Less the Band - "I Want to Know You". The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is in full swing and on Friday night I went to a play - Pulitzer Prize nominee Adam Rapp's Finer Noble Gases. I wasn't sold on the production. Despite the cast's antics as drug-addled slackers, the play's emotional core felt out of reach, ambivalent. Imagine my surprise therefore when the actors cleared away the set, threw on guitars, and closed the show with twenty minutes of hot, flickering My Morning Jacket-like indie rock. There was something magic in the way their songs resounded in the room, a voicing of things that the play's main action had left unsaid.

It seems that when the actors aren't acting, they're in fact a band (albeit a band with a lousy name). That band has a CD. And "I Want to Know You" is the finest of their songs. It's a track that glows with want, full of questions, hopes and riversnaking dreams. There's talk of robots but they might as well be singing about muscle and beating heart; voices gather in yearning, electric guitars remember. Feelings fly.

[buy/info]

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - "Cold and Wet". The album's not all I had hoped but "Cold and Wet" comes awfully close. Though an artist known for his eccentricity, his queer monkish remove, Will Oldham feels here close enough to touch. (Not just by his love, or by his kin - by anyone! Anyone who passes him on his milkcrate in the street, voice crackling like stray chip wrappers.) It's a strange song. Oldham's guitar gets caught up in its own curls, running backwards like the stutter of a dripping eave. You can almost imagine a rainy sing-along. But upbeat, lads and lasses - upbeat. It's a song of sex and getting rained on, or something, a song whose umbrella would be bright and almost scarily red.

[Then the Letting Go is due in September - in the meantime order the fantastic Cursed Sleep single]

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Winners of the Silent Shout Contest:

On the 11th I announced a contest for The Knife's new, exquisite album - Silent Shout. There were two ways to win - by sending me a photograph of a ghost, or by sending a 55-word ghost story.

The winners are below, along with a few runners-up (who, sadly, cannot receive prizes). I would strongly encourage anyone who wrote a 55-word story to submit it to my friend Anca's 55 Word Story website.

Thank you so much for all the marvellous entries, congratulations to the winners, and thank-you to Mute and The Knife for letting this happen.

Photographs of Ghosts

Winners:

Christine
(who inherited this photograph from her grandmother)

sirc

Runners-up:

Stories
(the story entries were, dear readers, fucking phenomenal)

Winner:

"Untitled" (by somniac):
In China snow is falling on humble villages. Man A runs through the dark fields and his feet are black. He falls and freezes. Man B sits and looks up from his fire. Reaches up into Man A and climbs into his body. Man A returns home from war and kisses his wife in darkness.

Runners-up:

"Untitled" (by ncmojo):
Am I alive, she asked me in a dream.

Am I alive, she asked. I could not respond.

"Another Thing I Really Can't Explain to My Mother" (by roseds):
The ghost slept under the bed. I preferred the suffocation of mattress and quilt. Once, I asked her why she slept beneath me. She dug her pistachio toes straight into the floorboards before answering. I don’t remember what she said—ugly letters smashed tight, all vowels. The next day I broke the bedframe, maybe on purpose.

"Untitled" (by Michael Van Fleet):
I never realized how much my father hated me until he passed away. I woke in the middle of the night to find him learning over me, his eyes milky, whispering "I hate you I hate you I hate you."

When I was young, his kisses scratched.

"Untitled" (by Will Hubbard):
In her bathroom, finally, a pull, then pinch, of bowels. I sat down, the motor just perceptible some streets off. Time only to run water over the wound, check teeth for signs of lunch. Her face was like two faces and I thought of all the colors in my blood. How else-wise they came out.

I wish I could share all of them with you. Thanks again to all participants. You can buy Silent Shout here (and if you follow that link, StG even gets a tiny cut).