Curtains

***Curtains / Antony Milton is a sound artist based in Masterton, New Zealand. He has been active in the underground and experimental music scenes since the early 1990s and has toured extensively. A recurring theme of Milton's solo work is landscape; place and presence, and his practice, under a bewildering array of project names (A.M, The Nether Dawn, Paintings of Windows, Clay Man In The Well, Curtains, Agentsss etc) has encompassed field recording, drone and noise work as well as idiosyncratic song-craft.

"This album was recorded during a period when I was home alone for a few months whilst my partner Sara was away walking the length of New Zealand - The Te Araroa Trail. This also coincided with very reduced work hours in my day job and so I seized the opportunity to dive into recording the second Curtains album.

1 had been released several months earlier and had been explicitly referencing some of the music of the early 90s that blew my mind and that has stayed with me over the years. Roy Montgomery, Peter Jefferies, Flying Nun stuff, Flying Saucer Attack etc. It is willfully nostalgic in that regard, and willfully underground-pop adjacent. The songwriting on 1 is also in that mode and is perhaps a step removed from my contemporary lived experience. The recording process is a lot more traditional and 'structured' than my usual fly-on-the-wall methodology.

2 starts out on that same footing, still being aware of honoring my external influences but on this record I found I was taking the actual songwriting a lot more seriously and ultimately it became a far more personal record. It's pretty close to being an 'Antony Milton' record really, albeit less sketch based and more finished and arranged than most of the material I release under my own name. I made a genuine effort to record it as 'well' as I could.

2 was recorded around the period of Trump’s re-election with the world seemingly in flames and flits between an impulse for escapism and a sense of responsibility to speak up honestly in a time of peril.