We have reached over half of the In Deep Music Archive – Phase 2 GoFundMe, thank you very much for all the support, the dream is alive and well and living in Porto. We are talking to the builders and painters and plumbers and electricians as they are about to begin the task at hand, they have the keys and the will, and as we have raised a significant amount, we can engage them to start the work. We won’t be back till July so we imagine by then there will be progress and possibly even taps, or at least hot water. As far as Phase 3, the actual move, well it seems everything takes a lot of time, planning and funding and every project we do contributes to the collection and the concept, the last stage, Phase 4, will be the cheapest and the most enjoyable, that is sorting it all out.

Today we had Tess in playing cello and Rich in playing harmonium and piano. There’s never enough time to get it all done, Tess will be back in a couple of weeks and Rich was in early afternoon but came back late evening as he wasn’t done before Tess arrived. When you are engaging musicians on those instruments you can’t play you usually send them the tracks in advance so it’s not a tricky surprise when they arrive at the studio, but today we were working on a song with Rich which seemed like a great one for Tess and of course she hadn’t heard it and she wasn’t prepared – but it was Tess, and she breezed through it anyway.

As we are starting the Space Summit album tomorrow we had Jason come in to set up drums, mainly so we don’t take away from the recording time – we only have five days. Kevin also brought in two amps, a Bad Cat and a Vox and John brought in a Fender Super Reverb. Fred lent us his Archer pedal and Jed is bringing his Ibanez UE 405 multi-effects. Today whilst talking to sessioneer Rajan who is coming to record in June, we discussed equipment and found an American UE 405, 110 volts, with switches instead of a foot pedal (Fred has one like this), so I bought it so I can use it for American projects, it’s just something I like for my guitar tones, and combined with everything else I use, it adds a little something special, maybe like Bob Clearmountain’s tissue paper on Yamaha NS-10Ms tweeters.

The heat was threatening today but as the afternoon became early evening, thunder, lightning, and rain fell from dark black clouds, obliterating the blue sky like a bruise. It was bad timing for Jason as he was loading in his drums. I sat in the recording room playing my Seagull along to a vibrant cello section building up to a crescendo and landing on a satisfying Em from a Cmaj7.

Music today has been The Smiths‘ Strangeways, Here We Come, my favourite Smiths album, and in memory of the sad passing of bassist Andy Rourke. I met him a couple of times in New York, introduced to him by my own lovely bass player Hannah. He was a sweet guy and gone too soon at the age of 59. RIP Andy.

Music Of The Daze