Albums of the Year 2020

a white piece of paper with colour swatches painted on

Friends, I was so close to not doing one of these this year, but my bad case of archive fever was too strong to resist. For the first time since the depressive loops of my early 2010s, I’ve really struggled with music this year. Yo-yo’d between extremely intense relations to music (listening to Grimes’ ‘IDORU’ three times in a row in spring’s post-cycle endorphin twilight, crying to Mogwai in the supermarket, thrash dancing to old Boiler Room sets alone in my bedroom, knocking everything over, basically living inside Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Garden Song’) and a very numb sense of trepidation about listening altogether. Have gone whole weeks without listening to anything except ’10 hours sounds of a meadow in june’ on youtube. Have gone whole months without noticing new releases. Music has anchored the year in strange ways. I think about the man in my block who kept singing/screaming Oasis’ ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’ in the shared garden, and did this several times throughout lockdown 1.0. I was so concerned. Boards of Canada albums I fell into, haphazardly studying. The conditions of lockdown, not to mention PhD and other pressures, have slowed down my output of published music writing, but I continued to diarise my listening habits and it was a pleasure to write on occasion for GoldFlakePaint, Secret Meeting and other places on new releases from Jason Molina, Phoebe Bridgers, Katie Dey, Superpuppet, Fair Mothers, Modern Studies. As ever, you can dive into the music journo archive here.

What follows is a selection of albums I’ve managed to dip in and out of, form some kind of bond with or which otherwise stayed with me. One of music’s main attractions this year was its provision of sociality: whether through late-night Instagram DMs or seeing everyone’s Spotify listening (pale vicarious experience of sonic simultaneity as commons), running Pop Matters workshops with the inimitable Conner Milliken or losing myself in heartfelt comment sections, music was a kind of touchpoint for contact when other kinds of talk or response seemed impossible. That you could screenshare FKA twigs’ ‘Cellophane’ video and all silently hold in tears while free-writing together on Zoom, that you could send some kind of bedroom performance to a friend when words were scarce, that you could buy stuff for Bandcamp Fridays and feel like you were doing *something* for artists while our livelihoods were otherwise being stripped away by lockdowns, recession and endless government (in)decisions. That you could send lyrics in acts of solidarity. That you could sit round a fire in the Trossachs and listen to ‘Farewell Transmission’ with smoke in your eyes or be in Hackney with a heatwave and Lucinda Williams; that you could cycle past psych buskers on Kelvin Way, or lie on the floor with Grouper recordings from 2018; that you could breeze down Sauchiehall listening to ‘Gasoline’ in a world without cars; that you were lucky enough to see your cousin, Hannah Lou Clark, play The Hug and Pint before lockdown; that you could micro-analyse Angel Olsen remixes with Douglas, lamenting another postponed gig or remembering an old one; that you could walk yourself into autumn melancholy with Grace Cummings, longing for the wind and sea; that you could read Amy Key’s excellent essay on Joni Mitchell’s Blue and remember the first of January, sober as a trembling bell and listening on repeat as everything refused to wake, and wine. Admittedly, I may have missed many significant things. Tell me!

Previous EOTY lists:

2015
2016
2017
2018
2019

In no particular order:

Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher

Angel Olsen — Whole New Mess

Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud

Savage Mansion — Weird Country

Yves Tumor — Heaven to a Tortured Mind

Sylvan Esso — Free Love

Mogwai — ZEROZEROZERO

Minor Science — Second Language 

Caribou — Suddenly 

Moses Sumney – græ

Grimes — Miss Anthropocene

Open Mike Eagle —  Anime, Trauma and Divorce

Run the Jewels — RTJ4

Protomartyr — Ultimate Success Today

The Kundalini Genie — 11:11

Sparkle Division — To Feel Embraced 

Juliana Barwick — Healing is a Miracle

Arca — KiCk i

Pelican Tusk — Rhubarb’s House (EP)

The 1975 — Notes on a Conditional Form

Porches — Ricky Music

Fiona Apple — Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Martha Ffion — Nights to Forget

Gia Margaret — Gia Margaret

Mary Lattimore — Silver Ladders

Jason Molina — Eight Gates

Sufjan Stevens — The Ascension

Fleet Foxes — Shore 

Keaton Henson — Monument

Half Waif — The Caretaker

U.S. Girls — Heavy Light 

Katie Dey — Mydata

Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song 

Eartheater — Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin

Oneohtrix Point Never — Magic Oneohtrix Point Never

Jessie Ware — What’s Your Pleasure?

