MUSIC FOR THE LAST COUPLE

Music For The Last Couple
Paul Hawkins

148 x 210 mm
180 page paperback 
publisher: Steel Incisors
16 July, 2025
£13 + p&p BUY

What is it? A novel? A novella or a long poem? A photo-poetry collection? Music For The Last Couple scrapes away at the perimeters of language, carving out an unhinged narrative from perceptions of normality, chaos, travel, the art of sound-making and fractured theories after watching/digesting Adam Curtis films. To enrichen the ‘narrative’ chosen words are then fed into an AI photo-generator for added dissonance. Part of Paul’s On The Brink project.

Read:

An excerpt in Issue 3 of Underground Overground
An excerpt in Issue 5 of The AI Literary Review

Listen:

Words from Music For The Last Couple are on the digital album soundtrack & ‘zine On The Brink

Watch:

"Notes on a travelogue movie-bricolage made of objects in transit. Objects to be included: everything in passing or consumed. Objects as stories, as shadows, as stains, as toxins. A story(s) of drainage and refilling, dry-drinking and neural pathways to the sun, burnt-out and on the blink. A story of facts and imagined facts imagined or dreamt and of the space between them. And of recovery and slippage and loss, gained on and lost in the undergrowth of telecoms and infomercials, Sam & The Sister. The Dealer. The Beard. Speed reaching Stargate entropy and boiled eggs and blisters."
Stephen Sunderland


"Music for the Last Couple moves like a mirage, endlessly-refreshing itself. Scenes arrive in waves, coagulating then dissipating. Hawkins creates a world that’s distorted but still recognisable – believable, but never quite real. In Hawkins’ hands, reality itself is on the brink, it’s on the blink, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. The result is equal parts disorientating and exciting, like being carried down a whitewater river. Like the AI tools he’s working with, Hawkins re-constructs our digitally-dismantled world, producing a work that revels in being both lucid and impossible to pin down. This book is a real treat, something to sink your mind into – log in, lie back, and let yourself fall over the brink…"
Dan Power