Late October, Cycled home in my t-shirt, thru the industrial estate and beyond. you and I remember well the opening sequence, credits to all those sly cartoons who lived in colours not of their own choosing. what I’m trying to say is the warmth comes not explicable from crisis, to say ‘i was warmed by crisis’ seems wrong, and yet as I walk in a light denim jacket purchased on the day of the kenmure raid, people are still debating who was the OG lady of sadcore, adele or lana del rey? there are two versions of the skins episode where cassie escapes to new york and she runs through an impossibly empty city: one which plays an Adele track and another which plays ‘My Town, My City’ by an unidentified artist which now seems relegated to the half played halls of ancient youtube history, yet also the chorus that would seem to claim for its singer something of a belonging in cold despair. in memory the piano begins when she bites into the apple and starts crying but this could have happened in any dimension, especially considering every time i bite into an apple now my eyes smart, crunching into a moment straight from chris marker and sugar brushed with what he doesn’t know, bright red, i mean ordinary feminine pain, or like, the year 2007 in bristol. i didn’t know what UK garage classics were until i keyed my first car or like buzzed myself athletically through the other door where i would be welcomed as a stranger to victorian milk and honey, reversing the version where you can’t wear that necklace for it has bumped against her sternum and now something of a soul is dead. my friend died but ever since july i have compulsively worn purple. when i get synaesthesia it’s usually for songs, words, general emotions that in relation make up grids or curlicues surprisingly happy to coexist, like if i draw a lilac spiral where your name once is, i feel better, i feel better. it’s a schoolgirl trick of the selfsame like writing out names in our jotters, yours or mine, walking the perambulator back to the moon where exhausted mothers are calling their mothers to war. we benefited from working tax credits and educational maintenance allowance, i asked friends born with particular chromosomes to buy me yorkie bars, i remember the feel of warm summer tar against my skull better than i recall my first fuck tho a kiss was easy, it was like pulling another fish through a big comma soaked in bourbon and the bright lights were on and everyone watching? sometimes i have to go out a room to remember something like what are you doing here, now i have to walk around to even get writing or find eloquence in pavement slopes. where i live now you smell hops on mondays and thursdays the cats are not ginger, i let them nuzzle against my leg in exchange for a purr. tonight there were electrical failures in the library so i decided not to imagine my evening as a series of blocks defined by the hours locked upon flat surfaces. this house has a shed! if i listened to anything it was to the street lights twinkle as mushrooms do when stamped on, baby screeches, we come home with medical certificates and iron deficiencies with mouthfuls of words about aurora borealis and sandstone. thru the periurban and elderberry. i create a sequence and it forges a colour for itself, can’t be changed. i’m wearing a white t-shirt and it’s late in the autumn and i’m telling you this because the sky is purple, it’s 16 degrees and i want to change
Tag: october
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
Playlist: October 2019
Ana Vaz has this film-in-progress, what she calls a ‘saga’: The Voyage Out (2016-ongoing). She begins with a projector showing nought but a scratchy, flickering red of varying hue, she reads over it carefully. There are different types of mutation: the body in a state of desire, the body in a state of trauma. When I am close to you, my body changes, my senses heighten. A hormone accelerates at the start of a touch. Irradiated so, changes to my cell structure alter forever. These are taboo subjects. Whose voice would we have to inhabit to live the troubles we stay with? Occidentally speaking, I have been lucky. I have not yet been exposed. At the end of the film, fireworks explode in vivid asynchrony with flowers, swaying in the breeze. There is life. Iterative light, noise, flicker. The fireworks are revelatory, would it be to crass to say like sex. She reads very softly, as though at the mid-point of this gyre we are caught in. There is a slippage between shock and pleasure, pain and sweetness: those flowers, their yellow burning between shots of the other colours, popping off with gunpowder and spark. Closing my eyes I see hundreds of black-eyed susans, flashing. It is a Sunday, after all or nothing.
What of our labouring fingers were jaundiced with turmeric? What language is it that starts a week? What curl of black hair is found upon the illustrated daisy? What occupation would fashion a consistent indigo? What message would you send me to say the end-world is good as the first? It feels like science-fiction.
In 16mm stock, colour is hungry. It lusts for presence. We filmed a trembling nest and waited for the eggs to fall. You could flip the lid of each egg and pull out a gooey universe: look, your stars are dripping. Hold record. If I was filming my writing, would the running vanish? For it would surely reach a point. I sap my writing of colour to get bone-clean in the morning. I take stills from the vaguest hour of this vanishing. There is land, a woven bracelet, a live wire. The first thing I wove for you, was it a fungible dream you gave me? The eggs break exit.
Contrary motion, contretemps. I had read of the wildfires after midnight, I could not sleep; I was craving fever. In the morning, quivering, there were all these fiery leaves. October you are topaz, colossal with multiple facets, burning. All of your facets, reflecting streams in brilliant cleavage. I pour orange on you, god pouring gold, I tilt the tap. There is all this fizz inside you, bubbles rising up to your hard smooth surface. Added orange, you change opacity. Brisk/kick; what it takes to leave. I think about what it would mean to break off a chunk, polish and wear you. October, a perfect solitaire. You ask what it is I am promising. I promise this month to you. A stone you could swallow. A flashback.
