The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motion. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

tumblr_mx70slpRTh1qzv802

Grails – “Future Primitive”
Deep Politics

Grails takes it back a couple notches after the sublime Burning Off Impurities and tense Doomsdayer’s Holiday. Here be restrained distortion, subtle arrangements, piano solus, and less overall dread. It’s Morricone-infused 70s psych rock with an undercurrent of unease, and it’s a very good listen. (insound)

Emperors are necessarily wretched men since only their assassination can convince the public that the conspiracies against their lives are real.

Domitian (shortly before his own assassination)

For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute.

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think

Their silence was of no ordinary kind.

said of the Pythagoreans

Bear In Heaven – “Werewolf”
Red Bloom of the Boom

If nobody had told me it was them, I wouldn’t have been able to connect this vastly varied and ambitious album to Bear In Heaven’s interesting but ultimately unfulfilling follow-ups. Red Bloom of the Boom is a dream of melody in battle with a nightmare of noise: multilayered headphone music that demands your attention and deserves it. This track is pretty subdued, though. (insound)

Sebastian Evans – The Ancients of the World (c.1870)

tumblr_muoopiRbYk1qzv802

CFCF – “Camera”
Music for Objects

A brief and diverse collection of (what else?) object-themed music, Music for Objects is less about hitting a catchy groove and more about creating unique sounds. “Camera” makes the biggest impact, but the keyboard-dominated “Ring” and “Glass” (bookending the album) are an airy side of CFCF I don’t hear often. (insound)

Oh, who can tell? Not thou, luxurious slave!
Whose soul would sicken o’er the heaving wave;
Not thou, vain lord of wantonness and ease!
Whom slumber soothes not — pleasure cannot please —
Oh, who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,
And danced in triumph o’er the waters wide;
The exulting sense — the pulse’s maddening play,
That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way?

Lord Byron,The Corsair

If this hell’s-dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst-quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirligig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease?

Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise

tumblr_mteeogcTur1qzv802

Savages – “Shut Up”
Silence Yourself

I’m not entirely sold on the vocals in this band (or their all-caps “messages,” though I don’t object), but the wailing guitars, clear growling bass, and mega-tight percussion are impossible to not stomp along to — they deserve the hype. You can skip the first 45 seconds or so, which is just album intro stuff. Note: Savages are the kind of band that would punch you for doing that. (insound)

A citizen of London, being in the country, and hearing a horse neigh, exclaimed, Lord! how that horse laughs! A by-stander telling him that noise was called neighing, the next morning, when the cock crowed, the citizen to shew he had not forgot what was told him, cried out, Do you hear how the cock neighs? [fiat “Cockney”]

Captain Grose, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

tumblr_ms8buquJsL1qzv802

Balmorhea – “Constellations”
Constellations

In the predawn gloom you can just make out the pianist slouching in the parlor, reeking of laudanum and rose water, deliriously tapping out a sparse gothic paean to hollow euphoria, then listing, toppling, and waking in the morning having forgotten all of it — the ecstasy, the agony, and the ivory. (/pitchfork) (insound)

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,“ Arkadian Porphyrich says. "What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler