Oh dear, I pushed a little too hard yesterday and put my body into all kinds of compromising positions, stretching, leaning, kneeling (on the one knee that I can), bending, reaching, lifting, carrying, placing, manipulating, cleaning, brushing, hoovering, wiping, dusting, de-staining, scrubbing, polishing, moving house isn’t just packing, it’s also cleaning the parts you didn’t get to before like under the couch, behind the bookcase and the pan shelf, it’s a domestic blizzard and my muscles feel like I climbed Mont Blanc.

I really did not like breaking down the studio speakers and the Focusrite and moving the desk into the hallway, it meant that I had to use computer speakers for sound these last few days and after the luxury of proper studio monitors and a real stereo system and despite having a new 27-inch iMac, I’ve confirmed that listening to music without a good frequency range sucks, I just can’t figure out why so many people compromise sound for convenience. One speaker, instead of two? The question should be, “Alexa, why are we putting up with you when we should have proper sound quality with a decent frequency range that covers bottom-end, mids and high frequencies balanced and sounding something like the creator of the music might have wanted you to hear it?”.

I managed to make it out of the house, struggled to the bakery but was glad of the stretch. It was sunny and cold, I exchanged the time of day with one of the ladies sitting on a shop window lip on the street “poco frio,” I said, “claro,” she said. I went to the glasses shops and had my sunglasses tightened up, which usually means they go to the machine in the back and heat them up but apparently you just have to bend these, now I know. I was soon back inside, Olivia was galavanting, attempting errands, appointments, address changes, cleaning materials, and boxes. Back here for Picard dinner, followed by a Bosch dessert but that was it, and then an unplanned sesh with Craig in Atlanta.

We’ll be leaving on Wednesday for the UK and the tour and strangely coming back to a new place. This is our last few days here, the last Friday night, the last weekend, how weird. The last couple of days have really turned the flat into rooms full of boxes rather than a home. I just hope the new place is ready by April, a work in progress but it looks like May we will be leaving again, so as long as we have that month to sort out, sleep, eat and shower comfortably then any other renovations can be continued when we are gone, presuming we have the funds, it’ll be a slow process because there’s so much to do and that’s not including actually getting The Archive here, getting Ariel here and actually making music.

Music today was one of my sixties guitar heroes, Harvey Mandel’s new album Who’s Calling (2022). It sounds like he’s having a great time jamming along with a cracking tone and with controlled reckless abandon. Read the reviews here (1/2/3). If you don’t know him or his debut Cristo Redentor (1968) and you don’t know that he nearly joined the Stones and played on Black and Blue (1976) and spent some time in Canned Heat and with John Mayall and that he is from Chicago, well, now you know. Listen to his first and last albums, then start filling in the middle (see the archive post about Cristo Redentor).

Music Of The Daze