The clouds move west with glitching frequency. It is 1 degrees celsius as I write this, partly cloudy, 10% chance of rain. Only a particle ice. From level nine I spent ten minutes watching the distant turbines, gracing the hills without name. The sun went down on Saturday; the clocks went back. I lost a health, cherry-red after cherry-red. Clots of the dark came and I talk too much, as though just to exist was auto-theory. Say an unfamiliar hand drags silt from a perishing island, pulling out luminous eggs. Say you could eat one whole and raw. Say there was a commons, a luminous commons inside it. Longitudinal, awaiting the nourishing rain. A fridgeful of wilted spinach. Say you fainted.
I switch accounts and fall out of the handsome ashcloud. Erstwhile to the eating, there was a glossy aporia starting to form close to the zone. So I circled the trees with you, came back to the bench. A child drew our portraits as double ovals, adorned with lines. Knots of pain convect in my back. How pink the sandstone tenements look, like gleaming chunks of spam, the year’s first frost a salt. Click here, please just do it for me; the scene can refresh itself.
Björk says a “gorgeousness”. ‘No one / bears witness for the / witness’, says Paul Celan. New poems from snowflakes are not just hipster. My empty cryalog started to melt, its position on the internet’s dissolve. We grow interested in the broken links, the page not found. I want to ask how this happened, but something feels prohibited, as though I were enquiring after a personal illness. But where does the work belong, who is responsible?
How we met. There was a midnight, a new bleach, a sloshing of soda and gin. Someone was sticking a plastic fork in the heart of their chicken pakora, staking claim to euphoria like a triumph in football. Mary Ruefle says it is ‘One of the loveliest possibilities / […] that the truth is made of glass’. Someone came behind with me and broke all the empty fishbowls. I was collecting their thick curved shards for hours, like pieces of easter egg I could not eat. For I would cut my mouth into meat again.
I copied the recipe for orange brownies, I copied a verily thought. There were measurements.
On the phone we talked personal crisis, plans for the weekend. I felt supine in the drain of my data. The cats were terrific, elastic in their relaxing spines. The concrete turned to milk underfoot. It did it just for them. They stretched themselves warmly out of season.
Email says: use research to promote equity. Dreamily reading the email. Weather dry, bright, crisp and cold. Little abrasions on my skin, little ways I am called back. Teasing out soundbites.
Fireworks and flowers. Daylight becomes an equation. I trade it for slices of fruit, think about the cut on my cheek and why it happened. Blue jumper, red text, red leaves (so cherry-red!), pieces of yellow in the beech leaves, black hair, cream linen bag, blue sky, blue capital.
I grill goats cheese on a baguette, plummed with chutney; I settle into the day. The city feels accidental to the fact of other contacts. ‘A good kind of pain, like a strong kind of theory’. I was reading Sedgewick, thinking about loops and silk. Where you said the poems were textured. Kissing stops at history. All that writing about snow, as though the snow itself were a thirst. Pour all the cinders down the sink.
Octopi on MDMA.
Octagonal mandy.
October magical.
There were all these facets, slants of contact, exchanges of touch and light. All the red smudged off the days. The girl in the foyer, saying over and over “I’m from Maine”, as though it were self-explanatory.
This month I can’t start or complete in the mess of a century. Dot dot dot. Cancel anytime, at the station eating a cheese sandwich letting the crumbs mess your velvet. This is anyone, this is anyone’s month. I saw three squirrels run across the road.
The art depicted a pale blue cloth, an assortment of roving peaches. I knew the peach was more than a prop. Navy ink stained my bedsheets, the creases were moving, the peaches tasted bad and winter. Mum says her dad would skin a peach of its fur every time.
The contestation of tenderness, the flicker at the heart of the light, the symbolic cocaine. When a flower folds towards the year. Find me in the flailing leaves, the syrupy windows splashed with light, the typing. We get all the way down to the minuses.
~
Floating Points — Last Bloom
Gelatine — Heavy Sheets
Black Marble — Grey Eyeliner
Hiro Kone — A Fossil Begins to Bray
Aisha Devi — The Favour of Fire
Lanark Artefax — Corra Linn
Portico Quartet — Immediately Visible
POLIÇA — Driving
Porches — rangerover
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds — Bright Horses
Angel Olsen — Summer
Wilco — Everyone Hides
Matt Berninger, Phoebe Bridgers — Walking on a String
This Mortal Coil — Kangaroo
Grouper — Alien Observer
Bob Dylan — Boots of Spanish Leather
Big Thief — Cut My Hair
Vagabon — The Embers
Infinity Crush — lunar pull
Karen Dalton — Katie Cruel
Arthur Russell — You Did it Yourself
Saint Etienne — You’re in a Bad Way
The Delgados — Coming in from the Cold
Coma Cinema — Caroline, Please Kill Me
Sufjan Stevens, Timo Andres — IV
Angie McMahon — Take It With Me
Weyes Blood — Wild Time
Playlist: October 2018
This month of intense transition, brisk walks after dark in a state of delirium. This PhD is all over me. My screen is so white and it glares all day. The moon is so white it’s almost offensive and so is the carton of milk which sits by the homeless man at Charing Cross. He rolls cigarettes and watches the traffic. I rarely see him smoke, but he is often rolling, and watching. Rolling and watching, as if the two were entwined and utterly necessary. I am watching too as I walk, but I walk fast and make of all features a blur. I run out of routes. I take the park at night to see the stars spread out on a sky of blue velvet. Nothing is nameable this way. It grows colder.
