It is my great pleasure to be able to present to the public these improvisations by my good friend and mentor N. A. Ünterwelt, but it should be noted immediately that he does not share my enthusiasm. The full extent of his objections and his uncertainty regarding the whole project will be explored exhaustively in due course, but first: who the man? Who the myth?

N. A. Ünterwelt (Norman Attila to his friends) is a musician of no repute. After an early exposure to the works of Bishop Berkeley he developed a taste for asking questions of himself that have no answers and are in any case pointless. His great grandmother was known as one of the most talented tarot readers in Europe and he believes that it is to her that he owes a malleable sense of self, an uncertainty of the boundaries between subject and object, between this world and others. From as early as he can remember he has had the nagging feeling that he is a figment of another's imagination, that the body he sees in the mirror does not belong to him, but is rather a sort of boarding house for many others like himself. Often he has no memory of entire days, weeks even, as if the body that seems to be his conjures him up only briefly, and against his will. A mind tossed about, dominated by a body. His use of music, improvisation in particular, is an essential component of his philosophical and spiritual investigations into this feeling of his, and is an attempt to try and pin down the specifics of his peculiar existence. 

He has been using improvisation as a diagnostic tool for at least 10 years. In his improvisations he finds laid out before his ears a precise overview of his habits, obsessions. He can discern in the music the repetition of repressed events, the vague outline of lost objects. His analysis is not so much of the music itself, but of his reactions to it. In the last 3 years has also been recording his experiments, to create for himself an illusion of movement, of progress, to convince himself of the existence of linear time rather than the circular, endlessly repeating loop of being that intuitively feels so true to him. He had also hoped that a recording, a thing, would in some way help to convince him of his own existence. Unfortunately he feels that the project has been less than successful and has instead provided all too much confirmation of his beliefs. This was to be expected. Ünterwelt is a thinker for whom any result will confirm any hypothesis. 

Alongside these concerns sits Ünterwelt's other primary life goal: to rediscover the value of boredom. Much like pan pipe CDs sold in garden centres, all of these selections circle, obsess, sustain a mood. This sometimes leads to traditional song forms, at other times to the most meandering of wanderings. 

The unique nature and purpose of the recordings as one man's hopeless search for meaning has been one of the main stumbling blocks to their release. At the time of writing Ünterwelt has roughly 36 hours of recorded material. I have long been convinced of the value of his recordings and the possibility of others finding some enjoyment in them, but Ünterwelt remains sceptical, even hostile to this opinion of mine. The recordings are inconsistent, recorded in different places at different times, and different levels. Strings are out of tune, chairs squeak, seagulls caw. Barely stifled coughs can be heard. Their failures are multiple: equipmental, musico-technical, bodily. But where better than in the failure of a thing do we see evidence of its reality? Failure is the verification of the Real. 

Ünterwelt is unconvinced by my amateurish philosophical speculations, far prefering his own amateurish philosophical speculations.

At one point he had convinced himself that he would be able to bear releasing some of them if he used a pseudonym and spoke from the perspective of an alternate personality, but he eventually rejected this idea as he deemed it far too cowardly, self absorbed, a postmodern cliché. He experimented with repudiating his use of a pseudonym within the text itself, layering irony upon irony, but he feared that he would be stretching the patience of even those most committed to his musical projects (i.e. me). And so, the task to curate and present these improvisations to the world has fallen to me. This first volume contains tracks recorded between 20/07/13 and 19/11/13 that use only guitar, reverb, delay (too much of both in my opinion, but Ünterwelt will not listen to me), and paper. Enjoy. Or don't. Ünterwelt would no doubt remind you that both states have their uses and illuminations.