Perfume Genius — Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

Field Medic — Floral Prince

Braids — Shadow Offering 

HAIM — Women in Music Pt. III

Porridge Radio — Every Bad 

Christian Lee Hutson — Beginners

Soccer Mommy — Color Theory 

Four Tet — Sixteen Oceans 

Lawn — Johnny

Lomelda — Hannah

Bright Eyes — Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was

Pinegrove — Marigold

Adrianna Lenker — songs / instrumentals

Duval Timothy — Help 

The Pictish Trail — Thumb World 

Tomberlin — Projections

Tennis — Swimmer

Laurel Halo — Possessed (Original Score)

Alex Rushfirth — The Moon in the Clouds

NNAMDÏ — BRAT

Autechre — SIGN / PLUS

Superpuppet — Under a Birdless Sky

Bartees Strange — Live Forever

The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You

A.G. Cook — 7G

Playlist: November 2020

drawing of

Surf Rock
for fred and kate

Lioness chained to hillsides of lavender        the sun 
is streaming oversea entirely conceptual homeland
5G howl                                      like how a fractal glint
constitutes one or more endings                and is just 
never never never never never 
lavender exactly                   who unimaginable loses
when fox does                                    borrowed snouts
language of flowers          fuck this                       howl 
again five dimensions


Is you said to me a common placard
stands vantablack in the manacles           jason cries 
his heart broke in your jaw              I swam all night
to the motor show                  roseate perfume of the 
problem                being born out of lobster wedlock
to be ravaged by the neo-marxist programme of
naming us wasp                and other wasp sadnesses
it is for me as I for you           better at swiss twilight 
when               I was community 


In the womb                  wept effort of what insomnia 
does
from the latin meaning wandering
                             policy of “rural lust”        I will swim 
I will swim through hedgerows I will swim I swim
this isn’t the song turn up your sleeves we enter the
chess in brightness mode I wanted the heat the reat
                                     skelped by autofictive descent
another coxcomb 
texts you back                                                    O lariat 


At that altitude paying the rent              in pale world 
and even if she has lost control 
what a car does                          in green light heaven
obscenity pedestrian    the ground here opal silicate
owing you a crush moratorium
cheques out after all
                                     this is just a modern rock song
adjusting   styles pane of my old wound, new wound
at clydebank the skycastles at four o’clock who are u


Harvest season was accordion sonnetry I lifted my 
volta skirts for assholes feeling perennially strange 
in melancholy chord progression of certified orange
is this out of the question              lazily in the grass
lexie and cecil and ariel               open your mouth
be lucid 
corduroy when stevie sings 
harmony on thursday morning exhaustion I thought
             just swish would do it


Could be 1995 
how will I get there                            painting the ice-
course with fairways                          is all that I have 
boygirlboygirl varieties of noodles
                                  bunny calls it cloudheartedness 
be mute in serious leaf together 
is falling 
                          the same as time at all / it got claws 
hi can I have some more bourgeois heroine pastry


Okay to just swim and arrive here                 my salty
fiancé is a type of fish         did you enjoy The Shape
of Water and other films to which I might fuck 
glitching in the real world 
                          darling is a missing numbering
merely the sun                  streaming feminine voices
never never
a century of the Laurieston & all of my guinnesses  
are oxygen                                         saw another fox 


And wherever you are I suppose the squirrels are 
listening
as bartender came home w/ three crystal ocean
we stub the ashes out
we stub the ashes out                                     it’s him
that I am smashed mezzanine      phoning my dad 
                                                          big blue energy 
another song about the suburbs   /   mineral & gem
sometimes I can’t believe


Red lions and lionesses are not metaphors but love 
laura no lies            & lilac passion in the first place 
I wrote about you in my notebook: we might not
even be awake in the world is still in the kitchen 
scratch at my socialist lichen 
                         second paramore whose kisses are 
madness         my counsellor said yeah 
I like those mornings also 
London fog, London fog  

