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mollyphoria · 3 years ago

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Moodboard #3

I was not able to make another moodboard since February because there's not much difference from what I was feeling from back then to now. It was pretty much all the same. Still wanting to get away and have freedom, yk same old shit but it wouldn't be a surprise that some things did change throughout this 5 mos like :

My lovely Calico cat Jimina gave birth to 5 kittens originally. She was pregnant at the start of this year and blessed the world with 5 cute mini jiminas on March 9 (same birthdate of BTS Suga)

3 of the kittens inherited her orange and white fur while the other one inherited the dark, striped fur completely devoid of any white fur. Only one kitten out of 5 got her triple color coated fur.

Sadly only 3 survived. Jimina hid the kittens briefly first and then abruptly one day she brought them up again already grown up, able to walk and with their eyes open but she only had 3 kittens with her. I never got to find out what ever happened with the other 2 babies with one of the missing of the kittens was the one that fully inherited the Calico cat status of Jimina which devastated me the most and I'm still heartbroken to this day that some of her babies didn't get to live like their siblings. I don't want to think that they died, I want to actually believe that they somehow survived without their mother miraculously but it's only the plausible reason why they never showed up at all 😞

The 3 surviving kittens tho is a lot of fun! They were rumbustious and full of energy. They were always playing and running around in my mom's garden. Climbing up a tree or an orchid branch, playing hide and seek through the plethora of plants. It was a treat to see them just having fun and I took lots of videos. I decided to name them after the BTS maknaes nicknames which is Kookie, Mochi and TaeTae. All 3 kittens have a very distinct personality from each other like you could immediately tell that Kookie is more introverted than the other two, his more reserved and prefers to be alone most of the time, TaeTae is more adventurous and playful but he doesn't trust that easily while Mochi on the other hand is the most extroverted and trusting out of all (FYI: I named them first without knowing their personalities believe it or not). Overall they brought so much life and extra joy in me. Now that they are 4 mos old, they don't play that much anymore, I guess it's really part of growing up regardless of what species. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now onto my summer. I was dreading it's arrival. It's not fun when you don't have an AC at your house in the hottest season. But anyways this summer I've been having this strong desire to experience Italian summers. I just wanted to be in Italy soooooo bad. I just want to ride my bicycle anywhere in rural Italy in a summer floral dress and eating a delicious gelato after while listening to Love my way by the Psychedelic furs. Yes this strong desire got even stronger after watching the movie Call me by your name. It envoked so much nostalgia within me which is weird because I've never set foot in Italy before but the feeling of longing that I experience just thinking about spending your summer in Italy is very strong.

Additionally, speaking of bicycles I successfully finished my remodeling or rather repainting of an old bicycle we have here which is perfect for summer aesthetics. I mentioned before on my previous moodboard back in February that I was in the process of painting this bike and I included a picture of a bike that I would like my own bike to look like after I'm finish with it. And I'm very happy and satisfied with the end result overall! And I would love love to ride it around Italy!...... perhaps.

These are 3 of the most impactful things that had rocked my world within the past few months and they are in a form of a documentary, an animated podcast and an anime film!

1. Grey Gardens

I first discovered Grey Gardens when I was actively looking for any good documentary to watch so I went to Reddit recommendations and one user suggested grey gardens. Its description peaked my interest enough to go check it out and luckily the full documentary is uploaded in YouTube for free. And I must say I'm glad that I took the chance to watch this wonderful hidden gem!

Little Edie quickly got my full attention on her. She's one of the most wonderful and fascinating people to exist in our world and her mother big Edie was just as interesting of a character as well. The way they live their life, spending most of their time in a rundown mansion near a beach was truly a sight to behold in a weird, peculiar manner.

What gives me the most profound impact about this documentary is the topic of wasted youth with wasted potential and the ironic part when your very own lifeline equally imprisons you as well. And we see this most evidently with little Edie. There was a part in this doc that stuck with me the most and it's when the mother-daugther duo was sunbathing in the balcony and little Edie mentioned about wanting freedom from her mother and the grey gardens then big Edie answered:

"you can't have freedom when you're being supported"

And this has struck a chord on me so strong because I relate to it so much especially with my current situation. I also crave freedom from where I am right now but I couldn't because I'm not capable of freeing myself.

What's more tragic was little Edies rebuttal to her mother's hotknife realistic take which was you can't have freedom both ways. That you couldn't have freedom when you're not being supported as well. And it's very true. If you decide to go out in the world by yourself you will definitely be freed from the shackles of your former home & life but you will subject yourself to another imprisonment.

Basically We're never truly free in this life.

2. The Midnight Gospel

I think I've heard of TMG when it was about to launch on its release year and I remember i was anticipating for it to come out because i just took one look at the official poster & I knew I would like the animation then I learned Pendleton ward is a part of it & I'm a huge fan of his creations so it's a double treat but I didn't had the opportunity to watch it back then bcoz of my busy shitty life & I actually don't have Netflix. But I remember i downloaded one of its ost first things first.

