Back to the Balkans this morning, or more specifically, Zagreb, Croatia. There seems to be a hell of a pop music scene there if PORTO MORTO is an indication. This isn’t so much cold wave for post punk, but it’s not really run of the mill pop music either. There’s a lot to it, with echoes of old Yugoslavian synth pop but with horns and some funk rhythms and a kind of Turkish thing too. It’s not exactly breezy either. Whatever it has in it, it’s tasty.

Yesterday was pretty much a bust, except for a sojourn into the East Village and Chinatown. I took some excellent photos but couldn’t really muster the energy to stay out long. Much of the afternoon and evening was spent nearly flat on my back, feeling little more than my pulse from somewhere deep in my head. The throbbing overwhelmed anything else that may have been going on. Let’s just call yesterday… ungood. Let’s make up words. The opposite of good isn’t necessarily bad unless we’re speaking in polar terms. The opposite of good is, for now, ungood. We’ll roll with that. There was nothing that absolutely needed to be done that was left undone. The rest can wait, and it probably won’t be done today either. I haven’t been up long enough yet for today to qualify as ungood, but…

There’s something really special about this album and I can’t really put my finger on it. I’m going to let it sit with Portofon for now. Even the album cover makes me happy with it’s strange hieroglyphs. It would actually stand alone on its own merits as art. That deep red…

That deep red.