~

Oneohtrix Point Never — I Don’t Love Me Anymore

i_O — Castles In The Sky

Quirke — Luxury Red Pence

Mogwai — Dry Fantasy

Salem — Red River

Songs: Ohia — Lioness

Silver Jewels — Federal Dust

Johnny Flynn — Lost and Found

Keaton Hensen — Ontario

Life Without Buildings — Sorrow

Drop Nineteens – Winona

The National — Dark Side of the Gym

Weyes Blood — A Certain Kind

Marika Hackman — Playground Love (Air cover)

God Help the Girl — Pretty When The Wind Blows

Porridge Radio — 7 Seconds

Elliott Smith — True Love

A. G. Cook — Beautiful Superstar

Bat for Lashes — Peach Sky

Lemongrass — Sayonara

Tennis — Tender As A Tomb

The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)

Golden Mean — Midnight 

Phoebe Bridgers, Rob Moose — Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)

Angel Olsen — New Love Cassette (Mark Ronson Remix)

Belle & Sebastian — This Is Just a Modern Rock Song

(NEW BOOK) neutral milky halo

neutral milky halo loops around the pixelated tempos, imaginaries and myths of this fraught, contingent moment. Poems of weird ecology, cultivated address and tendering detail; poems of disorientation, hospitality, sounding and shimmer. Poems seen through screens, reflected on or refracted from glass; poems seen-through and poems making visible the otherwise shadowed. Poems that envelop the animal, the flower, the technologies of writing and other means of resistance, expression and growth. Weaving the everyday ‘scenes’ of the anthropocene — from starry cosmologies of new gods, months and seasons, to kissable forests and the ice cream trucks that haunt our quarantine — neutral milky halo draws fragile yet glistening socialities for dreaming between ‘thick’ futures.

Pamphlet / 184 x 140mm / 44pp / Mohawk Superfine papers & sparkly pink end papers / ISBN 978-1-913749-09-5.

Cover design by CF Sherratt.

Available now for £8.00 from Guillemot Press.

(NEW BOOK) the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene

Announcing a new anthology I’ve been working on with the wonderful Rhian Williams and indie publishers Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Copies are now available to order…

Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams and with a foreword by Tim Morton, the weird folds intervenes in more traditional canons of nature and ecopoetry to offer a poetics of the anthropocene which is thoroughly generous, queer, sensuous, formally innovative, relational, occult, fugitive and critically sensitive to the mediations of technology and culture which shape our encounters with the more-than-human.

BOOKSHOP.ORG
WATERSTONES
BLACKWELL’S
AMAZON

NOTE: If cover images are missing from any of the above links, please be aware that the books are still available for purchase.

Pages: 296
Dimensions: B Format
ISBN: 978-1838015619
Cat No: DW-001-97
Imprint: Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals
Publishing Model: Tailored

The Author

Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams and with a foreword from Timothy Morton), the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene features contributors working at the intersections of lyric, cultural critique and hybrid forms. The contributors in order are:    Pratyusha, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Jay G Ying, Sarah Cave, Samantha Walton, Rebecca Tamás, Daisy Lafarge, Jane Hartshorn, Francesca Lisette, Max Parnell, Calum Rodger, Miranda Cichy, Alice Tarbuck, fred spoliar, Iain Morrison, Gloria Dawson, Vahni Capildeo, Sascha Akhtar, Fred Carter, Katy Lewis Hood and Therese Keogh, montenegro fisher, Nat Raha, Mike Saunders, Jane Goldman, Harriet Tarlo, Rosie Roberts, Lila Matsumoto, Colin Herd, Paul Hawkins, nicky melville, Kat Sinclair, Nasim Luczaj. 

Praise

This vital gathering tells slanted anthropocenic truths, re-cognising the manifold everyday as a crucial space-time of enquiry, excavation and entanglement. Performing kaleidoscopic arts of noticing, the works within these pages render traces of a changed and changing planet with tangible immediacy. Here is poetry as a barometer of the times.

-Mandy Bloomfield, author of Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History (University of Alabama Press, 2016)

These are poems of the future glimpsed through its shards and fragments here and now – they are unhomely and familiar, revealing a skewed new normal: they are fieldnotes from a world to come.

