P. G. Warren’s “How We Lived” was seven years in the making, through some extreme life events, with the Covid-19 lockdowns finally providing the opportunity to finish.
After a period making dark, cavernous electronic music, the idea was to make dynamic tracks that boosted energy, as an antidote to the negative onslaught of everyday life. But the album morphed into something louder and weirder.
P. G. Warren – Personal Statement
The media machine-guns images of tragedies, atrocities, international idiocy, and portents of global catastrophe into our sweaty doom-scrolling faces around the clock non-stop: grim reminders that we are not indestructible and that our planet and our lives are constantly embattled by the Machiavellian activities of power-crazed psychopaths.
Everything now feels like a furious struggle in a race against time: survival vs extinction, technology vs doom, fact vs misinformation, security vs freedom, future-proofing vs short-termism, cooperation vs isolationism, brown sauce vs ketchup. But on a day to day basis, it doesn’t feel like we can do much about it. It feels like the world is a runaway juggernaut hurtling straight for the gates of hell, and we’re all being dragged along behind like huge swathes of clattering empty tin cans tied together with lengths of hairy string.
If you stop and think about it, it’s all a bit depressing.
I’d had enough of the doom and gloom and everyday emergencies — I had to get on with my bloody life! I was feeling in need of an energy boost and decided to make beat-driven music to help me motor-on through any impending disasters.
I wanted to avoid predictable formulas, so I kept pushing the tracks to make them unique, self-sabotaging tunes in the process with walls of sound. I threw everything into the mix — including my recordings of everyday sounds and voices, a pile driver, bus brakes, metal playground equipment, an uncle popping his cheek in 1966… and ended up with an amalgam of all my electronic music influences from across decades.
An ongoing obsession with distorted synths, murky samples, cavernous reverbs and lo-fi drum machines torpedoed its dance appeal… the result sounds more like a corroded electronic music cassette found in a waterlogged tunnel by future archeologists — a strange vision that inspired the album’s naming. It’s like a document of current times viewed from an imagined future looking back on How We Lived.