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Hello, stranger! I'm Diego Garcia , formerly known as Hotel . This is a doom-scrolling website designed to encapsulate the ongoing forward motion that is living as a single human in Planet Earth using all mediums available to translate what we've been through into new and tangible, repeatable forms - may you find at least part of what you seek in its digital, borderless pages

Flower Eater Anonymous / Jeanette Fan Club / Corotico Studio / Tape Enthusiast / Transatlantic dreamcatcher / Open Guitar Tuner / Tik Tok Detractor / Low Volume Jams / Sun-Drinker / Reluctant Zuliano / Padmasambhava Admirer / Hobbyist Game Boy Game-Maker / Oneiric Albatross / 2023 Dragon's Lair's Pioneer League Final Top 8 Finisher / Suitcase Man / Cloud-factory Worker / Lydian Naturalist / Minimalist Drum Machine Operator / Late Bloomer

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RECORDS

2021 New London Fantasy

2019 Great Balcony Visions

2017 Full Color Padmasambhava

2015 Paisajismo Nocturno

2013 Otras Muertes

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GAMES

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it was at four in the morning that my cellophane sleep was suddenly disrupted by an invisible bird that had decided the time was ripe to erupt into song outside my window - I listened for a few seconds, in a state of sedated shock while trying to climb out of my brain and becoming increasingly aware of the singing’s impossible zigzagging melodies, tasteful flourishes, emotive range and volume.

The more I listened to it the more its melodic lines seemed to branch out, develop, circle back, tell a story. It sounded effectively like full blown gospel desperation, wild with abandonment, equal parts celebration of life, sensual crooning and fist fighting bravado… every vocalist’s idea of a trascendental performance - looking like a paid actor that has just received its cue, I jumped off the bed and started scrambling for my meagre recording equipment.

I pressed buttons, plugged cables into sockets and placed a microphone on the floor pointing out through the window and waited impatiently for my laptop to let me click through to the Logic Pro session I’ve just been tinkering with to open a track, arm it, choose Channel 2 on my interface and turn the hilariously large knob almost all the way clockwise until I heard the singing in my headphones and then quickly tap R to begin recording.

I must have looked completely deranged, standing by the kitchen sink, eyes closed, lights out, headphones on, rocking back and forth slightly. I was hearing the song I’d recorded a few hours earlier - a 3 chord, droning affair written in a made up language under the guise of “credits roll in a theatre were everyone has already left” music for my record - along with the bird’s prodigious singing, and it was making me feel like we were having a telepathic conversation. You have your song. I have mine.

The act of singing it is enough for us. I see you there in the darkness. I’m listening. Then I looked down and of course only then realised everything was blinking red, with big MUTE letters trying to let me know only silence was being committed to my hard drive.

My fingers flew over the keys in a frenzy, rerouting things so the machines could talk to each other properly. I set the digital playhead back at the beginning and then the second I pressed R the singing stopped. The software set in motion diligently, recording nothing but ambience noise. I was gutted. I waited in vain for about 25 minutes for the singing to restart, getting increasingly furious at my short-lived collaborator. Come on you fuck. A second ago you were Elvis. Aren’t you supposed to be trying to get laid?!

Come on, sing! And on it went. At the end I persevered (I was already up, after all) so I recorded some more. I got some small delicate birds chirping, rustling of leaves, a slight breeze and some other birdsong here and there. A lovely backdrop in its own right. Some of it sounded even suspiciously like the original bird in question, yet distant and deflated in comparison. Maybe it was the same bird but it had changed trees and I was hearing it faintly because of the distance.

Maybe it had gotten sick of the whole thing and called it quits on the spot and I was hearing other lesser performers. I’m tempted to write here that perhaps I had imagined it somehow, composed it in my dreams. But the thing is, I heard it. With my headphones on, standing by the kitchen sink in the darkness with my eyes closed. I listened.

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Moon in Cancer, an old song from when I was living in Västertorp and this woman I was living with left to chase some policeman's love in Greece, leaving me an empty apartment to record.


Have you heard of love triangles? - I have a tendency to complicate the geometry beyond such simple shapes.
It was a bright Stockholm summer, fit for rolling around carpets listening to Steppeulvene, sharing cigarettes with Nasir on Sunday mornings, playing accordions upside down, making promises you could never fulfil, falling in love, making a mess out of the hardwood floor, taking care of the bread mamma, running out of tears, smiling menacingly, leaving bruises on people's bodies, burning papers, playing 12-string guitar at 4 am, sun-drying lemons, sending secret signals underneath tables at J&B and other such activities.

