Play the flute in the key of Vincent you piss faced Richard. Welcome to The Blind Boy podcast. Fantastic feedback for last week's episode where I had the wonderful man Con Megan on to talk about, to talk about fucking all sorts, man. So I got great feedback from that. It was wonderful to have mankind on. I liked it, you know, it didn't sound like it didn't sound like we were doing it over the fucking phone because we were I have a new method of recording where it it sounded like we were in the same room.

When I listen back to what I was very happy with it and I'm glad you liked it. And I can't wait to do more more interviews in that way. You know, I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to achieve kind of. Conversational intimacy with a person, if I wasn't in the same room with them, but it doesn't seem to be an issue. So I'm looking forward to doing more of them. Welcome to the podcast Yukon's. And if you're a brand new listener, listen to some older podcasts.

That's what I always suggest. If you're a regular listener, what's the crack? And I'm recording this at nighttime while the world is waiting to find out who's the next US president. So by the time you hear this, we'll probably know who the next US president is. And I'm sick of it. I'm just. And that's no, that's not fair, I'm not going to say I'm sick of us. I just I just want to turn away from it, I just want to not think about it.

I've I've been through a fair few fucking US presidential elections and this is the one that I'm least engaged with because I can't call. I literally I cannot and would not try and call who has one. Simple as that. So I'm sure you feel the exact fucking same. You feel the exact same.

So this week's podcast is going to be about things I'd like to speak about that are not the US presidential election. So I think I'd like to speak about that isn't the U.S. presidential election, no one is. Easter Island men, Easter Easter Island, who had quite a unique and strange. Process of. Electing their leaders, if you could call it that, Easter Island is this tiny island, one of the most isolated islands in the world. Smack bang in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, like when you see it on a map, like I look at it sometimes, I'm like, holy fuck, that's isolated.

And you can do Google Maps on it. You can go around the streets in Easter Island, but. It's halfway between Asia and South America in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's part of. Polynesia, which is a vast collection of islands in the Pacific Ocean, tiny little islands of Polynesia and Micronesia have particular significance right now because. These are the islands that are disappearing because of climate change, you know, as the seas rise, these are the forests, the first islands that are disappearing really am Easter Island.

You'd know it because it's the one that has those giant stone heads. On the island, this tiny island in the middle of nowhere, and it has all these massive stone figures that just look like huge heads. Right, which we're all familiar with because. People have scratched their head for heads for years, wondering how the fuck did they do this in the middle of nowhere? What was it for? And those stone heads, they started building them nearly a thousand years ago.

Like when Europe was in the early, early Middle Ages, Easter Island, this small island, smaller than Ireland, was densely populated and there was a thriving civilization on it and they were building these huge heads. And the thing with Easter Island, it's one of these civilizations that the history of it often gets brought up anecdotally as a warning against.

Finish resources as a warning against unsustainable living, because there's many kind of theories as to what happened to Easter Island. Why was it once full of people who built these massive stone heads? And then it just became a practically a deserted island 200 years ago with just these heads left? And the common narrative is the people on this island had limited resources. They only had so many forests, they only had so many animals. And they basically used it all up.

They used everything up until the island itself was bare. Now, that's a real if that's a good story. OK, it's it's allegorical. Easter Island is always used, like I said, as as a warning for civilization. To show that, like, resources are limited, you can't just keep cutting down trees, you can't just keep using all the oil, one day it will all go and you'll be fucked. And Easter Island is used as the example of, look, it happened to them.

You know, a thousand years ago, they were able to build these huge stone heads, no one knows how they did it. They were obviously technologically advanced and now they're gone. But from the reading that I've been doing. Like I said, that's partly true, that's the most interesting version, it's really interesting to think that a civilization used up everything out of sheer greed. But, you know, there was a multitude of things. These this right.

Like the Polynesian people were fantastic at building boats and they weren't what seafaring people like Polynesia is. This collection of islands over this huge fucking distance gone right down to New Zealand. And they were flying back and forth between islands, you know, and populating each island and really, really excellent at port building. So a rat was introduced to the island, a Polynesian Polynesian rat, I think it was. And similar enough to which small islands you always see that the downfall is when an animal comes in.

