You never know what the day will bring. I headed towards the gym/pool, the sky looked dangerous but I managed to leave the house without my umbrella, despite yesterday’s downpour and the absolute necessity of having it, it simply didn’t occur to me to take it today and in our random universe, it didn’t rain. All was well, I ran into Nuno from the popular Portuguese band Ornatos Violeta and we chatted about that very universe till he went to swim and I went to the gym, yes, all was well. I jumped on the elliptical machine and did what I usually do and travelled 4km in 20 minutes. I usually feel like I need a sit down afterwards, my T-shirt wet and my body reacting to the simulated run. So I usually go to another machine, sit down and push some weight upwards, or pull something downwards. I have a problem with my right arm so I can’t push too much and today it was harder because I realised I was feeling sick after the elliptical. I moved to a corner of the gym where I knew there was stronger AC, so I could feel some cold air, but the nausea wasn’t going away. I contemplated going through the fire exit but finally stood up, left the gym and hurriedly headed along the corridor to the reception downstairs. Catarina was there, I told her to open the electronic gate because I was going to be sick and I made it outside and a few paces away from the front entrance, vomited in the spot where they park the electronic scooters.

Swimming buddy Francisco must have just been coming in as I ran out and trainer Francisco also must have seen what was happening because I looked up and they were both there checking I was ok, the two caring Franciscos. Trainer Francisco went and got me a bottle of sparkling water and they both stayed there with me till I started to feel better. All I could think about was how terrible it would have been if I’d vomited inside. We went back in, I got changed and came home and wondered why I was sick at all, I hadn’t done anything differently but it didn’t feel like something I’d eaten, it was more like a result of the exercise and that was disturbing.

In talking to Nuno I asked him about the men in the park and the card game and why all those men were there? He didn’t know what the attraction was but did know the game. It’s called Suéca (oddly Portuguese for Swedish (girl)), it’s played in pairs and it attracts men/friends of a certain age, I suppose it’s their TikTok.

Another strange Portuguese realisation today: King Charles = Rei Carlos, makes sense. Queen Elizabeth = Rainha Isabel? So how is Elizabeth translated as Isabel when they have a version of the name Elizabeth in Portuguese, Elisabete? Then I discovered something from the net which doesn’t quite explain how Isabel and Elizabeth are the same names and why the Portuguese say Isabel when they have their own equivalent of Elizabeth. And then there’s the point that to us in English, Isabel and Elizabeth are two different names, apparently not. The Universe is strange.

As it is a biblical name, Elizabeth has an equivalent in many different languages:

Isabella (Italian)
Isobel (Scottish)
Isabel (Spanish)
Elisabeta (Romanian)
Elisabete (Portuguese)
Élisabeth (French)
Eliisabet (Estonian)
Elikapeka (Hawaiian)

Music today was many things but the album I enjoyed the most was Gong – Pulsing Signals (2022). A Live album with mostly material from their last two albums: Rejoice! I’m Dead! (2016) and The Universe Also Collapses (2019) that I also really like. It also has a version of You Can’t Kill Me from Camembert Electrique (1971) and Master Builder from You (1974). Great album, if you like this kind of thing.

Music Of The Daze

Venturing out today I got as far as the recycling bins across the road. There, amongst an overflowing mess of plastic bags, clothing and cardboard was a small quarter-size wooden palette. We’ve been looking for something that’s just the right size to place between the wheel arches that rises Ariel’s mattress a little higher, and this looked just about perfect. It was then that it started to rain, so I had a good excuse to take the palette home and in dropping it off pick up my umbrella. I’m glad I did because the whole length of the walk to the pool it poured with rain. But despite autumn’s presence in the street, the evidence of brown leaves suddenly appearing in the gutters and those lush and vibrant branches in the Marquês park looking decidedly droopy, it was still warm – but then my hot blood thinks it’s warm when the humans are all wrapped up and it’s the middle of winter (okay, not in Stockholm).

I’ve been working on a new swimming regimen, ten with the floats, ten breaststroke, twenty freestyle, ten backstroke, twenty more freestyle and two dilapidated moths. It’s quite exhausting, especially the ten with the floats, just kicking your legs and trying to gain forward momentum. Swinging your arms in all different directions wears you out and that 72 lengths ends up taking about an hour and a half, substantially longer than just swimming a non-stop freestyle mile of 64 with a mix of eight extras in different strokes. Consequently, it doesn’t take long for the day to disappear and this is why I stay up so late, as Olivia reminded me – into madrugada – as they call it, the time between midnight and sunrise, it’s also the name of a Norwegian band.

