I love it when it’s winter in Australia and summer here because it means I sesh with Arktik Lake Tony in Sydney two hours later, at noon instead of 10 AM. Early delivery mornings had me doing my best to stay asleep as long as possible but I couldn’t last in sleep land after 10.30 AM, and they kicked me out telling me I’d slept enough and I had to go. So I went for a long breakfast that I didn’t need and for an imaginary shower that we don’t have, under hot water that we also don’t have because we have no boiler. These things will be installed over time but tomorrow morning is another early one for the new security gate people so I’m going to fight my way back into sleep land as soon as possible tonight.

Sesh with Tony at midday – apparently American people don’t say ‘midday’ and they think it means the middle of the afternoon whereas in England at least it means ‘noon’. But then American people don’t seem to say ‘fortnight’ either which means ‘two weeks’ in England. But then again I’ve never heard anyone in England say ‘copacetic’. All this reminded me of the perils of the metric system – you simply can’t say, “I love every centimetre of you” over “I love every inch of you”. Sometimes you have to go the whole 9 yards, it’s just not worth it if you have to go the whole 8.2296 metres.

After Tony, I spoke to Andreas in Sweden, he has mixed Arktik Lake and we are in the process of doing some single edits and shedding two minutes off a song. It’s not quite the edit of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida but there are a lot of instrumental sections to cull. Andreas will also be mixing NJ Brian’s Valley of Salt project and Minneapolis Fred’s project and more as we make them.

Olivia disappeared into a beautiful sunny day and I went to the Padrão square, that’s very close, less than a minute away, and ate lunch in the café. We’ve started to know each other’s names and a lot of the staff seem to be from Venezuela so I can actually speak Spanish with them, they don’t seem to have any English at all. I ordered and paid and sat out of the hot sun, which slowly crept towards me and had me moving to a table that was still in the shade throughout lunch. Two Venezuelans served me, Mareya was there at first then Jacinto. At the end I told Jacinto I wanted a coffee in a larger cup, he said well, that’s going to be more expensive and as I’d already paid I went to the cash register to pay the extra – it was 10 cents more.

Back for a sesh with Abby and Nick in Santa Fe. They’ve only moved there recently and they’ve been settling into a new life so I haven’t heard from them for a while, last time was at the show in Austin. After this and Olivia’s return from the wilds of Porto and Gaia, we watched two episodes of Picard that had me both groaning and liking it, I can’t binge-watch it, I can only stand two episodes at a time – and sometimes one.

Music today has been Iron Butterfly’s second album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1968). The famous title track was 17.05 and the dilemma was how do we make their most famous track that’s so long into a single? Simple. Edit it to 2.52, problem solved. The band still performs live although there are no original members – Danny Weis, guitar/vocals, Doug Ingle, organ/lead vocals, Jerry Penrod, bass and Ron Bushy, drums. Lee Dorman replaced Jerry Penrod on bass and Erik Brann replaced Danny Weiss on guitar for the second album. The two then went on to form Rhinoceros. Brann died in 2003, Bushy died in 2021.

Music Of The Daze