I can’t believe it’s been 10 years (+5 months) since my debut album came out. To celebrate, I wanted to put it back on shelves. This record changed everything for me; and in some ways I’ve completely changed as a person since it’s release over a decade ago. I was 21 when I wrote this album, but basically still a teenager - caught between adolescent insecurities and the kind of extreme arrogance and self-belief you only get at 21. Perfect time to write your first full length then! Back in 2011 Night Slugs made a modest suggestion to ‘see if you can make an album’ - meaning we could gather the hundreds of demos lying around and finesse them into a cohesive LP. Well fuck that, I thought - I’m gonna write an entire album from scratch. I’d scraped by my final year of art school without any idea of what to do next, and to deal with those worries, I replaced them with this obsessive idea of putting everything I had into creating the most intoxicating, mysterious and exciting world I could think of at that point. About 6 months later, after a lot of late night mix downs and guidance from Alex Bok Bok, visionary art direction from Vadik Marmeladov and Ilya Kolganov, Classical Curves was born. Looking back I had no expectations of how the record would be received or whether DJ’s would even play it. All I wanted to do was to make something that sounded exciting and looked amazing to me. I have to remind myself sometimes that this is the correct, and only, way to make a record. Times change, you get pulled in different directions, and not long after CC came out I was restless again, looking for new thrills and a new sound that would end up becoming Dream A Garden (and at the same time, Take Me Apart) But revisiting your old work is never easy for artists. We’re a neurotic bunch, always thinking our best work is the most recent one, with the pieces leading up to it just stepping stones / prototypes that are made defunct by the next subsequent release. But after a decade, people still ask me about Classical Curves, and it's made me love this record again, so it was only right to put it back out there. Link in bio (support independent stores!) JC x