2001 was a weird year for me. First time with a proper job (Ericsson, then WGS), first time driving everywhere (for fun and for work related stuff), and first time I genuinely thought I was going to die, when the Aerocalifornia plane I took to Tampico went dark and an alarm rung for the entire flight.

I discovered a different type of stress and with the symptoms, I feared it was going to be something else. Numb left arm, a spot of nausea, sharp pain on the sinus.

Relief came once the Easter brake came and I hightailed to Tampico for a few days. My aunt told me to sleep and I slept for almost 22 hours straight. When I woke up, hungry like a motherfucker, my cd player was spinning Café Del Mar, volume 7, the one I’ve written about before. The track was swollen by Bent, with some impressive vocals by Zoë Johnston.

The expansive synth work, the strings, the faster-than-you-think seven minute runtime. It’s a perfect song and Zoë Johnston sounds like nothing you’ve heard before but you want to relisten to as soon as you can. If you check her discography, you’ll find some excellent collabs with bands like Faithless, and some tremendous solo work on her youtube channel.

That Tampico trip was a bit of a duffer. I didn’t see any of my friends, only went to the beach once after a 3 hour traffic jam (!), and an octopus hugged my leg anf and gave me a nasty rash while fishing on the stone jetty on Playa Miramar. At least I saw my aunt and my cousins, had some great food, and played with my aunt’s pets.

Commuting meant a lot of traffic jams. Thanks, Mexico City. My to go music was the four volumes of Café del Mar I owned. I dunno, it felt right to listen to them when trying to be “professional”. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take the odd Deftones CD here and there, with curious co-workers experiencing the madness of Rickets or 7 Words.

The bursting of the dot com meant a lot of telecomm startups went belly up. WGS was such a case, and although they re-structured with less personnel and a newer office, I was never a part of their new setup, so I started 2002 with little to no money, doing websites and interactive cds (REMEMBER FLASH!?!?!) to get by. Serendipity helped me and on May of 2002 I applied to the University of Nottingham. They accepted me for a Masters of Environmental Science and in early September I left.

Living on my own in a new country was terrifying but exciting. I spent a good amount of time walking everywhere in Nottingham, with my 10-second antiskip cd player. It was a bit of a ritual to listen to Bent while roaming near Old Market Square, and I would make it a point to lose at least 2 hours at the clearance bookshop near Broadmarsh centre. I’m a person of routines, so I would listen to Swollen all that time inside the bookshop, then get my haul back to Beeston after grabbing a bus at Broadmarsh.

I’ll always associate Swollen with those heady days of freely walking in Nottingham, too many worries in the world, old enough to know better, still too young to give a damn.

-Sam J. Valdés López