Now fast forward to this year. I now have the time to watch every content out there that I missed from all the years of slaving my life away for absolutely nothing. one of those is TMG & it was a perfect timing. Ever since i took an hiatus from the rat race I decided to strengthen my spirituality & this time I want to try delving deep to Buddhism and certain philosophies which I don't have the time and energy to learn before and TMG was a great and perfect medium for me to learn further about this subjects as they tackle topics like mindfulness and meditation and much more other significant things, not to mention the superb,epic, psychedelical, full of awesomeness animation on top of equally superb awesome soundtracks is*chefs kiss ( I still have an LSS to the prisoner's song.. 🎵drinking blood from a stump of a prison guard that I just chopped up....🎶)

I felt like the universe intended for me to watch this later than sooner because if I had the opportunity to watch it back then, I think I wouldn't/couldn't appreciate this show as much as I do now. So thanks universe!

TMG is honestly one of the best show to ever grace the planet imho. An easily perfect 10/10 for me.

3. To the Forest of Firefly Lights

Now I've watched a lot of animes last and this year and I can tell in full confidence that this is the best of them all. I'm sure it's subjective but this one checked all the box for the most compelling story & amazing artwork for me.

Maybe I long for something similar with the characters, It was just so fascinating and huntingly beautiful to have someone or something (whatever your preference is) from a different realm to be by your side. Maybe I would also like to look forward for summer season to come for once, to get excited and get rejuvenated on a hot summer that otherwise would make my life hell. Or maybe and most definitely I just needed someone like Gin as a source of my utmost happiness and comfort.

Overall this anime had made me feel so much warmth in my heart with its unadulterated poignancy and I just couldn't get enough of it. What a masterpiece ✨

Ps: I recommend listening to Warning Sign by Coldplay after watching to the Forest of Firefly Lights 🌹Check it out ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

#moodboard #grey gardens #the midnight gospel #anime movie

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grimelords · 5 years ago

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October Playlist

My October playlist is finished and it’s complete from Rico Nasty to Rachmaninoff. I absolutely guarantee there’s something you’ll love in this 3 and a half hours of music, and probably something you’ll hate too! Something for everyone!

If you’d like to have these playlists delivered to your inbox instead of having them randomly appear on your dash, please subscribe to my tinyletter here.

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Santeria - Pusha T: In anticipation of Jesus Is King I relistened to the entire Wyoming Sessions project a few times, and a year removed from all the hype and controversy here's the thing: it's fucking great. The individual albums ranged pretty widely in quality and felt slightly unfinished for how short they were sometimes, but taking the project as a whole 5-album 120 minute playlist it turns out it's a masterpiece. My personal tracklist goes Ye/Daytona/Nasir/KTSE/Kids See Ghosts, which isn't release order but I think makes it flow the best - both Kanye albums bookending it and the less impactful Nas and Teyana Taylor albums buried a bit further in where you can appreciate them now that you're deep in the mindset of the whole thing rather than alone on their own.

Puppets (Succession Remix) - Pusha T & Nicholas Brittel: This remix is such a perfect match: Pusha T’s corporate villainy finally given a context and prestige it deserves. It’s also short enough that it could feasible be the actual theme song next season, which would be a marked improvement imo.

Use This Gospel - Kanye West, Clipse & Kenny G: I am and remain a Kanye stan, even after everything. It’s nice to see him going back to the extremely uneven mastering of MBDTF era, it’s a sound that is uniquely his and it’s fun to see him revisit it. The thick vocoder harmony is so soupy you get lost in it, and the way it opens up to include the full choir in the No Malice verse is beautiful. Kanye reunited Clipse through Christ and we have Him to thank for that at least. The Kenny G break is great, and the grain and dirt on the whole track when the beat kicks in is so gritty you can feel it.

Man Of The Year - Schoolboy Q: I didn't love the Chromatics album they surprise released but it did thankfully remind me of the time Schoolboy Q sampled Cherry for Man Of The Year. Taken exclusively on lyrics, Man Of The Year is a triumph: he's the man of the year and it's all worked out but the sample and the beat underscores the dead eyed melancholy that runs through the whole of Oxymoron of never winning even when you've won.

Cold - Rico Nasty: This song fucking tears your face off. Imagine STARTING your album at this level of intensity. She just goes straight to 100 and burns the house down. Outside of Lil John so few rappers can get away with just straight up screaming in the adlibs but the way she just lung tearingly screams GOOOO through this is fucking sick.

Fake ID - Riton & Kah-Lo: TikTok songs are becoming their own genre, but it’s a very nebulous sort of a mood encompassing everything from aughts pop punk hooks to skipping rope raps like this. It’s a strange new way for songs to blow up that everyone seems compelled to write articles about but my take on it is it’s exactly the same as ads were in the old days. Remember how many songs did absolute numbers because someone put it in a Motorola ad? Same thing except you’re not being sold a phone this time, so in some ways it’s better. Anyway, this song bangs. The spirit of 212 era Azealia Banks lives on even if she’s doing her best ever since then to kill it.

Doctor Pressure - MYLO & Miami Sound Machine: There was a very good era in the mid-2000s where you could just put mashups out as singles and they’d chart, it was sick. My only two examples are this and Destination Calabria but I’m sure there’s more. Drop The Pressure is a masterpiece but as an alternate version this mashup is equally masterful.