So Mouratidis right there used to be a bird on Mauritius called the dodo. And we all know the dodo because it's heralded as this big bird that once existed 200 years ago and then got completely extinct. And the dodo, when I was growing up, was always used as an example of animals can go extinct. And we were led to believe that like the dodo became extinct on the island of Mauritius because the Portuguese ate them all because the dodo had no natural predators.

So it was just this bird that you could catch easily. But that's not true because the word dodo, I think it's a Portuguese word that means Fatma's. So the daughter was too fat for humans to eat. No one wanted to eat it. Why kill the dodo was the Portuguese introduced pigs and the pigs got onto the island and ate all the dodo's eggs and killed the dodo's well on Easter Island. Yes, the humans on Easter Island were using a lot of timber, but a rat was introduced and I think the rat was brought by other Polynesians.

But a rat was introduced. And on the island of Easter Island, they used to be folklore, the palm trees. And when the rats got on the island, their favourite food was the nuts and seeds of this palm tree. So the rats ate all the fucking seeds and the palm trees couldn't grow. Also as well, Western contact with Easter Island. No diseases, diseases from Europe that kill a lot of people there, so there's many reasons why the population, the society of Easter Island did collapse, that's for sure, right?

It did collapse. But this narrative of they used up all the trees in order to help themselves build these stone stone heads is simplistic. But what interests me is what happened to be said, the beliefs, the spiritual beliefs and how they elected leaders as a response to collapse within kind of Polynesian religions. This common there's this common thing called manner and manner is like like a life energy like like the energy that the universe permeates through. That this man of energy is it gives our life and it dictates everything and.

They say that the purpose of those giant heads on Easter Island was it was part of an ancestor cult, a religious belief that kind of looks towards and worships ancestors in the dead. OK, so these giant heads, which were called Moai were. Giant stone structures that represent their ancestors and as soon as the people on Easter Island, the indigenous people of Easter Island, put eyes usually made to corral into the heads of the giant stone heads, then manna flowed through these heads and then the manna would flow to like the descendants of the people who died.

So these stone structures were like conduits for this manna energy of life and would flow into the people selected. The the people who are alive and the dead had this symbiotic relationship whereby the dead, the amanah, would provide this energy to the living. And this manna energy was everything. It was how healthy your animals were, how many crops you could grow, whether you could have children, how happy you were going to be, your luck. This was all determined by manna, which flowed from the dead through these giant statues and then through symbiosis.

What the living had to do is they had to look after the dead via these statues by providing the right type of offerings and worship and respect these giant statues. They then created this balance for man could flow between the dead and the living. And that was the way of life. That was the dominant theory of reality on Easter Island. Until their society started started to collapse until we say the rats were introduced, in particular when the resources started to disappear, then they stopped building stone statues because you can imagine a village building these stone statues.

That's a fucking huge deal. These are massive, massive, massive, heavy things. A lot of people would have had to have been involved. They don't know exactly how did they think they carved the modern mountains and then rolled them down and logs. But when the resources started to disappear, you have had a lot of immigration as well. These are seafaring people. So a lot of them would have simply left the island and walked off to Tahiti or somewhere near like that.

So when the population decline and the resources declined. The theory of reality and the religious beliefs changed, right, with the more stressful conditions on the island, with less resources, less food, less trees. The people of Easter Island just they started the fight more, they started to become more warlike and more tribal and more competitive with each other because there was less resources. But then around the 17th century, something interesting happened. They were still collapsing as a society, there was still a lack of resources, they stopped engaging in warfare, they stopped fighting with each other.

Because I'm assuming it was it was too costly to be killing people, but I have a kind of a heartache, too. I think there were so few people, less than a thousand, maybe a couple of hundred on the island that it was impossible for them to for different groups to dehumanize each other. In order for warfare to exist, one side needs to, in their minds, completely stripped the other side of humanity. And then that makes killing OK.

That's how warfare happens. All those over there, they're less than human. Therefore, it's OK to kill them. That's a common human thing. But on Easter Island in the 17th century, everyone probably knew each other. There were so few people, everyone knew each other and the concept and everyone was probably related in some way, either through blood or marriage. And the concept of actually killing each other became. Unacceptable. The pain people were too close, so it became unacceptable, so they developed this this new way to engage in conflict that wasn't violent.