On the way to the pool today I came across Austrian bikers, with the ‘cuts’ and Harleys and the hair and the beards. Their bikes were parked and there were six members, two walking, two standing and two oddly sitting at a small table in a cafe which looked too small for them, like adults sitting at a kids’ table at a kindergarten. I had bikes as a teenager and hung out with some bike lovers (Hi Spant). We had leather jackets, but I never felt the urge to get into the tough side, these guys looked tough.

Pool, psychedelic psupermarket and sesh followed by dinner and watching Giri/Haji (one episode left). Duolingo Spanish and some texts with Olivia and I’m about ready to hit the sack. I watched some of the Roma/Empoli game but I was falling asleep and forced myself up at halftime into the kitchen and iPod land.

Music today was Porcupine Tree’s Deadwing (2005), a riffy affair with some great melodic moments like the single Lazarus and long engaging tracks like Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt guests. Great album if you like this kind of thing.

Music Of The Daze

Sitting down on the couch, on the cushion was a medium-sized feather that had floated in from a passing seagull. The night had drawn in along with a silky mist that also seemed to be light and floating. A small breeze wafted through and pushed and pulled left and right on Olivia’s dressing gown hanging in the washing room, suggesting she was here. You don’t close the windows in Portugal in September, there’s a long time to go before that happens. The birds have fallen silent now, the distant hiss of cars barely audible over the sound of silence itself. This is my favourite time, midnight till 5 AM, the city sleeps, shutters are down, lights are dimmed or out, the street lamps illuminated for the stragglers, for the night workers and the revellers who have no fear of Monday mornings.

Sunday seshes, Tony in Sydney, John in Brooklyn and then a Salim meet with the strange sensation of the three-way screen starring me in Porto, Salim in Texas and Olivia in Mülheim. With the death of the Queen, the football was cancelled but the Italian Grand Prix and the US Open tennis carried on which I mostly watched, but it seems to me that the reaction of football crowds was an opportunity missed for silence in capacity rather than the empty silence in the countries’ stadiums.

In the kitchen, I have an iPod dock but when Olivia is here she always unplugs it because she can hear a high-pitched frequency that I can’t. I suppose it’s part of the general deterioration that we all suffer as we get older but when she’s not here and I’m in the kitchen, I have it on. Every action seems to be improved by a musical soundtrack, except for perhaps reading, then it’s a distraction. It wouldn’t matter how engaging my book was, I’d still be noticing the bass line. So music and reading doesn’t work for me. If I want to read on a plane, the noise cancellation headphones with no music are my best bet although I always feel guilty if people around me want to sleep and I have that personal spotlight on.

I’ve come to a frustrating conclusion involving choices. If you are taking in everything around you, observing, noticing things and having an awareness of your surroundings, then it’s hard to switch yourself off to concentrate and all that awareness becomes a distraction. How can you read on a bus? All those characters around you, the streets rushing by, and if it’s a double-decker and you are on the top deck at the front it’s even harder to switch off from the world around you. It’s almost like I need a special reading space in a pod, in a secret place where I can’t be found and where I can’t find anything other than the book, then I can read undisturbed. In my younger days, I could switch the world around me off, these days I’m in constant analysis, or is it reflection?

It’s actually the same with music, who listens to music with the phone off, the lights dimmed and a Do Not Disturb sticker? I suppose some people do but you can’t have background reading like you can have background music, haha. I’m not talking to you whilst reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, but I am talking to you with Wish You Were Here on in the background, I can talk and listen at the same time. I often wonder about that moment when you’re reading and you’ve drifted off and not read (not taken in) what you had actually just read. It proves your brain can read and consider different thoughts simultaneously, but processing them both simultaneously is the problem.

Music today has been the classic Richard and Linda Thompson album I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight (1974) but I just want to see no lights and go to sleep.

Music Of The Daze

Olivia is at a wedding in Bonn, I missed the market mistakenly thinking it was this week when it was last week, the Liverpool game cancelled because of the death of the Queen and I already went into town yesterday. So, I decided that my day off was going to be BBC, tennis and Netflix, but then I got the times wrong and missed the women’s tennis final, no bother, I wanted them both to win anyway and could only have been disappointed for the loser. I watched most of the BBC series called Giri/Haji (Duty/Shame). Lots of people speaking Japanese which is always a thrill in itself. I also watched a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film called Divergent. I did Spanish, I cooked, I went to the shops for the ingredients and here I am listening to Grand Funk Railroad and writing.

