Said the Gramophone - image by Matthew Feyld

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MONSOON
by Sean
Fuzzy photo


RECEIVERS - "Ships & Lanterns".

Listening to this, I think of nighttime at sea cliffs or city harbour: the cut glass of the waves' peaks, the black of the expanse. But then also the shock of a spotlight, that clear bright line, revealing the water to be blue.

"Ships & Lanterns"' sound is an accretion. Pieces placed together, a still-life on the table. Hear a heart's bass guitar, a singer's rayed voice, a cannonade of bass and tom. Hear electric charge, frilled harmonies, something like a melodica. These sounds exist in relation to each other. Taken together, they make a conversation, summon a spirit. They raise a weather system - flashing, trembling, pouring. Some songs you can sing; others you need to duck under, with held breath.

[bandcamp / Montreal's Receivers launch this album on 20 February]


(image source)

10:45 AM on Feb 5, 2015.
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INVITATION IN FEBRUARY
by Sean
Image by Odilon Redon


Tindersticks - "Come Inside". It's snowing, come inside. Here is a saxophone, to coax you. Here is a hot toddy. Here is a clearer picture of each of your heart's cloudy ambitions. There are friends here and also one secret enemy: we will not tell you who is who. There is a vampire. There is a nun. A nine-year-old Hindu boy, get rid of your wife. Ignore your inhibitions, ignore that faint fear that licks at your spirit throughout every hour of every day. You are safe here. It's snowing, come inside. Let us brush the snowflakes from your shoulders. Let us kiss the snowflakes from your lips. Cross the threshold, duck under the mistletoe, slow your heart to meet this gleaming 4/4 time. The universe does not care either way; the universe is abiding here too. [buy]

(image by Odilon Redon)

10:57 AM on Feb 2, 2015.
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SHEAR EXPERIENCE
by Sean
Sheep shearing


Jib Kidder - "Appetites". On shrooms, Stuart sheared the sheep. He hadn't meant to be on shrooms but he was out with Al when he got the text from his pa. Sheeps wont shear themselves. Now pls. So Al doubled him back to the farm then pedaled off himself, cap turned backward. His pa barely said a word - dropped the bucket with the razor at his feet, thump, and stamped off. Stuart took the bucket and and went out into the yard. Across the pungent mud and over the pricking fence, into the shadow of the barn. There were tiny starry twinkles at the corner of his sight. The sheep smelled like sheep. They baaaed like those toys at the shop on high street, a sour sound like cherries. Stuart put down the bucket. He thought to himself, I am high. He rubbed his face and fetched one of the sheep, grabbed it by the collar, but then he had to let it go so he could rub his face again and plug in the razor. Sun was roaring into the barn through the gap in the rafters. Straw was flying like ticker-tape. The baaaas like cherries. Stuart grabbed the sheep again, yanked it gentle and firm, as his father had taught him, clutched it to his knees with a razor buzzing in his hand - brrrrrr fffffffff brrrff ffff fffff shhh brrrrrrrfff. The sheep looked this way and that. It smiled like a happy grandma. It was skinny and weird, hot and animal. Stuart felt like a field of cotton, a field of soft fluffy cotton like you see on TV. [buy]


(photo source)

2:36 PM on Jan 29, 2015.
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SAID THE GRAMOPHONE IS NEW AGAIN
by Sean

Said the Gramophone is now twelve years old. I remember being twelve. It was terrifying. A time when childhood stories, dreamlike and brave, began to brush up against the chafing, torrid, unkind facts of adolescence. So much of being a good grown-up, curious and full-hearted, seems to be a matter of repealing the defence mechanisms learned at that time. Not to be childlike again - but to unlearn the lesson that the world must let you down.

At eleven and a half years old, I almost shut Said the Gramophone down. Dan had told me he was saying goodbye, making time for different things. I published my first novel and won a big prize. I wondered: What's the point? Maintaining this weird old blog, with declining readership, for free, at a time when hardly anyone is using a platform like this to introduce people to new music, when hardly anyone is writing like this, oddly and personally, from a realm of sense and feeling, intuition and dream, not to mention on a site that's green as a pistachio, unfestooned with ads.

But then of course I realized: That's the point. Those are the points. That this is old and weird. That not enough people are doing it. That even if the market can't support writing about anything that doesn't attract >25,000 views, that even if people want music streamed direct to their ears without any intermediary - Said the Gramophone's ambivalence to markets and masses affords it the luxury of stubbornness. Writing Said the Gramophone lets me work things out about songs and art, about myself; lets me figure out new ways of writing, lets me practice new sentences every day. Reading Said the Gramophone, reading the posts and stories by Dan and others, introduces me to wonderful new songs, paints pictures in the back of my heart, and also - best of all - shows me new ways in to music. Each post here, if it's working, is its author's doorway into a song: hand-made, hand-painted, with wood dragged in from the swamp.

