This year since January I’ve been keeping a list of peaks in my notes app, just moments when the sense of life giving me a gift feels tangible. Here’s June:
Hanging out with Ribbon Stage
Therapist rolling her eyes like we’re friends when I said ‘basically what i’m saying is I’ve eroticised safety’
Trying out david’s fun leather thing for drinking Yerba Mate on the balcony and talking about Amlo, anarchy and pension reform
Recording a record for Misere at Allee der Kosmonauten with sticky hot calippo thighs and Phuong teaching me how to patch the Soundcraft
Ordering Hugos because rather than in spite of it being an old lady drink
Imad drives Uber and he’s giving Israel five years tops
Sitting in my bed with my red light on having drunk an ill advised espresso at 11pm listening to the KLF on headphones and weeping with laughter at the delivery of the line ‘fishing in the rivers of life’
The record Catford’s finest Jimxlegacy made while he was homeless being better than anything anyone with stable house made in the same period
The gentle application of sunscreen under my backrolls at the lake
Nearly vomiting with contentment listening to N-trance
Lying in this hammock between two trees on Sunday june 11th at 17:33 and realising this is the exact same phyiscal effect as ketamine but without the need for any ketamine
Using a geophone !!!!!!
The Spiral Times on Refuge Worldwide: Radio Skid Row
This season since I last communicated via this platform, I’ve been continuing with my monthly radio show. The full archive’s up here. I try and use a mix of voices, include at least a few of my own original sounds and of course a playlist relevant to each theme. I think they’re worth listening to!
A love letter to a radio station, a city and a music community: Radio Skid Row 88.9FM. This pioneering community radio and a for-us-by-us radical platform for under-amplified area voices since it began in 1983 with test broadcasts on a landline telephone to Long Bay Jail.
Voice notes from my dear friend Huna Amweero, two hours of interesting and dark much of it made during ‘my’ Sydney era (specifically like four months in 2017, what an era….) and interviews with amazing women from Skid Row’s founding (aka Huna’s mum Nicola Joseph and Aaliyah-Jade Bradury, a proud Indigenous woman from the Larrakia Nation & Torres strait Islands and presenter of Blak Friday. They tell the story of the indigenous community members, communists, unionists, migrant workers committees, squatters, prisoners who built Radio Skid Row, and how they survived shutdowns, lock-outs and funding cuts to advocate for media justice into the future. It’s a dramatic, hilarious and moving story, one that is unique but will also feel familiar to anyone who has ever tried to build a counterinstitution using only your will and the rage and resentment and heartache and deep care that goes into it. The connection between between migrant and Indigenous communities in Sydney is for me the fabric of the place and yet not a story told outside of it. That should change.
Here’s the tracklist and link to stream the show.
Sounds of Sumud - Can you help?
I am going back to the West Bank p soon to be with the same refugee community I got to connect with last year, Aida Camp, near Bethlehem. Everyone will be a year older, maybe a bit taller with new or sharper dreams, some people will have lost brothers and cousins some people will be in prison now and then there is the shiny new robot gun that is aimed at the community center where we will be. The voices of this next generation are too often drowned out by drones and gunfire or just the useless bleating noise of truly an entire world that thinks it knows better, so what better but radio to cut through the static? We’ll be running workshops on everything from interviewing to Ableton to field recording (alongside some much more skilled friends) and at the end they’re gonna present the sounds they create as a radio show on the ever excellent Alhara. I’m really excited about what will happen.
Always grassroots, DIY out of choice and necessity, the sweet spot between unfunded and unfundable, a thumbed nose, illegible to the NGO industrial complex (and other forces) and imo forever the better for it, but this will also cost money. I sold some lemon and mint slushies at my Ribbon Stage gig last week and made a hundred euros oder so, but I’d really like to double that so we can buy good snacks everyday for the genius kids who’ll take part, and some XLR cables.
If you don’t want to, don’t, but if you can, potentially help me make this happen at the level of quality these kids deserve, just a few quid bucks or euros would mean the world to me and goes so far. This is my PayPal. You will stay anonymous.
Mark it with a spiral emoji. Thank you and more very soon.
xo