Cover art for Alex Cobb’s Passage To Morning

Juno – “The Great Salt Lake”
This Is the Way It Goes & Goes & Goes

I missed out on Juno when they were a Seattle band, though I had their split with Dismemberment Plan and later taught Travis’s daughter at preschool for a couple years. It seems they helped lay the foundation for later indie rock bands, and present a sort of middle ground between earlier alternative bands and post-punk stuff, like The Wrens mixed with Built To Spill, if that makes any sense. This track is not representative of the album at all, but is too good not to share with anyone who likes atmospheric rock and hasn’t already encountered Juno. (insound)

The pattern of life, therefore, appears to have made the world weak and to have handed it over as a prey to the wicked, who run it successfully and securely since they are well aware that the generality of men, with paradise for their goal, consider how best to bear, rather than how best to avenge, their injuries.

Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

Svjetlana Tepavcevic – Means of Reproduction

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The Wind-Up Bird – “Violin & Trumpet”
Conduction, Convection, Radiation

This excellent (but rather somber) split between 1 Mile North, Colophon, and The Wind-Up Bird has a number of great, near-ambient tracks. 1 Mile North’s “Ashes & Dust,” with its spare piano and texture, is a departure from their usual guitar noodlings, and Colophon’s contributions acquire perhaps too much poignancy once you know their context (probably better not to learn). But it’s The Wind-Up Bird’s tracks, shimmery and otherworldly, that stand out most to me — this one in particular. (insound)