-David Borthwick, Lecturer in Environmental Literature at University of Glasgow 

Anthropocene is the impact human beings have on the planet, while the trillions of cells making each human body are composed entirely of the fire, soil, air, and water of the earth. In this anthology, the poets are voices for a war the planet is having with itself through its human bodies, and I am very grateful for their reports. I wonder if it is unfair to think of poets as war correspondents, but this book proves we are possibilities for so much more.

–CAConrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017)

The Overlook

I remember burgundy jumpers

I remember the sleeves of them

I remember the wet feel of wool in my mouth

I remember sucking pencils, taste of lead

I remember when tall people gave me badges, they said FUCK ESSO

I remember how the oven door never closed

I remember lighting the back with a long match

I remember the feel of it striking

I remember sunrise from bus stops

I remember it all morning

I remember they supposedly fucked on the green

I remember the security cameras, all six of them

I remember bottles of cider the size of a baby

I remember being cold

I remember being so cold I thought I was dying

I remember being this cold every day for a year

I remember when the bottle smashed in front of me

I remember wearing everyone’s clothes

I remember when he fit his fingers around my thigh, at the highest part, and they touched

I remember the colour of sunsets and ocean spray

I remember cranberry juice

I remember that song 

I remember listening to the sound of a tape click over and over, softly

I remember using too many purples

I remember being told about liking petrol 

I remember the first cigarette, menthols by the sea

I remember when someone said poppers were moreish

I remember how she did her makeup, turquoise glitter gelling almond eyes

I remember shoplifting bourbon 

I remember endless packets of gum 

I remember an abstract notion of madness 

I remember the expense of American candy

I remember the headless cyclist my brother saw, but I wasn’t there

I remember a series of accidents

I remember the muscles in my legs were so weak I could hardly walk

I remember illustrious textbooks

I remember falling over in the deli, very subtly

I remember when he pushed me over

I remember black coffee

I remember safe foods

I remember being sick 

I remember eating three pieces of cake 

I remember throwing away

I remember the chord progression to the song called ‘Angels’