They still had this this concept of manner, this force, this force that determines resources, that determines your lock, the quality of your life, man is still existed both within a civilization who could no longer build these giant stone statues because there wasn't enough of them. They weren't being fed when enough. So. The concept of Mannar shifted from being present in these statues to being present in in one person manner now flowed through one individual, and this individual was known as the birdmen.

And on Easter Island, near the end, they start to develop this belief called the birdmen cult, right, instead of fighting, instead of hurting each other. Each tribe would elect like one man who could become the Bard man once a year through this mad competition, the contestants of the birdmen competition on Easter Island. The contestant was chosen by the contestant, was revealed to a prophet in a dream. So they had these profits. Each tribe had a profit and this person would dream up who the contestant was going to be.

And the contestant was always like a tribal leader. So once the once the tribal leader was revealed in a dream, this person must be the contestant. Then the leader, of course, isn't the person who's going to be the contestant. The leader then picks like the strongest young lad in their tribe to be the contestant in the birdmen competition. So how the birdmen competition worked was just off Easter Island, where it was this tiny Little Rock. Right.

So you wouldn't even call it an island and easily. I think it was called put this rock on on this rock live, the type of bird called a salty turn right. And what the goal was, is the Birdman contestant had to swim out to this rock with some basic provisions, like swimming out naked with some basic provisions wrapped up in reeds that they would tie to their body and then swim out to this rock where the birds lived. And it was really dangerous, like they died and everything like it wasn't.

This was serious business. So the contestants would have to swim out of this rock if they were lucky enough. They made it to the rock. Then they had to wait there for the chance to start nesting. And the goal of the successful birdmen the past, the man who becomes the bird man was the person who could collect the first egg that was laid by the Saudi turn right. Then they strapped the egg to their favorite. And had to successfully swim back to Easter Island with the egg strapped to their forehead, so then when the lad with the egg strapped to his forehead reaches the shore of Easter Island, he would roar out at MIT, my tribal leader, one, I have the egg.

He'd say, go shave your a.D.A, go shave your head, you have the egg. And he'd shout this from the shore. And then someone else would hear that and they'd shout it all around the island until it reached your mind. The tribal leader who was revealed in a dream. Then the tribal leader would have to shave his head or. And then the fellow that lost the father, that lost the father that last he got no egg, had to stay on the island with the birds on the Little Rock, with the birds and fast to think about the fact that he lost.

But anyway, so that the tribal leader who don't fuck all, he just been revealed in a dream. He was then standing at the top of a mountain and then the younger lad with the egg strapped to his forehead had to climb the sheer cliff face because he could still die at this point, had to climb to the top of the mountain and then present the egg to the tribal leader who at this point had shaved his entire head and painted his face and body.

Right. And this tribal leader now had all the manner, the manner, energy that 300 years previously had been, you know, brought into these big stone heads. Now, all the manna was in this tribal leader. All the other tribes had to give him gifts, had to give him resources. But what it meant, crucially, is that he became the birdmen and the his tribe had the sole rights to go to the island with the birds and collect all the eggs.

And that's what that meant. He was the bird man and his tribe could get the eggs and get the resources without blood being spilled. And then the leader, the fellow who's done fuck all on he received the egg he then had because he had all the manner, because he was the bird man. He had so much manner that the energy and power of it was dangerous for anyone around him. So he had to live in in complete isolation in this hot locked off.

And all you have to do for an entire year was to grow his toenails as long as he could and just eat and sleep for a year because his manner was too powerful. And he that that's he was he was like the president, I guess I suppose I'm thinking and talking about this because I'm trying not to think about the US presidential election. But I'm just marveling, as you know, we are here. You know, that bird shit sounds bizarre, you know, it's how they decide who the leader is.

Alad has to swim when an egg on his forehead and then if he wins, the leader grows his fucking toenails long. That's the long, long tunnel bird birdmen. But it's so more civilized. It's so more civilized than modern society. This is a society. Who decided to exist without war? They're like, no, we can't. We can't go killing people for power. There must be another way, and it's it's.

They most are really believed in this man's stuff because the cynic, the 21st century Western cynic in me. Like, if we were to do that in Ireland now, if we were to go right, what we're not having a general election. We're going to have a crack at based on the traditions of the people of Easter Island. We feel that general elections are too divisive to get people to angry. Let's have a crack at the birdmen competition. And you'd have.

Mary Lou McDonald and Leo Varadkar, what happened to the levee? They'd have to swim, race each other up the ball island and then headbutt a rat. They'd swim up to Ball Island and the first rat they see if they had bought the rat to death, then duct tape the rat to your forehead, swim back down to a kind of bridge, and then after a kind of bridge, run into supermax. Right into that supermax there near the GPO and get a guy like Chip, Mary Lou McDonald would win and then the winner would stand beside fuckin Jim Larkin statue outside the GPO with a rat sellotape to their forehead, heralding aloft a supermax garlic cheese chip.

And this would be the winner. That's the noticia. There's the Noticia, we all saw it happen, Mary Lou swam up, the Liffey had boarded the rat up and Paul Island, we all saw it. We had a helicopter camera crew, undisputed. She is now holding the galaxy's chip. She is the birdmen. People would just go, no, I don't like the result. I don't like the result, I don't want her as as my teacher.

I don't care that she had the rat. I don't care that it's duct taped to her forehead. I don't care that she's holding the fucking supermax garlic cheese chip. I'm not having her. No one would respect this. Because we wouldn't have had the man, and I'm guessing in Easter Island. Because you're you're thinking, well, what if what if you didn't? What if even if the Birdman won and even if he had the egg and even if he had the big landowners?

What if you just simply don't want them to win? Are you going to revolt? Is there going to be violence? And I guess not because of this belief and manor, the manor belief must have been so powerful that it's like this is out of our hands. It wasn't a competition of prowess. The best swimmer didn't win. It wasn't the most athletic person that won, the minor chose this winner, and we can't fuck with it because a lot is at stake, a lot at stake.

A man comes back with an egg on his head and the person he gives it to is like, well, my fucking tribe get to eat the eggs. Here we are on this tiny island. That's all. The food is gone. There's no fucking trees, right? All that's left is fucking eggs. And they're mine. They're mine and the miner has decided it, and the other tribes, I'm guessing, would just have to respect that. But also what I'm assuming is there was probably sharin.

This group. The Birdman's tribe had first dibs on the eggs, but they probably gave some to the other tribes that didn't win. That's probably how it worked. That's probably how it worked and. Maybe there was wide, wide scale immigration, emigration was a thing a lot of people from Easter Island, they went over to D'Haiti. And maybe the tribes that were maybe that's what happened. Your tribe, one, your tribe had access to the eggs, then the other tribe had less eggs.

So for them they experienced the recession and they just fucked after the Haiti. But it seems at that seems more civilized, it just. We have this temptation to look at that and think, I'm not mad. Why is that mad? Why? Why is that mad? And why can't we do it in Ireland with a. Arus. On Bull Island, but we almost we almost have a tradition that's similar enough to the Easter Island pardon tradition in Ireland.

There's a place down in Kerry called Oregon, a little village and since.

Since like Fokin, the 17th century, they have this thing called the Poque Feris. And what happens is one day a year, I think it's like Throned August. A group of people head up to the mountains and they catch a wild goat, they catch a wild goats, and then the goat is brought to the town square. But this happens every year and then they get like a JCB or a crane and they put it they put a crown on the goat and they elevate the goat high into the air in a cage.

And everyone parties below for like three days with the goat is up there as a king. And this happens. I doubt it happened this year because a coronavirus, but it's been happening every year and Kerry since the 17th century. Are not the 16 Fokin hundreds. Now, when I first heard it, I I'm I'm guessing what that is, is like it's it's an Irish resistance, a type of. And Irish resistance to the concept, their idea of a monarch.

It's like mocking, you know, if you're in Ireland, then you have this foreign fucking English king that you have to bow down to. And, you know, there's British soldiers in your honor, their role and their law. The one little bit of resistance you have is to create rituals that poke fun at it so you get a wild gold and you called the gold king. And that's really funny. Oneone mythology around it is that there's this Irish Songpol Kabbalah, and it's a belief that in.

When when Oliver Cromwell writes, in the 17th century, Cromwell was conquest in Ireland and Cromwell's famous quote was said to US soldiers, get your swords drunk and the blood of Irishmen. Cromwell was brutal. Crime committed genocide in Ireland. And there's a story that in Kerry Cromwell, Cromwell's army was invading on the town in Kerry in still Oregon. And what happened was his army came across this heart of Goetze.