If You’re Tarzan, I’m Jane - Martika: Martika is unfortunately best known for the 1989 one hit wonder Toy Soldiers, a sort of boring overdramatic ballad which is best known for being sampled by Eminem in 2004 in his quite bad super duper serious song Like Toy Soldiers. I say unfortunately because every other song on her first album is great, it’s all hypercolour 80s synthpop and I love this song especially because it is so completely stuffed with activity it becomes dizzying. It gets so lost in itself that they completely abandon the dramatic pause before “I’m Jane” for some reason toward the end and instead just layer three different tracks of vocal adlibs. Every part of this song is great, the weird ‘o we o we o’ chant before the second verse? The neighing horse guitar before the bridge? The musical tour of the world IN the bridge? The part where she says ‘I want to swing on your vine?’. This song has everything.

You Got Me Into This - Martika: Every part of the instrumentation in this is amazing. The bass sound, the main synth, the extremely athletic brass, the wonderful echoing 80s snare that’s as big as a house. I just love it. She also does some really intriguing slurs on the word ‘love’ all the way through, just moving it around absolutely anywhere.

Space Time Motion - Jennifer Vanilla: I love when someone has such a clearly defined aesthetic and mission from the very beginning. Jennifer Vanilla is the alter ego of Becca Kaufmann from Ava Luna who I've had in this playlist before but never competely investigated. Jennifer Vanilla feels like an episode of Sex And The City where Samantha gets really into Laurie Anderson and she is incredible. This video is the best mission statement I’ve ever seen and is currently criminally underviewed so please do your part and support the Jennifer cause by watching these two videos.

So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings - Caroline Polachek: Caroline Polachek said watch me write a Haim song and did it. Apparently the very early versions of this album started when she was in writing sessions for Katy Perry, but then it started to turn into something else and she took it for herself, and I think you can hear that. With more normal production and a little faster this is a hundred percent a Katy Perry song, but instead it’s completely uniquely Caroline Polachek and it’s all the better for it. And also Katy Perry must be furious because her new songs are simply not good at all.

Electric Blue - Arcade Fire: I just love the obsession of this song in the outro, chanting over and over and over “Cover my eyes electric blue, every single night I dream about you”

Promiscuous - Nelly Furtado and Timbaland: I got a youtube ad for one of those Masterclass videos the other day and it was Timbaland teaching production. This ad went for five minutes for some reason and I watched the whole thing and it made me admire Timbaland even more. He’s demonstrating his compositional technique which is basically to just beatbox, and then loop it, and then add some extra percussion layers with more beatboxing and hand percussion, then loop that and add a little melody by singing or humming. ‘It’s that simple’ he says. Then later he goes back in and puts in actual drums or synths or whatever. I was stunned because suddenly a lot of his music makes sense. Without the barrier of instrument or timbre to get hung up on it allows him to write from this instantly head-nodding place of just making up a little beat you can sing and dance to immediately. Listening to a lot of his music now you can hear the bones underneath everything so clearly, all his beats are supremely beatboxable and all his melodies are very hummable, they’ve never overcomplicated by instrumental skill or habits, they just exist to serve the song.

Serpent - TNGHT: TNGHT are back baby and this song is like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It feels like afrofuturist footwork from another dimension, the mbira sounding lead against the oil drum percussion in this cacophony of yelps and screams that just builds to an irrepressible energy without a bassline in sight.

Ghosts Of My Life - Rufige Kru: I'm reading Mark Fisher's Ghosts Of My Life right now and some good person has put together a spotify playlist of all the songs he mentions. He has a whole essay about why this song is sick so I’m not going to go into it here but it’s interesting to hear about someone growing up with jungle when it’s a genre that has always felt very niche to me. I guess partly as a result of it never really making it mainstream as a genre here, and also me being a little too young for it.

Renegade Snares - Omni Trio: My biggest introduction to drum and bass comes from the game Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition and this really great song from the soundtrack that is finally on spotify after a very long absence. At almost the exact same time as I discovered this song with its spacious piano and repitched snares, I discovered Venetian Snares and breakcore in general. Having no particular frame of reference for breakcore as an offshoot of drum and bass only amplified its appeal to me as a completely alien genre that sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard, and so my personal history with drum and bass is a story of walking backwards into it after the fact which is interesting if not helpful.

Punching In A Dream - The Naked And Famous: The Mark Fisher book also mentions the Tricky song which I’ve never heard from which The Naked And Famous got their name and I thought ‘man remember The Naked And Famous, they were sick?’. The sort of harder edged Passion Pit instrumentation mixed with pop punk, a winning combination.

Vegas - Polica: My favourite part of this song is the unexpected blastbeats after the chorus, using their two drummers to their full advantage and just shaking the song by its foundations every now and then lest you get too comfortable.

