An early Musical Monday

Well, it’s been a very strange week, and one that hasn’t seen much posting or commenting from this neck of the woods. Sometimes life takes priority, and whilst I won’t apologise I’m always conscious of those times when I don’t get to sit in front of the computer and play. Mind you, it’s probably a good sign, when you think about it...

Anyway, “The Trip” is fast approaching. And whilst Bea is meant to be flying over on Thursday, her Visa isn’t scheduled to arrive until Tuesday! Which means she can’t book her flight yet, and there’s a small chance that things won’t go according to plan, and that the timing of her trip will have to be changed by a day or two. I’m going to call the British Embassy in Madrid tomorrow, but you know what they say about the best laid plans...

Aside from this slight uncertainty (and the fact that we’re meant to be staying with one of the Scottish Sisters next weekend!) work is throwing up a few problems of its own. I have a meeting on Wednesday to confirm the programme for the work out in Russia, Italy and Belgium; this is great, but it seems likely that I’m going to have to fly out to Milan and Moscow over the course of the next two weeks. Not so great with regard to timing, is it? And to add to that little conundrum, something rather weird is happening that’s also throwing a little confusion into the pot.

About a month ago, a friend and I decided to bid jointly on a very, very, very large project out in the UAE. Now, his company is about the size of mine (i.e. tiny!) and the competition comprised the large multi-nationals who practice in our field, all of whom are already based out there in the Middle East anyway. We didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past the first stage, but the scale of the opportunity was such that we were just excited to be participating; now, and after a meeting with the potential client in the UK last week, we find that we’ve got to the last three! And more than that – because our solution is a bit novel (it involves setting up a Special Purpose Vehicle and doing all sorts of smart things with it) we appear to be the favoured option at the moment.

So the next stage is that we have to fly out to the UAE to deliver a presentation... yes, over the course of the next couple of weeks. This is fucking incredible, of course, but what it means is that by the time Bea gets here, she’ll be spending her time babysitting Lola. To be honest, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!

An Early Musical Monday

I’m not sure if I’ll have time to play tomorrow, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to put up my Musical Monday contribution a day early. And, of course, I did hint at what it was going to be when I posted the Boots ad last week (that’s “Boots, The Chemist”, by the way - the ad is about their range of cosmetics!) So this week, it’s a track from The Gotan Project, and their album La Revancha Del Tango.

The Gotan Project is a musical collaboration based in Paris and consisting of Philippe Solal (French), Eduardo Makaroff (Argentinian) and Christoph Müller (Swiss). This unlikely trio formed in 1999 and their first release was Vuelvo Al Sur in 2000, followed by La Revancha del Tango in 2001. Their music is clearly tango, but also uses electronic elements such as samples, beats and breaks. In fact, “Gotan” is an anagram of "tango", which is not a coincidence.

If you like this track – Epoca – I’d strongly suggest that you get yourself over to Amazon. The entire album is very good, but then it would be wouldn’t it? It comes highly recommended, after all ;-)