A new posting for every artist or even title Radu liked or loved?
That’ll fill pages after pages after pages – and I’m eager to read them all…
We talked about music very often, I guess almost every time we met or phoned… either were we digging in our memories, trying to find under the dust of time something to surprise each other (“remember this one?” – “aaaah, yees, of course! but that one too!”), or we updated each other with newly discovered music (that sometimes could have been much older than us).
As I wrote about The Tiger Lillies, sometimes I can’t even tell who brought this one or that one to one another’s ear – that simply never was important. How could I ever know someday (so damned soon…) I’d regret so much not having memorized/noted/recorded our little verbal ping-pong-rounds (of course it was never just about music)…
Anyway, one by one they hopefully come back to memory, those little, modest sessions of… I don’t know, I’d say of both “learning” and enjoying music. I liked it very much…
One of the finest pieces of music Radu brought to me was Louis Sclavis’ Album “Chamber Music”. I didn’t know Sclavis, never had heard of him. At first the music even ennoyed me a little, but it was of course rather my state of mind disturbing. It took some months to give Sclavis a new try (Radu gave me a CD-R of the album, it was in our fierce “grab-all-you-can-ever-get-your-fingers-on”-time). And what a “kaboom!”
Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Van der Graaf Generator, even Led Zeppelin (oh, how happy it made me! to give him the “Physical Graffiti”-CD so he wouldn’t have to listen to those crappy mp3’s anymore!) or Harry Nilsson with the soundtrack to “The Point”… every time we met (which mostly happened in Dresden) I had a pile of CDs in the rucksack – and sometimes the pile I brought back was a different one.
No matter how long the list of artists, bands, albums, soundtracks, versions we talked about and presented each other would get – it would never be complete. Because I still have and discover music I know he would have liked.
So every now and then I will put a record, tape or CD on and listen – with Radu. And I hope sometimes with Luca and Mira.