Currently deep down a Japanese jazz hole and don’t want to get out. All morning spent researching speaker upgrades and following vinyl shops in New York City. Portal Records keep posting these Japanese jazz albums and I am hooked like a child on sugar. Gullible and ready and perfect.
From Instagram I bounce over to EBay and check the competitive pricing. Always to much….. Simultaneously over to tidal for high end streaming. The louder I go with these Wharfedale Diamond 10.1 speakers the better the sound. Suddenly the room is full. I am considering removing everything but surfboards and going hard at the classic Japanese listening room motif…… Because that is what we are missing here in Marbella….. Endless Summer meets audiophile……. I can already feel the California tribe hate.
Maybe bean bag chairs instead of couches. Green season vibes coming down.
Roy Fukui is destroying me this late morning. From out of nowhere a sledgehammer of sound. A symphony of piano and perfection. Liters of love. Cheaper then foam. Less toxic then resin. Outside these doors is just heat and dust. Bury me here with the volume set at 36 and The Best of Roy Fukui playing. Bury me here in Marbella while the kids ride by on pink dirt bikes and Princessa sleeps on the expensive, dirty, Moroccan rug. Here in the tropical wastelands, arm wrestling for a future pueblo vibe. Down a Japanese jazz hole while no one is watching. Take out everything and add the $1,000 artisanal Silence speakers. Now here for looks and quality, the press releases read.
All in the same eco system. One at a time. Slow build, original, hand crafted surfboards, matched with this obscure Japanese jazz and dreaming of high end audio. The days are whirlpools filled with dreams. The road is dusty and hot during this Holy Week in the jungle. Prisoners in paradise. Perhaps we should start selling lemonade. High end audio and lemonade. What could go wrong….. A fine location to lose one’s porous mind.
”How do you handle the heat?” Mark asks.
”Not well,” I replied.
Steve Okonski would love this album. The hard pressed keys and steady pace around the neck. Like hands around the neck….. firm, yet not crushing. Track 5, “Nord,” is hands around the neck. Stepping on your toes. Knee up to the rubs. Sitting in the cool air of a tiny shop transplanted to Tokyo, and the cosmos beyond.
Yesterday Artemis left for the moon. This retail rocket ship posing as a jukebox. A tiny digital jukebox bound for the moon, playing Fukui the entire trip. Witnessing the stars pass by like burnt palm trees along the highway to Santa Cruz. Looking back on this blue pearl in the dark matter sky, like a paper mache orb hanging on a thin string. Consider how wonderful and lucky and unique we are. To have Roy Fukui playing in this pseudo jungle listening room at noon, in early April.
Us humans and all our bombs. Yet we make “Sonora” remastered. Playing through a pair of potentially sub par Wharfedale speakers. But it is all we have here in Guanacaste.
Astronauts looking back in awe.
Japanese jazz makes the most sense. Nothing else makes sense but that. The absolute devotion to craft. The care and intelligence required to make something beautiful and human. The absolute precision demanded to press a perfect album. To compose a radiant song. Even to shape a functional surfboard. Looking back from space at all our gorgeous dreams. Locked into form and function. Slow hands and well pressed keys. Listening to Fukui in a small room while the astronoughts and the aliens and the Gods gaze down at us from a peaceful distance and marvel at all these grand creations and flawed evolutions we have fumbled through.
The simple pleasures. Bean bags coming soon……
