DJ set preview // updates ♬

Hey everyone!! I hope you're all doing goooood <3

I wanted to share some updates with you. Also this video which I will explain in this post 😌 This is probably going to be a massive amount of oversharing but I guess that's what we're all here for so, y'know. If that's not what you're here for and you just wanna listen to the set I've been working on then feel free to skip the essay hahaha

Where have I been/what have I been doing? When LIKE LIGHTNING released, I had this great idea that I was going to ride the wave of momentum and have all these consistent releases following it up and everything was going to be awesome and the plan was SET. While finishing the album I had been working on some other song ideas in the background, with the hope that being ahead on those ideas would mean there wouldn't be tons more work to do for them to be ready for release once the album was published.

Obviously, this hasn't been the case. LIKE LIGHTNING dropped on February 29th and we're now in July and it's still my most recent release. Not only that, but I dropped off a lot of my social media usage and probably looked like I slipped a way a little. So I wanna open up a bit about that and let you in on where I'm at.

☆1.) New music is coming. More on that below.

☆2.) There have been a couple of changes in my life circumstances. These are actually very very good changes that have had massively positive effects on my life, and for the first time in years I feel like I'm in a lot of positive forward momentum on a very personal level. My general life scheduling has become filled with a lot more variety, which is one of the most significant contributors to the state of my overall mental health. Over time it has become more obvious to me that the more I sit in one place doing one thing, the more miserable I am. That was something I battled a lot when working on my album. Right now my life is full of variety, and for someone as extroverted as me I absolutely need a LOT of time around people doing things that interest me. The increase in that in my life right now has been a huge welcomed change, but also one that's led me to have to re-assess how to optimise my time and settle into a new normal.

☆3.) This is a big one: the momentum I thought I was going to ride with LIKE LIGHTNING actually turned out to be something I didn't feel was right when the time came. Again, this may be oversharing, but fuck it. LIKE LIGHTNING was a massively cathartic experience for me as someone who was battling ptsd and trying to fight for a future that wasnt burdened by it. The entire running theme of that album is essentially 'Hey I found this life I love and then everything got destroyed and I don't know how to fix it but I know that I can because I want it more than anything.' Hugely powerful for me to write on a personal level, but finishing that album came at a really transitional time for me: I overcame debilitating denial, cut off contact with my abuser, and eventually publicly acknowledged what had happened. The combination of those things mean that the way I feel, my outlook, and the way I live life has massively changed. I am not interested in writing 'escape from trauma'-type music or really being known for anything blighted by that overall theme. I'm also not interested in writing from the perspective of 'one day things will be good' because these days I feel like I am living very much in the present and not envisioning some imaginary future from a place of pain.

This is all great, but what it meant was that I no longer identified with the substance of LIKE LIGHTNING in the same way. And I kind of had this period of time where I was like, 'Shit, so what do I write about?' That actually kind of freaked me out a bit. And it 100% delayed any progress I wanted to make in having new music ready to go.

So I honestly just took a bit of time to play with ideas, think about life, practise gratitude, indulge in things that really stir me as a person, and separate myself from any mindset that was driven by 'what should I do as an artist?'. I wanted to stop feeling influenced by other artists I saw, as if what was right for them were inherently right for me too. That kind of meant just stepping away from the DAW for a bit, living some life, and reflecting what I want overall.

So what's next?

I said new music is coming! I've had a song finished for quite a while that I've been holding out on releasing yet because there's a couple of other things I'm working on that I'd like to release in conjunction with it. One of them is a DJ set, which the video above is a draft recording of. My hope is to record it within the upcoming month and have it ready to go on Youtube, but right now I'm still in the process of building and practising the set so I don't have a deadline.

The other thing I'm building is a new website. This has been in progress for a while and I'm super stoked about how it's going, but it's literally just me building it from scratch so it's not done yet.

I have got another few demos in the pipeline that I'm really excited about but I'm not rushing them. I'm prioritising ensuring that everything that I'm working on right now is super honest/authentic to me, and that includes things like social media, website, my irl level of activity, exploration of new music, fashion, etc. Literally anything like that. I've been in a really great mood for a while because I'm feeling very detoxed right now and I know that keeping that up will lead to the best path for my music stuff.

I have thought about doing some more DJ sets on Twitch again, since I'm DJing irl again right now. Honestly, whether I do that is primarily dependent on the UK heatwave because when I stream I need my fan on my camera so it doesn't overheat. So if it's gonna crest 30C I just can't realistically do that. HOPEFULLY the sun has mercy on me enough to justify some DJ streams again.

Soooooo yaaaa

I understand it's been a bit quiet around here and I am sorry for that. It's been a necessary process for me to back off from my previous ideas about what I was doing and to ask myself what I would actually be happy doing next. The answers to that question feels clearer to me every day so in the end, I know everything is gonna be great <3

Love,

aestheno ♡♬⋆.˚