Daniel Maze – “Steampunk”
Red After Image
A deliciously atmospheric album, equal parts Tim Hecker, Thieves, and older Manitoba. Soundscapes and beats and untraceable harmonies. The opening track is excellent as well. The best part? This great album is free. Download it here.
But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ, and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunter’s snares.
“Julian Assange’s extremely weird version of dissident “living in truth” doesn’t bear much relationship to the way that public life has ever been arranged. It does, however, align very closely to what we’ve done to ourselves by inventing and spreading the Internet. If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. The Internet is about his age, and it doesn’t have any more care for the delicacies of profit, propriety and hierarchy than he does.”
Unwound – “We Invent You”
Leaves Turn Inside You
This mystical and chromatic opener is an appropriate entry point for the beautiful, confident landscape of one of the great “post-punk” albums out there. Yes, that first part lasts for two glorious minutes.The first sound you hear is the distortion from the tape reel spinning up.
Hearing, a most excellent outward sense, “by which we learn and get knowledge.” His object is sound, or that which is heard; the medium, air; organ, the ear. To the sound, which is a collision of the air, three things are required: a body to strike, as the hand of a musician, the body strucken, which must be solid and able to resist, as a bell, lute-string, not wool, or sponge; the medium, the air, which is inward or outward; the outward, being struck or collided by a solid body, still strikes the next air, until it come to that inward natural air, which as an exquisite organ is contained in a little skin formed like a drum-head, and struck upon by certain small instruments like drum-sticks, conveys the sound by a pair of nerves, appropriated to that use, to the common sense, as to a judge of sounds. There is a great variety and much delight in them; for the knowledge of which consult with Boethius and other musicians.
Manabu Ikeda – “Regeneration” (art inconnu)
I asked him what he was doing with a basilisk and he said that was his business.
Oval – Track One
Commers
Some might hear a track like this and wonder how such a confusion of noise could ever be mistaken for music. I don’t blame them. With Oval, either you hear it or you don’t – but if you do hear it, its unique beauty is without comparison.
And I could not help murmuring: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair. Thy hair is as a flock of goats that lie along the side of Mount Gilead; thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate, thy neck is like the tower of David whereon there hang a thousand bucklers.” And I asked myself, frightened and rapt, who was she who rose before me like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, radiant as the sun, terribilis ut castorum acies ordinata.