And the goats ran away, obviously, when they saw this falcon advancing army, but one gold in particular broke away from the heart and came down to the town and the townspeople were like, the fuck is that goat doing here? Like, almost like when when seagulls come in, you know, when seagulls come in, you know that there's a storm out sea. So the people in town were like, fuck is this goat doing here? This isn't this isn't right for this girl to be in the town he should be with.

It is hard. What's he scared of? What's happening? And that this goat came into the town and ended up accidentally warning everyone about grandma's advancing army. And then the town were like, I don't know what the fuck the goats doing here, but it's bad news. Let's get the fuck out. And then when Grandma's army came in to commit genocide on the town, he didn't find any people because they did run away. And this is where the Depok Fair, the goat comes from.

How about that as a way to find our elected representatives? I don't want to know your opinions on the economy, I don't care what your opinions are on Ireland's corporation tax. Falkoff up there and finally got Willia, and then we decide who gets to be king around these parts. There is a slight political element to Depok there because.

Like, one big political issue in Ireland is whether we should model modernize our nightclub nightclub laws to kind of coralline what Europe like in in in Spain pubs, just that nightclubs just stay open all night. They just stay open all night until the morning and people come and go. And people say that that's a healthier, smarter way to have nightclubs. But in Ireland, we don't have that.

Everything shut down a two hour 2am port in fucking Killgallon during the Park Fair. The pubs stay open till three a.m. and it's not official. The guards just don't enforce it. So the only place where the pubs will stay open till three a.m. are longer. Once a year is in this little village and carry because of because of the fucking poque fair. So in a sense, it's political. The law gets bent, gets broken for one night because gold is declared king.

I think it's time now for an ocarina pause. A little pause, because there's going to be some adverts inserted and I don't want you getting a surprise and having your podcast whole ground, so let's play the ocarina. No. Are the weekend time to catch up on some preciously?

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Twitch is just unbelievably enjoyable and it's a great creative space and it's nice during the fucking pandemic as well. It gives me a sense of it gives me a sense if I could speak into people, I don't get a chance to speak to people. I'm quarantined for fucking more than six months now, you know. So that's twitch dot com forward. Slash the blame by podcast. Recommend the podcast to a friend. Shares all that. Carry on. You know, the crack.

All right. I do this shit every week because people come and go. People come and go from the patch on people coming home from Twitch. And this is my full time job. So I got to do this or else there's no one paying bills yard. So what else do I want to talk about? We're not talking about the U.S. presidential election. I want to talk about the folk music of Colombia. Now, as you know, if you listen to this podcast, I'm fascinated with music of all types.

If I'm bored, I will literally just decide. I wonder what music sounds like in Colombia and I will end up on a big, long Spotify haul and a YouTube hold on Wikipedia finding out about Colombian music, art. Then I might decide what is Peruvian music sound like? What does music sound like in Chile? So I went through a phase of listening to the traditional music of pretty much every country in the world just for crack, because I find that enjoyable.

And as like I like hearing how different music is influenced by the physical environment, by the politics, by the the people who came and went. How certain music from here can sound like certain music from there and. With all of music in South America. You can kinda I can hear all the different folk music and it can make sense, it's usually a mixture of indigenous music from the area, West African influence because of the transatlantic slave trade and then a little bit of European.

And this is present in all the different musics that you find around South America. And they're all different. But then with Colombia, Colombia is the one that stands out as going these days. Doesn't sound like any other folk music in South America. What the fuck is going on with Colombia that it sounds so radically different to everything around it? I'll play a little example.

So that there is Colombian traditional music that's called vallenato, very narrow vallenato is the style of Colombian traditional music, and it sounds completely different to any other traditional music from the surrounding countries.

It's completely unique. Specifically, the use of the accordion and the accordion is all over. This Colombian vallenato music accordion is without question the most prominent instrument, and the accordion doesn't feature anywhere else. In traditional South American music and the music that most closely sounds like this Vallenato music is German traditional folk music.