I decided I wanted it to continue. And so I packed some provisions, got on my horse, wrangled myself a new gang. In alphabetical order:

  • Emma Healey is a Toronto-based poet and essayist. I first read her work when Dan asked her to fill in for him here. Last year, she wrote "Stories Like Passwords" one of the most important essays written anywhere in 2014. She loves music and dislikes puns. She writes like every sentence is a book of matches.

  • Jeff Miller is a Montreal-based writer and zinemaker. He has been publishing photocopied, stapled, stamped-and-posted issues of Ghost Pine since 1996. Some of this writing was anthologized for a 2010 collection, showcased on this blog. Last week he took me to more-or-less my first hardcore punk show. It was awesome and as we trekked home through the snow and cold I could think only of how hot the thrill in my chest. Each of Jeff's stories is like a new arrow.

  • Mitz Takahashi is a musician, woodworker and furniture-maker who was born in Osaka, Japan and now lives in Montreal. He DJs and plays in bands, including Mavo, who have appeared on this blog. He loves amazing music. English is his second language so he has found new ways to use it, shortcuts and cheatcodes, and his sentences have a way of undoing me.

  • I'm still who I am, and I'll go on posting.
Starting today, Said the Gramophone will once again be updated five days a week.

Thanks to all of you reading. To Jordan Himelfarb and Dan Beirne. To Emma, Jeff and Mitz, for joining this dumb folly. Please leave some comments on their posts, in the coming weeks; let them know if you're listening.

1:39 PM on Jan 26, 2015.
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UNDER ROYAL CORONA
by Sean
Image by Andrea Galvani


My Brightest Diamond - "Looking at the Sun".

When you close your eyes
you imagine where you think the limit is
and you make the limit move.


It is an orderly court. A yard of white marble, a white sun, each of the square's four sides bordered by a line of baobabs. Osiris on his throne: just a plain wooden chair, nine pieces of wood, inscribed in gold by the first high priest. Osiris sits straight, but not too straight. There is no effort in it. Seated, erect, listening to his two closest advisors. Four steps away, a knot of merchants. Four steps beyond them, an admiral, an astrologer, a priest. The courtiers wait in a space beyond that, clustered around a musician. There is the sound of spring birds, the visitor's lyre. The conversations in measured voices. A close observer would watch the way Osiris's eyes move from one face to another. It is a snap of focus but he makes it seem like a gradual thing - something invisible and foregone. His advisors do not dare to watch him. They cannot know where he is in the process of looking to; they do not want to be caught peeking. Instead, they make statements that they know to be true. They give advice that they would die to defend. The musician's song is like a sunbeam unpeeling ray by ray. Beneath the court, it is rumoured, there is an underground river.

[buy]

---

Elsewhere:

  • I am hiding in this gorgeous video for James Irwin's "Sahra". Album launch in Montreal tonight.

  • However I will be spending this weekend at Fredericton, New Brunswick's Shivering Songs festival, alongside Owen Pallett, Bry Webb, Henry Adam Svec, Peter Broderick, Buck 65 and more. I'm doing a reading on Saturday.

  • Can't wait to dig into Aquarium Drunkard's mixtape of vintage Saskatchewan gems.

    • Tune in on Monday for a big announcement.

    (image source)

    11:59 AM on Jan 22, 2015.
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    HEAT DEATH
    by Sean
    Astronaut by Scott Listfield


    The Soundcarriers - "Entropicalia". Takes a few seconds, sometimes, to work out if something is being done or if it being undone. Your eyes or ears take these moments to adjust: to work out the order in the shapes & lines, the clatter & motorik. Then you see: this is doing, not undoing. This is assemblage, erection. This is weaving and growth. You listen to "Entropicalia" - its Neu-like swagger, its Stereolab shimmer, its Broadcast shine - and you hear the accumulation of rhythm, chords, voices, harmony. A luscious gathering, loose and tight. Galloping movement, rising temperature, soaring melody. And then the gradual realization: it is not always a choice between doing and its opposite. Sometimes assemblage is collapse, growth is destruction. Sometimes, entropic, everything gets hotter & wilder & freer until finally it's ruined.

    [buy / with thanks to David Belbin]

    (image by scott listfield)

    10:37 AM on Jan 19, 2015.
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    MINUS SOME CENTIGRADE
    by Sean
    Blue ombre


    Christine and the Queens - "Saint Claude". French pop with the interesting (time-honoured) tactic of making the chorus en anglais - a break from what's come before, a change of affective key, a switch from what's frilled and elegant to something a little clumsier, to something much more vulnerable. The words themselves aren't great, or those soppy strings, but "Saint Claude"'s full musical landscape, that sunlight dancing on ice - it's enough to make this track compulsive, a little treasure you want to hear again. [buy]

    ---

    Some wonderful changes coming up soon for Said the Gramophone. Super excited. Stay tuned.


    (image source unclear)

    10:49 AM on Jan 15, 2015.
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