Saturday wouldn’t let me have a leisure day today because I had so much to do, I wrestled with it, but it got me in a stranglehold and wouldn’t let go. I still managed to watch the early game, Wolves/Liverpool – because it was early, that is, breakfast television, musician style. Unfortunately, with all the things I had to do, when I looked at the result of the day, it seemed that I had hardly chipped a splinter off the mountain. You just have to keep on digging upward until you see the light.

At 5 PM, Olivia and I went to the end of the street to our old landlord’s gallery, where sculptor and artist Daniel Gamelas was showing some of his evocative pieces. It was well attended and we felt a part of the community, knowing some of the people there. We talked to Julie, a French ceramicist and her partner. He and I got into a very interesting conversation about Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) and how there seems to be little preserved history of his life and that perhaps he might not have even been a person but a collective, or at least a director to an underground secret society of painters depicting the world with symbolic images and hidden meanings, antagonizing the clergy whilst telling the truth about hell on Earth in those brutal medieval times. The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Haywain Triptych are in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, only a six-hour drive from here, worth the drive to see these amazing artworks – C’mon Ariel.

Dinner over Andor and catching up with yesterday’s blog, emails, and suddenly it’s late again. Tomorrow will be catch-up after my sesh with Arktik Lake Tony in Sydney day (hear the latest single here). This will include the started Nocky 5 project files that Dare just sent me, the final tweaks to Brian’s Valley of Salt project, and more mixes of the mystery project. Then there’s Niko and the MOAT project, which is ongoing and waiting for Niko to have a window. The project with Jerome Froese is done, just waiting to connect with Jerome about how we would release it. Then there’s the building of the pyramids on the moon. It looks like Olivia and I will have some shows in Spain and Portugal in November, will keep you posted on that as it happens. There will also be gigs at those pyramids when they are finished, presuming we can be resuscitated in 3065 when they will be completed. Grateful Dead played at the pyramids in 1978. Can you imagine?

Music today has been Grateful Dead – Live/Dead (1969), live at The Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. I’m happy to say that the ex-band played there once, I had that experience, but it wasn’t all roses. I think we had a pretty small crowd (although Green Day‘s Billie Joe Armstrong was there) and the promoter was disappointed, I think we even had him pay us less than our fee (not that I remember the numbers). I also remember at soundcheck, they were freaking out about keeping the back doors closed because of the neighbour complaints…in the afternoon. Who moves close to The Fillmore in San Francisco and complains about the afternoon soundchecks? The legacy of the venue, treading the boards where Janis, Jerry, and Jimi stood should overshadow the complaints, who moves close to a sports stadium and complains about regular sports events, no one, sport always gets away with it whilst causing much more disturbance, all those people screaming and shouting.

Music Of The Daze

The test! I ripped across the top of the plastic, took all the parts out of the bag and lay them on the desk in front of me. Plastic test tube, cotton bud, and drop tester. A little flattened box you make to hold the test tube and a small little sealable plazzie bag, I presume to put your cotton bud in. It’s quite an affair, and the result, NEGATIVE. It’s not that I felt ill, it’s just that I had a cough and it seems that if you get anything like a cough or cold it’s prudent to check, because ultimately, it’s not about me, it’s about spreading something to somebody else who might not be able to brush it off. COVID was never about you Superman/Superwoman, it was always about who you might harm.

I woke up to a day of intense listening, the mixes are arriving from Andreas and I put on my headphones, the same ones he uses, which helps get perspective because listening on different equipment changes everything. It’s good to do that, but also good to know where the mix balances are coming from sonically. I listened intensely, getting close to being done but not quite yet, Brian’s Valley of Salt project needs a lot of attention to detail, the nature of the music demands that. There are also mystery project mixes, the imminent Blueburst, and with the first Arktik Lake single out, an album to sign off on.

I had a sesh with Fred in Minneapolis. Nicklas from Anekdoten has played ‘real’ Mellotron on one of the tracks on his record and we were discussing what a huge difference it made to the track in comparison with the electronic version that we had on there as a vague guide. Digital works for some things but at other times analogue is king, perhaps the most timeless electronic music is the German music from the seventies – analogue. Digital is often shortcuts that take longer.

