Music makes the Belgian museum come together

It has started being a right bitch to go to work on Mondays. Nice weekend - met some very nice new people and saw the best museum ever, or one of them, which is the Musée des Instruments de Musique. It's in the finest Art Nouveau building in a city of staggeringly fine Art Nouveau buildings - fuck, do I love Art Nouveau - as the F-Word says, the last time architects tried to make their art aesthetically pleasing and livable - anyhoo, it's in one of those.

And it has intruments from all over the world on the ground floor, and then classical instruments on the first, and then I don't know because we got kicked out when it closed. Which is something, because we were there for two hours and usually after an hour in a museum, I'm thinking of getting a waffle or having a beer - sad but true. The charm isn't just the insane variety of instruments, like glass trumpets and displays of international jew's harps and bagpipes, although that's worth the price of admission - they also soundtrack it, so that most of the display cases broadcast a performance on the instrument it displays to the headsets they hand out. Fucking amazing.

And I'll tell you one thing: without Africa, we'd all be fucked. We would have no rock and roll or dirty beats, and no bass at all. We'd all be fucking polka-ing to violins and Edith Piaf, not that that would be so bad occasionally, but I like having a little more. It was really striking how contemporary the African instruments sounded, especially from the Congo - the beats and the instruments.

Here's an extended Suite Française review, and I am off.