Hello. I came back. It has been a funny couple of weeks.

I did manage to find a decent number and range of records in Brazil, but since I’m still getting my life back together here in London, I haven’t been able to play them yet.

This is a shame, because there’s some interesting stuff, some Brazilian, some just pressed in Brazil, and a few that have nothing to do with Brazil whatsoever. In this latter category is a bizarre 1970 motorola promotional record promoting the hip, right now sound.

Other items included a nice Brazilian pressing (on the equipe label!) of the notorious 101 strings play the sounds of love record. In Curitiba, there was a nice store that let me listen to the LPs, so I got some previously unheard of Brazilian jazz and pop easy listening records from the 60s. I will report more on these in due course.

I have been able to listen to the CDs I got. I didn’t go overboard, but did splash out on the 21-cd Elis Regina box set (detailed reaction to come), some Marcos Valle, and several other nice discs in the Odeon 100 anos series.

This is a dull post on a dial up connection. I have a new computer, which is great. I’ll tell you what though, that pop up message problem on Windows computers seems to have got much worse – I was still signing up for my dial-up account when I started receiving them! The people who send them (the gist is: these messages are so annoying. Go to this site and we will sell you the information on how to not receive them – I got this same message a dozen or so times) are utter arseholes. It makes me sad to think that people want money so much that they will piss off millons of people to get some money from 10 of them. Anyway, I was able to look up how to disable the feature in a couple of minutes; if you have a problem, here’s how to do it…