steam rose from the graspers

good morning ~

(click the link / oranges to listen)

My Big Breaksteam rose from the graspers

today’s track is a syrupy sampler smasher

tomorrow brings us “astral projecting into flavortown” but don’t worry, I will bother you about this again. unplanned but they’re also doing an LA wildfire fundraiser on Bandcamp tomorrow so if you buy anything on there, the Bandcamp sale portion will go to MusiCares, nice.

Too much to mention, we'd be here for hours - there were clementines and roasted chestnuts in the town market, a Dutch post-punk band grooving on the famous fountain, the Basque accordion duo in the museum of ceramics, hundreds of little Devils on the landing below waiting to be installed, one of the best hardcore bands I've ever seen in the basement of a nearly empty mall, their amps rattling the sheet metal wallpaper and their singer held up by my hand in a sweaty crowd surf. There was bread soup served en masse pungent with garlic and a guy with extra arms sewn into his jacket and a white wig singing his heart out over a disjointed cumbia beat. I saw the Yemeni band from Berlin and bought their sick t-shirt. I saw the guy from Angola who, I learned later from the guy who drove me to the airport, had gotten totally lost and drunk in Porto the night before and was without both his passport and his USB stick with all of his backing tracks on it. He barely made it to the gig - had to beg a stranger for train fare. Wouldn't have known it at the time - he put on a great show!

The Ukrainian duo was the first act I caught in the empty movie theater, a shutdown cineplex with all the trappings of an early 2000s cinema palace - empty poster boxes with marquee lighting, a cavernous lobby full of hard angles, a snack bar converted into a bar that sadly offered no longer offered popcorn. It felt a bit like if you were to make an "generic empty movie theater" level in an N64 first person shooter game, except it was full of friendly people and everyone smoking outside smiled as we entered. The stage itself was quite literally an empty theater - someone had taken out all the seats, leaving just the hi-vis tape at the edge of each step as protection against rolling an ankle, and the two folks from Ukraine were screaming on stage over metalzone pedal guitar while the smaller of the two with the chin-length bob posed and bounced to an indiscernible pulse from the music. The lighting went nutty behind them, particularly bright in a room with no windows - that's funny, I thought, usually in this room they'd point the light the other way, now I'm being flash banged by strobes. At the end they spoke passionately and disarmingly about art, community, and fairness in a world of war - the tall one with the guitar was surprisingly measured given what their home has been through. They were extremely pumped that I mentioned them in my Instagram stories. Perhaps taking the high road is a viable survival method. I caught a couple other DJs but by the time the guy with a show on NTS had started I was falling asleep where I stood, time to ride a scooter down the hill back to the hotel.

It was so great to finally link up with my friends - my being asked to curate a slot led directly to them planning what seemed like a really wonderful tour / vacation, but I had been in Portugal for four days or something and our paths hadn't yet crossed. Finally we could eat pastel de nata and sip our little coffees, giggling. My not eating meat lately complicated our dinner plans but eventually we found a perfectly acceptable tourist trap with fish on the menu. It was a lovely meal, a great hang, but then they very suddenly had to get out of there - the wild array of exotic seafood they had been enjoying for days finally caught up with them. I would not see them again before their soundcheck. And when I offered help thinking that ginger ale might be in order a great honor was bestowed upon me: I was asked to gather flowers, an absolutely crucial aspect of the performance.

Even though it puts you in god's throne, zooming on down from above, you can't truly understand a place by poking around on Google Maps, you can't quite grasp that the majority of the florists in Braga operate near cemeteries and that mourners seem to get their business done before 1pm on Saturdays. You can't trust that a place by your hotel that's supposed to be open until 7pm is closed for no reason. But it seems like there are humans all over the world that find themselves with a last-minute lack of flowers and so, naturally, the grocery store has a small selection available on an endcap, emergency blooms. I stood there taking photos of the selection and waiting for Jennae to indicate which ones they were willing to chomp down on at the climax of their set. I bought five bouquets and savored the raised eyebrow of the lady at the check out.

They arrived, they sound checked, they rode out a wave of nausea while waiting for the audience to arrive. They took the stage and - quite suddenly - the room was full, folks of many ages and nationalities head banging, one little girl bewitched with a digital camera bravely stepping up to the stage to capture Jennae against a cloud of hazer strobing blue with the stage lights. The flowers flew, they exploded from mouths, the audience held them tenderly as if caught at a wedding and full of promise. At the end of the set, Nae descended from the stage and poured hot water over the dried olive leaves and toasted rice distributed at the beginning - as the plumes of steam rose from the graspers, the aroma swirled about the room and a serene drone unfurling from an SPD. I'm most interested in work that discernibly changes a room, the stand-in for the world - how are we all different now that the music has ended? On the mic, Jennae spoke of Palestine, described this ritual of liberation. The road we take must not only be high, it must also be holy.

But what about you? What road are you walking? What rises steaming from your cup? Are you gathering flowers?