My feet look for a path but often find the grass instead.
Days pass, immersing myself in the journals of Gilbert White for a sense of the seasons, and how they manifest in the Earth. All the dead leaves of centuries swept. Then also Derek Jarman’s garden, so lovingly noted in Modern Nature.
To have such connection to the land, documenting its events. White:
Baker’s hill is harrowed-down after these great rains: it was no easy matter to subdue the clods at all. Some of the olde elders round the garden are almost leafless. Wallnuts are this Year innumerable. The white-apples are fit to make pies. Grapes, peaches, nectares very backward.
This is in August. Arboreal fruits and other riches. I ate a lot of apples in August, because there are always apples at conferences, nestled on paper-linings. In air-conditioned rooms, you crisply attend to knowledge. Something tart and sweet that activates the acid of many collective stomachs.
Mostly White’s journal compends the minutiae of fruits and vegetables grafted and grown and harvested in the garden. Little discoveries named in both English and Latin. The beauty of regularity and daily rhythm. But there are glitches: talk of ‘vast rain’ in the night, eerie events that just happen and remain unexplained —
A great light seen, & a vast explosion from y S: about a quarter past nine in the evening: the Cause unknown. It shook peoples houses very much. It seems to be meterous.
(White)
I write this on a Sunday morning, just as the bin men are creating a cataclysm of the garden. On Wednesday morning, the cleaners come early and the sound of the mop hitting the wall wakes me up from insomnia’s half-formed slumber. I dwell in these rhythms of other people’s labour, and consider my own, fingers on keys.
I have been thinking about data and how we access climate change as both event and ontological condition. What kinds of data do I attend to on a daily basis? I do not check the fluctuating air quality of my city, although Google allows you to do this. I rarely check the weather, at least beyond a cursory search as to whether to prepare with waterproofs or not. Checking the weather reminds me of the days of the week and all I have to do, and how the days are just units and thus the struggle of cramming things into them. I stay up very late because I am anxious about the days ahead, the things I am supposed to do in them. I remember a period of my life where I’d stay up all night all the time with friends, and when they’d lament the loss of their imminent day I’d say, no but this is great, it’s like cheating time! I did not realise they would sleep through the day, while I would ride wild on a sleep-deprived high, seeing the world as through frosted glass. The wee hours came, then the sun, and they would roll cigarette after cigarette in televisual flickers.
Summertime draws to a close, and dusk acquires a drama of light that demands photography. I skirt around Park Circus, following the curve of the streets, the incline. Ruffles of deeper darkness. How many memories are concentrated at the top of Kelvingrove Park, with the lights spread in ribbons of gold and red and glimmering distance. Collect my intensities, try not to think too hard. The air in my lungs reacts and is hot and sweet. The clocks go back and what a pleasure it is to flip straight to 1:01 again. Where does the hour go that is lost? It shaves a little light off my evening, for which I lament. Last year I was working until 3am when the clocks went back, and I was scared I’d have to work the extra hour unpaid. This is something we never talk about, the impact on those who pull night shifts. Luckily, there was a system. But customers did not understand. It got to 2am and we were kicking them out and they demanded we stay open till 3. The way it was on their phones, which automatically reset in electric synchrony. We were open till 3am that night; just on retro time, the time of before.
So tired I fall asleep with the light on, my face in some book. The luxury of curling into yourself and disappearing until all the dreams come.
The moon this week was consistently incredible. As in, cloaked in a halo of rainbow; magnetic, amphetamine rush of staring at it. Walk walk walk with the moon above, so below. The white pools of light that fall on the street. It gave me this charge or energy. I couldn’t sleep because I was full of the moon. Some lunar reaction inside me. I wanted to be more alone.
A friend describes my poem, ‘A Beautiful Video’, as ‘an autumn harvest of internet trash’, which I like a lot.
Adulthood means getting your bike fixed, over and over. Testing the brakes. It means learning to say no to things. It means being responsible for this and that. The ontological condition of email, with its beautiful intermittence — the sway of send and arrival. Kindest of wishes. I have been trying to start a letter all week but there are so many things I want to say to you. It’s been so long and I have no idea how you’re living.
It hurts to write ‘now’, like the lostness is already always.
On Hallowe’en, I’ll see Grouper play in Mackintosh Church.
The month began with me listening to Leonard Cohen, and ended in electronic abyss.
Spooky as the air is, filling the wood.
In my diary I seem to write a lot, ‘I feel sick at the thought’.
This is the month I leave my job of five and a half years. I have a lot of separation anxiety and maybe one day I’ll be back. Strange to have such emotional dependence on a place and its people. To measure yourself against the pace of its shifts, the demands of others. To love and love and love unconditionally. I miss everyone already; I did the very moment I set foot in the door for my last shift. We played a game of flexibility and were lovely to everyone, got good tips. A table of Texan tourists, the last people I served, told me: ‘you’re so pretty…you’re like as pretty as this glass of rosé wine’. The wine in question was our house, Angel’s Tears, so I said, ‘and I’m as sad as the tears of the angel’, to which they laughed uneasily. They meant it earnestly and I checked on the menu and a large glass was £7, so I am happy that my apparent attraction matches my second-favourite number. It was a cheap thing to say but I kinda liked it.
There have been these twangs in my chest, like someone pulling the strings of a harp too hard. I have not been sleeping too well.
Maybe I don’t miss the lush excesses of summer’s end, but I miss the extra light.
