Quiet life on Sylt. Not always quiet though. Yesterday the longest walk, about 15 miles starting with some industrial noise made by rattling machines (I have no English names for) and construction workers on the seaside of Westerland. Then it went very still, down Rantum beach, to the nowhere land of Hörnum with those „walking dunes“. All prospects of sunny moments replaced by gritty grey in countless shades. Like in one of those merciless, melancholic black and white movies from early Italian neo-realism (but without people).
And then, while working on a special sequence of tracks for two long radio nights in December, changing mails with some Manafonistas (on things like „Normal People“ (season 1), the reasons for playing a song from Willie Nelson’s „Stardust“ in one of those nights, etc., and the lost jukebox culture of Keitum), waiting for audio files from two of your musical „heroes“ to give further insights in their soundtrack works (Eno, from Norfolk or London) and recent musical revelations (Tibbetts from Minneapolis) – I mean that’s a special way to spend your time, between the sea and the sounds, on a remote island at the most northern point of Germany (tourism just a memory). This is what Steve wrote:
„I’ll improvise into a microphone tomorrow or Friday, send you the results this weekend, and you can be Teo Macero and chop it up any way you want. Like, „Rated X“ where you can hear Teo punching in tracks using the subgroup buttons on the recording console during the mix. (Teo described in the liner notes to the re-issue of „Get Up With It.“). I‘ll try to be intelligent.“