Letter #71

Good morning / afternoon / evening,

I hope you’ve had a great week! As you read this, I think I’ll most likely be wandering around Colombo a bit lost, but having the time of my life. Yep, I’m on holiday! There’s no break in service, don’t worry. I went to the brilliant All Our Friends party last weekend, so the playlist has some heavy inspiration this week. I’d put it together by Tuesday and it’s been on repeat since then – I think it’s one of my favourites. Anyway, enough rambling.

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🌪 TL;DR section 🌪

Interesting things this week:

The All Our Friends party is one of the best I’ve ever been to, and I think membership might be open for a short while 😉 (HURRY)
Read this fascinating interview with Haruki Murakami in the New York Times
Vulture has an interesting roundtable discussion on race and pop culturethat’s worth a read
LEGENDARY record collector Ed Motta is the latest to take part in The Vinyl Factory’s excellent Crate Diggers series
The Guardian has picked five rising stars of photography. I’m a big fan of Phoebe Kiely’s work
Do you have producer friends that use terms you sometimes can’t follow? Try this glossary
I also enjoyed this piece on projections of dystopia and cyberpunk (thanks to Jay for sharing it)
I loved Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and while he courts controversy, this feature from Huck had some interesting ideas
Watch Migrant Sound, from Boiler Room – a brilliant documentary series on the importance of the cultural impact of the Windrush generation
Finally, I loved this NYT piece on the importance of mediocrity and doing things because you enjoy them, rather than doing them to be the best. Seems fitting really, given this project…

📚 The notes 📚

Shiv and I always see holidays as opportunities to explore (with a bit of relaxation too, I suppose), and one of the reasons we were so keen to visit Sri Lanka is immerse ourselves in a new culture. I love the feeling of being dropped into a new world and everything feeling like an alternate reality.

I’ll also be reading a bunch too, so instead of rambling notes, you can have my rambling holiday reading list instead 😃.

I’ll be finishing Mark ‘Snowboy’ Cotgrove’s excellent book on the evolution of jazz dance, jazz funk, and acid jazz. For anyone with an interest in ‘modern’ jazz, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It’s filled with stories, interviews, and endless recommendations of music too.
I’ve just started Champagne Supernovas, which is a short history of the 90s fashion revolution, told through the stories of Alexander McQueen, Kate Moss, and Marc Jacobs. So far it’s excellent, and makes for interesting reading alongside the recent reviews and furore around Hedi Slimane’s first show at Celine.
I’ve never read Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, but I’ve always wanted to, so that’s getting read too.
I’ll also have the Leifur James album A Louder Silence on repeat, as it’s beautiful.
I might also try to sneak Catcher in the Rye in too, given I’ve never read it…

Any book, music, or Sri Lanka suggestions, I’d love you to fire them through. And as always, if you’ve read to here, thanks for indulging me ❤️.

See you on the dance floor.
Love Will Save the Day

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