Right Words - Cults: I’m beginning to suspect I may be the last surviving Cults stan but if this be my lot I’ll gladly do it

Running From The Sun - Chromatics: The new Chromatics album got me to relisten to their definitive document Kill For Love, and something new I appreciated this time about an album I love a lot is its length. Kill For Love is almost 80 minutes long and it luxuriates in that length. It’s sequenced perfectly so it never feels like it’s long for no reason, but large chunks just completely space out and go out of focus in the soft neon light and the second half of this song is a good example. The whole thing just evaporates into smoke and it feels perfect. If this were a shorter and more concise song that had a proper ending it wouldn’t feel right, this whole album has no straight edges at all and it’s all the better for it.

Chance - Angel Olsen: I cannot belive this song. This feels like she wrote her own version of My Way looking forward instead of back. Instead of the ruefully triumphant "I've lived a life that's full / I've traveled each and every highway" it's “I don't want it all / I've had enough / I don't want it all / I've had a love." before the turn from the future to the present at the end, where she gives up on a forever love in exchange for right now. I love how raw this vocal take feels. It's not her best voice but it feels very very honest as a result. She's just singing her heart out in this huge showstopping closer. In an interview she said "I didn’t love the recording of it very much, and now I just feel in love with it as a closing statement, because it’s a way of saying, ‘Look, I have hope for the next thing in my life.’ I’m not going to anticipate negativity or hate or an end. But instead of us looking towards forever, why don’t we just work on right now?"

Something To Believe - Weyes Blood: This album just keeps paying dividends. I’m systematically going through long obsessive periods with every single song on it and now it’s Something To Believe’s turn.

Don’t Shut Me Up (Politely) - Brigid Mae Power: Without meaning to, Brigid Mae Power seems to have created some incredible fusion of folk music and stoner metal. The way this song absolutely sits unmoving on one deep and resonant chord for so long is amazing. When it does change chords it feels like a full body effort to get up and shift. She has a similar feeling to Emma Ruth Rundle, who more explicitly wears her metal influences, but Brigid Mae Powers' strength is in how much it resembles the traditional folk side of the spectrum. Her voice is also amazing, with the huge effortless runs she goes on about halfway through just coming unmoored from the song completely and floating off into space.

Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ - Josh T. Pearson: I had a real problem with Josh T. Pearson for a long time because of how he presents as so authentic on this album, and as I’ve previously discussed in these playlists the concept of authenticity in country music is a source of neverending anguish for me. But his newest album The Straight Hits! has largely cured that for me because it’s not good at all, is extremely contrived (all the song titles have the word ‘hit’ in them) and he’s shaved his beard and replaced it with one of the worst irony moustaches I’ve ever seen. So now I’m free to enjoy The Last Of The Country Gentlemen as a character construction, which allows me a far deeper and truer engagement than the idea of a man actually living and thinking like this which is frankly a little embarrassing.

Codeine Dream - Colter Wall: I love this song, it has that feeling that great folk songs do of feeling like you’ve always known it. The strongest moments on this Colter Wall album to me are in songs like this that chase this particular feeling of morose isolation, and where he leans away from storytelling like his biggest hit Kate McCannon - a kind of cliche country murder ballad. This song is fantastic because of the way it wallows in this black depression not as a low point, but as a reprieve from the lower previous point. Things are as bad as they get now, and they’re always going to be like this, but at least I don’t dream of you anymore.

Motorcycle - Colter Wall: I only just found out about Colter Wall this month and have been listening to this album over and over. When I first heard him I though it was strange I'd never heard of him before because he's obviously some old country veteran based off his voice, but it turns out he's 24 and this is his first album he just sings like he ate a cigar. I love this song especially because it's so straighforward. It's a simple and supremely relatable mood: what if I bought a motorbike and fucking died.

Who By Fire - Leonard Cohen: I watched American Animals a couple of weeks ago and it’s a great movie, highly recommended. This song plays near the end and I waited for the credits to find out what this great song was, and like a rube found out it’s only one of the most celebrated songwriters of all time. I’ve never had much of a Leonard Cohen phase, somehow. In my mind I always get him mixed up with Lou Reed, which I’m learning is actually way off. I love the harmony vocals in this, and the way they move around into the shadows in the ‘who shall I say is calling’ parts.

Words From The Executioner To Alexander Pearce - The Drones: Alexander Pearce was a convict who escaped Sarah Island’s penal settlement in Tasmania with seven other convicts in 1822. He was recaptured two months later alone. In 1823 he re-escaped with a fellow convict, Thomas Cox and again was returned alone.He was executed by hanging later having eaten six men during his escape attempts.

It Ain’t All Flowers - Sturgill Simpson: I found this album going through the Pichfork 200 albums of the decade list and I feel like a fool for not having heard it sooner because now I am completely obsessed. Sturgill Simpson is doing the very best work in country music right now because he's looking backwards with one eye and forwards with the other and this song is a great illustration: a perfect Hank Williams Jr type country song with big voiced hollers that morphs into a surprise psych freakout for the whole second half.

Desolation Row (Take 1, Alternate Take) - Bob Dylan: I’ve always liked Desolation Row a lot as a song but the acoustic guitar on the album version is simply not good, it's just kind of mindlessly playing this long directionless solo the whole time and over the course of a song this long it really adds up to just being annoying. Luckily because it’s a Bob Dylan song there’s a whole universe of alternate takes and mixes and this is a great pared down version I found without it. The best kind of Bob Dylan songs are the ones where he just makes an endless stream of allusions and bizzare imagery, and this and Bob Dylan's 115th Dream are my favourite examples of it.

