Sloucher.orgThe bit that you skip #93: Gazelle – At last, friend
Many songs tend to remind you of your childhood. Another quantity, perhaps greater, hark back to your teenage days. Then there’s songs that make you think of your early adulthood. The wide eyed rookie days. Wages are minuscule, possibilities are endless, and nothing is written in pen.
After Headlights broke up, I trawled for everything related to the Fein clan. First it was Absinthe Blind and their wondrous space age dreamy rock. Then I went for Ad Fein’s and Jeff Dimpsey’s Peléan eruption of a band, Gazelle. Healthy doses of dream pop and electronica gave us an album that sounded like nothing else. Perhaps what U2 wanted to do with POP, Gazelle did with their only album.
Just as I graduated from Electronics and Telecommunications, I went hogwild into ambient and lounge music. After a stint at Ericsson in Gustavo Baz, which wasn’t too far from my house, I got sent to a communications hub in Polanco in Lago Alberto, where it always smelled like chocolate due to La Holandesa being near. After a couple of weeks, I absconded to another central, a few blocks from Lago Alberto, on Kepler. The disorganised wires, dusty countertops and odd rodents of unusual size on the lower flowers contrasted with the upper floor, where I befriended two people, Chrissie and Alan. We would spent most of the time talking and eating in nearby places than doing much work, since a lot of it was tests that took time and the real crunch was understanding the output, then correcting anything in our means.
I would walk from Metro Polanco to Kepler, a good 2 km walk. The metro trip was brutal, as it was peak hour and you were, as Radiohead bluntly said it once, packt like sardines in a crushd tin pack. I wouldn’t dare to use my cd player as you could barely moved an arm, much less try to adjust volume in a noisy commute. Once out of the metro station, I’d go for a small coffee at a small joint on the way to Kepler’s telephone central. I would listen to any Café del Mar compilation I had ready, or just whatever electronica mix a friend gave me.
Chrissie and Alan eventually had to go back to London and we would meet a couple of times later but no longer as employees for Telcel, but as ex-coworkers. I considered them friends. Alan sadly passed away from cancer a few years later. He was pencil thin, and always smoking, holding his cig in a strange “inside ash” manner. Chrissie I talked to a few times, first after arriving at Nottingham in 2002, then after arriving in Sheffield in 2008. I’ve lost track, as one does with friends in life. It’s not intentional, it’s just something that happens and even if we never meet again, we had good times, like the trip we took to Teotihuacán with one of her friends that speak no English at all and paid my tourist guide with delicious plum candies. Or a strange trip to Acapulco where we barely escaped being on a disco boat that meet a grisly end (no casualties, thankfully).
Gazelle’s At last, friend evokes memories of both Chrissie and Mark. Chrissie usually went as “Chwissy” as a joke, and Alan…well, his devil-may-care attitude was always juxtaposed with an encyclopedic knowledge of telecommunications. The song also reminds me of my first days in Nottingham, wandering through town aimlessly. In fact, a few songs that have effect on me. I don’t think I’ll ever have that wide-eye feeling again. But nothing is written in pen. That never changes, though.
-Sam J. Valdés López
https://youtu.be/gfwSNGLAcqM?si=vKLPXRZulZuHoQF7
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