I remember the virgin who wanted to know

I remember telling her 

I remember being in class and infinite and nothing 

I remember the feeling of three tongues in one mouth

I remember pissing against trees

I remember pieces of crisps stamped into carpets 

I remember the invisible bugs on her palms

I remember selling bracelets of luminous, plastic materials

I remember light-up trainers

I remember hot soup 

I remember vodka for lunch on a Wednesday

I remember they knew my name on the bus

I remember coming online and seeing you 

I remember this

I remember holding them

I remember being told I’d fail

I remember failing

I remember failing to fail

I remember taking the train alone

I remember glossy pages

I remember wanting to be warm enough to bare my limbs

I remember nothing but

I remember the river was all that I was

I remember walking my dog the morning she died

I remember a rainbow

I remember the bruises

I remember the bruises all over my breasts

I remember biting my arm not to cry

I remember weeping all winter

I remember the welt 

I remember he bit the inside of my thigh

I remember feeling dumb

I remember the empty train

I remember being illegible

I remember losing my grammar, my handbag

I remember that winter it snowed forever

I remember counting tips

I remember we said sorry to each other

I remember it happened again

I remember holding your hand so hard

I remember it not being you

I remember fireworks from the library

I remember that friend’s apartment

I remember hot water and lemon

I remember backcombing my hair

I remember messaging you the morning he touched me

I remember not wanting

I remember stupid bowls of muesli 

I remember the smell of linseed oil, white spirit

I remember being thinned, and thinning

I remember the lyric 

I remember the clarity 

I remember yesterday

I remember the time you drove all night

I remember the dream where my hair was three times longer

I remember we made it to the beach

I remember being told my kissing was good

I remember gold stars 

I remember so many stars

I remember gasping 

I remember being so thin the air passed through me

I remember that too, the wind

I remember thinking that girl took crack

I remember the word capsule take shape in my mouth

I remember asking for it

I remember not having asked for it

I remember getting it anyway

I remember being turned over

I remember the river inside me as 

I remember that picture where I stood in the river

I remember wanting everyone inside me, I was so hungry

I remember a dress code

I remember the unreal election

I remember the absence of insects

I remember the first time, you said 

I remember we should have done this sooner

I remember the hot bright sense

I remember falling out of the hour

I remember the view 

I remember he didn’t come

I remember coming home

I remember not wanting to

I remember the burning look in her eyes

I remember being sorry for something I hadn’t done

I remember dropping it boiling on my arm

I remember stripping off in the kitchen

I remember the phone call

I remember the gentle white lie I carried around all year

I remember a series of elaborate bandages 

I remember more than a friend

I remember avocado emoji

I remember I knew it all

I remember telling them

I remember this one cool trick for making it pop

I remember your irises amethysts 

I remember my blood

I remember the word ember 

I remember saying a sunbeam

I remember red velvet 

I remember you well in the Ibis Hotel 

I remember the size of a blouse 

I remember she said, it’s worse over there

I remember a hip flask of whisky

I remember a docile reply

I remember falling asleep with the bass underneath us

I remember Arran

I remember Luss

I remember wearing skintight jeans 

I remember graduating into the falling leaves

I remember falling up stairs

I remember the clots

I remember my fingers in your hair

I remember being golden

I remember doing it again

Remember I wasn’t there

*Written in response to a writing exercise during Tawnya Renelle’s workshop on Memoir and Memory.

Playlist: October 2020

Listen for exits

For a brief eternity, nobody was fucking anything that already got fucked and that was when the leaf started falling & another then a whole earnestness of them. Fuck. The way to keep strong is being meticulous about noticing clouds and writing shit down I stopped wanting to rain, I’ll fall asleep smoking. I’ll fall asleep smoking in some movie where my brogues are black as the wet night this all was conceived, draw my red curtains away from the moon that Nasa had a claim on and think about salad days, my nails painted trademark Billie Eilish lime. O salad days pacing restaurants, the rain is on; I remember the leaves swept in the door and they too were victims of a fate in their genes, once green. So I took samples and pressed them crisp between Moleskine pages in the sleep dimension, my writing was automatic and sullen, chlorophyllic, squeezed between menus, I was windswept inside it with the beach pouring out it was heavy. File this under the brush, bush, brush it back into language. I listened to the intricate complaints of the shrubs.

*

Between myriad Tuesdays, I became a psychiatrist of seashells, pressed to my ears their exquisite misery. 

*

Time was a month of afternoons and then rivers of weeks and the sexual appetite of the hours then none. M. said in emails it all feels like soup. In no time I drink echinacea tea and wait for you in black velvet trousers, my pretzel crossed legs. The black velvet night is missing from other suns. There is no time. My chest is clearing itself of the leaves and a mysterious spore they call viral but is it just metaphor, is it the just continuum of falsehood, heavy as my tongue in your words and letting the owls out is only fake news. A black velvet night full of owls. The way to keep going is smoking at the window notwithstanding the smoke, I mean lean out like me and catch it. Someone drops loneliness pills from high windows, highest, like the song about throwing pieces out a twenty-storey flat…Your browser does not currently recognise any of the video formats available. And yet that song and for the love of bread and jam and here in our crumbling houses. Seedless. My brother does not understand tenement lust, the trend for it, but a tower-block remains in our town. Black velvet surrounds us, slapped between lunar slices cut from the nightmare of twenty-twenty. It isn’t your vision. 

*

At five, he would drink all day diluted wine and snort at jellied nature. I love receiving your comments and photos and learning what is an amethyst deceiver and those in history who wanted us killed. If I am held down by world, I had a cold shower and lived in the hades of a woodlands that didn’t belong to me. Smell of tomato all summer in the glow of my window. Smash it all over your clavicles, the insides of your thighs, between your toes, the secrecy of your neck. Flesh of a very red vitamin C. Imagine owning the woodlands. Not to eat, I typeset all night to the sound of sentences, insects, let them lay me down later, I am all this humming snow. What sleep is it that comes three hours at a time, at a time without time that is never quite dark and five hours late. If the clocks go back. You say it’s impossible to write in these times and you are right, as anyone is to say of the impossible I feel it, here and closing in and peeling the skin from my cuticles. Not this. Backwards. When you ask what I’m doing, I’m quietly bleeding. In the hazard assessment, failing to be meticulous is not this. Failing violence. Touching green. I have a good kick at the heart and the head. The men are all down. Held down. You and I get so tired. 

