oh, i like this.

I know, right? The whole album is like that.  It’s kind of Collide-y in the best possible way.

alexanderraban:

heksenhaus replied to your quote: Let us add to this the most important phenomenon…

i would tend to agree, and i also think that the contemporary song lyric is… something other than poetry, at this point.

Yeah it certainly occupies a different space, that’s for sure, although I like to think about the fact that much of our classical literary inheritance was originally set to specific music (now lost), and so are in effect their song lyrics decontexualized. The way we experience Greek Drama is like someone finding (at best) the libretto to the H.M.S. Pinafore without any of the music, or the lyric book to a rock opera (without the album) and trying to relate to it. 

That thought experiment convinces me that (naysayers aside) we are probably underrating the Greek cultural achievement by quite a bit ;-)

this is a grand sentiment.

It pretty perfectly sums up what I find difficult about much of modern poetry; I feel like the evolution of verse has been a gradual drift away from the musical roots of the genre, and that the abandonment of all musical and metrical effects has gradually obliterated any meaningful distinction between verse and prose (not that all modern poetry lacks musical or metrical effects, or that I hate all modern poetry, but the extent to which music tends to take a back seat makes me sad).

Hence my goofy-musical-interpretation-through-metric-poetry project (however ill-conceived and reactionary it may have been)

hrm. i should listen.

Definitely do, Stringy Acid and Beelzedub [yes you read that right] in particular are rocking my socks.  But I was always a huge orbital fan, so I may be biased. 

Also, I had John Talabot’s recent album on loop for like four hours in the car last night, and, if you haven’t heard it, it’s probably my favorite new techno album this year.

Holy shit, I was not expecting the new Orbital album to be this good

Seeing the A;GRUMH album Bloody Side on Heksenhaus’s discogs, reminded me to put my copy on.  Conclusion: the song “Wizard needs food” may just be a wizard picnic party anthem (in addition to being an awesome track about Gauntlet)

Here’s a sonnet concerning portents from my private stock (for an auspicious beginning):

A vagrant star disjoined the heaven’s host,
cast out no last sidereal glance; bright white,
for five or fifteen fleeting beats, at most,
the sliding lambent speck bescarred the night.
A vagrant star arrived today to beg
our eyes, to fix its place by wonder in
the sky; as if our gaze could put the egg
to rights again, send home the horse and men.
A vagrant star left us today for parts
unknown, unknowable, turned tail and streaked
away into the vasty depths, the dark
and empty folds from which no light may leak.
Fixed stars arise and fall in their redoubts,
unmoored they wander, founder, and wink out.

— Written while star-gazing [or VOID-gazing, depending on your perspective] and listening to Portishead

Ill at ease again; here’s one from the archives for another long night:

Long nights, the burning dust, the hollow sky,
the sable sleeves adorned by cinders sown,
the firmament, the yellow moon, and I
will turn our face to greet the dawn alone.
The morning light will bring a carnival,
with music and the flesh of beasts still red,
and e’en though, like the moon, I feel its pull,
I shudder and refuse to leave my bed.
I see the tents collapsing into hell,
the animals run off and wild with fear
The jongleurie incanting darkling spells,
a festival of rust and blood and tears.
Abashed before the ill-starred veins of night,
a thing of beauty pauses and takes flight.

— Written during a particularly disabling period of anxiety, while listening to Cirkus, the first track of King Crimson’s third album Lizard.  Cirkus began its life as a poem (before it found it’s musical setting) so I’m really just helping it return home (as it has helped me so many times)

Drunk with a headache, listening to the Quicksilver Messenger Service at an unreasonable volume (given my situation).  Only one and a half of these things are good.