I’m sure a lot of people who make music or art can relate to this sentiment - you encounter a work that impresses you so much that it makes you want to just quit. Your own work, in comparison, sounds feeble and amateurish. You wonder why anyone would ever bother listening to what you have made, when they could instead spend their time listening to the object of your admiration.
This is obviously not a healthy way to be thinking, and I realise that if reverence for music that I love is reflected back at me as a demonstration of my own inadequacies, then I have an issue. It’s also a symptom of the competitive mindset which permeates society enough without it also invading our passions. Yet, I’m not the first to experience this response, and I won’t be the last.
Connor Kirby Long’s work always made me want to quit. For people who haven’t heard his output, it’s difficult for me to describe the idiosyncrasies of his work in a way which would provoke much intrigue, like someone telling you the best cake they ever ate tasted like baked flour, sugar, butter and egg.
He is ostensibly a computer musician who sometimes, but not always, sings, plays guitar, makes pop songs, makes more exploratory pieces, makes beats. He has an original approach to employing digital distortion/bitcrushing, granulation and stutter effects. He has a knack for designing synth pads that convey the searching (adj) character at the core of his output.
This description probably makes his music seem overly serious or sterile, which couldn’t be further from the truth - it’s underpinned by a sense of humour that comes across in his lyrics and vocal technique, as well as the irreverent use of samples, often pitched up, down and all around. Perhaps the first thing one would notice is that it is dense. There are a lot of ideas being deployed simultaneously, and tracks unhesitating swerve in often discordant directions. His work can often seem illegible and difficult to penetrate upon first encounter, but somehow it manages to burrow into the psyche and become deeply memorable with repeated listens.
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I would have been 14 or 15 years old when I first encountered his work, namely his album Handwriting, released under the name Khonnor on Type records in 2004. It generated quite a lot of attention at the time (am I misremembering it being named album of the year in The Wire?), a lot of which seemed preoccupied by the fact that Connor was only 17 years old when the album was released, and concentrated on the supposed naivety and youth underlying the album, as well as acknowledging its originality and beauty.
I connected with Handwriting because I was of a similar age, and what I assumed to be a similar disposition. This time for me was one which was characterised by infinite spare time and potential, but also the loss of childhood and the subsequent reckoning with the inescapable melancholy and loneliness that grown-ups never really succeed to estrange themselves from. I distinctly remember walking to school, listening to Handwriting on my iPod, feeling exhausted by the dreariness of the suburbs and the difficulty of connecting with the people around me.
It was my birthday recently, and I had the idea to listen to Handwriting on the way to work. I felt like treating myself. Life is still dreary at times, and while I have less free time now, I’m thankful that there are a lot of brilliant and kind people surrounding me. It seems the older I get, the closer I get to being able to realise my ideals surrounding friendship and community. I’m happy.
Looking out the bus window at the expanse of the West Melbourne docks, with the new overpasses being built overhead, the album holds up as well as ever. In retrospect, it’s clear Handwriting was the best Indietronica album (like, what’s better? Give Up by the Postal Service? Ha, no way is any album with Ben Gibbard lyrics all over it the best of anything).
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From what I can see, Connor didn’t put out any releases between about 2009 and 2019, although I’m sure he was disseminating work via online channels in some capacity. The next time his work came to my attention was when he released Niagara Falls under the name Cclcng in 2020, on Quantum Natives (anyone who knows me knows that the respect I have for QN is probably greater than any other current operation releasing music).
This was of course during the most unstable and tumultuous part of the pandemic. I was living in Taipei at the time, far from home, literally blocked from re-entering my country of nationality, and contending with an unstable employment situation. Yet somehow I was happier than I could ever remember being, despite feeling absolutely crushed by feelings of guilt, precarity and dislocation.
I have one distinct memory of standing under a small shop awning in Dongqu in the pouring rain. I think someone had cancelled on me that night - I remember the feeling of having nowhere else to be while cowering in this nook where the rain couldn’t find me, melting into the bleared neon lights and Niagara Falls.
I didn’t read much press at the time (there is categorically less music press during this era compared to 2005), and most of it seemed to focus on Connor’s personal struggles in the intervening period since Handwriting, which by all accounts have been substantial, prolonged and injurious.
There’s something that doesn’t sit right with me about the fact that what little discourse I’ve seen about Connor’s work seems more concerned with either his youth (back then) or his personal struggles (more recently). It’s not like he didn’t volunteer this information himself, and I think it’s a necessary insight into Connor - the person, but there’s something that just seems a bit unfair that there isn’t more being said about his absolute uniqueness and mastery of his craft.
What does it matter if Connor’s a tortured genius? He’s a genius. In what world is that not enough?
Rather than anguish or misery, what I hear in his work is a sense of curiosity and wonder. I think it’s fair to assume that doing music is a key part of Connor’s method of interacting with the world. He’s highly prolific despite not having many releases per se. In fact, Niagara Falls was apparently compiled from an archive of hundreds of tracks by Quantum Natives.
This abundance of output, and his proclivity for self-revision, brings to mind Arthur Russell or Fernando Pessoa - the main difference being that the bulk of their output was published after their deaths. On the contrary, Connor is alive and well.
He’s on social media, and he’s approachable and friendly. He listened to my work and seemed to enjoy it, which clearly means a lot given what I’ve written above. He described my sense of humour as brittle, which made me laugh and is probably about right.
Connor’s self presentation on Instagram is like nobody else doing music. There is no careful curation of his artistic aesthetic, and no sense that he would ever consider concealing any aspect of himself. Rather, it’s characterised by the same abundance with which he produces his tracks. Particularly notable is an unending series of minute-long reels of Connor driving around, phone camera facing the dashboard and out the window, while listening to (premiering?) tracks he’s made.
Given this surplus of output but inconsistent approach to releasing and presenting his work, you can imagine how happy I was when Connor recently did a surprise drop of three albums worth of material within a one-week period.
It’s extremely exciting to see Connor re-approach the archiving and curation of his work in this format, and I hope to see him continue down this road. Both Handwriting and Niagara Falls are enhanced by the track selection and the album context, each release providing a consistent but multifaceted tour through the headspace of a truly idiosyncratic artist.
I have no idea what Connor will do next, but I’m sure it will feel like a reunion with an old friend who you don’t see particularly often, but who you know you can rely on to make your day better.
This piece was written in September 2023. I contacted Connor asking whether he was ok with me publishing this piece recently. Not only did he thank me for writing it, he also sent me through a new unreleased album, or rather a folder of 33 WAV files with no specified order and five video files, including four short animations and one longer phone video. He described the album as:
This description works. It’s a bit more austere and beat-centric than his other work, and the scarcity of the sublime moments gives weight to their impact. It’s immediately recognisable as his.
AND THEN a few days before I went to publish this piece, he dropped another one - ‘The coil that absorbed Jersey barrier’. It’s great as usual. As fragmented as the other new one, but a little more melodic or approachable. There’s more autotune. The short downtempo track ‘so nany fleeting moments’ and shoegazey ‘blanks’ are my first-impression picks. EDIT: And he’s taken it down again. Such is life for aficionados of this guy’s work.