Glowing in the darkest night

Oh my, oh my. I need to get hold of this album.

Ah wowee. You can download them for free, or a donation, over at his site.

http://prettylightsmusic.com/#/downloads

You caught me drifting

Saltillo - I Hate You

The Pancake Repairman's channel over on Youtube is worth a little peek if you enjoy watching snippets of old films cut to ambient post-rocky type music. 

Aspidistrafly - Porcelain Sky Wink

Lead me astray, eh

I am very much liking Frenic this evening. 

Pages of Lumin

A while ago I was flicking through books in a gift shop, waiting for some people to surface from an exhibition. I was feeling a mite grumpy. The exhibition had been so rammed i'd given up on it, and now I had to loiter in a crowded shop, pretending to be interested in tidy displays of pencil sharpeners and posters.

I nestled into a small gap infront of the books and started to paw hopefully at intriguing-looking spines. Help, I willed the books. And they did! When I peeled open a copy of The wrong place by Brecht Evens, my grumpiness lifted. People nudged and jostled past me, hands reached above my head for heavy books, and I stood there oblivious, staring into the colourful scenes, engrossed, my feet locking unmovable roots into the ground.

I didn't notice my buddies had already left and were huddled outside the window in the street, kicking their feet. I don't know how long they had been there. I'd been lost in those pages for a while, and I shuffled out feeling guilty and entranced.

Wandering around town, I was still mulling over the images. I had so wanted to keep the book, but I always find it hard to justify buying anything that isn't edible. I don't like to accumulate stuff. But I still want to paw at those luscious watercolours. They look like beautiful, kaleidoscopic 'Where's Wally?' scenes. I don't really know what's going on in them but they are somehow hypnotic. Nightclubs, stations, parquet floors, parks, streets, shadows.. it's an alluring, quietly chaotic journey.

Here is his blog. He's Belgian, so only a little of it is written in English, but there are a glorious amount of pictures.

Day after day

I run up and down stairs, along the tops of estates. I'm hidden under wintry layers. My breath escapes in billowy, incriminating wisps. I step on through my trails of cloud, look out across the treetops. I hurry on. And my mind drifts.
What a tempting communion.

If you click upon this link, there is a story told through a delicious scroll of illustrations and spoken word.
http://the-bea.st/

I love Laura Marling's diction, it's clear cut and lilting. She moves us whilst it seems she herself hardly stirs or smiles, a pretty static performer. But the songs stand alone, she doesn't need to impress us with anything else.

"The beast was a creature I did not know, I held him once and could not let him go."
Yet "the more you bent and shook for me the more inclined I was to flee",
says she.

Laura Marling - Night after night

Thursday looms

Múm - Now there's that fear again

The storm is gathering

I cycle home at dusk and watch the trace of a moon grow a little each day in the sky. I rummage in my backpack and pull out jumpers and scarves like intestines. I am feeling for an old camera, I found it buried  in a corner of our rickety house not long ago, halfway through a film. It's almost time to develop it.

I take a photo of the sky. Three more skies to go.

I found a couple of other cameras too, one belonging to someone lost. A treasure. I cross my fingers and hope for a photo of them on the film. I know there won't be any -no one else understood how to operate that clunky contraption so they were always the photographer, rarely the subject- but i'm excited. I'm impatient. I want to see the scenes that were snapped and forgotten -a glimpse of what their eyes saw and wanted to remember. But there is trepidation too. I put the camera aside, I don't want to rush it.

Adam Hurst - Unseen

Soviet bus stops

Christopher Herwig has documented the weirdly imaginative and bold monuments that are Soviet-era bus stops. They look forgotten, and a little at odds with their desert-like surroundings, like an actor missing an audience.

Also worth a look are his pictures of the Aral Sea.

The roaring

Last night I saw Mount Eerie play a set of quiet songs. I was hoping for some crashingly noisy fuzz to blow out my eardrums too, but it was just Phil and Nicholas Krgovich playing some of the softer songs in a folk venue, and getting only as noisy as one guitar and a keyboard could allow. Yet the quiet of it was brilliant. Something about the way he sings seems so disarmingly honest and humble and intimate. His lyrics are pretty delicious too.

