Chairhouse - "cowboy song". [buy]

On Saturday, three roommates recorded this song at their home in Atlanta. It was a good use of time. 152 seconds well spent. It was perhaps, I hope, their best use of any 152 seconds this week. It is hard to imagine much better, and I do not think it is fair to expect most days to contain 152 consecutive seconds as worthwhile as these 152 seconds - this despite the fact that one day contains five hundred and sixty-eight 152-second segments. Listen to that bassline. Listen to that wheezing synthesizer. Listen to the sunshine/raindrop lilt/wiggle of the vocal. These are strange days. I am trying not to ask very much of them. I am trying to be kind to myself, and to my days. "Cowboy Song" seems like a very small outpouring of kindness. If this is what we aspire to - this much kindness, one "Cowboy Song"'s worth - and aspire not expect: I think that would be good. I think it would be good for us, from Atlanta to Montreal and then over the water to wherever anybody is, quarantined in a shantytown or making hay with penguins on their giant clod of ice.

(cartoon by Charles Addams)

Magnolia Electric Co. - "Hold on Magnolia (Sun Session version)".

Another snowstorm today. But I have seen the photographs. Images from out west, and down south, and faraway climes. I have seen the teases of sprouting tulips in my own front yard. I will watch them from my window, when the snow melts. It won't be long now before even our own lilac begins to bud. Or the magnolia a few doors over. Or all the daffodils, making golden eyes at each other, taking in sunlight and rain and the cities' unclean air. Making it all spring.

Not long now, I think.

(Seven years that Jason Molina's gone. Hope you found peace, JM.)

[buy]

Astral Swans - "Strange Prison"

"There is no point / trying to run," sings Matthew Swann. "In my head / it's a strange prison." Astral Swans did not write this song for 2020's early spring. They wrote it for the everyday and all its habitual monsters. But in these strange, rare days this grey song glimmers. There's a hopefulness to its lament, like a drummer-boy at the front of a brigade, and as always Astral Swans are painters of echo, wielders of reverb, offering reminder after reminder that some things pass through walls.

[buy]

(photo source)

Max de Wardener - "Bismuth Dream".

I spend my day looking at changing numbers. Green numbers, red numbers, yellow numbers. If the numbers have been printed in an interesting or especially sans-serif font, they seem bland. If they are serifed, or large, or black or red on white, they seem dire. They change. They tick up and down, noiselessly. The numbers mean so much. They are important; they predict the future. They're also just numbers. This morning I was looking at the numbers, selecting and unselecting some of them, copy and paste, graph and compare, and then I looked away from the numbers at my piece of toast on the plate, and the way the sunlight fell across that toast, with the distant sound of laughter through the apartment wall, and instead of attending to the numbers on the screen I simply counted in my head, from one to ten.

I felt hopeful suddenly, as if I had received an inoculation.

[buy]

MF DOOM & Nujabes - "Voice of Captain Brunch".

Rhymes last, they can't be broken. This rhymes with bliss, that rhymes with acrobat, even in hard times or trouble there's no undoing that bond, unrhyming the rhyme. Say a thing, think its rhyme; think a thing, imagine its rhyme. Can pictures rhyme? Can smells? Can feelings, early on a Friday evening? Think a thing, imagine its rhyme - now those twins are twinned, they're rhymes, forever. Every time you smell that perfume, you think of that morning. Every time you hear a bell, you think of that bike-ride. Every time you see pistachio green, you should think of Said the Gramophone. We rhyme. This song rhymes with tonight, and maybe yet with yours, whenever you are.

[soundcloud]

DJ Stokie ft Loxion Deep & Kabza De Small - "Senorita"

Imagine a video game, an imaginary video game, where the beat of a song is expressed in the form of a long, undulating path, and upon that path there are jewels, jewels and also objects that are not jewels - a bead, a marble, a twig - all of them in an easy sequence, easy to pick up, some close together and some farther apart, and you play this game by walking down the road, walking at an easy pace, your easiest pace, listening to a beautiful song, picking up the jewels, the objects that are not jewels, each in time with a downbeat or a high-hat or a shaker shaking on, each as satisfying as touching the ball of your foot to the ground at the precise perfect moment of a song, each as precious in the hand as a flute upon the air, a friend who calls you "beautiful" and means it.

[soundcloud]

(img source)

Brightblack Morning Light - "All We Have Broken Shines".

Hello again. I have looked into it and the evidence is unambiguous. It is abundant. I checked and double-checked the data, I didn't quite believe it, I went and checked it again. But: yes. You can. You can unfasten your latches. You can open your locks. You can unseal your secrets, unbutton your garments, undo the tie that keeps the curtains gathered up. You are home and you are safe. There is sunlight outside, and clean air. Open the window if you wish - there, you've opened it now, feel that breeze on your face, on your neck. Believe me, the air is cleaner than it has ever been. It is good. You are good where you are, living and loosened, free to go about your rooms. Never mind what's faraway or future; never mind what if. Cover your mirrors and light a match. Breathe in smoke. Blow it out.

[buy]

hope you're all safe.

(photo source)