The way it feels to cycle downhill in freefall, giving yourself to the traffic, choking on the fumes of the cars around you. Red light upon red. Watching a film about homicidal ants. Messy situations and Skype conversations. Virtual reality and the value of objects. The enchanted beings appear on Byres Road, glitter-eyed at the crossing. Have written a sonnet a day for a week.
When I write in my diary it always begins so tired, so tired, or a variation of. I feel like I’ve done everything and nothing, and there’s so much still to do, to write into.
I watched The Garden until five in the morning and my eyes burned red all through the day. Something extravagantly eccentric about the manner of epic. Rub salt.
Erase yourself for rain and call it extinction. People have a lot of things to say on the matter.
So I sit here polishing pairs of shoes. At least I have something to walk with.
Begin again ordering rounds of Guinness. Almost asleep in the taxi, river-cross, the motorway morning orbits a thought. The mattering treacle of darkness. The air so cold it is almost sticky. When you see the abyss but take it anyway. This is such a soft short story to write in the library.
I lost my keys in the litter and leaves. I lost something in the hills, along time ago. Finding the words to say it.
~
Pinegrove – Rings
Angel Olsen – California
Red House Painters – Grace Cathedral Park
Sharon Van Etten – I Wish I Knew
Half Waif – Every Animal
Big Thief – Capacity
Karen Dalton – It Hurts Me Too
Haley Heynderickx, Max Garcia Conover – Slow Talkin’
Fleet Foxes – Icicle Tusk
Kiran Leonard – Working People
Leonard Cohen – The Partisan
The Innocence Mission – Lakes of Canada
Cocteau Twins – Summer-Blink
Arthur Russell – Losing My Taste For The Night Life
Sun Kil Moon, Jesu – You Are Me and I Am You
Oneohtrix Point Never – Love In The Time Of Lexapro
Lo Kindre – Torment Of One
Hiro Kone – Outside the Axiom
Low – Words
Mazzy Star – Mary Of Silence
Sibylle Baier – I Lost Something in the Hills
Nico – Afraid
~
Field Trip to Aberfoyle and Loch Katrine
Telling a story is not like weaving a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding the attention of listeners or readers into it.
— Tim Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’
It seems I am happiest now when out in the country. Brought coachwards through Maryhill, Bearsden and north to the Trossachs, warmly we arrive where the air is clear and there are plenty of lichens to prove it. Something relaxes within my chest, the familiar twangs are settled.
On the road, we talk of stories and allusions. There is a cipher in the heart of Scotland and a myth that says more than etcetera. I jokingly call it Rob Roy of the Anthropocene and something makes sense.
October tells a story of all that has happened in summer. The leaves fall like words but never ask for discernment. One of us asks, What is the intention of the wind? It is easy to grasp what the people and the pollen and the tractors are doing. But what of the wind, most aleatoric of weatherly elements?
We arrive here to think through a specific term: Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘taskscape’. This notion brings temporality to an otherwise static conception of landscape: it factors in the performance of all entities involved in a landscape’s conjuring and perpetuation. Birds singing, workmen whistling, the whir of traffic, groan of thunder, sigh of trees. I stir up a whole anthropomorphic cauldron; its ingredients activating each other, bubbling and working. Ingold would prefer a more symphonic metaphor. Everything is performing some task or another, enmeshed in a complex, living system — what Ingold calls an ‘ensemble’ of ‘mutual interlocking’. The ‘taskscape is to labour what the landscape is to land’. To dwell in the taskscape is to enact a form of noticing that is multisensory, a way of attuning that picks up the subtleties of crackle and static within the picture, and in doing so reminds us of (multi-species) sociality, time and life: ‘the landscape is the congealed form of the taskscape […] the landscape seems to be what we see around us, whereas the landscape is what we hear’. Our guide for today’s trip, Dr David Borthwick of the University of Glasgow, presents us with paper ‘frames’ to remind us of this difference between landscape and taskscape, active and passive.
We shoot pictures of frames within frames, we flatten. I try to capture with my phone the green and the gold and the red and the light, but I cannot capture the fullness of surround sound, of medial sense, that makes a taskscape. And even with field recording, where would the motion of the water be? With video, how could the heat of the sun be felt? The smell of carbon coming off the road, and mingling with the forest’s brackish aroma? The burr and clunk of a passing lorry, laden with logs, which was more of a ribcage rumble than anything heard? Is writing able to capture some of that sensory dynamism?
Archaeology, for Ingold, is the study of ‘the temporality of the landscape’. The beat of its rhythms and actants, their play and tasks. Sometimes a taskscape eludes measurable time. The ease of synchrony. It could be time split into multiplicity. The time of the myriad ants trailing over pine needles in infinite fractals, the time of composting, the endurable time of the woman who works in the wool mill, the waitress who serves us coffee. Labour as glitch and repetition. The gift shop has summoned Christmas early with excessive trinkets, each one a throwback to a prior nation, the act of (re)imagining, Scotland the Brave contained on a keyring.
When we linger too long in one moment, Dave warns us we are burning daylight.
But we linger awhile by a grave. ‘Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me –’. Maybe we are mesmerised in churchyards because a slumbering looms beneath us, compelling. What is the work and the sound of death? Is it perhaps Emily Dickinson’s famous ellipsis, the almost-just-so of each fat dash? Is this the punctuated work of dwelling?
