Love Letters
Love and peace to all bands.
Greetings Dear Friends,
This unsolicited writing you’ve happened upon is Part 1 in a project I’m calling Love Letters.
Each Love Letter is a collection of things that I love, and want to share. They will naturally reflect what fascinates me and draws me in: songs, lyrics, conversations, stories, the creative process, the pursuit of greatness, the sharp backbone of ambition and the raw and delicate human experience.
Why am I doing this? Other than the obvious motives of self-indulgent gratification and an unquenchable thirst to write, I consume a lot of content. Over the years I have found certain individuals whose tastes I share or aspire to share. When they share content, I know it’s worth tuning in and it expands my horizons to new things to be fascinated by. I would very much like to be that person for someone else. Oh and my uncle promised me he would read this.
You will start receiving updates right here in your inbox, whenever I find enough things that I love to warrant a collection.
To avoid these going to your spam, drag to your primary inbox or hit reply and say hello.
Thanks for stopping by.
Joshua Rose
Love and peace to all bands. It’s a struggle. Life’s a struggle. And Monday morning may be a struggle for a lot of you. In a job that you despise. Working for a boss that you despise. A slave to money then we die. God bless ya.
Solomun, the D.J. Who Keeps Ibiza Dancing
An enchanting look at the life of a prolific electronic music artist known for his marathon dj sets.
“Midsummer in Ibiza, ten minutes to midnight. At a long table in the dimly lit garden of Can Domingo, a restaurant in the southern hills, two dozen people picked over the remains of a generous dinner: ravioli, veal Milanese, caponata. Gerd Janson, a forty-five-year-old German d.j. with courtly manners, asked me if I wanted a little more fish. He was dressed like one of the Royal Tenenbaums, in a neck scarf and a white camp-collar shirt tucked into chinos. I was full, but he insisted. “The fish is so delicious—and it’s a long night,” he reminded me.”
I have always been fond of the striking parallels between electronic music and religion; church and dancefloor. A congregation of people brought together by a belief in something larger than themselves that is intangible in its beauty. A yearning for belonging and the need to feel…something. Anything. If this interests you I recommend reading the 2016 autobiography of Moby: Porcelain: A Memoir. From the horse's mouth, the tales of banging heads in the 90s golden era of electro-punk (think Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Prodigy) amuse. But it’s the deeper struggles of how a staunch Christian, vegan, animal rights activist living on the streets and abandoned parking lots of New York came to create one of the most nostalgic records of the last 50 years, that will take your breath away.
A little closer to (my) home, here is Solumun playing off an ironing board in a Melbourne living room. The story goes that after finishing a headline show, his Ibiza stamina kicked in and Mladen played on in a lucky punter’s living room, eventually calling it quits a cool 19 hours later.
Ah yes, the art of The New Yorker profile. A most loved medium. Here’s another that recently sucked me in and flawed me completely.
I once asked Wolff what attracted people to Formula 1. “It’s an alpha-male thing. You want to beat the other guy,” he replied. “It’s very archaic.” About a thousand people work exclusively for the Mercedes team. (Another thousand or so make Formula 1 engines, which Mercedes supplies to three other teams.) At the start of the 2021 season, Wolff sent an all-staff e-mail asking employees—everyone from aerodynamicists to catering staff—to find out who their opposite number was at Red Bull. “Look at him/her every day,” Wolff wrote. “Put the picture right in front of you so you know whom to beat.”
“Emma is not a person; Emma is a place that you get stuck in; Emma is a pain that you cannot erase.” ― Justin Vernon
Blocking and Staging: the unspoken dance between actor and camera. How Kubrick, Spielberg and Inarritu Stage their Scenes.
The first CD single I ever bought was Until the End of Time by Tupac Shakur. My parents did not approve of the profanity. But it was too late for me, the hip hop genie was out of the bottle and would not be returned. My mum did however approve of my interest in poetry as music, and bought for me Tupac’s book of poems: The Rose that Grew From Concrete. Spoken poetry in hip hop has caught my ear ever since. Here is the mother of British introspective rapper Loyle Carner’s, on the last track of his tremendous 2019 album Not Waving, But Drowning.
I've watched you grow, from first kick, to first kiss
Shoulder rides to sleepless nights
Felt-tip crows to scoring goals,
and bedtime Katamino
Watched you hold your own from boy to man
As you stand firm, bare and bold, not afraid to walk alone
Reveal your pain. Unique. Defiant. Uncompromising
And with our compass lost, we talked long into the darkest hours
Until we saw the burnished sky, and our eyes stung as our words blurred and became thoughts
As we were silenced by the dawn
We clung to each other like sailors in a storm as our world pitched and bucked, our breath stolen by grief
But you stood strong, filled such big boots
Gripped to the helm and steered us on into the calm
Abandoned your lifetime ambition, to hold us down
Took on a different mission, while we were turned inside out, raw and gaping
But you wrapped us up in your dream, realised your vision and fed us with your words of pearl
Like buccaneers, we sailed the seven seas and drank in the wonders of your world, and returned giddy with the heady smell of your success
And when that time came, oh did we weep, but the tears that streaked our cheeks were stained with glee because we knew that this was not goodbye, that you'd be back, that you'd never really left
Because love does not lessen by miles it's not locked out by doors or walls, but reinforced in thought and heart
It cannot be lost like a key or a sock, or left behind in a box, it is present in each and every breath and flows deep with every beat and deed
It may not be your presence but it's your essence that remains. Forever dancing like glitter in our air
And now it's as clear to me my beautiful boy, as naked as the joy that caresses the creases of your eye, that you've finally found your one, your golden snitch, and my task is done
For I've gained a daughter
I've not lost a son
Longer forms I’m loving:
How All This Happened by Morgan Housel
The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene by David Epstein
Being at a show where the crowd is singing louder than the artist sucks. Doesn’t it? What if it doesn’t? What if it’s actually completely magical, for the artist themselves as well as the crowd…(check out Marcus Mumford’s face at 40 seconds)
Forget what they say. Always read the YouTube comments:
“San Francisco has only one drawback, Tis hard to leave” - Rudyard Kipling
And yet. I’m moving to Brooklyn. Just down the road from The Lot: an independent, non-profit, online radio station live streaming 24/7 from a reclaimed shipping container on an empty parking lot. Here’s Brooklyn native, Tokyo born, DJ and multi-instrumentalist, TAKUYA NAKAMURA, spinning at The Lot last week. This mix is a vast journey of electronic exploration and perhaps an early contender for set of the year - or at the very least, set-in-a-parking-lot-of-the-year:
If you enjoy watching top DJs stream online in small, strange facilities, check out HÖR BERLIN: a Berlin bathroom that went stratospheric during Covid lockdowns, hosting some of Germany’s best selectors and attracting some serious eyeballs. Here’s my friend playing some vinyl records there.
With Love,
Joshua Rose