Letter #136 ✨
Love Will Save The Day
archives | sign up | how this works | whatsapp
07.05.21
Hey, hello, hi, hi...
How are you? I hope you’re good.
Huge thank you to Ben Lukas Boysen for his excellent guest mixtape and interview last week, and thanks again to Julie for sorting it all out. What a brilliant way to kick off the new guest format! If you missed it, it's here.
Before we get started, a few bits of news; 1) there's a Love Will Save The Day party coming soon (together, in a room, dancing!), please let me know if you'd like to come along. 2) I've put together a few guest mixes recently, one for Cosmic Bob's excellent London Sounds show (listen back here), and another for the wonderful Conor Jatter on AAJA, which went out this morning at 9am! And 3) Love Will Save The Day family Melissa Harrison has a new book out this week that looks excellent!
Now, this week.
I'm equal parts nervous and excited for this week's letter and mixtape. Excited: I've got thirty brilliant songs that soundtrack an imaginary evening in the Mediterranean to share with you (big on the balearic vibes). Nervous: I've also written and narrated a short story to accompany it (big on the vulnerability vibes). I wish I could be all nonchalant or even aloof about it all, but... Eeek.
You can, of course, skip all that nervousness, and just listen to the music. In fact, I'd encourage it. Just click 'Just The Music' and save both our blushes. For those of you that brave out the show, you might notice it sounds a bit different - I've been experiencing some tech issues, please let me know any good microphone recommendations you may have.
So this week is story of bohemian poolside escapes, of balearic sounds, of universal vibrations, and of new realities. The music tells half the story, and I've tried to write a story that tells the other half (and while it's narrated in the show, it's also written out in the notes below too). The story is a roman a clef, so while there are parts that are loosely based on experience, most of it is fiction. I know I'm maybe exploring the format of all this a little more than you'd expect, and publishing this has left me feeling incredibly vulnerable, but here goes, I hope you like it...
Stay safe, stay happy, and stay in touch.
See you on the dancefloor,
Jed x
PS. If you're new then this is how it works. Here’s what you’ve missed so far. And this is me.
PPS. If you're still reading this bit here, then would you mind sending this email on to a few friends that might like it? Or tweeting or posting on on Facebook about it?
🌪 TL;DR Section 🌪
The TL;DR Section is a little different at the moment, as I've been trying to read more books, so naturally my other reading has shrunk a little.
Stuff from the show
Club Meduse, by Charles Bals
Some books I'd also recommend, and some that I'm about to start
Some added extras
Huge shout to Matt Hannigan for sending me this: Laurent Garnier's final set at The End. Goosebumps.
Ahead of her upcoming album, Greentea Peng talks to Malvika Padin at gal-dem (support gal-dem here)
Thanks to Julie for sending me this on the Make Art Work launch from worldwide (support worldwide here)
Celebrating ten years of NTS, this oral history is good in Mixmag, and the six hour Theo mix was... well. (Support NTS here)
I really enjoyed the Ai WeiWei documentary, Never Sorry
This interview with Tony Nwachukwu of CDR for RA's Black Minds Matter series is really good and well worth your time
It's Nice That has a great photo-essay on Japan's 'sea women'
Classical with Cassy is a new show on worldwide and the first instalment was immense
This weekend I'll be listening to the first part of Zakia Sewell's My Albion, from BBC Radio 4
Resident Advisor picks up its Art of DJing series again, this time with the legendary Colin Dale (thanks Travis for flagging!)
This New Yorker piece is doing the rounds, you've probably seen it, but if you haven't it's worth a read
I really enjoyed this extract from Benjamin Myers' forthcoming book featured on Caught By The River
Anti-racism resources
Akala’s Native’s
Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race
Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish)
🙋🏻♂️ Driving Change 🙋🏻♂️
Platforming; If you are black, a POC, or you're a person that has been marginalised, and you would like to guest edit an edition of Love Will Save The Day, please get in touch with me. I want to ensure that your voice is heard. Just reply to this email.
Mentoring; As a senior white man in a media agency, I hold a very privileged position. If you, or any one that you know, is interested in a career in advertising or media and needs a mentor and/or a leg-up, please contact me / get them to contact me at jed.hallam@initiative.com
📖 Old notes 📖
Notes on culture
Rebuilding culture: fixing the asymmetry of art, culture, and commerce
A response to the argument that culture is boring these days
Notes on music
Notes on mental health
❤️ We Are Stardust ❤️
The crunch of the gravel under the tyres of the taxi wakes me from my tiny sleep. As we slow to a halt, the bigger rocks pop under the pressure, hitting the skeleton of the car, and perforating the gentle thrum of traffic coming from the road beside us.
As my eyes take focus, I hear him pull the hand brake up slowly. The teeth clawing through each ratchet with a steady rhythm, and rising through a musical scale as the cable tightens.
I wind my window down, and the warm evening breeze provides much needed relief from the sticky heat of the backseat. He leans over to the passenger seat reaching for something, and then steps out of the car.
