darren francis

I've uploaded a new track to my soundcloud, named Hometime. Though the recording is new (the music, at least; the voice was recorded - along with a bunch of other recordings I'll be posting with music in the future - a few years back), the text was written in 2008, and is about being very drunk in afterhours London.

Aptly perhaps, I have no recollection of writing this. It was one of several pieces I uploaded to my then blog on myspace on the night of 28th March 2008. I was absurdly drunk then, too, and…

My good friend  Jason Oliver has remixed two further Logos tracks, this time Shamania and Bipolar Binary from the third Logos album Shamania. I'm very pleased with both mixes; they compliment the originals while taking them in a very different direction. I plan to work further with Jason on music projects in future.

Shamania

 Bipolar Binary

Currently reading: Daniel Defoe, A Journal Of The Plague Year

Currently listening: Marilyn Manson, Portrait Of An American Family

Yesterday I finished a very rough (45,000 words) first draft of a new novel. Now for the hard part, wrestling with all those words and putting it into shape.

The novel - currently untitled - grew out of a jumble of material I wrote back in 2009. I later recorded one section as a spoken word track, He Knows The Use Of Ashes. That title, of course, is borrowed from Pearls Before Swine (via This Mortal Coil) and the track The Jeweller, which is one of those rare tracks in that I equally adore both…

I've added a whole bunch of new drawings to my deviantart page. See them here. Here's one, Source XVI, a biro sketch from September 2013. At some point I'll update the gallery on this site, too.

[Note: This is a re-post from November 2012 of an entry from the previous incarnation of my website; I'm posting it again here as I intend to continue the series in future].

I know I have a bit of a reputation - in terms of music taste - for loving dodgy goth shite, wayward industrial dins, self-hacking soundtracks, and guitar-based songs with vocals the depths of which you need a bathysphere to penetrate, so herewith the first in an occasional series presenting music I love very much despite what you…

My good friend Jason Oliver has done an excellent remix of my Logos track Everybody Gets Elves, from the 2010 album Gehenna Now. Listen below; to find out more about Logos, go direct to their website. I hope to work further on music with Jason in the future.

New poem; I wrote the first draft of this in Pewsey, Wiltshire, in late July, and reshaped and finished it this evening. I expect I'll do a with-music audio version at some point.

Jack Palmer And The Unspeakable Thing, a pulp teen horror book I co-wrote with my friend Simon Lewis, is now available to download for Kindle.

Set in contemporary London, it's a horror adventure story featuring magic, madness and mutants, feuding Elizabethan sorcerers, and the dread being known only as The Unspeakable Thing.

Note that this book is very different in style to my other writing. Click on the link to download, and to read a sample section.

Download

Somebody told me today that my drawings reminded them of Massive Attack, so I listened to Mezzanine while sitting in the sun sketching this evening. I can't see the link, but appreciated the chance to reacquaint myself with an 'old friend' album I've not heard in far too long.

Here's the drawing, Others XIII.

Those of you in the UK can see an exhibition of my photos and drawings at The Keystone in Guildford (3 Portsmouth Road, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 4BL), starting today and running for the next four weeks. For a while The Keystone have been showcasing the work of local artists, and I was very pleased to be invited to participate. The show features a wide selection of my images, primarily photographs but also some drawings. All prints are also available for sale.

See The Keystone website for map and…