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.