Gustave Moreau – Hercules and the Hydra (1876)
El Ten Eleven – “Living On Credit Blues”
Every Direction Is North
The song’s structure is simple, and the notes and chords are nothing out of the ordinary, but the basic theme is so triumphant and fun-sounding that it’s hard not to listen to again and again. (bandcamp)
Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek. There are, I know, other languages, but they are petrified, or have yet to be born.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Frederick Barnard – Bill Sikes (Oliver Twist)
A man who had been in motion since eight o’clock in the morning, and might now have been still — who had been long talking, and might have been silent — who had been in more than one crowd, and might have been alone! Such a man to quit the tranquility and independence of his own fireside, and on the evening of a cold sleety April day rush out again into the world!
Jane Austen, Emma
Kepler – “Elemental: Blood or Water”
Missionless Days
This slow-build masterstroke has been in regular rotation on my playlist for 12 years now, but I still manage to feel it’s a song for “special occasions,” not to be spoiled by repeated listening. Not that Kepler needed to prove they could do loud, but coming at the end of this incredibly restrained album, this song feels thunderous.
Andy Warhol’s 1985 “Amiga Experiments,” discovered this year
Original poster for Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” by Boris Bilinsky (more)
Manual – “Midnight Is Where The Day Begins”
Ascend
Confluence was an airy ambient album, very like Stars of the Lid in its ethereal swells. Ascend sounds like it’s sampling Confluence, but for a very different purpose (there are beats, for one thing). Its gentle glitches and washes of filtered instruments remind me of label mate Styrofoam, but it exudes the calmness and confidence of the band’s simpler, softer, and surprisingly, later albums. (insound)
Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of that same law which ordains that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian