For God’s sake consider the consequences to your brother—to his family! I tell you that malice and rapacity are at this moment gleaming like wild wolves within a few paces of you—ready to rush upon you. Did you but see them as distinctly as I do, you would indeed shudder and shrink—

Ten Thousand A-Year

The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
   Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted – never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it.

Wilkie Collins, The Woman In White

The Infernal Spirits obey me as their Sovereign: By their aid shall my days be past in every refinement of luxury and voluptuousness. I will enjoy unrestrained the gratification of my senses: Every passion shall be indulged, even to satiety; Then will I bid my Servants invent new pleasures, to revive and stimulate my glutted appetites! I go impatient to exercise my newly-gained dominion.

The Monk

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The Intelligence – “Like Like Like Like Like Like Like”
Males

A raw, basic, and fun album with the charm and energy of The Lovely Feathers and the stripped-down aesthetic of Japandroids. The songs are simple and bite-sized, the longest track (“Males”) running just 4:47, with more than half being an instrumental breakdown and a full minute of glorious, unaccompanied distortion.

Theodore amused himself with relating to the credulous Nuns, for truths, all the strange stories which his imagination could invent. He related to them his supposed adventures, and penetrated every auditor with astonishment, while he talked of giants, savages, ship-wrecks, and islands inhabited

‘By Anthropophagi, and Men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders,’

With many other circumstances to the full as remarkable. He said, that He was born in Terra Incognita, was educated at an Hottentot university, and had past two years among the Americans of Silesia.

The Monk

These faults may occasionally be excused in a work of length; but a short poem must be correct and perfect.“
    "All this is true, segnor; but you should consider that I only write for pleasure.”
    "Your defects are the less excusable. Their incorrectness may be forgiven, who work for money, who are obliged to complete a given task in a given time, and are paid according to the bulk, not value of their productions. But in those whom no necessity forces to turn author, who merely write for fame, and have full leisure to polish their compositions, faults are unpardonable, and merit the sharpest arrows of criticism.

The Monk

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Michael Trommer – “Morning Haze”
Tree Line

This barely-there album is like Tape’s most abstract pieces, further deconstructed and stretched out into soundscapes. Its moments of beauty are like the natural moments of beauty inherent to the world: transient and difficult to isolate. This track doesn’t really get going, if get going is an applicable idiom, until around two minutes in. The album is free.

What can repay me for having kissed the leathern paw of that confounded old witch? Diavolo! She has left such a scent upon my lips, that I shall smell of garlick for this month to come! As I pass along the Prado, I shall be taken for a walking omelet, or some large onion running to seed!

The Monk

Amongst fowl, peacocks and pigeons, all fenny fowl are forbidden, as ducks, geese, swans, herons, cranes, coots, didappers, waterhens, with all those teals, curs, sheldrakes, and peckled fowls, that come hither in winter out of Scandia, Muscovy, Greenland, Friezland, which half the year are covered all over with snow, and frozen up. Though these be fair in feathers, pleasant in taste, and have a good outside, like hypocrites, white in plumes, aud soft, their flesh is hard, black, unwholesome, dangerous, melancholy meat; Gravant et putrefaciunt stomachum, saith Isaac, part. 5, de vol.; their young ones are more tolerable, but young pigeons he quite disapproves.

Anatomy of Melancholy

None sleep so profoundly as those who are determined not to wake.

The Monk

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Black Forest/Black Sea – “These Things”
Forcefields And Constellations

It’s a strange and noisy album, but sounds cohesive in that every track is something that could only come from Black Forest/Black Sea. Often the highest points of more traditional styles of music approach the quality of the best tracks from more popular or ancient bands like the Beatles or Pink Floyd. But it’s nice to have bands that, when they do something perfectly, you think “man, that is so… them.”

Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
Of graceless form and dwarfish stature;
By few approved, and few approving;
Extreme in hating and in loving;
Abhorring all whom I dislike,
Adoring who my fancy strike;
In forming judgments never long,
And for the most part judging wrong;
In friendship firm, but still believing
Others are treacherous and deceiving,
And thinking in the present æra
That friendship is a pure chimæra:
More passionate no creature living,
Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving,
But yet for those who kindness show,
Ready through fire and smoke to go.

Matthew Lewis, Preface to The Monk

A nun did eat a lettuce without grace or signing it with the sign of the cross, and was instantly possessed. Durand, lib. 6 Rational. cap. 86, num. 8, relates that he saw a wench possessed in Bononia with two devils, by eating an unhallowed pomegranate.

Anatomy of Melancholy

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The Cubists – “The Orchestra Breathes”
Mechanical Advantage

There’s something soft and effervescent about this song, like it’s reaching you through a layer of drugs and water.