Ov Pain – Free Time [LP]

"With respect to the making of Free Time here’s what Tim says:

All the tracks are basically live improvisations. We recorded four different synthesizers – two apiece – straight into a computer pulled from a skip.

There was no the-agony-of-the-blank-page associated with it. Nor was there a great plan. There was our second bedroom studio, our instruments, a unified creative impulse, our free time. Late one morning we started, two days later we had more or less everything down. Following that we made some gentle edits, added some further live tracks. Then we replayed everything in the context of could-this-be-an-album? Arrived at the affirmative.

A couple of weeks after all this we both spontaneously remembered an interview with Heather Leigh in which she termed her process something like ‘improvised songwriting’. To some extent, I guess, this album represents an attempt at improvised songs. How easy or uneasy this work sits alongside our other stuff is of little importance to us (note 1 – improvising in low rent studios has been a feature of our lives for a while now; note 2 – we change our method often).

One thing that is important to us is the immediacy and economy with which it was made and how that immediacy and economy becomes the thing itself."

A Guide to Saints, 2025