Living On Credit Blues - El Ten Eleven: This is a groove I get stuck in my head a lot, and this is also a song I think would work well as a theme for a tv show. I've been meaning to do a 30 second edit of it just for my own amusement, maybe I'll do that soon. El Ten Eleven are a duo where one guy plays drums and one guys plays a double necked guitar/bass and looping pedals and somehow against all the odds of that description they manage to make emotional, driving instrumental music of very deep feeling, like this song which is one of my all time favourites.

Dusty Flourescent/Wooden Shelves - Talkdemonic: This is sort of a companion Living On Credit Blues, and Talkdemonic are similarly an instrumental duo with good drums. This entire album from 2005 is highly recommended, it's a sort of halfway between the post rock of the time and a kind of acoustic hiphop instrumentals that ends up sounding very rustic and homemade, like a soudtrack for a winter cabin.

Turnstile Blues - Autolux: This is a perfect song, built around a perfect beat. Every part just fits perfectly.

Fort Greene Park - Battles: The new Battles album is finally out and I absolutely love it. I cannot think of another band that has shed members in the same way as Battles; originally a quartet on their first album, then a trio for their second and third and now down to a duo for their fourth album - and somehow still performing material from their first album live. The paring down has seemingly only servers to focus them and the new album sounds fresh but still distinctively Battles, with no sense of anything lost or missing. This song is my standout so far, and the guitar line in particular is so good and interesting to me because I don’t think I’ve ever heard Ian Williams play something so distinctly guitar-y in his whole career. This is a straight up pentatonic riff with bends and everything. Filtered through his usual chopped and looped oddness it feels like he’s almost gone all the back around the guitar continuum and is this close to just doing power chords next album. And I’ll support him!

Diane Young - Vampire Weekend: I've listened to this song a lot in my life and I only looked up the lyrics the other day to find out that the opening line is 'you torched a SAAB like a pile of leaves' which I somehow never noticed. What a power phrase. There's also this very good quote from Ezra about it: "I had this feeling that the world doesn’t want a song called ‘Dying Young’,“ says Koenig, "it just sounded so heavy and self-serious, whereas ‘Diane Young’ sounded like a nice person’s name.”" and he was right to do it. This song is 100 times better because he’s saying Diane Young than it would be if he was saying ‘Dying Young’. That’s a songwriting tip for you.

Monster Mash - Bootsy Collins & Buckethead: Hey did you hear Bootsy Collins and Buckethead did a cover of the monster mash? Thank god for freaks.

The Dark Sentencer - Coheed And Cambria: There's not that many bands that I absolutely loved as a teenager that I've completely abandoned. I've moved on from a lot but I'll still keep up with them if they have a new album or something. Coheed And Cambria are one that I've almost completely turned my back on. They've had 3 apparently pretty patchy albums since I stopped listening after Year Of The Black Rainbow, which was extremely bad and really taught me what people mean when they say an album is 'overproduced'. On a whim I decided to see what they're up to now and listened to their album from last year and guess what: it rocks. It's got everything you'd expect from them: big riffs, bad and confusing lyrics, his weird high voice, overwrought and overlong songwriting, cheesy muscleman solos. Everything about this band is sort of cheesy and embarrassing and takes itself way too seriously, but I'm discovering slowly that that's what's so good about it. The weird pulp sci-fi story and mindset that underpins this whole band is ridiculous and overwrought and as a result it gives the music a reason to exist the way it does. It’s so big and dumb because the story it serves is so big and dumb. It feels exactly like reading Perry Rhodan or some increidibly long and dense but not especially good series like that, it’s pulp music and that’s what I love about it.

Romance In A (6 Hands) - Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano works for 4 hands (where two guys sit next to each other on the same piano) have always seemed to tend towards the realm of the gimmick or party trick, and works for 6 hands (where three guys do it) even more so - but this Rachmaninoff piece is just beautiful and I can’t believe I haven’t heard of it before this month. It doesn’t overload everyone with a million things to do, it just builds this very wide harmonic bed for the simple melody to swim in - then the way the melody transfers over to the middle register is just magical before the tension of the final section takes over and builds.

Love's Theme - The Love Unlimited Orchestra: I’m so glad I got to learn about the Love Unlimited Orchestra this month. Aside from having one of the best names in music, they were Barry White’s backing band and had their own solo instrumental records too. Here’s a fun aside: Kenny G was a member when he was 17 and still in high school. This is a genre of music that has seemed to totally disappear into the realm of parody and farce only which is sort of a shame because it is unironically very beautiful and dense in its own way.

Dancing In The Moonlight - Liza Minelli: Can you believe I thought Dancing In The Moonlight by Toploader was an original until the other day when my girlfriend played this Liza Minelli version that predates it by several decades? This also isn’t the original! It was written by a band named King Harvest in 1972, with this version AND a version by Young Generation both coming out in 73 and a whole bunch of others in between (including a Baha Men version in 94) before Toploader finally had a proper hit with it in 2000. Truly the world works in mysterious ways. This version is the finest I think, it just goes and goes, frenetically unwinding at a breakneck pace before opening up into a flute solo of all things and then winding up again even and finishing in a kick line breakdown. Absolutely no limits.