So when I heard this one, when it popped out, I'm a ago and what like if I'm listening to all the music in South America and then one is is wildly different to the rest, I didn't immediately have to find out. I'm just like, what the fuck is going on with Colombia and accordions and why does it remind me of German folk music or stuff you hear in Switzerland or even a little bit of French? And then lo and behold, I find out that in the 19th century.

German ships and traders used to go to Colombia quite often, right, and the sailors on the German ships used to trade their musical instruments with Colombian and it's the 19th century now with Colombian people in exchange for whatever they had and the Colombians were getting all these. There are specific German Hauner horn or brand accordions, diatonic accordions. The Germans were just the Colombians were like, we want your fucking recordings is given to us their class. So all these German accordions ended up in Colombia in the 19th century.

And then they started to mix the accordions with traditional Colombian percussion instruments like bongos. And there was a type of flute, a Colombian type, a flute, and they developed their own folk music with these German accordions. And that's why. Colombian folk music sounds so different and so strange to the music around it, and it's really beautiful because we take for granted now like with the Internet now, that can't fucking happen, you know, musical. Specific musical genres, being unique to certain, being unique to certain areas, is something that only really, really exists when you can't hear recorded music.

Like. Those lads in Colombia in the 19th century, they were simply handed an instrument, they might have heard German sailors playing it. I'm sure the German sailor showed them a thing or two on the accordion. But ultimately, they're existing in isolation. One instrument, and this gets the. Offshoot into something completely new, some completely new thing, almost like the influence that. I mean, certain ingredients would have had an cooking like the tomatoes, the tomato came from South America and made its way over to Italy.

What the tomato do to Italian cooking? Italian cooking is not Moroccan tomatoes. No. You know. What what Italian can be without tomatoes, so the the the accordion is the Colombian music, what tomato is to Italian cooking. Potatoes, men. Potatoes come from fucking Peru. We all need potatoes, tobacco, chocolate, these are all South American things and we refer to this as the Colombian exchange. That's what it's called because of Christopher Columbus, the Colombian exchange, when a load of fruit and veg and animals and livestock went between the Americas and Europe and changed how we how we eat and how we live.

But I never thought of it with music going in the reverse direction, you know? But then it got me thinking that can't just be an isolated case. They can't just be an isolated case where an instrument would arrive somewhere and then drastically change the sound of of of a people's music. And then I heard this shit from the 1970s. So that there is music from a place called Cape Verde, right, and Cape Verde, it's this island off the west coast of Africa.

And again, I would listen to traditional music from many different parts of Africa in particular, I'm interested in music from West Africa. Because the traditional music of West Africa and opera, Morocco as well, North Africa and now music, it's called, you can hear in West African music the roots of blues and jazz and have a particular interest in that. But then I start listening to music from Cape Verde and it's radically different, radically different to everything else around it.

In particular. I'm listening to that. And I was going for me, is that a synthesizer? Because I thought it was some sometimes weird stringed instruments can sound electronic. But it wasn't them like that's definitely a synthesizer, and then I went listening to more music from the 70s from Cape Verde. And it was all of it had all these synthesizers, but the rhythms weren't like pop music, it wasn't like disco rhythms, it wasn't forfour, they were quite complicated African folk rhythms.

So immediately that gets my senses tingling. I'm like, I need to find out what the fuck is going on here. What is going on? That's this music from this African island. This West African island is using electronic instruments. And I'm not hearing this in other music from that period in any other part of West Africa. What strange thing has happened here in Cape Verde? Is it like Colombia? Is it like Colombia with the accordions? And my senses were correct.

So it turns out in 1968 race, this ship left Baltimore. Now, I don't know what Baltimore was it was it Baltimore in the US or Baltimore in Cork? I can't find that out. I'm going to assume it's the US because it's 1968. So this ship left from Baltimore in the U.S.. Yeah, Baltimore is still in the U.S. It left Baltimore in the US most likely. And it was heading for Rio de Janeiro down in Brazil. So leave an east coast of America all the way down to Brazil.

And then the ship went missing and I mean really missing, I'm talking fucking months, no one could find this thing. Now, the journey from Baltimore to Brazil is a fairly straight line down. So the ship drifted all the way. E! Until it eventually reached West Africa and the ship ends up four months later, right, the crew are nowhere to be found and the ship ends up on the coast of this little island, Cape Verde, off West Africa.