The grave belongs to one Robert Kirk, ‘The Fairy Minister’ best known for his book The Secret Commonwealth: a book about fairy folklore, witchcraft, ghosts and second sight. People have placed silver coins on the symbols adorning his grave. There is a currency to this kind of mourning, that blurs into well-wishing. Maybe it is more of a summoning. We learn that Kirk’s fairies were human-sized, tricksy and prone to following us, often as doppelganger creatures with their own mortality. Kirk had set out this alternative ontology, not entirely incompatible with his Christianity. These fairies live off of light, their flesh is comprised of air congealed. Idly I browse Wikipedia for further anatomy: ‘somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud, and best seen in twilight’, their bodies are made ‘pliable through the subtlety of Spirits that agitate them’. The internet weaves stories around the things I am seeing. I click off my phone and instead breathe information in through my lungs, closing my eyes when the light is too bright and catching soft rainbows inside my lashes. These speckles of rainbow are my fleeting sprites, made of air and light and shining.
We ascend Doon Hill through burnished woods to find a shrine. There is a tree in the middle of a clearing where people have tied bright rags or ‘clooties’, along with loom bands, glitter, ribbons and a stray satsuma. Lichenous twigs are piled as offering, pennies and sweeties and conkers collect. We talk about whether these human trinkets make us feel closer to the tree, question our role as observers, the slide between intimacy and distance. The key word here is ‘kitsch’: these are mass-produced items, cheap commodities, remnants of sentiment and transient tourism. I am reminded again of the objects on sale in the Aberfoyle gift shop. Looking upon this kitschy monument, are we compelled or disgusted? Are such human-made objects utterly incongruous with the rustic landscape, or does their presence remind us of how land exists in time, is formed in continuums, assemblages, ensembles of affect and process and change. Dave tells us the last time he visited the tree, it was surrounded by mass quantities of plastic — presumably toys, wrappers of sweets, litter made sacred by fact of arboreal proximity. A sign down the hill says biodegradable clooties can be purchased in town. A problem was identified and the ecosystem of the land and the shrine shifts in tandem. There is perhaps a new aesthetic. Nothing is static, not even a monument. Lichen and moss spawn on a grave, a fly lays eggs inside a lost silk bow.
We admit the brightly coloured things, pastel and garish among the autumn hues, kind of gross us out. But we can’t stop looking. In Ecology Without Nature (2007), Timothy Morton says kitsch
exerts a fascinating, idiotic pull. It is often synesthetic, and it has no power except for the love we invest in it. Kitsch is the nearest thing in modern culture to the shamanic ritual object. Kitsch is immersive. It is a labour of love: you have to “get into it”. It poses the problem of how the subject relates to the object in a striking manner.
The more we look at the tree, the more we feel the pull of millioning time zones: the midges at night that might glow around it, the people who came and went, who took and stayed and left. It is only after we’ve been staring and puzzling the shrine for a while that Dave tells us the story behind it: ‘What if I told you…’. It’s important that this story exists in the conditional; for it too is a part of the taskscape, a melody played among the rest. The shrine began after the Dunblane school shooting, when a local primary school teacher brought her pupils up the hill to this tree, where she encouraged them to lay something of themselves in its roots. There was the hope of some kind of catharsis: a gesture towards memorialisation, to make a hurt world wholesome again. Dave suggests the term, ‘a secular spiritual’. The tree becomes a collage of innocence, of selves in time. When the pressure of being a ‘subject’ is too much, we call to the ‘object’. We want of the tree a longevity denied to others. There is some kind of empathy between species. Does the tree speak back? Here I am in this realm of kitsch and already yearning for a sort of panpsychism, a promise of communion, of relief and immersion.
Dave offers an answer, ‘To bear witness to landscape is to undertake an act of remembrance’.
The shrine began as a response to a deeply human calamity, but I wonder how this would function in the case of ecological destruction. Do people visit flood-sites, ruined forests, the ravaged remains of wildfires, with a similar sense of necessary ‘return’: the elegiac act of imparting one’s sorrow, sympathy and regret? Tying a ribbon to a tree, perhaps with the string of a message — is this part of ‘a new culture of eco-confessionalism’, which Stefan Skrimshire summons in his recent article ‘Confessing Anthropocene’ (2018)? Riffing on Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on witnessing and confession, Skrimshire suggests that: ‘the essence of the ethics of confession is that I never confess for my “self” in that modernist sense, but I always confess the other in me’; when we confess, we realise ‘the other’s desire for forgiveness operating in me’. My urge to lay down a flower, a toadstool, or some other jewel of the wood, is an act of remembrance and witnessing that also admits how such other species speak through me. I recognise the impossibility of asking for forgiveness for ecological crimes that exceed my limited comprehension; I gesture towards the small worlds of these things and how their hurt, their life and precarity, resonates inside me.
Perhaps what we need, in addition to confessions, are spells. I think of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ recent book of acrostic spell-poems for children, The Lost Words: A Spell-Book (2017), which seeks to encourage children to recognise biodiversity, to perform little charms that ask us to notice the beauty of species before they disappear. While Macfarlane and Morris’ work gestures more towards the flora and fauna of the past and present, we might also think of enchantment as an attunement to the kinds of deep time inaccessible within ordinary human comprehension. Cautiously, Ginn et al. (2018) advocate Jane Bennett’s mode of ‘enchantment’ as ‘an uncanny and unsettling reminder of vast forces beyond one’s control. We might try to channel these forces in more or less enchanted ways, but success [in terms of progressive politics] will remain elusive’. Enchantment means noticing material vibrancy, the activeness and collaborative potential of everything in and around us, even while aware of the limits. It means thinking with, and wondering.