I straighten out my shoulders and twist and jerk about in my seat, pulling my frame up from my slumbered slouch. We've pulled into a lay-by just off the highway. From here I can see the last fragments of the sunshine disappearing behind the mountain range of a neighbouring island. The dusk casts a beautiful cloak to hide the days transformation into night.
The car dips forwards slightly as he leans on the bonnet, stretching his back out as he draws deeply on a cigarette. My head lolls back onto the headrest as I feel his release secondhand. I can still feel the gentle fog of sleep, and it only serves to amplify the ethereal feeling that I've ascended to since stepping off the plane. 2,000 miles could be 2,000 light years.
I check my phone; no service. I feel my body tighten slightly, but it's soon released as I hear the opening bars of Playing Your Game Baby from the radio...
A soft smile spreads, and I close my eyes, drinking it all in with a desperate thirst.
I hear the car door close; the engine chokes into action. He lowers all of the windows, and the breeze floods through the car. He turns the volume up. I drift higher into the cosmos.
--
As we weave through streets made for mules and handcarts, the air is punctured by the smell of Yves Saint Laurent's Opium, freshly cobbled tan sandals, and the soft rumble of lovers deep in conversation. The infant moonlight bounces from the white walls, bathing everyone in a lunar sunshine. This is the heavenly labyrinth I remember.
As we drive deeper into the town, I feel a sense of the uncanny creeping over me. Twenty years on and the walls have been painted, but the signs remain the same. We pass bars I remember falling asleep in as a child, and I see the faces of people from family holidays gone by. They've barely aged, preserved by celestial sunshine and a life lived by a different clock. While I take a certain sense of security in my own transformation - aged far beyond my years, a disguise upon a person they might once have known. Creases, bags, and scars worn like medals won from a private war.
Before I'm swallowed up by my own sense of lament, he drops down a gear, and the car jerks me back to the present.
He takes a sharp left down a seemingly narrowing corridor of a road, followed quickly by another left into a cobbled yard, that's almost entirely overgrown with palms and olive trees.
You could be forgiven for feeling lost, but I can feel my fingers tingling with excitement. Here it is. Here I am.
I've arrived.
As if to reassure me, faint traces of marine-blue light occasionally burst through the fauna, and now he's cut the engine, I can hear the unmistakable low-frequency four four kick of the Oberheim.
My silent driver taps gently on the meter.
I rest the cash on the central armrest, and grab my bag.
A few steps ahead of me is the hotel of my early-teen dreams; a never-never-land, filled with exotic cocktails, otherworldly bohemians, and what looked like an atmosphere of unrelenting Mediterranean ecstasy.
When I was just into double digits, after my parents had a good sample of the islands party spirits, I'd sneak out of the back of whichever bar we were in, and nervously make my way here. From the cobbled courtyard, I'd peer through the palms and watch people dance by the pool, drinks held high as they shuffled to the sounds of Tangerine Dream and The Style Council, barely clothed, but bathed in the purest happiness I'd ever seen.
Two decades later, would those universal vibrations have continued? Or was I too late to experience that happiness myself?
--
As I take a few steps forwards, the palms part to reveal a long, brutal white L-shaped building carved into the hills. Stretching the length of the hotel is the marine-blue pool from my dreams; softly lit, trees overhanging, feet delicately drawing figures-of-eight as their owners talk...
I catch myself slipping again, and head to find someone to ask about my room.
As I walk through the hotel, a young man glides towards me with a glass of something, handing it me with one hand, while taking my bag with the other. He welcomes me by name, and then gives me a deep smile, and tells me that I'm lucky, this evening is the hotel's Dream Sequence party.
He moves to stand beside me, and casting his arm from one side of the pool to the other, he smiles at me again, and simply says 'welcome'.
I float out onto the poolside. It feels even more secluded than I'd dreamed. While the soft breeze carriers the sweet smell of livani, the rhythmic pull of the four four has begun, and bodies start to come together to dance, "Hypnotic, Hypnotic, Look on the floor, And all is spinning round..."
--
"Love is such a wonderful thing,
The angels sing when freedom reigns,
Freedom from the chains,
That hold us back from harmony..."
My mouth silently makes the shapes of these words as I dance by the pool, eyes closed. My body is no longer my own, I'm locked into something more profound. We move in beautiful synchronicity, and take one step closer to heaven with each chorus and key change.
As my body takes charge my mind feels like it's slowly dissolving. All I can be is here, in this Dream Sequence that's now my reality. 2,000 miles from home, and no one knows that I'm here. Is this true liberty? I feel like I'm passing back through time, relieving myself of the burden of unnecessary regrets. I'm finally living the life that I dreamt of having.
Am I really free, or is just my fantasy?
Am I crazy, or just hazy?
What for me is true reality?
Squeeze up every part of me
Floating out of the blue
Fear of all the pain of life
Is that really much that I cannot do?
Smother my feelings
Am I really free, or is just my fantasy?
Am I crazy, or just hazy?
What for me is true reality?
Squeeze up every part of me
Floating out the blue
Fear of all the pain of life
Is there really much that I cannot do?
My trance is broken for a fleeting moment, and I feel my body drenched in sweat and happiness.
One by one, all the stars appear,
As the great winds of the planet spiral in,
Spinning away, like the night sky at Arle...
--
As the shade of the night sky deepens, and the pace of the celestial orchestra slows, I feel the searing heat of happiness spilling over into a warm persistent glow. I look down to find I'm holding hands with two people, both of them still with their eyes closed, dancing in unison, locked into our groove.
The blissful atmosphere feels like it's expanding beyond our planet, our universe. All is full of love.
We walk, beyond the palms, through moonlit alleys, the maze of the whitewashed walls some how leading us to exactly where we need to be.
The solo cicada singing its finest song to the stars. I feel the sand, the warm, gently pulsating sea at my ankles. They splash, and flash their smiles in the starlight, radiating happiness.
Am I really 2,000 miles from reality?
A tear gently falls down my cheek, and onto my lips. It's followed by another, then more. They aren't tears of sadness, but of confusion. Why am I here? What am I running from? What is wrong with me? Am I broken? Why could I only find this purity of joy, this liberty, here?
Just as I start to feel myself slip into a strange melancholy, the universe catches me.
My new friends offer no words, but squeeze my hands tighter. I look to the stars and see the same three stars I've stared at since I was a child. Celestial beings, watching over me.
They've always been there, watching, guiding me. Holding my hand. I take a deep breath, and my body fills with the cosmic dust from a million years ago, sending shivers through each nerve-ending, and stoking the fires of happiness once again.
I am here, this is reality.
--
I part the palms, walk back to heaven, and back to the dream sequence. The air still dancing, people still smiling, I strip down, and climb into the pool. The fading moonlight casts a shadow across my body, as I step slowly into the water. A woman sat by the pool gently strokes my hair, giving me a smile that could only come from a point of nirvana. I arch my neck to face the sky, and slowly, push my body up and backwards from my toes. The universe catches me, once again.
And as I lay here, smiling, floating free, I feel the vibrations. The muffled low-frequency waveforms of Crying Laughing Loving Lying, the sharp, piercing clack-clacking of footsteps as couples return to their rooms; I feel the slow thud of my own heartbeat flooding my body with stardust, married with vibrations all around me. I feel free.
Immersed in the cosmos, I sink into myself, slipping under the waters of my own consciousness. Drunk on happiness. My smile broadens, and my eyes widen as I feel my body and soul open and try to swallow the last few stars left in the sky.
As the moon pulls at the ocean, I feel the vibrations in my ribcage. A celestial message.
A splintered fragment of a poem floats into my head; “Wave after wave, each mightier than the last”, a half-remembered nothing that's now come to mean-everything.
I've spent my life wandering through each chapter, collecting trinkets and debris, trying to understand what I've been missing. Thinking I've been shipwrecked, stranded, and missing some substance. But it's only now, floating here, that I realise that I've always had everything that I have ever wanted.
I'm a tiny part of something far grander, a b sharp in the galaxy's never-ending concerto. But a note that fits, that belongs, that must be played, else the entire cosmos falls out of tune.
Sometimes it's easy to lose that perspective. To feel like we're missing something that we didn't notice we had before. A phantom sense of loss.
When it feels like the weight of the world is bearing down on you, it's easy to wonder 'what am I missing', but the fact is, you are everything you'll ever need.
You are everything.
You are part of the cosmos.
You are a universal vibration, and the universe vibrates through you too.
We are the stars, the moon, and the breaking dawn.
We are stardust.
📃 The tracklist 📃
Blank & Jones - My Island
Azymuth - Voo Sobre o Horizonte
Lonnie Liston Smith and the Cosmic Echoes - Summer Nights
Barry White - Playing Your Game, Baby
Shintaro Sakamoto - グッド ・ラック
Malcolm McLaren - Obatala
Nicola Cruz - Cumbia del Olvido
Young Marco - Kalapa Garden
Tornado Wallace - Healing Feeling
Khotin - Dwellberry
The Style Council - Long Hot Summer
The Who - Eminence Front
Tangerine Dream - Love On A Real Train
My Mine - Hypnotic Tango (original 12" version)
New Order - Your Silent Face
Dharma - Plastic Doll
Steve Arrington - Feel So Real
Haruomi Hosono - Sports Men
Brian Eno and John Cale - Spinning Away
Axel Boman - Fantastic Piano
Gigi Masin - Tears Of A Clown
Lemon Jelly - Soft
Horsebeach - Midnight Part 2
Zero 7 - Futures
Badly Drawn Boy - You Lied
Labi Siffre - Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying
Michael Kiwanuka - Light
Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Air A Danser
Steve Reich and Pat Metheny - Electric Counterpoint: II. Slow
Beverley Glenn-Copeland - La Vita
💥 If you enjoy this letter, then please take a second to forward this email, or share this link with a recommendation on Facebook or Twitter 💥
See you on the dance floor.
Love Will Save the Day