Archives : all posts by Sean

François Virot - "3". A hailstorm in sunshine, a mountain upside-down, I am in Colorado and it is all summer, radiant with fall colours, I'm confused and heightsick and drinking water til my throat is dry. François Virot makes his racket with the windows open and the curtains pulled, he's racket and tennis racket, he's cock and shuttle-cock. He fumbles everything, beautifully, gorgeously, tumbledown and tumble-up, falling uphill with the grin across his face. [buy]

10,000 Horses - "This Too Shall Pass". Sometimes I marvel at how small a song can be. Like a star, impossibly dim and far away, yet still undeniably a star. This song unfolds and emerges from so small a space. It rises rickety from just a few pieces - ukulele, voice, drum machine - and yet it's still fully, boldly, splendidly a tune. It's a pop-song of edges and winks, glints and flashes, with a promise at its heart. A fragile song with such a pretty melody, such a loud, brave vow. I'm left thinking of rhinestones, pieces of glass; how, if given the right light, even the tiniest jewels will never stop shining. [10,000 Horses are from Montreal / buy]

Pony Girl - "Foreign Life I". A song like a multicoloured coat, a many-kinded garment. They dress up in it one way then another, then another. Something for the grey cast of twilight - a hood, long sleeves, corduroy. Then later something for sunbleached road, an unfurling highway - short sleeves, whites, pieces of cherry red. Pony Girl have a few kinds of music folded in their pockets: the xx, Stars, Casiotone for Painfully Alone. They have a few kinds of music and scraps of other things too - polaroids, love-notes, shards of compact disc. They are collectors, I think, in the midst of a divestment. Riddlers in many-kinded garments, giving it all away. [buy]

Enya - "Echoes in the Rain".

It's an election day today. For me, these dates always feel faintly magical. Set apart, extra-ordinary, tinged with a sense of possibility. All this maybe in the air, pushing down streets and riffling through the leaves. Strange itineraries: voting tucked between breakfast and work, between work and work, between lunch and picking up the kids from daycare. Everyone has Xes on the brain. Different kinds of smalltalk. Anything could be happening right now, could be due to happen tonight; maybe we'll wake up tomorrow and everything will be different. Before the results come in and everything's frozen again, locked into place, we have this slippery election day. Today we've living in the interval. We're living in the blink of the eye.

So here's a song for today. It's difficult to find music for the moment mid-change, the moment in motion and unsettled. Bizarrely, "Echoes in the Rain" does it in declarations. Short, declarative sentences - something is happening / something is happening / something is happening, but each of these somethings is fleeting, a vision that's gone as soon as it's sung.

Watching the sky / Black as a crow
Into the wind / I throw the night
Long journey home / Never too late

Most changing is made up of discrete moments. Discrete, ordered moments - all these squared, settled events that together add up into movement. "Everything flows," Enya sings. "Everything flows," she repeats. But this flow, these changes, all are formed piece-by-piece, note by note, bar by bar, vote by vote, election day by election day. Something is happening, something is always happening. Maybe tomorrow you will see it.

[buy]

Beirut - "Gibraltar".

Look at the line above, the name of artist and song. Two places, two interchangeable proper nouns. A city in Lebanon, an Iberian bay or strait. One is the name of a musical act, the other is the name of a song. Try to forget what you know and then press Play. Listen to this song - this chunky piano riff, shaker and drumskins, the snake-snap of percussion. Beirut/Gibraltar. Which is which? Are Gibraltar singing "Beirut"? Are Beirut singing "Gibraltar"? If this song were water, what shade of water would it be? If it were a longitude, what longitude? Zach Condon sings a line of maybes, ambivalences, nothing Beirut or Gibraltar about it; names don't matter; forget the names, we'll forget them all eventually; never mind specifics; all that matters is whether, when it comes to the ending, we feel like we've found the right one. [buy]

A.G. Cook & Life Sim - "BIG BRATT". This song is like a procession of silvery show-offs - a parade of a fashion-show or maybe a V of birds 'cross the sky. But it's also a boast, a string of boasts, a string of boasts made into a patient, silvery procession. A.G. Cook and Life Sim smooth out Mz Bratt's braggery, even the pop of her gunshots. They make her swaggers feel like shiny ornaments, baubles, things you could possess or hurl across the sky. They disempower her in a way, de-fang her. Turn all this intensity into a pretty, synthy shuffle. And yet there's something mesmerizing in this inversion. There's something fascinating in it. If this is a procession of show-offs, of birds, then these birds are razor-beaked and dazzling. Tamed, not docile.

[from the bonkers, wonderful Xtreme Mixology mix]

CHVRCHES - "Empty Threat".

CHVRCHES' songs like long columns of jewels, staggered gems, dotted lines on a night-black road, gleaming headlights on invisible hills, cats' eyes, cats'-eyes, one harvest moon and another harvest moon and did you know eclipses occur in sequence, regular sequence, once every xx months. These songs like long columns of jewels, staggered gems. Sometimes life is happening at regular speed and then at other times it seems faster, accelerated; and after a few hours or days you realize it has not accelerated, it has always been like this, that it has not got any faster but just become syncopated, re-rhythmed, subdivided by a new hope, a new feeling, new lights in your mind's sky. Subdivide a song and it becomes two songs; or it remains a single song ghosted on itself, a mirror.

[buy]

(Björk photo source since forgotten)

Emily Hall - "Embrace". "Embrace" is the apex of a modern opera composed by Emily Hall, with a libretto by the Icelandic writer Sjón. It is the sound of a man climbing. Scaling an electrical pylon, hand over hand, into a clear blue sky. That climb - reaching, straining, stepping closer & closer & into the space that he wants. An answer at the top of a silver tower, a deluded fulfillment. And throughout it all you can hear the ground below, the windy ground below and all its movements. All its deadly facets. The singer is named Allan Clayton. He is a tenor singing at the edge of his range. He sings at the edge of his range and yet he sings as if he is at home in it, at rest in it, so totally safe as he clambers higher and higher toward oblivion. [buy/listen on bandcamp]

All Dogs - "That Kind of Girl". Physical objects hang together in the air. They exist in space, molecules fastened in a row. You cannot deny their presence or their force - not as a boat nudges through the water, not as a spear is pushed through your side. A song is not a physical object. It is not a boat, a spear. And yet it hangs together in the air. And yet it is a presence, a force. A song is not a physical object. And yet it is a boat, and yet it is a spear. [buy/listen on bandcamp / thanks Hamza]

(image source)