Trying To Pull Myself Away

Things should be better by this time next week. Right now I'm just fighting against the clock to make a Monday deadline on submitting a chapter I'm writing about performance in Second Life for a book on learning and teaching in this virtual world. The book will be published by an academic press in Norway within the next few months. On top of this, life goes on and my "to do" list keeps getting longer and longer. Ironically, as the impeding start of the new academic year looms over the temporal horizon I long for it to all come into place because it helps me structure things better.

The other thing that helps me structure things better is of course my weekly Mużika Mod Ieħor podcast. In the midst of the final sprint to get my Second Life writing done on time, I can't but pause for a few hours to produce this week's MMI podcast. By taking time to do this I find that my brain works better when I get back to writing about avatars and the conceptual possibilities of virtual worlds.

I'm very pleased with the new recordings from Dean Saviour. His Marshmallow Girl was picked to top the 2007 MMI podcast listeners' picks in the online releases category. He now returns with two new online releases. Hallway of Kites is the one I've picked to open the 131st edition of the MMI podcast. I'm sure Dean's music will receive a good number of votes again on this year's listerers' picks. More about that in a couple of weeks or so.

I'm also thrilled to discover that Brikkuni are in the process of putting together an album and it looks like it'll be entitled Kuntrabanda. They've just released to unmastered tracks from it on their MySpace page. Brussel is one of them and it captures the unique sound of this band fronted by former Lumiere singer Mario Vella. The band now includes a prodigious line-up, which includes Danjeli on keyboards, his mate Michael Galea on drums, Daniel "il-Flambu" Cassar plays bass, and the other former Lumiere Matthew Cuschieri on guitar. Additional musicians include Ruth Abela on clarinet.

Their earlier recording was too raw for comfort - I featured it on the 47th edition of the MMI podcast anyway - but it also encouraged me to include a track from a recent batch of recordings I discovered on Facebook by a defunct band called A Fuscia Sun Vessel. This trio was only together for about six months in 2006 and since then Robert Farrugia Flores has emerged as one of the foremost performers on the underground scene along with his new band Dominoes. They will be appearing at the Poxx Bar with Explicit next Friday the 19th of September.

Since I've gone back in time a little bit for A Fuchsia Sun Vessel, I thought that this would be a most appropriate time to play a track from a CD I've been wanting to feature on my podcast for a long time. I finally acquired my own copy of Sigo's Perfect Existence from 2002. Sergio Gatt, the singer-songwriter who also goes by the name of his band, has withdrawn from performing original material since then but thankfully he still gigs regularly playing covers. This is a shame because as you can hear from Bliss, a duet with Marvic Lewis, there's much more than meets the eye to this performer who has been active for about 20 years now. I must dig out some of my old tapes one of these days and play you something from his days with a band called Big Foot, a time when survival on the local music scene was a much harder slog that it is now.

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