So we are still, so we listen. A little chill creeps in. I am grateful for shelter within these trees, the steps of their roots built into the hill. The wool in my fleece, which makes me look slightly sheep, but keeps me warm.
‘Enchantment is not a choice (although receptivity to enchanting experience can be cultivated); it is usually something that arises unbidden’ (Ginn et al.). I suppose we are doing our own work of enchantment, listening to Dave’s tales as we break fresh ground on the Highlands, trying not to think of ourselves as mere tourists — trying properly to see and hear and temporarily dwell.
Is folklore a form of environmental seduction? I listen to the trees, the way the wind speaks through them. I note all my instances of anthropomorphism. Okay, so Rob Roy was blatantly used to sell Scotland to American tourists, and, as a ‘thoroughly mythical character’ in Walter Scott’s fictional depictions, ‘the embodiment in life of all that the Romantic writer seeks in art’ (Leslie Fiedler). I wonder who our heroes are in the anthropocene, and whether they are human, and how we might queer them. If Roy is ‘the very spirit of risk and of the wilderness which he inhabits’ (Fiedler), then who might embody the spirit of global risk society (a la Ulrich Beck), who renders a wilderness once rich now spent and depleted by the actions of anthropos?
I miss when I was little and the woods were full of magical creatures, where now I often just see Buckfast bottles, fire pits, broken glass and other evidence of human activity. Of course the latter was there all along, it is a question of noticing. Does enchantment really have a summoning, interventionist function, stirring political desire, or is it more about consolation?
Maybe the anthropocene demands a kind of imaginary vigilantism? Letting rainbow smoke off into the taskscape, performing poetic intervention. Explode the light of all that action, demand appreciative feedback loops of refraction. This is nature hyperreal and this is it inside me and in you; this is it just as it is, this is why it matters. This is ‘the matter / of all of us mattering’ (Elizabeth-Jane Burnett).
The sound of a distant wood saw does its work. We fold back and descend to Aberfoyle.
Somebody spots this bird or that. Their branchly flitters an interruption, a quaver in the staves of the day, one talk flowing after another. As if to say, we are not gone yet; we are here and we still make sense.
The sun squints into my eyes, makes rainbows. The air is crisp and I crave orange juice, a supply of this light I could bottle, smell of mornings and woodsmoke.
We cruise along Duke’s Pass and make it to Loch Katrine. When I drink Tennents in Glasgow, sipping my yellow tin, I am drinking the water of this loch. Whenever it might taste bittersweet, or clear or cold or good, a remnant of that originary gold is present. To advertise your freshwater source is perhaps itself an act of ecological kitsch, a gesture of synecdoche that craves its place-name, its blue security. But I love it as I love the gold of these mornings. Drinking the landscape to drunk immersion.
There is of course also the light on the water, its scintillations just there, rippling, like someone spilled mercury. Silver and gold, but nothing of Christmas yet. There is a rhythm, just as Wordsworth and Nico both said, there was a pleasure there or then. To push such beauty into past tense. Miranda tells me about wild swimming and I’m already relishing a sort of burn and shudder within my extremities, the plunge of cold which is doing its work, shocking my body.
Noticed things:
Murmuring burns
Clumps of moss, soft & bottle-green hills in miniature
Pale teal lichen
Intimations of meadowsweet
The wires black-taped to rocks (origin & purpose indeterminate)
A fine specimen of birchwood polypore clamped to its tree
Tiny waterfalls
A fluffy pig sleeping in the sun
What is the intention of the wind?
Wanting to preserve my tired light feeling, I decide against coffee. Calm as I am, sleep-deprived and attuned to things as though they were already wisps of memory. To make of a landscape only medial presence, and thus richer than if it were grand and static. We can’t look at the gorgeous sweep of the hills for too long, but we stare at the mushroom and the grave and the tree and the pig.
These harvested fields of depleted green, this sense of the real-time seasons.
Dave tells us the legend of Sir Walter Scott visiting the Wordsworths, and being so disgruntled by their continual serving of porridge that he jumped out the window and ran for the pub. I think of Jazzer in the Archers and this archetype of the Scotsman with his fondness for pints, company and hearty dinners. I think of these men as a weird continuum, the overlapping currents of cultural narrative.
Like porridge, the Trossachs are truly nourishing — as in, all your carbs and protein at once. I come back softened yet inclined to wildness. Home to Glasgow, I want to go back and walk and walk. Is this what David Lynch meant by The Return with the new Twin Peaks; as in, this odyssey towards belonging, the wind in the douglas firs, the cherry pie taste of a former present, always already slid into retro?
Rob Roy was also known as Big Red. Before he was co-opted as a folk hero, tartan-filtered & highly masculine, Rob Roy was a shapeshifter, a problematic noble savage. I remember a childhood trip to visit his grave, wandering the moors with my mother and father, unable to find it. Now I can just see it on the internet, but as jpeg the image is spectral, flat and distant, overgrown with ferns and pixels. By necessity, compressed. But in fact it wasn’t his grave we were looking for, but his cave, somewhere along the banks of Loch Lomond. Memory acts in slippage of language. I have invented the moors for my own ecological ambience, adding the wind and the mist, a childhood hunger for the warmth of a car and a packet of crisps. How do we carry our own taskscapes, or is it more that they haunt us, making their overlays of locality, literary story and myth? I don’t think we ever found that cave, and thus how could I confirm that it even exists?