*

I want to know how she dies before the novel even opens. Lain down in the grass; the spine is split, our folds are torn. Because you say nothing I go into the orange department and juice my feelings very slowly in rapture. Waking up is to know not what happened. A blade is working in spiral formation – a blade tornado. What would rip us from orange and up, up to our tower block office at home? Dream pith all over the air around us, sticks. Walter Benjamin is very anxious about this, that you should not write dreams down before breakfast, should not attempt to narrate them. You break fast to break with your dreams. I dreamt I wrote copy for an orange juice company, who wanted their ingredients relayed as sonnets. It seemed impossible that orange juice should be so teeming with things other than oranges. The names were beautiful: canola oil, sodium citrate, beta carotene, cellulose, sucralose, Neotame, potassium sorbate, yellow #5, yellow #6 – and what could be seven? What could be less than seven! We are, we are…In the mix, at the end of the nineties, “soft drink turned a girl yellow.” I remember this as though I had been in hospital and the walls were all yellow for how much I stared at the pale and acceptable middle-class blue. Where was this, surely not in the news. I paint my eyes girl yellow, the colour of soft ghosts; I practice quietude, then sugary schemes of rhyme.

*

So what is the meaning of soft in your work, is it ordinary eggshells around the thing itself, is it orange peel, goldfish, autumn maple. I tread lightly on the question of being at all. These terms are so loaded. K. is reading novels where people casually set off fireworks, they do it all the time: they grab them from supermarket bins and set them off in the carpark because why would you wait. A catherine wheel for Asda and my blues is spinning, my blues in the washing machine, O rocket, a felt sense I could hug you then and the blues left a stain on the radiator. Dashes sparkle. We sit in old meadow in mud and the dogs roll over each other. We are not drinking cocktails. The transience of dalmations. What is the meaning of soft. Softness as a kind of value. I wish I could learn precision in language but it goes running over my senses and to be soft is to experience aphasia. Say in the meeting we stammer and get to the question, late morning before this, zoom before zoom, arranging the clattering scale weights and spices. I slept with Bachmann’s Malina under my bed. A blue skirt stain on the radiator. Blue heat rises. Dad says, “have you been listening to seashells again?” I fantasise gas flames.

*

Conch, scotch bonnet, wentletrap, simnia, drill and murex. Rose and sharp-rib, American carrier, Gulf oyster. Marmite mushrooms frying on the stove. You know there is a shell called ‘Coffee bean trivia’. In Brighton you could buy trays of them for a fiver. I bought Guinness instead, a half pint for you and I on the last hot day of the year. There was a kind of listening to sunlight. Softness as what could be damaged inside us: organ spleen, aura lamina, the shell of our bodies. Your cells soft mint as the cure. People are cycling to work; I barely leave my sofa. Various adrenalines assemble inside us. So far the shells have daddy issues because of the sea. Scrub hard and anything shines. I am under the influence of rainbows, umbrellas, a rim of salt. 

*

I was fired from the orange department for wearing this blue on my sleeve. In the atrium standing there with Styrofoam coffee, swished blue from my dreams; compliments from the manageress and frowning at the meeting that never would last, and something we didn’t say. ‘Divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions’, writes Jackie Wang. I sat outside Perch and Rest with lemongrass steaming from a cup I had purchased and the leaves blew into my face with rain, they were soft and important, licked and wet.

*

We were about to make love but one of us took concussion from the piece of citrine beneath my pillow. 

*

I dreamt rabbits were climbing my beech tree the way goats do in Israel. 

*

A small porcelain jug of milk, a blue jug, was all I could glean from the orange department, after my passing. Carried it home in cardboard, I passed through the walls. It is all because the clocks go back and a crack on the wall. Anhedonia, that I hold breadcrumbs and nothing left to imagine. At the late-night snack bar, composing these empty sentences. Do we get paid for the hour we lose? A soft wound is still a wound. “I would like truffle fries, I would like oysters…” This is something I once seriously wondered. Pools of oil in shells, a meltable system. You break crockery and throw it at the sun. It goes like fuck; it is fucking you brightly. There are still exits, listen.