Girls - Royal Headache: The sheer amount of power and melody that this song manages to pack into a minute and a half is incredible, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more instantly relatable opening lyric than “Girl! Think they’re to fine for me! Oh girls! And I’m inclined to agree!”

Pov Piti - Matana Roberts: In anticipation of Matana Roberts new volume of her Coin Coin album series that just came out I relistened through the three previous albums and they are even more powerful than I remembered. This song serves as a pretty good mission statement for the whole project, and the heartrending tortured screams that open it set the tone for the rest of it. Matana Roberts sings the injustices of slavery into being, and her sing-song delivery highlights the trauma - her indifferent delivery mirroring the indifference of the world at large. The way she rattles off this story like she’s gone over it a million times and grown numb to the facts only accentuates the pain in the telling, a pain that rises to the surface in the screams of her instrument and herself.

Kingdoms (G) - Sunn 0))): This new Sun 0))) album is one of my favourites they’ve ever done because it’s so straightforward and back to basics. Every song is just ten minutes of straight up no-nonsense, big, rich, drone. They even put the notes in the track names so you can drone along if you like.

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lit--bitch · 5 years ago

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On ‘The Moth Apocalypse’, by Joseph Turrent (2020)

(Disclosure: I don’t personally know Joseph Turrent. I do know Haverthorn/HVTN Press, which is run by Andrew Wells and Iris Colomb (I’m familiar with Andrew). They both seem to have an interest in interdisciplinary practice, and they do some really interesting things with form and language, kind of messing with the dimensions of how we receive language on the page, how we receive language as performance. I think those values are synonymous in the work HVTN publishes. It’s not about work that can be classified, rather the unclassified. It’s been a really beautiful thing to watch Haverthorn grow. I was published in the first issue of Haverthorn Magazine, that must’ve been about 5 years ago, maybe longer (I was a completely different writer back then, I was 17). Back then it was just a tiny collective of poems and fictional pieces. Now they’re a press, they’ve got multiple different platforms including Haverthorn Magazine, they also run Interruptions and Correspondences. Their identity is much more streamlined. Thematically I would say that the publications are varied, but I think they’re all united by a common interest in intertextuality, or multidisciplinary influences. I think it’s rare to find publishers which are so openly into the “uncategorised” in the UK. I think the UK is still publishing a lot of writing which yanks itself into a genre, like the industry is still bound by a lot of traditional canonical stuff... I think it is changing a bit, but it is refreshing and comforting to know that Haverthorn have been thinking and publishing this sort of stuff for a while.)

This debut collection from Joseph Turrent is like a fever dream. The relentless doom of oncoming death in a cyclonic-tidal-wave-storm where God is a 58-year-old man and Elon Musk is singing baby shark. How do we continue to forge and define our self-identity when the end of everything is so near? When our inevitable mortality is met by storms we can’t weather? How do we drive that message home without flying off the handle?

What I’m most flummoxed by is this text’s use of layering, and the multiplicity of that “layering”, textually, structurally... (something I’ll unpack in a while). It plays on ambiguity in words, it cracks open these weird, beautiful dualisms mirrored between reality and irreality, sort of echoing Charlotte Geater’s poems for my fbi agent except the relationship here is not a coexistence between I and the agent. Rather this is a relationship with the world, felt all over the whole world. It’s our binding relationship with the very public disintegration of our existence in a world which never fails to learn from its mistakes, from a species whose errors seem to forever *glitch*. It’s a huge headache, but it’s also crystal clear in its admonition to us, and yet it articulates the world’s end in a beautiful, complicated, mesmerising way (certain lines make me think of Crispin Best). And in its prescience, Joseph really underlines how much of this is already happening before it has happened, in analogies both profound and absurd.

So again, I thought because of some of the interesting pop-culture references and crossovers with poems for my fbi agent I decided to talk to my mother about the complexities that this collection poses, and jostle with its meaning. I think we both felt really weird reading this swirl of a text (it’s literally swirling down the page), I likened it to feeling ‘car sick’ at times, so I’m gonna start with the way the poetry is structured because I think it’s the first layer to this collection, which you need to pick at before you can bridge all this amazing, convoluted imagery.

For the sake of keeping the poetry’s structure intact, I’m going to screenshot sections from the review copy HVTN generously sent me. This way I’m not spending ten years typing it out carefully (which I usually do cos I’m normally quoting from ze printed matter), and I want people to see how Joseph works with form and shape. It’s not obvious from the first poem in the collection, ‘Moths’, what the structure is because it’s a short opening piece, but begins to imply some sort of outline, or perhaps a disintegration, where line breaks leave words hanging. I begun thinking about what moths are in this scene, their presence, when do they come awake? Part of the collection’s thematics takes it focus from “darkness”, literal and figurative, the darkness of day, the “grimdarkness” (as Joseph puts it in ‘one rain drop falls out the sky’) of a summer in February and these gruesome, seasonal abnormalities which are set to interrogate us and make us feel uncomfortable. (Let’s face it, it’s uncomfortable when there’s daffodils in January). Beginning with ‘Ending Scene’:

