Nathan's Small Delights: SD_009

Ayup, what’s good?

Spooky season is officially wrapped up & it was absolutely stacked with treats. Strap yourself in because this installment is gonna be longer than usual. I find myself entering the month of November perfectly whelmed. Here we go!

The Delights

I’ve been picking up a lot of new oddball records & October turned out to be a great opportunity to play them out at a few spots. The month started out strong at Cosmic Saltillo with an International Music Day event. I was a bit unclear if that meant International Music, Day (celebration of non-western music) or International, Music Day (general celebration of music) so I ended up just packing a mishmash of records that would work for either. The venue is charming, the staff is incredibly friendly, & the overall vibe is chill to the max. Hats off to Kenny Red (not his real last name) for organizing everything & executing it so smoothly.

After making some slight modifications to the contents of the record bag, I hit the road for another outstanding San Antonio Beerfest gig with Rick Lara. This year, we were posted up in a mostly shaded spot near the edge of Civic Park. We spent the afternoon slinging wax to a boisterous crowd & just having a damn good time with it. Notably, this was the second time in as many gigs that someone approached for a track ID when I played the Chłopak Z Sąsiedztwa edit of Tadeusz Nalepa’s Dbaj o Miłość from The Very Polish Cut-Outs Sampler Vol. 2. It’s a stone cold groove for sure.

The move into the new place has been going fairly well. Record boxes are unpacked, the studio is in a workable form, & I have cleared out most of the boxes. Unfortunately, a few of the plants did not take well to relocation & have given up the ghost (as the saying goes). Certainly this is not a delight. What is a delight, is that the immortal words of the enigmatic Ian Malcom always hold true - Life, uh, finds a way. Where many plants fall, two tiny moth-like sprouts will rise!

I am currently in the midst of a much-needed slug day largely on account of me being fresh off the plane from a trip to Ciudad de México - I flew out early last week with a squad to revel in some international delights! The amount of activities crammed into the six-day span of my visit was pretty impressive. The list of first-time visitor standards included a day trip to Teotihuacán (where we learned about the puma who traded a leg for a bigger butt), a stop at the National Autonomous University of Mexico to marvel at the unreal Juan O’Gorman mural, & a trip to the Museo Nacional de Antropología to get first-hand looks at some post-classic Mexica sculptures.

The city is huge & jam-packed with some of the friendliest people I have ever encountered. The visit also allowed me to practice my completely atrocious Spanish. I would like to take a moment to recognize how embarrassing it is that I, a grown adult human Earth creature, can only speak a single language (something I plan on remedying). About halfway through the trip, I wised up and leveraged the unlimited power of Google’s translation feature on my phone. The results were mixed & sometimes hilarious.

Early in the trip, we swung by a few local architectural wonders - the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo (another Juan O’Gorman joint) & the absolutely GORGEOUS Luis Barragán designed Gilardi House* - (edited the name & link to the correct house we visited. Thanks for the correction Shelbs!). The use of colors to segregate & accentuate the different areas of the house was first class. To access the indoor swimming pool, one must traverse a yellow portal of a hallway - the contrast between the yellow & blue/red/white waterworld is transcendent. In all of my days, I have never seen a swimming pool this magnificent.

As you can imagine, I took every opportunity to pop into record stores for some digging. I made out like a total bandit & managed to check off a few items from the want list (nothing quite like just finding records I am after out in the wild). Add in a few stops for some dancing (Departmento) & some speakeasy vibe live jazz (Parker & Lenox) for a well rounded experience in CDMX. I enjoyed this trip to the max & am already trying to figure out how to get back there as soon as humanly possible. Big shout out to our wonderful host & city guide Sam (muchas gracias!) - the trip would not have been nearly as fun without you.

As many of you undoubtedly have heard, plumcot season is officially over. Please bow your heads & join me in a moment of silence… Thank you.

Some of you may be familiar with the old saying, “He who doth consume an apple of whole within every 24-hour cycle of the calendar year will surely not need a visit from the physicker.” I think about that saying a lot & finally decided to take action on it. There are a ton of apples out there & a lot of them are not very good. But how is one to know which apples are worth consuming? Is there a way out of the monotonous routine of buying only your favorite apple? Is your favorite apple even your favorite apple? I decided to answer these questions once & for all with Apple Off 2025! Here’s how it went down - I popped into Central Market (best produce section in the city) & purchased one of each variety of available apples. Excluded were organics & miniatures - the total number of varieties sampled was six & twenty. I’ll spare you the play-by-play & jump to the juicy conclusion - I now have a few new favorite apples. Cosmic Crisps have been my go-to for a while, but boy howdy was I surprised at the explosion of flavor packed into the new kid on the block - the SweeTango. This is a really good apple. But it is not nearly as good-tasting (definitely not as good-looking) as the Lucy Glo. Housed in an unassuming yellow skin, the red & white star-shaped interior flesh is just the right amount of tangy & sweet. It’s a very unique apple that has the potential to be the star of the show at a cocktail party or cotillion.

What a delight!

Vinyl Jockey on the web

A few weeks ago, the lads at 4Ever Groovin (McAllen fam in the house!) dropped their second release, 4Ever Cuts Vol. 1, which features a party jam I wrote called Get Ready. This one is a bit more tracky than my usual fare & I had a lot of fun writing it. Also upcoming on the web will be my Season 3 In The Studio appearance for Motive Artistry Music. I think the mix lands in about 3 weeks & it is jam packed full of mid-tempo sleaze, so get those ear holes ready for some jimmy jams!

Vinyl Jockey in the wild

November is shaping up to be another chill month with no in-person gigs on the books. I’m hoping to utilize this downtime to work on a new mix & put a pin in some unfinished studio projects - let’s see if I actually manage that.

That’s a wrap for now!

-Nathan Stewart