*

Thee Oh Sees – Goodnight Baby

Little Comets – One Night in October

The Cure – Underneath the Stars

Oneohtrix Point Never – ECCOJAMC1

Moses Sumney – Neither/Nor

Massive Attack, Young Fathers – Voodoo in my Blood

Bicep – Apricots

Autechre – si00

HEALTH, 100 gecs – POWER FANTASY

Animal Collective – Bridge to Quiet

Pharoah Sanders – Astral Traveling

The Raincoats – Only Loved at Night

U.S. Girls – Velvet 4 Sale

Jenny Hval – Conceptual Romance

Tomberlin – Floor

Sharon Van Etten – Let Go

Julien Baker – Faith Healer

Julia Jacklin – CRY

Sun June – Karen O

Soccer Mommy – crawling in my skin

The Weather Station – Robber

Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders

Jason Molina – I’ll Be Here in the Morning

The Mountain Goats – Rat Queen

Bright Eyes – Miracle of Life

Admiral Fallow – Dead Against Smoking

Adrienne Lenker – heavy focus

Kevin Morby – Valley

Lana Del Rey – Let Me Love You Like a Woman

Four Tet – My Angel Rocks Back and Forth

Julie Byrne, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Love’s Refrain

New Book: Chlorophyllia

Chlorophyllia: a pamphlet of poems written in April and May 2020 in the midst of lockdown, feeling falling, light sensitivity, the body as plant life and panic. Released as part of a 5-part series alongside Carolyn Hashimoto, Suki Hollywood, Ruthie Kennedy and Emily Uduwana.

~

Chlorophyllia is a glassy architecture for gathering the leafswirls of those moments of seeming contingency, the offcuts of correspondence, and nourishing them in the hothouse of lyric hyperbole. Maria Sledmere offers up a pamphlet of weird dialectics and conversation: where dreams eat into ~reality, where herbal remedies glitch in the feed they’re found in, where green and blue meet zanily under the breeze of ‘Jolene’, where sleep is yet daylight’s constant longing and language is photosynthesised. Elon Musk crawls out of a Deleuze and Guattari parenthesis, Keats is filtered through Zoom mosaics, there are glimpses of Neptune rain and the speaker craves IDM aquaria. As increasing time spent online comes to dominate our unconscious with surreal imaginaries of face-reacts, screen freezes and the syncope of laggy encounter, poetry becomes a way of laying out those confusions of voice, scale, desire and bodily grammar.

~

Maria Sledmere hits the reader with a monsoon of language played at once in major and minor. It’s a blissy elegy with room for the amphibian and the paypal. For thinspo trees, waging snowstorms, missing bees. For solace and subscription. Here, loss concerns the heart-eye react as much as the dinosaur. Snowstorm is a person. Everything finds itself unshakeably sensory, and that whole heavy load — of being at all, of being here — is packed sleek into a Tesla. Chlorophyllia is an oil essential to any engine.

          — Nasim Luczaj, aka [underthunder] and author of SWAT SIGHT

The poems of Chlorophyllia love a green thought in a green shade almost as much as they pant to leap in daylight. What does the enforced reproduction of the shit we’re in mean when ‘Continuance is lightfast’? Lyric is truly sound against death but how do the interruptions feel when to persevere – the shimmy of life itself – only serves to hold up the wicked ceiling, the needles underfoot? Fuck extinction. Memory was always lossy. The desert is wherever we are. Find your friends in vernal places, ask each other ‘what familiar year is it / Another encore of the air.’ 

          — Dom Hale, editor of Mote and author of Time Zone, Firewall and Scammer

Now available for £2.00 digital download from the wonderful OrangeApple Press, edited by T. Person and Meredith Thompson.

Playlist: September 2020

Darklands

what if she entered  
the sliver of morning and haemorrhage
left for her

on the rooftop, signal
that someone was still coming in caustic shoes

theorising a free continuation 
of handsome disorder, to access the paywall
and free us from pain 

she could breathe here, just 

to feel like getting trains, filming herself 
speak only to speed 
and lag

in practice of relative motion, to feel it

“how all the protests ceased”
but not to look 
was to watch the hard tomatoes soften from green
and the weight 

to glow awhile, orange
and I miss

a strategy of oratory whereby someone has a line 
from beautiful afternoon television, like
“who would buy this house?” 
as if there were choices