Imaginary outlaws of ecological rupture. Where might we forge a folklore for the anthropocene, in its always unfolding, its gesture towards archival pasts and residue futures?
Ingold: ‘For the landscape is a plenum, there are no holes in it that remain to be filled in, so that every infill is in reality a reworking’.
A porous landscape is the illusion I want, pouring in dreams of milk and honey, preserving Romantic patches of mystery. Is this why people wedge pennies in trees? What are they trying to keep out or in; whose time are they buying?
I used to always be unnerved by the viewpoint symbol on a map: half a sun, half a symbol for buffering. As though the landscape’s vista were beaming out from the person, or beaming back into. Subject and object, difference and deferral. Was each line one of sunlight or current or spirit? What is it really that we’re supposed to be seeing?
So I get home and I take out my phone and skip through the roll of images. So I scroll through my notes. I close my eyes and there are imprints of sound and sense, the warmth and chill, the wind ripping raw my ungloved fingers, the flash of my hair flaring fire in light. There is so much to parse in place-names, these histories in miniature I can hardly manage. Dan Hicks (2016) revisits Ingold’s concept of the task-scape and concludes that archaeology is actually ‘the study of the temporality of the landscape revisited’.
Back in Glasgow, I hold the word ‘Aberfoyle’ in my mouth like a toffee. I’m trying to make it last a long time, hoping it won’t melt.
In Gathering (2018), Alec Finlay writes: ‘sometimes people say and repeat place-names simply because they like to hear them’. I am so ignorant of the complexities occurring within the Trossachs, within this taskscape or that. The delicate filigree of history, literature, tourism and labour. But I hope by merely feeling pleasure, learning the names and lay of the land, listening for its shimmers, I am doing something of the work of dwelling, appreciating, gesturing towards a sense of care, mixing myself with the wind and all of its unknown intentions.
We could make a list of all the places we’ve been, the things we’ve noticed:
‘may these place-names be, once again, useful in the world; may we be inspired by them to remediate the landscapes they describe’ (Finlay).
I fold out a map and think of the future, dotting at random. There is so much I don’t understand. Space is a palimpsest of half-remembered places; sometimes you can’t traverse it clearly. Maybe there are holes, or pores, or fissures. So anyway, you tell a story.
The air is full of spells, and names, and fairies.
~
Bibliography
Burnett, Elizabeth-Jane, 2017. Swims (London: Penned in the Margins).
Fiedler, L., 1997. Love and Death in the American Novel (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press).
Finlay, Alec, 2018. Gathering (Zurich: Hauser & Worth).
Ginn, F., M. Bastian, D. Farrier & J. Kidwell, 2018. ‘Unexpected encounters with Deep Time’, Environmental Humanities, Vol. 10, No. 1., pp. 213-225.
Hicks, Dan, 2016. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape Revisited’, Norwegian Archaeological Review, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 5-22.
Ingold, Tim, 1993. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape, World Archaeology, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 152-174.
Macfarlane, Robert and Jackie Morris, 2017. The Lost Words: A Spell-Book (Hamish Hamilton).
Morton, Timothy, 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Skrimshire, Stefan, 2018. ‘Confessing Anthropocene’, Environmental Humanities, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 310-329.
Playlist: October 2017
(disclaimer: my god i’m feeling autumn morbid)
Time is a stopped drumbeat tonight; it is the remnant of old Halloween feeling. Singular childhood memories: salt-crisp toasts in the shape of witch hats, chocolate spiders, fireworks; a plastic bag snagged on a tree, resembling the gossamer trace of someone’s soul. Pumpkin seeds sprinkled paprika, oven-roasted. Surrender to central heating. I close my eyes to desolate parking lots where the wind buffers round and round in the thick-whorled conch of my ears, which have not heard enough in their time; filled with white noise and melodies honeying the sore parts to moan or depart. We talked about feeling passionate or just not at all and long communications across channels across waters and distances of spacetime unfathomable to the little things beating in our chest that were tender of fibre and sinew, blood and bone. Heart attack, absence. A craving for airports, places of arrival and departure. Erase all communion. At the very least, some ferry terminal where the rain lashes my face and it’s like being born again and over and over–the way a shell is each time the tide unfurls some granules of sand in ribboning form, sweeping layers of time back over the nacreous skin. A white shape looming chltulu from darkness, from blue. Suddenly nostalgic for everything; days where less pressed upon the brain, where a deep abyss still made its outward ripples around me. The wake of a ferry, see the whitening arabesques of that line. Days sloshed out with delicious, ice-deprived, inexpensive whisky. The blurriness of alcohol a delay, an appeal. Repeat. Too many nights lost in flats without sense of an ending, every corridor a wind tunnel. Cycling home the abstraction. Best to present this as fact or fiction?
Bursts of prose, aches and pains behind the ears, deep in the muscle and bones. Getting harder to cling to routine. The nights draw in malevolently, extravagant in their darkness. Things to look forward to seem less and less. Sometime you come home; you come home and there’s a version of home I swim through, salt stung and sober but nonetheless longing for home. Less lost tracing same old routes, longing for the everywhere nowhere of hill mist and sea fog, rivers you step in forever for each time is another, another. Moss between cracks in the patio driveway. Keep mesmerising beats still close to sleep. Fabricate reality.
