To Remind Myself I Have Lived (Collage Works 2020-2025

Across To Remind Myself I Have Lived, aquatic sounds drift through hazy electronics and lush bedroom textures, before giving way to harsher, more industrial British landscapes. Voices appear and disappear. Loops seem to circle memories rather than rhythms. Guitar fragments become dream sequences. Domestic spaces open onto something colder and more distant.

The new album by London-based Michele Tellarini under the Catholic Block moniker gathers works made across five years, moving between composition, improvisation and a more instinctive form of sound collage. Known for his work with concrete punks Qlowski (Feel It Records/Maple Death) and goth-punks Secrecy (La Vida Es Un Mus), Tellarini approaches this material without the conventions of a traditional song cycle, allowing disparate pieces to find their own connections.

The first works emerged during the UK lockdown of 2020, as conversations, walks, guitar bits and experiments made at home accumulated into a kind of fragmented diary. The process continued almost unconsciously between other projects, with recordings made across different rooms, machines and cities gradually disappearing into folders, from synth improvisations cut into new shapes to pieces made entirely from MIDI on a laptop. Rediscovered years later, they became traces of a life lived across places, moments and changing states of mind. 

The album's strange coherence comes from this accumulation. Nothing needs to resolve into a conventional song. A fragment can remain a fragment; a provisional title can remain a title. Day 4, Track 3, Track 4 and Track 5 retain something of their original existence as files rather than finished compositions, while the recurring if only pieces suggest thoughts returning in slightly altered forms. Elsewhere, Loop #1 turns repetition into a lo-fi orchestral warble, while Track 5 opens into something closer to cinematic wonder.

The geographical dimension is equally important. The recordings carry the circumstances of their making without always revealing them: Cumbria, London, Berlin, a family home, a temporary room. The places are embedded in the sound rather than described by it.

Completed with the if only trilogy, which extends the project into home video and moving image, To Remind Myself I Have Lived becomes a collection of traces rather than a reconstruction of the past,  fragments gathered together simply because they were worth remembering.

There is something strangely timeless in these works: a quality shared with music that seems to exist slightly outside its own moment, from the intimate, confidential organic realm of Mount Eerie to Bruce Gilbert's more abstract electronic and ambient experiments or the haunting digital world of Holly Herndon. To Remind Myself I Have Lived belongs to that same uncertain space, music that feels both deeply tied to the circumstances of its making and somehow detached from them, music for the lonely that shines with crepuscular clarity.