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Deborah (New London Fantasy B-Side)


Deborah (Deborah)

thank you for your advice

I'll take it to heart


Deborah (Deborah)

thank you for your advice

I'll take it to heart


"Take what you need

and leave the rest"


"There's no in-between

you deserve happiness"


Oh, Deborah

thank you for your advice

I'll take it to heart


Oh, Deborah

thank you for your advice

I'll take it to heart

(to heart, to heart)

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Big Dumb Sun


I'm over acting smart

I'm going to let the days wash by me

not call back anyone

stay inside and rot my mind off

with a barrage of pixels

on a screen trying to cheat reality

colours more vibrant than life itself

the most fragile of lifelines you'll see


The sun came out today

I saw it burning through my windowpane

have they all gone insane?

I get the newsfeed pumped into my veins


Oh, what a cavalcade of children

playing with their hands open to the wind


One day they'll be fathers and mothers

soon they'll close their fingers in a fist


One day they'll be leaders and lovers

and they'll close their fingers in a fist


One day they'll be dreamers and cutters

closing their hands against the wind


Against the wind

Against the wind

Against the wind

Against the wind

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Everybody keeps trying to talk me into getting into TikTok. Big talk about algorithm, numbers, growth. Hey, I’m just your regular city ghost, trying to swim in the light. All I want is to do like Kate Bush, take my shoes off and thrrrrrooooowwww them in the lake. We're at a weird time… we've stopped talking about art and have started to throw the word content around along positioning, trends, reach, following etc… it promotes a weirdly bravado self centred narcissistic result-oriented kind of thinking, which works out if your interests line up with the model - and it’s really hard to argue against the model when the people involved are actually getting what they want out of it, they’re deep in the game, pressing those buttons, and I can respect that, but what happens when what you have to say (or how you want to say it/what kind of person you happen to be) doesn't line up with the model? Then people look at you like you've gone insane/are living in the past. It’s almost dogmatic, I’ve seen it change people around me, I notice talking to them we’re just not seeing eye to eye on an emotional level about what’s important in a fulfilling, healthy creative life. Man I don't even use TikTok, my girlfriend shoves it in my face sometimes and of course it's funny/interesting, it's designed to attack you from all angles and stimulate your receptors, but TikTok (and all social media for that matter, it’s just specially horrible under that “for you page”/endless scroller shit) just leaves me feeling drained, it revolves around this cycle of devouring mindlessly I just don't relate to. I don’t see what you as an audience member get out of it that’s in your best interests. It’s actually a lot like hard drugs, which makes sense. Instant gratification, a blurred sense of that you’re actually living life when you’re not, etc… It just doesn’t feel right at a gut level, the whole circus aspect of it - dance monkey dance, sell me your eyeballs I’ll feed you cotton candy until you love me. In an ideal world I could just make my art and through that connect to whoever is vibrating at the same frequency and then we could have this relationship (like the one I have with other creators that are essential to me - I don’t think Frank Auerbach is losing a lot of sleep over his engagement numbers yet I’m fully connected to his output) based purely on the art itself. It’s probably way worse for musicians/comedians than graphical artists because there’s just something inherently wrong with whoever wants to get on a stage, there’s some aching part of you that needs it, which is great because then we get amazing records but… you know you probably would be better off owning some sheep and being content with singing to yourself instead of feeling this insane need of being this larger than life character that craves bucketloads of online attention. Also funny how everything is in the air and we’re just wrestling with empty space, some pixels in a screen and the demands of corporations we didn’t know we were working for.

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A Fit of Mundane Enlightenment

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Somewhere in Göteborg

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Buenos Aires, 2024

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The duality of man


Cerulean Blue

Borrowed Shoes

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I'm turning 30 today - been listening to Paul Simon all day

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postal desde Buenos Aires - Enero 2024

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Corotico Studios

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"Living is simple, try to avoid dying"

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Alguna vez fuimos jóvenes

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"det är tufft att vara gullig"

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"say something real abour your life and the life of others around you, what do you have to say, in the face of eternity? what is your subject matter? if you're getting in the ring then throw, jab, move. Remember the winged chariot"

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Train window - sketch and painting

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Recording New London Fantasy in Bengtsfors, Sweden. Three weeks alone.

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Stockholm, 2023

Thai Kiosken Lullaby

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Västertorp, 2022

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Albert - everybody needs a pocket friend sometimes

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Selfie / Selfportrait in oils

As a whole, we remain obsessed with our appearence - the way we present outselves to the world is a carefully curated accumulation of isms with which we try to shape our personality, whatever that word means, the feeble armature to which we cling in the hope of making a place in the world for ourselves - we send selfies to loved ones, we paint portraits, we write songs, we go shopping for clothes, we look back on our pasts armatures and don't recognize ourselves in them, the spheres we use to let the light in distort all images, we wobble through life blind, trying to learn how to see

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