Fred went on to help me sort this iCloud business out, it’s full, how do I move stuff out of iCloud, it’s a mystery. I figured out how to move photos, so I could free up space and put them on my hard drive, but of course, every photo has a long number and I have to name them all, who has time for that? I thought I’d buy more storage for 99 cents a month, I bought it, yesterday, today it hasn’t changed. Why is it so hard? Why did they close down my Instagram accounts with no one to help? Progress has never been so hopeless.

The rest of the evening was spent half with Blueburst Craig in South Carolina making sure all the artwork for the Blueburst album is correct and the other half with Noel in England discussing the benefits and shortcomings of the treble booster. The idea of having a pedal board is a relatively new concept – Hendrix didn’t have a pedal board, neither did Jimmy Page, maybe a treble booster, a fuzz, a wah-wah but a pedal board, no. These days, pedal boards can make you sound like an orchestra and have a nice piece of buttered toast ready for you to eat between songs.

Music today has been the single I Am The Seed from the forthcoming album Albion by Harp. Harp is the project of former Midlake singer Tim Smith. As it happened, today there was an article in The Guardian about him and it name-checked The Blurred Crusade.

Music Of The Daze

Up with the leak taking centre stage. Filipe the plumber came at 12.30 to see what was happening. What was that running down the walls from above the bathroom, nice brown streaks (always brown), and the tiles of the false ceiling starting to stain? Filipe came in, touched the flooded floor and realised that the liquid was burning the flesh, some kind of drain blockage liquid to burn out the chunk of yuck in the pipes upstairs. So, apparently, the woman upstairs has a flooded kitchen and tried to unblock the pipes with something nasty that didn’t work and it mixed with the flood water and came through the ceiling. At 10 PM, you could hear them upstairs trying to sort it out. What happened to the day crew? Towels on the floor had to be soaked before they went into the washing machine, domestic bliss.

It was over 30°C again today and I made my way to the farmácia to see if I could get a Covid test with fewer steps or with English instructions, even the diagrams had an odd quality to them, making them hard to follow. I pulled the open test out of my bag – English on the outside, Portuguese on the inside, she said she’d just show me, but then one of the parts was missing, a small test tube with fluid in it. It had fallen out into my bag, I eventually found it and she talked me through what I had to do, scraping, twisting, shaking, squeezing. I still haven’t done it, today has been sesh and music madness, but I’m still coughing.

I hit the shops, cruised the supermarkets, I let a tourist go past me in the aisle, he used the feminine form of thank you, ‘obrigada’. His wife was waiting by the pillar for me to come by, I knew she was there, but I waited. In the end, after what seemed like an eternity, I continued, she was just standing there waiting for me, it seemed like I could have read a chapter of my book and she would still be waiting. (Reading a chapter of my book, what a concept, she could have been there for months.) I saw her again by the fridges, I told her to tell her husband to say ‘obrigado’ not ‘obrigada’ but then she told me they’d only arrived this morning from Lisbon, great that they were trying to speak to the locals so soon, although mistaking me for Portuguese might be far-fetched.

Sesh with NJ Brian Valley of Salt at 7 PM and Ohio Jeff at 10 PM. Atlanta Craig and Blueburst as well but lots of emails, we are in constant touch at the moment as the album is nearing completion as is the Valley of Salt record and Jeff’s projects. Same with Arktik Lake, the single Bright Sunny Days is finding some airplay in Oz. Where will these projects be available? When will they be available? Will they be physical, digital, CD, vinyl? Will there be a pre-order for any of these records, should there be limited vinyl runs…yes!

Music today has been Dot Allison’s great new album Consciousology (2023). Born and bred in Edinburgh, she still lives there, she was the singer in One Dove who made just one record, Morning Dove White (1993). Since then, she has made seven solo albums and this one is the first that I’ve investigated. Highly recommended.

Music Of The Daze

Up for a midday sesh with Bob in Boston and then waited for Raúl the piano tuner to arrive, so I could go out to the ‘farmácia’ to find something for the cough and find a COVID test. I waited by the gate, Raúl went driving by looking for a parking spot, he eventually came in with the new strings and their larger loops to attach inside the piano which allowed me out. It was hot, hotter than it has been and I coughed my way down the street till I got to the farmácia. I got something for the cough and the test, English written on the front but inside no English and a whole lot of steps and accoutrements that seemed confusing to follow. So, no test, I’ll take it back tomorrow, cough my way back down there, and see if I can get some English instructions.

