English experimenter Steven Ball has been sending us a series of his very distinctive solo statements since about 2015; if they had any common ground, it’s that they represented a concerted effort to deconstruct the song form, as it exists in recorded popular and rock music. I use the word “deconstruct” as I think this fits Ball’s plan and his general aesthetic outlook; I think he’s no stranger to many forms of modern conceptual art, including the very challenging world of structuralist-materialist film, whose proponents went to very extreme lengths to deconstruct narrative cinema.
After an absence of about two years, Ball returns with Creative Writing, a new four-song EP released as a CDR on the Wormhole World label. I see he’s moved away from the slow guitar-playing mode which he attempted on records like Bastard Island, and now his songs are slotted into a form of desolate, minimal electronic music. It’s tempting to think he’s reimagining the music of John Foxx or David Sylvian on his own abstracted, mysterious terms, while the actual style of singing is highly reminiscent of Scott Walker’s later albums, such as Tilt or The Drift. Ball is attempting some sort of “meta” theme – what does songwriting mean in today’s world, and what is today’s world anyway? He’s looking at such factors as his immediate surroundings – the very room in which he writes, and the street outside; and takes note of the existentialist threat of passing time, framed within the business world of such applications as Microsoft Teams or Outlook, or indeed any cyber-menace which makes us all that much more acutely aware of the passing of every minute, hour, and day. And obliges us to be more agile about managing time in the pursuit of what these American corporations would regard as “productive” activity. Ball even writes and performs a song about himself writing and performing the title song, including his own drafts and footnotes as part of the song text. How self-reflexive can an artist get? He even pens his own press release, under an alias name. That latter song also includes a reference to a “large language model”, showing our man has his finger on the pulse of the latest cyber-menace invading our world and sapping our creative forces and our capacity for thought, that of Artificial Intelligence.
Not a conventionally entertaining record, and it’s a lot of work for the listener to mine the nuggets of philosophy and intellect from this 20-minute alienation session, but Steven Ball is an intelligent and gifted creator, putting a lot of thought into his creations. In this case, the concision has probably been hard-won after much effort spent condensing his ideas into these compacted statements. (17/03/2026)