WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
Now this is some proper liner notes:
The flesh withers to the pulses of thunderous cave reverberations, while the spirit is united with the psalms of the Glorious Dead, the Ancient Entities that have conquered Death and become Life, dominant, absolute and victorious. This Work consists of a ritual deriving from the darkest corners of the Mind, the deathlike spheres of the Netherworld and the truest essence of the Afterlife, to become a homage to the Force of Life Eternal.
Guided by Her Luminous rays, it is dictated to be experienced solely in chamber-like conditions, below the waxing Moon, accompanied with Myrrh and lunarian incenses and agharbattis, to be properly roamed within its uncharted corridors. Listen, experience and conquer, setting aside the mundane aspects of realities, explore the unmapped pathways, with every preconception burnt to the altars of this Magnum Opus.
SHIBALBA’s music is saturated with the mysticism of the East. It’s richly detailed and multidimensional, while layered with chanting and broadly defined elements of traditional ritual and shamanic music. Apart from contemporary synths and guitar drones, the band makes use of bones and skulls as percussion instruments…, Tibetan Horns, Tibetan Singing Bowls, bone & horne trumpets, Darbuka’s (goblet drums) as well as ceremonial bells and gongs, to name a few.
Big record.
The white blossom blankets the little hills, thick and warm and curled like shavings of skin. The locals pointed me up here, saying “Kirisuto” in their northern Japanese accents. And now I’m standing in front of the little hills, each with a cross on them, each with a bilingual signboard in front of them. One with a dirty spade discarded next to it.
The one on the right, according to the bad English scratched under the gorgeous Japanese, is the resting place of the remains of Jesus Christ’s brother, Isukiri, who died on the cross in his place. His remains were brought back here to Shingo, in Aomori Prefecture.
The one on the left is Kirisuto, Japanese for Christ. The locals believe he came to Japan when he was 21, to study Shinto. They say he left Judea again before the crucifixion, and returned to Shingo, living to the age of 106.
You read about all this, didn’t you? I barely listened. I coped with the tattoos. And then the brands. And then the floggings, and the torture, and the crucifixion that collapsed one of your lungs. I’ve had all this catching up to do. Right across the world to catch up with you.
I walk around Kirisuto’s grave mound, hating knowing what I’m going to see. The disturbed earth. The bulge in the mound.
Poor beloved ruined you, curled up around Jesus’ bones.
(Written 2004, and it’s bugged me ever since. There’s the germ of something useful to me in here,)
In the last of the morning light – storms incoming.
I picked up an unexpected job late yesterday, so the first thing to do is knock out a quick outline of that, and then go straight into all the other things I already had to do today, so I’m descending into the mines tout suite.
Inviting escapism through detailed, glacial textures, S.W.I.M. elevates a traditional beatless spectrum into a first-person narrative, moving across burning wastelands, miles-high sundown, a dizzying night sky, subterranean exploration, and more beautiful, natural phenomena. Subtle changes in tone and texture across each of the six environments provide a signal of the destination’s energy and the intended perception of the traveler. At times, elated and dwarfed by nature’s surrounding grandeur. Other times, bestowing a sense of apprehension and unknowing.
The cinematic, repetitive music of Polish instrumentalist Dobrawa Czocher evokes the work of Philip Glass in its textured atmospheres and deep emotion. A dreamy neoclassical highlight of the Europavox festival.
We like a bit of modern cello composition. Files close to Julia Kent and Zoe Keating.
I’d read Joan Didion before, but had somehow never sat down with THE WHITE ALBUM, even though it’s the one all the famous quotes come from. I picked it up as part of my winter projects of filling in the gaps in my reading I’d never got around to attending to, and then didn’t actually open it. During a week’s insomnia, I opened it up just for something to do. I’d already read the opening essay somewhere, but most of the rest was new to me.
Joan Didion was a reporter, author and screenwriter. In a lot of ways, I think she was always a reporter first. In the Sixties and Seventies, she was labelled as part of the New Journalism crew alongside Wolfe and Thompson. She shares a lot of creative DNA with Hunter Thompson – they both typed out entire Hemingway novels in their youth to get a feel for how that language worked – and early/mid Thompson has a similar music. But Didion was always more subtle. No less a mythologiser, in her way, but in a very different register.
I have never been sure what the word “nouveau” can possibly mean in America, implying as it does that the speaker is gazing down six hundred years of rolled lawns.
The sentences are glorious. I don’t even want to quote the famous ones. All of them have the glow of inspiration and the shine of polish. I highlighted this one because it is so clear and so timeless:
There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here. On the whole “the critics” distrust great wealth, but “the public” does not. On the whole “the critics” subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but “the public” does not.
(She was writing here in a time when “man” stood in for “humankind.”)
I could go on at length, but all that needs to be said is that this is a classic collection of reportage and memoir with beautiful, resonant writing, and I wish I’d read the whole thing years ago.
It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.
For a certain kind of movie fan, Anderson’s movies are a Rorschach test of how we look at film, not just whether we value story or character or spectacle, but how we even define these core elements of the art form.
- Burial – Emilija Škarnulytė (2022) – The Arts of (Slow) Cinema
- Waiting for the Miracle: The Films of Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, and László Krasznahorkai on Notebook | MUBI
- ‘In Camera’ Is Made for a Generation Who ‘Can Only Focus for a Minute at a Time’ – Variety
- The Five Most Essential Books About Video Art – ARTnews.com
With Discreet Music (1975), Music for Airports (1978) and Thursday Afternoon (1985), Brian Eno invented a new music genre, Ambient Music, which he defined as “able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
These versions performed and arranged by Dedalus Ensemble, according to the musicians and the critics who listened to it, goes beyond what we expect from it. A mental base that takes us far away. One of the only music without beginning or end in which we want to stay as long as possible.