All the way through, Joseph’s poems zigzag and swirl down the page like this ^. I enjoy Joseph’s, I’m assuming intentional irony here, in beginning the collection at the end. He’s intimating the symmetry of our present-day predicament: living in the beginning of our world’s end. That first line propels us to our future: ‘it’s 2030, the wind is so strong it’s a geometrical pattern’. Now take a look at this extract again, look at it as a whole image. Joseph is playing out that image of a geometrical pattern through line breaks and alignment. It’s so deliberate, so exact. It feels engineered. And it’s this powerful wind, winding its way down and down the pages, which embodies a resemblance to a natural form, like the way you think of clouds travelling across a digitised map of the world on a weather channel. Half of this collection situates itself amongst ramifications of climate change, the erratic change in weather, the sky’s putrid colour, threatening and sick. We’re seeing a storm unwind in words. But when you take a look at the other references Joseph wields in his writing, you can begin to see that this visual structure intimates more subtle connotations.

Remember how I said that the collection is exploring the errors of our species which forever seem to glitch on themselves? We keep repeating the same history which evidences our end? I think this is implied by the way the text swirls, and eats on itself. Joseph says at one point, ‘this glitch is hilarious’ (one rain drop falls out of the sky), opening us up to this denial, like “the apocalypse is happening, this is surreal” laughter, but it’s also kind of like, we’re losing our minds, we’re laughing because we’re bridging the insanity of everything dissolving before us, endlessly replaying itself, over and over. I’m kind of reminded by that scene in ‘The Midnight Gospel’ from Episode 6, ‘Vulture With Honour’, when Clancy and Captain Bryce (the guy that comes to fix Clancy’s simulator), tells him his list of rules when navigating these dangerous different coloured wobbles to get to Sparkle (a cow-like creature who makes green oil which is used to preserve and keep the lantern part of a simulator healthy I guess, hard to explain if you’ve not watched the series). Anyway so they come across this little weird man creature with a hoopla head holding onto a rocket or bomb-like thing, stuck inside purple wobble, which Captain Bryce explains: that’s the kind of wobble that locks you in time. And this little man stuck inside the purple wobble is glitching like:

And then Captain Bryce says: “it’s too late for this guy, his mind is pickled” because he’s been stuck in the same second forever. And I got to thinking about how, the more acutely aware we become as a species of how we’re repeating the same mistakes, facing the same consequences, extinguishing the same forest fires, over and over, the more riddled the mind becomes, and anguished I guess. So the poetry here isn’t just like a cyclonic pattern depicting a natural form; the strange, violent weather tearing up the planet’s astro turf and rainforests. It’s also a visual representation of history’s rhythm. This glitch, this error that remains eternally stuck, jolting on itself. It really gives weight to the series of images in this writing, which repeatedly hit you in the face, but it also compounds the repetition in the writing. In ‘this is the sadness’, (and pretty much all of the poems), Joseph keeps coming back to lines like ‘I can’t stop thinking about’ and ‘I’m writing a’ pegged by a series of repetitive motifs, butterflies, 58 year old men as God, airplanes, butterflies, horror show, airplanes, horrow movie’... That repetition is attached to this glitch-affected way of writing. It’s clever and unusual, and when I started reading the structure as a message in its own right, I was amazed by how things suddenly started to make sense in terms of the writing. I could see all this incredible dualism which Joseph plays with and writes about.

So I went back and refreshed the first poem in this collection, ‘Moths’.

I’m thinking of terms like ‘cloudz’, and what clouds are, how they move, what they mean in this day and age. The obvious dualism here is the physical clouds we see and study in the sky, their changeability as they move across throughout the day, carrying rain or snow, whatever. And then there’s this more enigmatic weird concept of ‘The Cloud’ in computing, which is a homonym in and of itself. You have Sky’s WiFi ‘The Cloud’, where anyone can make an account and sign into their WiFi and they have hotspots called ‘The Cloud’ all over the UK. You’ve got ‘cloud computing’ which is this method of data storage, normally created by a single provider. They manage the data and how it’s processed/stored/encrypted and users can upload or save information there. Anyone with an Apple product automatically gets an ‘iCloud’ account where their data is automatically backed by Apple’s cloud software. This means you never have to sync up your devices with wires or buy extra USB sticks/external hard drives to back up your data. You can just set a timer on your phone, link it to your iCloud account and it’ll automatically back up whenever you want. People think of this accumulation of data in one place, (without having to personally manage it) as being an “amorphous cloud”. I’m seeing this as a poem which introduces this element of denial about our surroundings. We’re pretending its normal and trying to squish out the reminder of these seasonal abnormalities. Even if it’s stripped across the sky, ‘black with insane swirls you could drown in’ (alluding to the writing on the page itself), our denial tells us to talk us away from the indefinite scream that it’s not okay. ‘Our cloudz are dying because of u’��the way Joseph intersperses Internet vernacular/text-speech/shorthand here introduces the Internet’s presence, and our tensions between our physical reality and our artificial one. We transcribe events into our phones. We see something, we talk about it in on an online platform. The way we transfer reality from a physical realm to a virtual realm is an exchange which happens so regularly and with such rigour that it’s an indented feature to 21st century society. Every time Boris Johnson makes an announcement in real-time, journalists flock to Twitter to unpack it in an online arena which stays up for the rest of time. The fact that language is swamped by Internet culture and adopts terms once pertaining to more physical objects or tangible sensations sensations, renders language more faceted and multiplicitous than ever before. Such ambiguousness in what we mean and how we mean it, contributes to this acute confusion and fear, which compounds contemporary culture.

