It was one of the first pieces of music I'd ever written, and for whatever reason, I became quite attached to the instrumental.
A couple of years later, around 2017, I brought it into an indie rock band I was playing in.
Eventually, the band abandoned the song.
But I never really forgot about it.
When I started experimenting with The Kubrick Stare, I decided to revisit the instrumental and see what I could do with it.
The result is the recording you hear here.
And I don't think it does the original idea justice.
It's an unfinished piece of music, really. There are interesting moments, but the arrangement never quite comes together, and the production leaves quite a lot to be desired.
Listening to it now, I can understand why it never developed into something more substantial.
But I still think it's worth preserving.
There's something quite funny about the fact that a piece of music I wrote as a teenager in 2015 somehow ended up on the first ever Kubrick Stare release.
It predates the project by years.
And yet, here it is.
04 - clocks
And then there's clocks.
This one has a slightly unusual place in TKS history.
While some of these early recordings have already found new life, clocks might not be quite finished yet.
Watch this space.
The original recording is raw, distorted and not particularly controlled.
It's essentially the song before I'd figured out how I actually wanted it to sound.
It also contains something I definitely didn't intend to release.
The Logic metronome.
Somehow, I managed to bounce the finished track with Logic's metronome still switched on.
And I didn't notice.
So I released it.
The funny thing is, it actually works.
There's a one-bar break towards the end where all the instruments fall silent, leaving nothing but the metronome ticking away.
What started as a mistake ended up becoming part of the recording's character.
I could easily remove it now.
But I won't.
This is an archive of the original recordings, and I don't particularly want to start correcting the mistakes that make them what they are.
Besides, I think it's quite funny.
There's also a rather lovely moment after the song itself finishes, where roughly a minute of reverberated synthesisers continues ringing out.
The notes gradually decay until there's almost nothing left.
It's an accidental ending, really, but it's probably one of my favourite moments on the entire EP.
There's something wonderfully atmospheric about it.
Even if I didn't entirely know what I was doing.
A Little Piece Of History
I don't want to pretend these recordings are some great lost masterpiece.
They're not.
They're early experiments by a young musician trying to work out what sort of music he wanted to make.
And I think that's exactly why they're worth preserving.
It's very easy to look back at old work and judge it against everything you've learned since.
I could spend months rebuilding these tracks, fixing the mixes, replacing the sounds and generally trying to make them resemble something I'd release today.
But then they wouldn't be the same recordings.
And that would rather defeat the point.
The imperfections are part of their history.
They show where I was at the time, what I was interested in, and what I was capable of doing with the knowledge and equipment I had.
Some ideas survived. Some were completely transformed. Some were abandoned.
And some, like false surroundings, had already been hanging around for years before TKS even existed.
At the time, I wasn't thinking about establishing a particular visual identity or building a larger body of work.
I certainly wasn't planning four albums.
I was just making music.
And yet, listening back now, I can hear little pieces of what eventually followed.
I think that's worth keeping.
TKS000
I've decided to give the EP the catalogue number TKS000.
It feels appropriate.
These recordings exist before the releases that properly established The Kubrick Stare as it is today.
They're not part of the current TKS catalogue, and I'm not putting them on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer or the other major streaming services.
Instead, I'm making the original EP available again on Bandcamp and SoundCloud.
Somewhere it can exist as what it really is.
A little piece of history.
I'm not trying to disguise its age or tidy up its imperfections. I'm not presenting it as a polished retrospective release, and I'm certainly not pretending it's representative of the music I'm making now.
It is what it is.
A sort of prologue.
And if nothing else, the four people who bought the EP back in 2022 can finally rest easy knowing that I have my own copy again.
Thanks for keeping it safe, whoever you are.
SMS