There’s a small breeze coming in through the summer window, the regular midnight fireworks have finished and the Portuguese easy listening open air live concert from some distant venue is over, the streets are quiet. I can see stars twinkling in the sky despite having the lights on in the house, the sky is so clear but empty of traffic, no planes, shooting stars or Unidentified Flying Objects, just the persistent mystery of the universe compelling some to theorise, some to commit to explanations and others to simply wonder.

Science and magic, the supernatural and vivid dreams, all tempered by the reality of normalcy, the rent, the shopping and keeping a watch on your mental health in a troubled world. It seems that even those that have everything are worried but then again ‘everything’ is subjective. The unhappy rich are a strange beast, but your fiscal condition doesn’t direct your well-being. I suppose we have to accept that for as similar as we are, with all the ups and downs of being human in the end people are different to each other and culture dictates, through history, politics, repression, freedom and GDP. King Charles III, born of a queen to become king in a world of dubious balance.

In my world I discovered happiness through music, listening to the sound of something as simple as the papery snare drum on an old Grand Funk record can bring me great joy. Different days, different moods and different musical pleasures, sometimes visceral, sometimes intellectual, sometimes the sweetest melody, the most complex arrangement or the simplest chords, a beautiful voice, or an expressive voice with no beauty at all, just personality and the wherewithal to deliver the essential ingredient, impossible to determine but also impossible to ignore if that mysterious ingredient is present.

Music today has been Survival (1971), Grand Funk Railroad’s fourth studio album. At some point around this time, they sold out Shea Stadium. As a teenager this album was in high rotation, that grinding bass on the Stones‘ Gimme Shelter always made me happy. Analog energy, a three-piece, bass, drums and guitar, Mel Schacher, Don Brewer and Mark Farner with Farner and Brewer singing. Producer Terry Knight made Brewer put tea towels on the snare because he saw Ringo do it and created an unhappy drummer with a unique sound, a big old rock band with tea towels, perfect. I had a ticket to see them in London in the early seventies but didn’t go, I can’t remember why. I also listened to Sudan Archives today and thought about how differently music is constructed today and understand how awful Deep Purple or T. Rex must have sounded to the parents after Frank Sinatra and Glenn Miller.

Music Of The Daze

It was an absolutely beautiful summer’s day today here in Porto whereas Olivia who is near Bonn/Cologne told me that autumn is in the air – that’s the difference between living in Southern Europe or Northern Europe in September. In the pool, the sun was pouring through the windows into the water, blinding light that was obscuring the wall under the water. I didn’t swim into it but it sometimes appeared sooner than I thought it would. I got to the pool late and was rushing to get out after my 70 because I wanted to go into town. I rushed back down the streets, running lights and feeling the swim in the run. I made it back home to find one of the lifts out again but got in the working one and fumbled the keys into the front door on our floor, I left them there as I was on my way out as soon as I got in. I hung up my towel, grabbed my bag and whoosh, I was gone again.

In town, I made it to the music store, the DJ store and the record store where I found some great records, well priced. The remastered Van der Graaf Generator albums – The Least We Can Do is Wave To Each Other (1970), H to He, Who Am the Only One (1970), Pawn Hearts (1971) and two Dutch Music On Vinyl Records, Golden Earring’s Eight Miles High (1969) and Shocking Blue’s Third Album, and a classic, Steven Wilson’s limited remix version of King Crimson’s Red (1974). Then there were the cheap cool CDs, Iggy Pop – Free (2019), St. Vincent – Masseduction (2017), Björk – Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), Ben Harper and Relentless7 – White Lies for Dark Times (2009), Rupert’s People and Beyond 66-72 and the amazing Lhasa de Sela Live in Reykjavik (2009/2017). So much amazing music, so little time but that’s what the archive is for, the listeners and lovers of the future.

I ate out, Wok to Walk, great quick Asian veggie meals, I shopped for groceries, I had a coffee and by the time I got home, my body was ready to stop. I came in and sat down and put the tennis semi-finals on. In the distance, a rather loud live concert of Portuguese music was wafting across the rooftops. T-shirt watch gave me Tupac again, The Beatles and interestingly The Pixies but I completed my ‘most Popular T-shirt Top Ten’ with The Beatles until further notice.

Last but not least, Salim Nourallah is doing a Kickstarter campaign for the album I made with him, A Nuclear Winter, click the link. Also, check out our little IN DEEP VLOG:

 

Music of the day is Quicksilver Messenger Service – Happy Trails (1969). If you want to get your classic San Francisco band head on, this is as good a place to be as any, just ask Julian Cope at Head Heritage reviews.

Music Of The Daze