priryo @priryo@linernotes.club

This is an archipelago.

It's not one place but a series of islands of differing sizes and closeness. You've landed on the shores of one of them that you like and set up camp. You can always hear what your neighbours are talking about and you get parcels full of the messages sent out from neighbouring islands.

If it seems too quiet, you can venture out to look at some of the other islands. They each have their own unique culture. Some speak languages you don't understand; some speak your language but use it in ways you don't understand, yet. Some places they seem to talk of only machines, or politics, or music. In others they make art for their neighbours to enjoy. Some are ruled over by a laird, others are democracies. All islands display their rules clearly; most enforce them justly.

You're not tied to the island you're currently on. You could set up a home on another island, many other islands if you please. Perhaps here you will write poems, while over the horizon you will learn how to repair a broken computer. Argue vigourously on one island, return to another to enjoy the views of your neighbours' gardens.

All these places are accessible to you. You can befriend people on any island and receive visitors or not, as you choose.

This is our achipelago. It is Free and you are welcome.

"How did Freddie Mercury become the straight person’s idea of a gay icon, while simultaneously becoming excluded from the actually-existing gay canon?"
https://huw.substack.com/p/nobody-left-to-believe

In Spanish, to cut up is trocear. It makes me wonder if beat writer Alexander Trocchi, no stranger to literary cut-ups, was influenced by that in his choice of pen name.

Saw this in the window of a second hand bookshop in #Madrid. Anyone know what it is? It looks to me like some kind of barrel organ or pianola roll, pre-electric recorded music thing.
I like that it looks like a tree trunk.

After 20 minutes of "leyenda negra" and "hispanofobia" I've switched to the OchoMadrid early 80s soft porn movie slot and I feel much less dirty.

Improving my Spanish and my sense of feeling at home here by hate-watching "historians" explain how the Spanish empire had "provincias not colonies like the Anglo Saxons" and that pre-Columbian societies were barbaric because look at this clip from Apocalypto
Looks good, I can end up hating this place as much as the UK.
(I wish I was joking. Now they're scare-quoting "genocide".)

It's a long story but I was on a crowded dancefloor last night and they played a couple of choruses of a House-ified Bella Ciao.
It's a crime against music, of course, but on a pre-National Day weekend when Vox had been rallying in the city, it felt good to have so many voices singing along.

This is our share of the harvest from my father in law.
#allotments #harvest #cosecha

Thing I learned from a hacker news comment:
"The singer of the group A-ha, Morten Harket, bought an electrical car in 1989 and refused to pay road tolls and ignored all the subsequent fines"
...he literally said to the Norwegian government, Take On Me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914

Listening to Shellac-curated All Tomorrow's Parties 2002 compilation. My main memory of the festival itself was excess. Too many good bands of a similar type, too much drinking, too much greasy holiday camp food.
But mainly too many great bands. Did I get to see half the bands on these 3 CDs? Can't have done. Surely I'd remember seeing Nina Nastasia live, but it's a blank. No, not quite a blank, but a hazy dim stage.
Never mind the financial shenanigans, the too many bands, diminishing returns problem would have killed this type of festival by itself.

So I'm now listening to New Lands by Flying Saucer Attack and want to add something to what I said about them not being as varied.
The noise / fuzz in this album is more on the drone / dream / haze side. It's rhythmically constant, like a steady pulse. The new Low makes more use of jarring, cut-through effects with their noise, and the fuzz has harsher edges. They foreground the vocals more, whereas FSA veil them the same as the other instruments.
Overall, the FSA uses a similar palette but introduces each element more gently.

I treated myself to Low's new album on my birthday.
It's really something to pull off the mix of beautiful and ugly elements without seeming arch or even sarcastic. And there's enough dynamic range (loud-quiet parts) to make it a tough listen in it's natural late night home, at least if the kids are light sleepers.
The closest (non-Low) reference point I have is Flying Saucer Attack but they were never as varied as this.
What a record.