We live in times where our selves are divorced from our acts. You can be someone my age, 30 or younger, and have no idea of the wave of history we’ve rode in on. We live after World War II, after the Cultural Revolution and the Marxist youth intellectuals of the 60s, after the Cold War, and after the destruction of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. We can grow up knowing nothing true about these things because it is in the current world’s interest to keep us uninvested in the struggles of community, while fully invested in the struggles of the individual self. Since none of these ruins of the past have been reconciled, they have instead been painted over, and there is a forced separation between our unexplainable feelings and the knowledge of what caused them.

I’m drawn to music because it’s what I happened to witness others doing music during my social development, and I was drawn to socially imitate the act. Like anyone, I feel a contradiction between my expressive self and my true neutral self at the core. All we are given is the tools that exist in our surroundings, and while it’s perfectly possible to feel amazing using them, there will never come a time when we can have “true creative freedom”, since freedom is always relative to the constraints of ideology and the material means of production. But while this fact used to push me away from music, it instead now comforts me and makes this new record, Stay Sharp, the easiest one I have ever produced.

What is self-worth in relation to one’s artistic work in the face of this fact? From my point of view one’s sense of self esteem is governed by forces outside our control, and becoming increasingly so since the spread of neoliberalism in the 80s going forth to the completely unintelligible beast that culture has become today. Since the systematic annihilation of various collective forces, the push from those in power toward our ever deepening introspection and narcissism is only serving to heighten the intensity of our feelings of inadequacy. In the face of coming to terms with this, my method slipped out of habits of trying to make things perfect and gradually settled into just letting things be. I started to allow myself to consider a decision I made to be the right decision, whether I understood it or not. I started to rely more on improvising lyrics, feeling out song structures as I recorded, rather than obsessing over whether I was truly representing my feelings or doing justice to ideas. The films of Michelangelo Antonioni, like L'Avventura and Red Desert, were particularly inspiring to tease these realisations out of me.

Over the year or so since finishing the record up until its release, I’ve begun to see Stay Sharp as the end of a trilogy of sorts preceded by my other two Raiden Freeman records, Deep Farm and Sins Ear. These three records mirror my political, intellectual and emotional development over the years of their creation, from Deep Farm’s rustic disinterested aestheticism, to Sins Ear’s cold control and didacticism, to Stay Sharp’s letting go and allowing myself to just enjoy the process, to say what I’m feeling in the moment and have the confidence that that’s the right thing to say and that it’s worthy of art. The record is structured as if it’s a dossier on myself, with documents spilling out as you pick it up. I imagined myself as Guy Van Stratten, the protagonist of Orson Welles’s film Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report), compiling a detailed examination on my unknown life. At one stage the record was even called Confidential Report, and then it was called Case File, until I decided to drop the explicit Mr. Arkadin homage and settled on the lyrical phrase I thought was the most memetic.

Sutures (Stay Sharp) is one of the easiest times I’ve ever had making a song, which contradicts its circumstances. My relationship to Reuben Winter is something that at this stage I feel like I could never explain without doing disservice, and I still feel largely the same as when we lost him. I drew the self portrait that is now the album cover a few days after his suicide. Reuben was the key person who stopped me from giving up making music so many years ago, and after he died I almost stopped again, but I know he wouldn’t want that. Grieving, it goes without saying, is different for everyone, and to me it’s been a period of being stoic in spite of myself, of to this day not crying about it for reasons I don’t understand, of suspecting that my unusually good moods and sunny dispositions since then have been a lid over something boiling horribly that could explode at any moment. It’s been a year since it happened and since I wrote the song, and I still can’t react to all this at once. I lost one of the people that meant the most to me in my life, and it didn’t seem to pull any strong feelings out of me. And the more I don’t react to it, the more I wonder if I’m just not going to. But right now I just have to be okay with that, to trust that what I’m just naturally doing is okay and not overthinking it. If I overthought it, I would start to perform in a way that contradicts my interiority, which over time just feels more and more wrong.

So at the end of it, I guess my advice with this record is exactly the title, to keep your head in this climate of constantly having to pretend you’re feeling differently to the way you are, to keep your wits about you enough to keep from being distracted from what’s in front of you. The walks I’ve taken this year are the most overwhelmingly beautiful of my life, because I’m trying to pay more attention to what I’m seeing in front of me. Almost all the time, anything you are looking at is incredibly beautiful. In a time where we are pushed to do things “for our own sakes” that really end up damaging us, I want you for truly your own sake to stay sharp.

Jack Mells
17/08/2021