The Psychic Paramount – “Intro/SP”
II

While not as mind-shatteringly intense as the near-nuclear Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural, The Psychic Paramount’s new album is still louder and more powerful than 99% of music. The songs lack some of the traveling I liked on their previous album – the tripartite “Para5,” the ambient freakout of “Ex-Visitations,” the hypno-slow-build of the title track. There isn’t as much of that here, but there are plenty of moments where the noise and the drums and the chaos and the noise seem to transcend themselves and achieve something akin to cosmic glory, and if you were hearing it live, your eardrums approaching the limits of their durability, you would fall on your knees and worship.

Vintage Black Glamour – a side of the 20th century I hadn’t explored much

Vocabulary: Unfeeling Entitlement Edition

heliograph: a device with shutters and mirrors used for sending Morse code via sunbeams
auscultation: listening to internal organs for medical purposes (e.g. with a stethoscope)
erethism: physiologically or psychologically, abnormally sensitive or irritable
appanage: something one is entitled to by rank or position, real or figurative
arras: a tapestry or hanging, or a gift given by the husband at marriage
trepidant: characterized by trepidation (an uncommon adjective)
indurate: to make enduring, unfeeling, or hard, or to accustom
strathspey: a type of slow Scottish dance
corant: a quick but stately dance
pleach: to interweave or braid

Kawahara Kazuhiko, From The Sky Down

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Ghosts and Vodka – “Futuristic Genitalia”
Addicts & Drunks

I’m not sure how to categorize this instrumental guitar play-date, but I love it anyway.

microlawns

“Grand Piano keystone type, about 7 feet in length. Asexual in disposition, it serves as a pleasant-enough nap area for two toddlers curled in fetal position.”

Stills from North By Northwest

Literature, like virtue, is its own reward, and the enthusiasm some experience in the permanent enjoyments of a vast library, have far outweighed the neglect or the calumny of the world, which some of its votaries have received. From the time that Cicero poured forth his feelings in his oration for the poet Archias, innumerable are the testimonies of men of letters of the pleasurable delirium of their researches; that delicious beverage which they have swallowed, so thirstily, from the magical cup of literature.

D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature

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Voltron Opening Theme (no narration)

A break from the usual. This one lacks the opening narration (“This… is the story… of the super force… of space explorers”) and lets you focus on the sweet horn breaks.