A statement of intent by P . L . Winfield
“Everything potentially always, all is forgiven” - Petrichor
Something occurred to me today: our name has taken on a new meaning. As a child, I would tape the radio onto cassette, fanatically watch VHS tapes the adults left out, and play both ‘until the ribbon broke,’ cementing a life-long obsession with the marriage of sound and image. Our first record was a genuine attempt to capture the sense of wonder in first discovering that magic. An exercise in atmosphere, texture and nostalgia.
When left in the sun too long - when unpreserved and unattended to - cassette ribbon begins to unravel and warp, often trying to escape the safety of its own plastic housing. And in the months and years following our first release, and to a large extent whilst promoting it, I most certainly unraveled. Spilling, unspooled, my life eventually became unmanageable. The crippling anxiety that I had spent so many years masking had finally succumbed to the influence of its most tyrannical friends: Alcohol and Benzodiazepines.
To some degree, I think a large part of surviving the uncertain and chaotic experience that is the human one, is the ability to lie to oneself; pathologically and convincingly. At any cost. In bright white rooms before we walked onto stage, I would stand, gently trembling, tsunami approaching and whisper gently to myself:
“One. More. Drink. No. More. Fear.”
A drink before one stands, vulnerable, in front of a large room of people is, in isolation, a perfectly reasonable reaction to an understandable level of anxiety. In moderation. Just one. Early night. Early start.
But the difference for someone like me, is fundamental. To an alcoholic these words are impossible theory. A brick by brick instruction manual for the Wall of China. There is no moderation, only the promise of oblivion and for me, the temporary quieting of a loud, pervasive and almost constant voice of anxiety.
“Anxiety, I’m pulling down the blinds” - Black and White
Every day and night I tried to quieten that voice. Pushing it away, trying to starve it, bury it, drown it out. Every day it came back harder, louder, more and more vicious. I poured fuel on that particular fire until I couldn’t fight it anymore. In the end, I no longer knew if I was drinking because I was anxious, or anxious because I was drinking.
I couldn’t leave the house without drinking vodka straight from the bottle and worse, I had accepted it. I had lost the fundamental belief that anything of any worth was on the other side of the door. Congratulations! I had, knowingly, torn down every aspect of my life, spitefully, on purpose.
“No more courage in the bottle, I’ve got people I can’t let down” - Meru
In September of last year, I had reached the end of my rope. I could no longer hide from myself, or those still around me. I will be forever grateful to the two people who sat down with me one fateful afternoon and helped me devise my escape route from madness. The start of a journey that was to define my recovery and the very reason that there is even a body of work to speak of.
“The only way out is through” (Alcoholics Anonymous)
Far from the environment that had enabled my addiction, I began treatment, treatment that would change my life forever and help me to reconnect with another voice. A voice I had long forgotten. For three months, I worked. A daily routine of physical and spiritual practise, shedding old skin, changing old stories, reconnecting the dots. Finding a way back.
There are of course names for what we did, there are words for the practices rooted in various schools of thought and belief. Practices that have existed in both the East and the West for hundreds of years. But I find the language of such things needlessly flowery and over-complicated. In layman’s terms however, which have always sat better with me, I believe that any crisis of the soul is a detachment from your true self, the part of you that patiently sits behind all of the worry, all of the pain and discomfort and waits quietly for your return.
So that was our aim, that’s what we set off to find. Some peace of mind, the same peace of mind we all start life with, in my case, long buried under the old, dead weight of fear, shame, and clear, strong liquor.
“C’mon now kiddo, we’ll be alright” - Count the lightening
I had my daily practice, I had my mentor and I had the ocean. As I started, day by day, to feel better, I could feel a kind of shift creatively. I could feel something start to come into focus. Words, sounds, images. Gradually filling up the spaces in my mind, previously occupied by grey, a light was coming on. I set up a makeshift studio in my cabin and went to work filling the spaces on a record that I had previously thought was finished, with a sense of wonder and love for writing, that I had all but lost. But here it was, words and sounds, in my every grateful, waking thought.
It is worth mentioning at this juncture, that whilst in the midst of madness and my subsequent recovery, Elliot had been patiently waiting, wondering if his oldest friend and band member was ever coming back to some kind of normalcy, let alone to music. Never one to sit on his hands, my best mate, also navigating his own turbulence (his story to tell) took it upon himself to learn how to produce and engineer, creating a studio of his own at home on the west side of LA, making loops, ideas and creating fundamental additions to a slowly, surely forming, completed album.
Once back together and with an incredible amount of renewed energy in making music and being a band again, we finished the record, creativity and friendship, two hugely underrated aspects of recovery, I think, from anything.
So here we are today. I find myself writing this with trepidation. I can feel that old knot in my gut forming and my heart rate start to quicken a little. Anxiety of course, is incurable. We need it to survive - it is after all only trying to protect us - but it’s not a perfect mechanism. Much like us.
It’s been 8 months, 243 days since I last had a drink. My life is, by design, more simple now. I go to A.A meetings, I cycle along the seafront, and I make things. I paint, I make music, take photographs and edit film. These are now the things that quiet that negative, critical voice in my head. It’s still there of course, chattering away, but crucially I now have distance from it. I know what it is now.
I think sobriety can mean many things to many people. In my mind, you can get sober from anything that is a negative force of energy in your life. It’s not about alcohol; that was just a symptom, a temporary and ultimately flawed solution. The only real way out for me, in the end, was to look long and hard in the mirror and pull it all apart.
Nothing is coincidental if you look hard enough. You just have to allow a little light in, accept a little serendipity. Be open to a power greater than yourself and submit control. These are the lessons I have learnt in the last few years. These are the simple practices that keep me open, honest and vulnerable. There is no solution to the pains of simply being. There is no quick fix, only radical acceptance, compassion and empathy of what really is: of who you really are.
And yes, cassette ribbon can unravel, but it can be saved (if you are old enough to remember) by lodging a pencil into the reel hole and winding the ribbon back. This, I believe, is why this collection of songs in particular - this record - is self-titled. It’s time to give something its name, to take responsibility for it, to hold up a sometimes trembling hand and say, “I’m Pete, I’m an alcoholic and I’m grateful to be alive, thank you for listening to my story, until we meet again, until the ribbon breaks”
