It’s bad out there, you can see the ash against the street lamps and you can feel it in the back of your throat. They’re fighting the fires not too far away from the city and firefighters and citizens have died already. They reported today that the air quality is 20 times beyond the healthy limit and we were advised not to go out unless we had to. They suggested we close all our windows, despite it being hot, so we did that and as we did, we noticed the ash that had come in overnight where the windows were open. We do happen to have an air purifier and that is helping, all we can do now is wait till the weather breaks.
We had Colin, who has his own studio in Porto, come around to look at my studio situation here and figure out how to get it ergonomic and productive. He is from French Guiana but speaks great English, Portuguese and Spanish. I’m surrounded by talented multilingual people. We’ve decided that we have to move the whole room around to get access to reverbs and compressors and delays and record…easily. You can’t let the equipment hinder your creativity and I am not an engineer – yet.
But first, we have Matias from Argentina coming around on Sunday to set us up for a live stream which will be Olivia and I performing songs as a fundraiser for The Archive as we fight to keep it through the only means that we have at the moment – our tunes and the Sessioneer Series, set up to help people move forward on their own music. These are our only choices until we can get out on the road next year, getting behind projects that are in the works. (It seems absurd to sell part of the collection to keep the collection.) As far as the date we will do this performance and through what platform, we will know the answer to that when we know where we are with it technically after Sunday when we do our dummy run, but it has to be before the end of the month to make The Archive rent.
I hate to complain, haha, but royalties are small, we all know about Spotify, but we have a new way of getting our designs on T-shirts and other items. Although, we find ourselves with little returns – 39 sales, 450 euros, our share 81 euros. We are very happy that these things have been affordable to everyone who ordered something and we thank you from the bottom end of our stereo systems in The Archive for purchasing something and spreading the word.
Music today has been the latest Arooj Aftab album Night Reign (2024), who I hope we can go and see in Lisbon when Olivia has to go there anyway to renew her passport. For the Anoushka Shankar show in Porto, we managed to get on the guest list, I hope we can for Arooj too as she has worked with Anoushka on her last album Vulture Prince (2021) and hopefully, that same source can help, I wouldn’t want to miss a chance to see Arooj (see previous post about her).