The first instalment in terciopelo's HIGH-MINDED TRILOGY is essentially a lo-fi rare groove record with extra Latin swing. The duo riffs on online habits, disinformation, and environmental destruction.

We were partially educated in liberal arts schools, but the lattes, libraries and labels were not enough. We fled the academy to wander Western Europe for a while. We do not lead glamorous lifestyles and have, for many years, been known for our questionable dress sense.

the neighbourhood of poblenou is new. it’s right on the beach and has a high concentration of brit & US expats because it’s where the tech companies reside. we found a little flat that we were gonnabe sharing with another short-term renter. it was right opposite the sala beckett. the short-term renter was a flat-earther and he wore tees and hats that spelled it out. one night we were watching 'las chicas del cable’ practicing our spanish when he came in, sat down and started explaining that the queen of england was a reptile, and that stanley kubrick shot the moon landing in studio 237 in hollywood or pinewood, or somewood. he didn’t really go outside. he spent a lot of time online.

sandra was a dancer from almería who'd grown up in london and not gone back to spain with her family when they'd returned. we’d become friends because she couch surfed and was trying to make her fortune following a dream. her mum back in almería told her it was dangerous and stupid, but sandra took no notice. she ended up in love with an older woman who lived in croydon, and the older woman smoked in bed and had lived on the bowery in NYC with some punks and glenn o’brien in ’81. her cultural cache is so hot!, sandra used to say to me. a while after they met they went to montana or somewhere and lived in a commune for 6 months. when she got back sandra told me she was being manipulated by this older woman and that she needed a place to stay. this older woman had taken sandra's phone and gone through it and found all these people sandra had never mentioned before. ultimately they were just colleagues she rehearsed with and went out for coffee with now and again. i told sandra she could stay at mine, but that she couldn’t get under my girlfriend’s feet cause then that would make my life difficult because my girlfriend worked at home. then sandra said, oh, she still an online social justice warrior? there were all kinds of implications to this rhetorical question, but i blocked them out. no, no, no, sandra went on, it’ll just be a place to sleep and then eat in the morning. within 3 weeks she’d met another woman named deborah and before we knew it they were playing larry heard and theo parrish all night long, and leaving tarot cards all over the bathroom floor.

one day a pigeon, or perhaps a dove flew into our window at the back of the flat. deborah heard the thud, thought it was a ball being thrown, opened the window and saw this poor bird writhing on the ground. her instinct was to go and get it. don’t meddle in nature, my girlfriend told her, but sandra went down and got it anyway. we were all unemployed. we spent our days nursing this bird. it brought us closer together. but our feathered friend wasn’t getting any better. her eyes blinked more and more slowly and she started refusing seed. the mood in the flat started to turn morbid. it was clear she’d never fly again, never recover. i started to think my girlfriend had been right all along. now all of a sudden these three women were looking to me to put this creature out of its misery.

then sandra got a job working at a cabaret club in soho and moved into a big flat with a big man, and deborah disappeared.

no clean water,
her sign's unseen,
next time fire
touches the wave machine