next to the undiscovered 
shaven lawn

*

I’ve been having dreams about family
and scaffolds

how she just lay there
literally
until the child began throwing soft toys at her
in the 1990s 

anyone could come to life and be numb

I want to read Graeber’s thesis on magic,
slavery and politics

she didn’t say to me

do you ever feel free, for instance
in fugue state when brushing your teeth 

I’ve been dreaming about ancestors
stuck on trains 
killing rabbits and eating crackers
it was that easy

all season 
complaint of what’s coming, knowing nothing
of photography

when you can’t measure the wind 
by the grass

she had this enormous laughter 

*

dwindling into ambivalence
if this isn’t a dream exposure

and we can’t enter houses

I’ve been trialling sentences, Bernadette Mayer says 
I’m not faulting being periodic but sentences with caps and end marks do seem so bloodless to me

You swing gazelle legs over the actual
You wait in the room for the wine
You pull collectives out of the sink

distracted, I watch through windows
turn on my flash
to lead workshops on trash 
and poetry as finance, like
eons of speculation 
had brought us to nothing but numbers

and the anxious among us, cooking the numbers

I watch her slice an avocado in the dark
and the police van
opened to reveal us
with leaves in our molars, perfect hello
it’s autumn

in the bloodless sentence

* 

dreamt I was tidying the rooms
of siblings

this mad kind of everywhere acid 
I couldn’t clean up 

in the panic of rich, linguistic Monday, you are 
part of the story, too smart for me

the interminable smell of pine resin, kimchi
and menthol gum
yes, just there

in lightness rimming

I made this commitment to sleeping ‘upstairs’

taking pleasure
on my editor’s credit
before the treehouse snapped

*

I can barely listen to music anymore
it’s all error

describing her pain as shooting

when I smashed my thumbs in my eyes
you kept going
it was Jupiter

now

cruising down Alexandra Parade to send you 
the voice message 
of not seeing nightingales, a bathtub
attached to a car
I wish I could touch
between times is when I most feel ‘we
exist’ and just like that
the cornflowers won’t die

and we can’t enter houses

and you end 
with the fresh heat of illusory commute

I could say anything new

in dumb, erotic anonymity 
where all this falls

*

she had lit up the sad remains
of the tree

bound to other seasons, even look good

despite not hearing this live
I like it, finally
summer light on the same

even if we live 

in adrenalised versions of trying to keep warm
on the video call
or wavelength

of audit continuum

she was all 
“it is up to the unassuming […]
to represent reality” 
in The New York Times

and the well-oiled loss of taste

feels the same 
the shadow

years of tax avoidance
edible sundown

*

what if she knew before all of us
doubled in running away with me

I dream all my friends 
attending the burning

“where have you been”

and you could put this to archive

swipe left for the hidden
indentation of nothing happening

20,000 years ago

mostly I worry if she lived in the dream
I had to wake from 

cradling the ersatz animal, sprigs of rosemary 

having clambered reality over again
and knowing you survived the scaffold
GESTURES FOR LIVING AIR
as the art was told
“I just need to check
your temperature” 
a rough kind of festival kiss
that was listening

in the underpasses of everything
prior to millennium 

installs a magical feeling that 
:heart:
you would be at the station

and my bouquet emoji of blood
flowers await.

💐

Fenne Lily – Solipsism

Sylvan Esso – Ring

Gus Dapperton – I’m Just Snacking

Sufjan Stevens – Run Away With Me

Fleet Foxes – I’m Not My Season

Chastity Belt – Ann’s Jam

The Durutti Column – Sketch for Summer

Frog – Photograph

Adrienne Lenker – anything

Tim Heidecker, Weyes Blood – Oh How We Drift Away

Bill Callahan – Sycamore

Gillian Welch – Picasso

Margo Guryan – Why Do I Cry

Norma Tanega – You’re Dead

Elliott Smith – Speed Trials

Kath Bloom, Loren Connors – Tall Grass

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Darklands

Alice Boman – Heartbeat

Edwin Organ – Self Alarm

Broadcast – Echo’s Answer

Cocteau Twins – Aloysius

Yo La Tengo – Bleeding

Perfume Genius – Valley

William Basinski – Tear Vial

Oneohtrix Point Never – Long Road Home