Americans can’t believe it when I tell them this – we only eat pancakes once a year on Shrove Tuesday aka Pancake Day – and yes, Olivia was prepared. But what is Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Day? Well, it’s the day before Lent and Lent is for fasting and Shrove Tuesday is feast day and confession day and you’re supposed to take this opportunity to use up your eggs and flower – and shed your guilt. So when I first went to America and I was introduced to ‘the stack’ I was amazed. Amazed at the regularity with which they are eaten, amazed that they are eaten at breakfast, amazed at the maple syrup, amazed at how thick they are, and amazed at how many are eaten in one sitting. Ours are thin and we put lemon and sugar on them. It must be a great shock if an American tourist happens to be in England on Pancake Day and this is what they are served. It’s like Europeans eating English chocolate – not enough cocoa, it’s not chocolate, or the Japanese eating Norwegian sushi. I once went to a Norwegian sushi restaurant and there was no wasabi on the rice, I asked where’s the wasabi and the waiter said, Norwegians wouldn’t like it. When I was in Rome the year before last with Anekdoten, Italians couldn’t understand that I wanted pasta with broccoli. In the early eighties, the ex-band was taken to a sushi restaurant in London by the record company and they served the sushi with two pieces of white bread and butter…cultures clash.

I had a strange mixed day today of domestics, cleaning out drains, opening the windows, letting the oxygen in, brushing the floor, and discovering that there are two types of cucumber available here, one where the rind is sour and one where it isn’t. So I peeled the sour one to put slices on my sandwich after discovering too late for the first sandwich what I had to do. So the thicker darker green cucumber (pepino in Portuguese), the more natural-looking one from the vegetable market not wrapped in plastic, is the sour one, and the longer thinner one with plastic covering you can eat with the rind. I then did some cucumber research (as you do) and discovered there are actually over 100 different varieties. I discovered that the cucumber originates from South Asia and that people pickle it which is the most terrible thing (haha). Then in a fascinating metamorphosis, it changes its name like a caterpillar does to a chrysalis and becomes a gherkin. The only difference being that the end stage is not a beautiful butterfly but a vinegary, tangy, awful invader of the sandwich either on it or almost as bad, as garnish. One of my most feared foods – the horror of garnish featuring evil tomatoes, scraggly salad with acid nasty dressing or poison ggggherkins, yuck. Haha.

I had three great seshes today, Matt in Brooklyn, Chris in New Jersey, and Brian in Indiana. We found some secret passages, dusted away cobwebs, and moved down towards the treasure with our flaming torches. No seshes tomorrow but a couple of days of interviews for the new MOAT album, starting with Spill Magazine. We found ourselves added to “What’s New in Indie” on Apple Music Germany with Judgement Day.

Here’s our editors’ roundup of the newest in indie music. Rock-based, pop-adjacent, R&B-curious, new twists on old sounds — if the approach is fresh and a little unconventional, this is where you’ll find it. Selections are updated regularly, so if you hear something you like, add it to your library.

So I suppose they think it’s fresh and a little unconventional and that it seems is what they want. I’ve never heard this terminology before – Rock-based, Pop-adjacent, R&B-curious, must be the new thang, and if we are making “a new twist on old sounds” I guess we’re doing something right.

Music today has a curious twist on old sounds and sounds ‘out there’ 48 years later. You probably are not aware of Lard Free – French, experimental, electro, jazz, progressive lunatics from space (French space). (Thanks to Reid who turned me on to them.) They make The Birthday Party sound like The Carpenters although there are no vocals and honestly there may be some Carpenter-like piano flourishes here and there in between razor guitars, searing sax, and incessant beats, sound effects, and general musical wailing.

They were together 1973-1977 and made three albums, the first, Gilbert Artman’s Lard Free (1973) followed by I’m Around About Midnight (1975) and III (1977) and then there’s Lard Free Unnamed recorded in Paris in 1971 and 1972. The original consolidated lineup was Gilbert Artman on drums, François Mativet on guitar, Jean-Jacques Miette on bass, Dominique Triloff on organ, and Philippe Bolliet on sax and flute but for the first album Triloff was gone and Miette was replaced by Hervé Eyhani not just on bass but also on ARP synth. By the second album, Mativet who formed the group, was gone and the band continued with floating lineups, see the interview with him below. Anyway, it’s crazy music, brilliant – if you like this kind of thing.

(Lard Free Bio | Lard Free Interview)

Music Of The Daze