Olivia went to Germany at some ungodly hour this morning where she will be hosting the Night Of The Prog festival. I stayed here to smell the paint that is being spread profusely across the rooms in different colours and textures. There are different surfaces, stone, metal, plastic, and wood (it sounds like different music genres) and like music genres might be associated with different colours, coincidentally the metal will be painted black, the wood, plastic, and stone will be sharing the palette depending on the room. One of the issues has been that the different surfaces need different types of paints as well as different preparations – you don’t just slap it on.

Mafalda, Hayden, and Suze were here earlyish this morning to start on the metal bits and the smell sent me out into the streets to find things to do, supermarket for food, ironmongers for an extension cable, coffee shop for coffee, and the various electronics shops for a black ink cartridge. I browsed some stores, but I was mostly leaving them to it in The Archive, that was until I realised it was pretty hot and I wound my way back and settled into a room that isn’t being worked on whilst they climbed ladders, painted, and sanded walls in another room for preparation. Simultaneously, the bathroom was being drilled for shower and washing machine pipes by Filipe, it’s pretty hard to concentrate on writing, music, or text, planning the next move, with all this going on.

I started getting in touch with people today to say I’m back and I will be doing that throughout the week for the ongoing musical projects, there are mixes to listen to and tweak, songs to write, album song orders to consider, videos, edits and long conversations about the musical futures of everyone. I’m having to hop from room to room as they work, and as no one room is finished, it’s hard to get settled and concentrated. I have to make sure that anything electronic isn’t near any indoor dust storms. It’s hard enough keeping the dust under control with electrical equipment, so when it’s been generated you really have to make sure that the speakers and the amps and the guitars are hidden, buried, or at least thoroughly covered.

As they left today I wandered around and looked at all the ongoing work and tried to imagine it all done with all the records and everything Archive in here. Once that’s done we’ll be able to invite people in and see how we can utilise what’s left of the space for music events, listening parties, and album launches, and is there room for a small stage somewhere up front to have acoustic people? What about coach loads of Syd Barrett fans coming in to listen to The Madcap Laughs (1970), Barrett (1970), and Opel (1968-70, 1988)?

Music today has been Syd’s Opel album, unreleased and alternate tracks from 68-70 and released in 1988. A must-have for the hordes of Syd devotees.

Music Of The Daze