There's quite a prolific amount of music he's made and different bands he's sung with, and never a bad song. His artwork is great too! I'm a little bit in awe of him.

Cities rise and fall

Continuing the 'space is comfortingly vast' theme. 

Gas - Microscopic (Ambient Electronic Space)

The inverted ending is nice. We are so very small, but we are vast too! if you change your perspective.

Take me 240 miles above the glittering cities

German set designer and video artist Michael Konig has made this time-lapse video using three months worth of footage shot from the International Space Station. It's ever so soothing to forget the horrors of the world for a moment, and watch this quiet, rhythmic spectacle of light. 

The station drifts far above the earth's atmosphere. The planet spins below. Storms flash, creating their own explosive light-percussion. Green silky trails of aurora spread, mist-like. Clusters of yellow city light trace a filigree map over the dark.

I am very, very small. There are beautiful things I have not seen nor even imagined.
I like to be reminded of this.


Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König.

Your name, lying just where you left it

A sky as white as clay stretches ahead for miles. The trees have been razored to the ground. A film of floodwater lies smooth and undisturbed, a sheet of mirror to the creeping, clay-white sky.

Pick up your name. Brush off the grime. Hold it in your fist and take great gliding strides. Make for the horizon.

 

Bersarin Quartett - Mehr Als Alles Andere

Dear wasp

It looks like we’re going to have to sleep in the same room tonight. Please don’t be too noisy. Tomorrow's a big day for me. And don’t do that thing where you sneak into my bed and I roll onto you and you sting me again. That wasn’t too nice. I’m still kinda upset about that. I don’t know if that was you, it might have been your cousin Jeffrey or whoever. It was dark, I never got a good look. I don’t wanna dig that whole deal up again, just don’t do it and we’ll be cool. Don’t crawl on my face either.

When the quiet deepens

Hold on.

 Javier Navarrete - Lullaby, from Pan's Labyrinth

This makes me smile

Space cartoons, handclaps and desperate lyrics.
Hailing from 1980, meet Italian duo La Bionda and cartoonist Guido Manuli.

Dirt Bike Kid

When your week takes a wobbly nosedive and you wake up feeling tender and more reclusive than usual, when you write off the day and shelve your plans, when you fill up a hot water bottle and an oversized mug of coffee and settle down to finish an escapist book, when you contemplate going out to choose another book but decide it looks chilly out and you'd have to make the effort of finding some less-hobo clothes and comb the tangles out of your hair, which you'd much rather not have to do.. not just yet.

When you want to hide in a cocoon just a little while longer.

If any of this applies, I recommend a dose of 1980s kid films. They cure many ills.

I love the dirt bike kid.  He is awesome. Truly.

Walk quietly by

Goodbye Bert Jansch, thank you for the music, it's wonderful.

"The birds fly out behind the sun
And with them I’ll be leaving"
  - Robin Williamson, October song, covered below by Bert.

 

 

I never can be sure

If we're as free as they say.

Sandy Denny - Fotheringay

Company for the insomniac

Worry needles into your sleep until you snap awake, restless.

You peep behind heavy, psychedelic curtains to guess at the time from the shade of the sky.  The air is a quiet, icy chill, tickled by the skitter of an eight-legged critter that skids across glass brushed with the dappled stain of past dirty rains.

A spindly silhouette.

It dances, it dances just for you.

Listen, listen,  from dream to daylight 

Owl creek street

 

This was a song written for 60s American television show, The Twilight Zone, a series where ordinary characters found themselves lost in strange, supernatural stories. It's sung by the actress Bonnie Beecher. Her voice is the kind that can drift through your ears, into your bones and haunt you.

Here is the clip from the weird episode it appears in, Come wander with me.
Some of the the other episode descriptions sound wonderfully bleak.

Time Enough at Last - A bookworm finds himself blissfully alone with his books after a nuclear war.  
The Midnight Sun - The Earth falls out of orbit and two women struggle to cope with increasingly oppressive heat in a nearly abandoned city. 
The lonely - A convict lives exiled on an asteroid.