Foam Party

At times it's hard to fathom how people survive in the face of adversity. For instance, over the last couple of days, we have been out in Bogota collecting materials to build the studio and have witnessed people with horrendous deformities carrying on with their lives by collecting money and surviving in the only way they know possible. It is a far cry from Britain where the welfare state provides for anyone with a cold, let alone a life changing illnesses.
In a way their plight is indicative of the way Bogota functions as a whole. The society, to a large extent, functions in the face of adversity. We have found, for instance, that we are able to get hold of anything that we want to build our studio, we just have to approach everything laterally. We are used to building in a certain way and being able to get hold of what we want in a certain manner.
However, in Colombia, things are not as easy for the untrained foreign eye. To counteract this we have employed a local friend Diego, who has a lot of experience of building studios, to help us get hold of what we want. He has helped us traverse through the myriad streets and areas of the city to find exactly what we need. But, this being Bogota, we have had to approach certain things as a local would do. We bought some second hand tools the other day as good tools cost the earth over here. Unfortunately the drill we bought broke quite quickly. The next day we took it to get it fixed in the engineering district of the city. It was incredible to witness exactly how this part of the city operates, I mean you can get anything, fix anything, do anything, as long as you know where to go. People who survive on very few means are able to achieve what we take for granted, they just have to make sure they can get by with what is presented before them. Here is a culture that will fix anything, the polar opposite of the disposable culture that has grown in the West.
Without the help of Diego we would have been screwed. When we said that we needed insulation for the studio walls he said that he had just the thing in mind. A little while later we were stuffing a van full of foam offcuts in the foam district of the city (where else?) and sending it on its merry way for a price so reasonable I don't want to write it down.
So here we are with another day dawning and more work to do. Our time is precious and the schedule remains tight but we are getting lots achieved in a short space of time with the help of our friends.

Begin Again

I guess that I didn't really explain before what we are doing back out in Colombia again. We have come out to set up 2 recording studios: one in Bogota and the other in in a small town called El Salado near the Caribbean coast. I am out with Tim Giddings and we are the advance party to actually build the studios. The first one is our own studio in central Bogota and will be available to musicians from low income backgrounds, and when I use that term over here it truly means low income.
My mission is also to sign some agreements that will create FairTunes Colombia as a legal entity and will empower some people over here to represent us properly.
As mentioned before our first mission is to set up the Bogota studio before the 4th October when Nick Minton is to begin some workshops in conjunction with a local Hip Hop festival called 'Hip Hop al Parque'. The festival is a city-wide music event pulled together by government organisations who have invited us to work with some underprivileged young musicians in return for some financial support for the running of our studio.
We have a lot to do and, due to us losing a day (see previous blog) we are well behind as we haven't been able to buy the materials or the tools we need yet, as it is the weekend.
However, we are confident that we can hit the ground running and have sourced some tools already and cleaned out the studio space that is housed in a new music venue called 'Boogaloop'.
Luckily for us we we know some amazing people over here from our previous visits and we now have a solid local team who are helping us out in a variety of ways. So, for us, the hard graft starts tomorrow and we can hopefully start something big here before our journey to El Salado where the crazy part of the trip really begins.

Back Again

Lady luck at times appears a little whimsical as to where her gaze falls, and it certainly wasn't shining on us when we left the UK on our journey to Bogota. More to the point French air traffic control was on strike which meant that French air space was closed and we missed our connecting flight in Madrid. So after a night in a hotel on the outskirts of the Spanish capital we caught our flight and arrived safe and sound in Bogota. This time we sailed through customs who, for some reason, appeared not to be paying much attention to the screen when our equipment laden bags passed through the x-ray machine. So lady Luck was at last taking notice as we rushed a little disbelieving through the airport to meet our welcome party.
As soon as we left the airport building I was rushed in a car to meet with the founder of a charity called CIREC. It was a little overwhelming at first but eventually the importance of a collaboration with CIREC became apparent. We are going to be setting up a studio with CIREC in a place called EL Salado, and this was an initial coming together to become aquainted with each other.
CIREC is an amazing organisation that works on a variety of projects, in particular rehabilitating landmine victims from around the country. They make prosthetic limbs for the victims and have at their headquarters the facilities for said rehabilitation. As I was given a tour of the facilities I was really struck by the importance of their work - 2 people get blown up by landmines every day in Colombia - and came to realise how important it is for us to collaborate with them. I will write more about El Salado and what CIREC are doing there, for the moment we are starting to measure up the space for our new studio in Bogota and have to get to it, so I'm off.