Nathan's Small Delights: SD_004

Ayup, what’s good?

A mostly uneventful May has come & gone. At one point I was feeling slightly overwhelmed, but at this moment… I am whelmed. Let’s get down to it.

The Delights

I was gifted a membership to AFS Cinema for my birthday (thanks Shelbs!) & for the past month, I have been nothing short of dazzled by the quality of the films being curated at this theater. As part of their World Cinema Classics series, they showed one of my all time favorite kung fu movies - The Mystery of Chessboxing. I first saw this movie on VHS in my friend’s garage back in high school & have watched it periodically throughout the ages, but this was my first time experiencing it in the theaters - it was marvelous! Ghost Face Killer will forever be top of my villain charts, due in large part to him being an absolute menace & living up to his namesake by all the killing he dishes out during his revenge tour. He’s also a certified shit talker throughout the whole movie.

I’m not sure how it happens, but every once in a while I am exactly where I need to be in order to see something that makes me like, “Wow. I am living in a world.” Sunday night was one of those whiles. There is a building in or around the ACC Highland campus that looks so wild around dusk. The sunset was throwing these lovely colors & making these great geometric shadows. It felt reminiscent of a Hiroshi Nagal design. It was so surreal. I stood there for a moment just soaking it in & then I was like, “Wow. I am living in a world.”

I’ve been chatting a bit with some friends about how, in my 20’s, the record store was this unique place in the universe where I would randomly run into friends & it would act as the starting point for adventures of all shapes & sizes. It occurred to me that I probably am not having those same experiences these days because I am not spending nearly as much time at the record store as I did a few decades ago. All of that is to say that I have been spending more time at the record store.

I popped into Breakaway Records the other day & scooped up this wonderful reissue of Tatsuro Yamashita - For You. The B-side of this record has a straight up summer time bopper that put a smile on my face as soon as it started. Love Talkin' (Honey It's You) hits all the right spots for me & will be in rotation for a hot minute.

What a delight!

Vinyl Jockey on the web

This past month had me mostly focused on studio projects. I wrapped up a few tracks that had been on the back burner (more details to come) & did a lot of prep work setting up some ideas for new tunes. Alas, this did not leave me much time for record mixing at the house - unfortunately, that means no new mix.

All the time spent in the studio did get me thinking about how I worked through ideas for tracks. I thought this would be a fun opportunity to show how the musical sausage is made. That said, I created a new playlist on my Soundcloud named Origin Stories. Ideally, this is the place where you can hear how a track goes from a loop idea that might have some legs to a completed track that maybe sounds kind of the same, but hopefully better. First entry in the playlist is up. It’s a little 55-second slow burner called Wait For It. The source sample is from a record by Mystic Merlin. I’ll just let the gatefold image from the record do all the talking.

Vinyl Jockey in the wild

Nothing on the books for June, but will be making some appearances in July.

That’s a wrap for now!

-Nathan Stewart