I wrote this in 30 minutes — I recently figured out I’ve got this block about newsletters, I always want to try and make them all arty and interesting. Ooo i’m too busy i’m too busy I couldn’t possibly do it. Well what if I carved out a specific chunk of time where I summarised goings-on and tried not to stop and overthink it. Would it be unreadable, I asked myself
Ill cut to the chase —
NEW ALBUM “MAKING FRIENDS” by OR SOBRE BLAU (Kiran Leonard x Andreu G Serra duo)
LIVE DATES (next one is in two days, Saturday 20th June at THE HORSE HOSPITAL [London, WC1N 1JD], with John Edwards / Daniel Thompson [duo] and Luke Cowan; later there are shows in Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Brussels [see below])
Further context: I lived with Andreu G. Serra in Lisbon many years ago and made a record of guitar micro-improvisations called the Piri Piri Samplers (Memorials of Distinction, 2019). This was reissued (with an extra recording made at Les Ateliers Claus in Brussels) by the label STROOM in 2024. And when that happened they said to us, And if you make a new record maybe we would put that out as well. Many years before I had moved to London and Andreu to the Southern Catalunya Delta, and we had not played together or lived fewer than 1,000 miles away from each other for many years. Still we tried to make something of it and put it together remotely. We had a mostly empty Google drive folder. It wasn’t really working. A few weeks went by where we didn’t really talk. We thought fuck it this isn’t working we need to light a rocket up the ass of the project and convene in the physical world. So in May 2025 we met up in Amposta and spent five days improvising and writing and tracking. Now there are songs (I mostly sing in English and Andreu in Catalan) — a lot of them ended up being about friendship, the long and fragmentary arc of the project, the long and often stupid road of making music as a partial living for past a decade. Over the course of that spring Andreu resolved to renew his efforts to move to the UK, which is now very challenging and expensive because of the EU exit. He spent a few months in Lewisham and we finished the record off. Two days before the record was announced he got his visa. There is a narrative completeness to the record I’m very proud of. I hope you enjoy it.
OK out of time. Well I cut some of it out. Had lots more to say (need to get better at this) will write next week and probably give myself more time
MORE OR SOBRE BLAU DATES (tickets)
22/7 MANCHESTER, Impiety Hour (w dbh)
23/7 LIVERPOOL, Quarry (w Sunglasz Vendor)
18/10 BRISTOL, Cafe Kino
28/11 BRUSSELS, Botanique (more info tbc)