And it turns out the ship was gone from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro because in Rio de Janeiro in 1968, there was supposed to be this huge exhibition of electronic music instruments because they would have been a massive novelty in 1968. They would have been a novelty. They would have been incredibly expensive, ridiculously expensive, prohibitively expensive. Like to own a synthesizer in 1968, you'd want to be fucking either a very wealthy musician or a studio might buy one or a university might buy one.

And they were heading down to Brazil and the ship gets fucking lost. So the ship ends up wrecking just outside Cape Verde. So then the police commandeer the ship and it's like the crew's not around. Fuck it, let's open up the ship and they open it up. And inside it, they find hundreds of like Moog synthesizers, Rhodes pianos, organs, all these cutting edge, high end electronic instruments wash up on the shore of this small, tiny West African island and the leader of the country at that time, the leader of Cape Verde, he was anticolonial.

So this anticolonial leader was like, well, fuck it. If a ship washes up on my shore, I'm taking what's inside it. So the leader basically took all of the synthesisers, all of the organs and decided that they were to be equally distributed to all the schools in Cape Verde. So now all of a sudden, in this case, this poor nation, you have all these kids and they're playing traditional Cape Verde West African songs, but now they've got cutting edge synthesizers in the classroom.

And what you end up with is this early 70s.

I don't like some people call it space echo music, it's unlike anything else because these people in Cape Verde, they've never heard electronic music. They've never heard a synthesizer. It's the late 60s, early 70s, they've simply been given the people there thought the ship fell from the sky. That's they said the ship fell from the fucking sky. They've been given these instruments that they've never heard played.

And they're just fucking around with them and they're doing what they know, which is mixing it with the rhythms of their tradition of folk music, and then they invent this completely bizarre type of electronic music, which has no nothing else. Sounds like it is its own unique fucking music, which then went on to inspire more electronic music throughout Africa. And it doesn't there's not a huge amount of recordings around, and I'd imagine a lot of the music got lost.

But someone released the compilation a couple of years ago called Space Echo The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde, because Cape Verde is called Cabo, where they know it was a Portuguese colony. And now it's independent, I believe, but. The folk and folk music of Cabo Verde that has electronic instruments that was years ahead of its folk and time, and what's beautiful about it is its naivete. It's the music is naive because the musicians received these instruments, had never heard them before, didn't know what they were, and managed to find a use for them that fit in what they were doing with traditional acoustic instruments.

And there's a there's a beauty in that the same way with the lads in Colombia, with the accordion's. You can't that doesn't exist anymore. You can't get that anymore. The Internet ruins that. The Internet and the capacity and ability to hear recorded sounds ruins that, you know what I mean? So that was the second thing I want to talk about. We're not talking about the U.S. election. All right. And like I said, I'm recording this the night before, so I don't know what the fuckin results are, I don't know.

I'm going to catch you next week. In the meantime, be compassionate to yourself, be compassionate to your neighbor. I don't know what next week's podcast is going to be. Hopefully, it would be a hot take of some description. I'm going to be on the lookout for new guests. I think the world is my oyster. Now that I've figured out how to record high quality at long distance, I think I can have anyone on the podcast and have Karakorum.

But yet, mind yourselves. So I know we're all in lockdown again, but if you're getting your little walking, smell the fucking air, smell the autumn, be mindful of the crunch of the leaves and nature, smell the cold, smoky evening this cold, smoky evenings that we have no you know, don't let don't let winter get you down is what I'm saying. We have this this opinion. I say this every fucking year. Let's but we have this opinion that, like, it's cold and it's dark and therefore that has to be ugly or that has to make you upset.

It doesn't find the beauty in winter. There's beauty in winter. Look for it. Find it. You know what I mean. Don't be saying to yourself, OK, shade outside. Therefore, therefore, I'm sad. Find the fucking beauty. Yacked. What a time to turn 17 months in your prime, unpause classrooms gone, training gone, Sohmer slipped by north face to face, let alone the shift. And don't even start on believing everything turned hard, lessons learned and will never go harder than ever already to make up for lost time, staying focused, staying sharp, standing together, a united front for the future.

However it plays out in times like these teach you everything you need to know about yourself. The Electric Ireland Geet Minor Championships.

This is major.