I was reading today that pubs in England are charging more for a pint in the evenings and at weekends. I also saw that the average price of a pint of lager is 4.37 – that’s what I pay for a CD, how can it be the same price? If you went out at 6 on a Saturday (by yourself) and had a pint an hour and bought nothing else, you’d be over 20 quid down. Add in your partner, food, getting there, a packet of ciggies, crisps, buying an expensive round, with some wanting double whisky and a mixer, a late-night Indian, and a taxi home, and you’ve spent a fortune. You didn’t even pay for entertainment, a band, a film, a show of some kind, if you did that the following night and got the T-shirt you’d have to have a pretty decent wage to go out for one weekend.

I got back in time for a sesh with Artoush in Atlanta via Austin and was straight back into computer land going through second mixes of two different projects – one was quite simple to check, the other always tricky because of the nature of the music – yes, it was NJ Brian’s Valley of Salt project. I listened long and hard, haha, and I see that we are getting there, soon we will be done and ready for mastering and then trying to figure out how to release this amazing project that I will tell you all about when it’s cooked.

Seems there is a leak in the bathroom – not from anything in there, but something is coming down the wall and leaving brown water on the bathroom floor. Can you imagine if something like that happened and a burst pipe upstairs drenched the collection, ruined it? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Suddenly, in this moment, I realised that people less lucky than me are in the news right now – the Moroccans and the Libyans.

Music today was a great German Jack Bruce compilation, Once Upon A Time, released in 1970. It’s a double gatefold and part of a series from the era. Collect them all!

Music Of The Daze

I went to bed last night feeling really awful, coughing, my eye perception all askew, and all at once I knew that I had to lie down in the dark and try and sleep, eventually I did but by the morning I could see straight and was coughing less but that’s because I was standing up. The shower head had broken and the day before Filipe had come and replaced the head and the connection to the wall, so it worked again, but the angle was too inflexible so if you put the pressure on too hard it went over the curtain. I knew the day would be a strain.

I was going to Gaia, I was late, but when I got there I was too early, the day was continuing as expected. I went to the big posh department store El Corte Inglés which is right next to the train stop. I got in a queue, ordered a coffee and they got it all wrong and they had to do it again. In the store, I had to find an exotic cooking sauce that most of the staff had never heard of in any language. Finally, I found it in the pricey gourmet section, the woman knew exactly what I was after and gave me multiple choices for this rarity, I felt like a millionaire shopping in Harrods.

I left and carried on down to Jorge the luthier’s place where he wasn’t fixing my guitars but my cosy lamp. It had one of those tap-and-the-brightness-changes electrics and as I had smashed my other lamp that also did that, I had the electrical bit that makes it happen available to be butchered. So Jorge cannibalised one to fix the other, but then when he put a bulb in the new one something blew, so he had to cannibalise part of the broken piece and make one working bit from the two. Something that was going to be easy was hard, Jorge found a way as he always does and I was on my way in my fractured day.

I took the train back across the bridge, got off in the city, went to the record store, and bought the new Paramore LP – This Is Why (2023). On the other end of the scale, jazz-rock trumpet player Ian Carr from Nucleus released his second-hand solo album, Bella Donna, in 1972. This new reissue was available for a really great price, the original would set you back a bob or two and might be a little worse for wear. There was also a cheap Goo Goo Dolls CD, Miracle Pill from 2019, and last but not least a surprise to everyone including myself, Olivia Rodrigo’s new album Guts (2023). I realised that although her market was as far away from me as it could possibly be, if the song Vampire had been written and sung by David Bowie then the whole world would be loving it across the age groups. The unexpected and unlikely, the slightly awkward and missing pieces had continued.

I had a sesh with Alain in Cyprus. He plays some tricky acoustic guitar and it’s interesting helping someone out who already has complex skills.

Music today has been Paramore‘s This Is Why (2023), I like the songs, I’ve heard it twice and I’ll be going back for more.

Music Of The Daze