What are Sundays for? Obviously, to listen to the records you bought on Saturday. But not necessarily the Saturday of 24 hours earlier – there are a lot of Saturdays in the past (haha) and as listening to records is time-consuming, it takes time to catch up. I suppose the art of sitting down and listening to a record all the way through (without your phone) might be considered old-fashioned. Ultimately it’s about being able to concentrate, focus, and from that comes the enjoyment of having paid attention. Can you imagine going to the cinema and not considering that your scrolling might disturb someone? I once went to see a Tarkovsky film (Andrei Rublev, 1966) and a moron answered his phone during the film and went on to have a nice casual conversation with the caller – some humans have no hope.

Sesh with Tony this morning an hour earlier because the clocks have changed in Australia for their summer time. I came up with a really nice melody to one of Tony’s chord progressions, a new song for the next Arktik Lake album on the way. After that and before the records, Sunday football with Brighton and Liverpool 2-2, and Arsenal and Man City 1-0, first win in eight years. Olivia’s Mamma is here and they came back from the sea as the after-game interviews were on, perfect timing.

I put on a record whilst Olivia cooked and didn’t give it my full attention as I was doing Swedish sitting next to Olivia’s Swedish mum. As I was going through the lesson I found a glaring mistake in the text which Mamma confirmed. Over dinner, I put on more music, something appropriate, as we were speaking Swedish today and they were speaking German and we spoke English and Olivia went out and spoke Portuguese, so I thought the obvious choice for dinner music was Carla Bruni’s self-titled sixth album (2020), where she sings in French and one song each in Spanish and Italian (she is actually Italian-born).

Mamma is here till Wednesday so there’ll be a dinner out and some sightseeing, a walk through the market, the river, the city, coffee, and maybe a walk through the souvenir shops. Siv brought me a record I’d ordered and had sent to Germany, Kadavar’s second album Abra Kadavar (2013). A contemporary German Black Sabbath. Sometimes it’s just cheaper to have records sent to Olivia’s parents’ address in Germany, especially if it’s a German band.

Music today was a reevaluation of Rick Wright’s Steven Wilson remix of Wet Dream (1978), but I’m still not sure, so it turned into Free’s Tons Of Sobs (1969) because Kossoff is magic. Bassist/keys/man/boy, an extraordinarily unique bass player, Andy Fraser was 16, they were all under 22.

Music Of The Daze