Xico came around today to look through the dupe records, and I helped him take the ones he wanted to the shop and picked up some records he had there in return. We have a trolley that we strapped the records to and wheeled down the uneven pavement. Xico said “slow down” but I explained it’s all about momentum, slowing down meant the heavy box just throws the trolley off balance and if anyone saw that happening in the street then they might think I was off my trolley.
So I was in two record stores today, Xico’s secondhand and Tubitek’s new, and in each store, there are a ridiculous amount of cool records that told me they would love to be in The Archive. There’s sixties garage bands, progressive and singer-songwriters from the seventies and brand-new releases that jump into my bag and extract notes from my light wallet and I don’t mean musical notes.
I came back from the buzzing Porto streets via the coffee shop where they have just opened a garden, but then you realise that the garden isn’t for the plant lovers, it’s for the smokers which really defeats the object of sitting in the garden, for me anyway. Having said that, there was nobody out there, but the tables had ashtrays full of cigarette butts that I moved to the furthest table from me.
We watched Kleo – Season 2 over dinner, it’s in German, so Olivia can look down at her food throughout the episode whereas I can’t. Sh?gun was at least half English and half Japanese, although the English was historically supposed to be Portuguese. I was speaking Swedish today at Xico’s with a Danish lady who spoke Swedish. After dinner, we decided to go for a walk and took to the streets and wound our way to the Dom Luís bridge and looked over the city as a mist came down. Ice cream on the way back and I got into a conversation with a fellow in a Vini Jnr. shirt and asked him where he thought Mbappé might play — roots football analysis.
I spoke to Anekdoten/Kosmogon Nicklas Barker today in Sweden and had a sesh with Space Summit Jed in the Americas where we talked music and songs because that’s what we do.
Music today was the first release from former Anathema singer Vincent Cavanagh and his new project called The Radicant and the We Ascend EP (2024). It’s one of those releases that you’d better get when it comes out because you won’t have another chance. These records are so limited, it’s not like the good old days, where a limited edition might have 15,000 copies, it’s probably 300-500, if you’re lucky.