Spent inordinate quantities of time this month listening to Elliott Smith. Sad pale lullabies from a lonely Los Angeles. I pace these streets, pretending they’re boulevards. The only palms here are ugly, reedy, hardy. Stop wearing liner because regardless the irises stream. The wet leaves gather and stick and are swept into gutters. Gelid, compact. Packed into bags. I don’t know where they go, where the end is.
We put the radiators on for the first time since spring.
Autumn requires more indulgence in pleasure. Thickening of the flesh. I buy spice and wait for sweet potatoes to warm on the stove, thinking of how music creates space and it’s space that I need—so much space and space. Space is space is space. Where strings elasticate the littler twinges of pain, I’m counting the falling beats of a piano far from my room, far steadier than the twitches of dreamcatcher feathers above my bed. Tidal sighs. Voice grows frailer with audience, chance Saturdays off work recounting old lines in the sea pace of rain that steadies the brain in concrete roads. The opening chords, like coming home. Dusk slowly loses its dramatic autumnal sense of transition. Winter steals ruthlessly, magpie glitches of silver light. My hair dulls against the cognac gold of the leaves, their magical lambent light. My skin gathers sapphires, latticed and laced with violet blue, violent hues. Bumping my legs on things in my room because it is all too small, dollhouse small & ever shrinking; the arrangement of objects and clutter and books that spill over and spaghetti tangles of words I can’t follow because sleep might steal me. Words, words. Lurid in sentence through sentence. Sleep is a sort of ache you have to embrace for the sake of refreshing, a scab you can’t pick off the physical. I might dream of tomorrow then fold back on the future. Sentences come in again, re-calibrate time. I wake up frozen or burning; or I stay up late, stay up beyond human time, missing summer’s songbirds in the garden. It is all too cloudy, shivery, silent. What time is it wherever you are? The maps provide little flavour; I cannot orientate myself on those pastel colours. Still, there is a durational beauty to everything we speak of, itching towards light with crisp new lines. A photograph, then words. White upon deep, messenger blue. What doesn’t feel borrowed, what feels mystically distinct and uncertain. It’s lovely. Confessionals kept abstract as always. So many meetings with those who inspire. Except there’s the dread. How can you hold so many words in your head?
I make notes on the moods in work the way you would weather. There is often a pattern, a miasmatic misery catching. A cold front coming. Hysterics and dashboard laughter. Smashed glass. Not even a full moon and still the weirdos flock in with awful demands: this wouldn’t happen in St. Andrews! I picture myself between two places; oscillations of identity with a flareup of possible rupture. Between two needs. She says there is something deeply wrong, a pang out of sync with the rest of her body. Is it possible to be this body without organs? For you are all fingers and bruises, lashing trellis of glitter and breath. There was a hurricane that buffeted our ill-equipped figures, our red raw fingers. You could hear the wind flapping in the scaffolding like the masts of a ship. I walked west alone, the cold so hot in my throat. Strangers asking me where to dance. Plug up the volume. When the trippier synths came in, eloquent cross rhythms coasting, the serenity would cure this feverish dreams. Too many tenses tangled. Stifling coughs in working clubs, watching a friend make music on telly. Fairy lights blinking out of sync. A sudden swelling pride over the fact that such beautiful things can exist. His reticence, his crazed expression. What was it she said? We can’t have nice things, that’s why we lose them. It’s true, they slip away from you; or else we’ll drop them like keys down the drain. Maybe that’s okay, maybe that’s the best part, the losing and leaving and dwelling in pain. O sweet naivety. Everyone is leaving. I would hurl my keys in the sea for you.
Far away on a rooftop smarting my brain on the stars and learning to drink again.
I walk home in the lost hour and screaming teenagers costume the streets with vague and avid despair or else carnivalesque they paint dawn with hilarious shadow.
=> Switching the radio on at six in the morning haven’t slept yet & what comes on just another crap Motown no. recalling fresh restaurant hell… <=
UNIT. UNIT. UNIT. // these misdirectives I will follow forever not knowing, not knowing. She sounds a bit like Bjork when you turn the sound right up to a shrill; a brittleness threatening to shatter all that is cool and sound and sound. She is pure sound. She is bitterer, sweeter.
><
I wonder how long to lose a day to a train? Somehow the north beckons: the sense of my smallness; a need to be swaddled in brisk wind, sea smell, true Scottish frost…may we bury our feelings in negative hypothermal versions of now…but for now I can only look forward to seeing Com Truise on Thursday & drown out & drown out…
*
Lee Gamble – Déjà Mode
Alt-J – 3WW
Moses Sumney – Lonely World
William Patrick Corgan – Aeronaut
The House of Love – Fade Away
’Til Tuesday – The Other End (Of the Telescope)
Phoebe Bridgers – Would You Rather
Elliott Smith – Twilight
Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile – Peepin’ Tom
Rob St. John – An Empty House
Sufjan Stevens – Wallowa Lake Monster
Cocteau Twins – Pearly-dewdrops’ Drops
Good Good Blood – Running in the Dark
Joni Mitchell – Roses Blue
Kathryn Joseph – the bird
Johnny Flynn – Hard Road
Simon & Garfunkel – Kathy’s Song
mariaology 