Well, thank you for the myriad of fascinating responses to the questions I posed yesterday. I was thinking about how the world now has so many different choices, so many different ways of doing things and the responses showed me that all ways are the way to go. If you want to be on that list for the Arktik Lake 200 aquamarine 4-track 12-inch EPs please send Olivia an email at olivia@martywillson-piper.com for notification of when it becomes available. A few people said they would like to be on that list but didn’t send Olivia a mail, that’s the trick.

So after talking to Jed and Tony and Ahad and Stephen at Schoolkids Records, we will be doing all kinds of different releases for these projects and will keep you posted on how and when they are going to be available. Some digital, some with CD, some without, some with vinyl, some without, as seems appropriate, but we will try and get digital songs out soon for you to hear so you know what these different projects are about.

I saw a lovely day outside but went straight from breakfast into a chat with Stephen at the label about all these questions, then a Matt sesh in Brooklyn, and then a Craig sesh in Atlanta. Olivia was out looking for some retail therapy and came back just in time for her Portuguese lesson. We finished around the same time and I said to Olivia, “I need to go out, for going out’s sake”. So we just went down to the Marquês square as the light was failing and we sat in the park near the fountain and enjoyed the fact that we could sit there in shorts and T-shirt at 8 PM in April. One of the benches is just about under the pigeon tree and no one sits there although in the semi-dark a man came and plonked himself down and then realised checking his pants. It made me wonder where all the birds go at night. There are so many birds sitting in that tree in the daytime, they’re flying around, up and down but at this time they are nowhere to be seen, do they have homes? It’s like the flies in our front room, all day they are flying around the centre of the room in continuous circles. How do they know it’s the centre of the room? And where do they go when the sun starts to go down – and why?

Olivia arrived back with a kimono, a summer hat, and an old map of Asia in French, printed on cloth and depicting Asia in a time when Ethiopia was called Abyssinia and there was no North and South Korea with many other differences. She loves maps and it’s a companion to the map of the US we have – in French of course.

My mouth seems to be having a great time figuring out what’s going on. It’s like it’s getting better but the inside of my cheek seems to be raised. I’m taking as much good care of my mouth as I can because I feel I’m going to need it. Salty warm water, floss, brushing, mouth wash, toothpick. Eating carefully, trying not to irritate what is obviously already irritated – but not painful, result. But a real result would be if it goes away and my mouth doesn’t feel like I’ve eaten a mouthful of dust.

It seems that more and more of you are finally getting your CDs and vinyl delivered. Let’s hope we can get back to normal after the pandemic and not have all these institutions falling apart. The pressing plants were apparently having difficulty in even getting the raw materials to make the actual records.

Music today took me to a couple of interesting places although earlier in Showerland I was listening to Robin Trower’s In City Dreams (1977 ). I started tonight with Far East Family Band who are a Japanese kinda Floyd type thing. I only had one album by them on my iPod (French lesson time), Nipponjin (1976), I have all their albums on vinyl in the archive and they are there on Spotify for your listening pleasure. After French, dinner, and Deep Space 9, I was craving some Kate Bush and listened to The Kick Inside (1978) and Lionheart (1978) on Spotify. She was 19 when she released the first album and 20 when she released the second – Wow! Great, if you like this kind of thing.

Music Of The Daze