Day 38

so in London listening to the Songlines CD there’s a track we love by Mexican Institute of Sound, a track called México, kind of politico-funk mariachi. In Mexico I see, along with an actually infinite number of other wonderful things, several references to a book called Pedro Páramo, and I also happen to watch a documentary about Mexican music called Hecho en México which features a mix of famous and well-known names. There’s a kind of bedroom DJ with this kind of absurdist electro track about how it’s really hard for him to get any action in DF because he’s just too weird. I look him up and it turns out that his name is Camilo Lara and he’s also the guy behind Mexican Insitute of Sound, which is actually called, for fairly self-evident reasons, Instituto Mexicano del Sonido, and he uses a lot of spoken samples in his work from a guy called Juan Rulfo, who I’ve never heard of, but it turns out he’s the guy who wrote Pedro Páramo, which I now realise is the book that Hussain told me that I must read, and which I will now actually read, once I’ve finished reading this book in which I now remember I more recently came across a reference to Pedro Páramo (and I also must get round to reading El Laberinto de la Soledad, because it crops up everywhere), and I now also want to listen to everything by Insituto Mexicano del Sonido, and other similar bands and singers, such as Natalia Lafourcade, who, in 2012