Other homonyms:

I’m thinking of dark as in ‘dark mode’ and ‘dark’ as in ‘disturbing’. ‘I regret not running through Wheat’ I think is a reference to that Theresa May interview where she said the naughtiest thing she ever did was run through fields of wheat with her friends, (as opposed to increased austerity and fucking up Brexit + various other shit).

‘accidentally deleting the human race’ makes a mockery of the way the world is ending, which is by no means, “an accident”. I also wonder about the dualism in ‘A tornado touched my heart & I’m crying’, is it that we’re seeing the destruction a tornado unleashes as a perturbance? Sometimes Joseph writes like the way emojis sound, does anyone get that? Sort of like a staccato, plain-text way of articulating emotion. Did an emoji tornado touch his emoji heart?

Such an incredible line: ‘I love / thunderstorms because it sounds like God is choking on grapefruit’. I’m not even going to unpack that. I’m going to leave that one to simmer. But that’s not an example of an homonym here, in this section I was looking more at the part about ‘a million weird dead bugs’. There’s the bugs that come to eat us as we decompose. And then there’s “computer bugs”. Just a few examples where Joseph’s playing on words here.

I think of these homonyms as alluding to our inability to discern between reality and virtuality. We’re unable to understand our reality as it is now, I mean if you discard the Internet and technology, we already struggle with deciphering between our own perception to another’s perception. What one perceives as being red, another might call pink, or orange, or green. The additional threat that Internet culture imposes is that, our language eventually becomes swamped by the technological vernacular of computers, of online-existence. And yet it’s inevitable, and it’s already happening. It’s interesting—Elon Musk said in 2016 about whether he thought humans were living inside a computer simulation— ‘The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation I think is the following: 40 years ago we have Pong [the Ping Pong video game]—two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of playing simulatenously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, just indistinguishable.’What Joseph’s showing here is the multiplicity and changeability of language, how technology burrows into its sinews, transforming terms we use to describe our tangible, physical realities into ones which you can hold in your hand and scroll down with your thumb. Language is the currency of culture which is being endowed to technology. But that’s not abnormal of language per se, I mean it’s symptomatic of how language and meaning evolve simultaneously, language’s multiplicity. Rather what Joseph is saying that it’s bridging a confusing gap, how can you tell between the tears streaming down your face and the ones streaming from your television? His poetry seems to breed flesh and wire together, forge them as inextricably bound entities of today. We can’t distinguish ourselves from our flesh to our wired online flesh.

But although set it in the future, you can tell that this collection is entirely rooted in the now, even when it oscillates between different years in the near and distant future, from 2030, to 3042, to 2076. It reads like a series of tweets, but it appears like scan-lines coursing down the page, so Joseph’s really capturing a generational voice here, that “online” voice which is stripped and clipped, where it feels squeezed into 100-odd characters. The poetry is peppered with well-known, familiar references pertaining to our present-day. And I think year dates are an artifice in this collection. The world’s end is so resolutely close to us that we can taste it in images like Elon Musk singing baby shark, Lana del Rey as the saddest superhero, David Hasselhoff eating the white wine emoji... It’s laughable. It’s funny. It’s hard. I think part of the way I read into this mesh of pop-cultural references was down to its implied superficialism. Y’know, we sort of think of our extinction as being a distant probability, but we can’t think about it without losing our minds. We barely accept the inevitable truth of our own mortality, we just can’t come to terms with the reality that someday we will sip our last cup of coffee, hug a friend for the last time. And we won’t necessarily know it’s the last time, until it’s the last time. This fear is particularly prevalent in Western culture, so we’ve barricaded ourselves with our egos, and constructed this site which vows to distract us from that not-so-terrifying revelation, that we’re all going to die. Death is natural. But we think it’s so unnatural and upsetting, that we’ve invented celebrity culture, make-up tutorials, 100K followers, emoji reactions, opinion polls, status updates, likes, Facebook algorithms, botox and red shoes as part of a sequence to distract us from the eventuality of death, thinking that these things will sustain us. It’s all artificial, it’s all blue-light, it’s all moths ever gravitate towards. Joseph humours it, (I wonder if he’s jaded at times) with a sigh:

‘There’s all sort of thunder & / lighting and it is Fantastic and important tv.’ Me and my mother both laughed when we read this, it’s more mockery of the kind of vapidity in contemporary culture. Just endlessly being like: ‘oh watch this, oh I’ll link you the video, this is so funny watch it, look at this, this is my fav clip’, it’s nauseating. And you get this nauseating feeling when you’re reading this collection as it continues, it begins to make less sense, it begins to glitch and unravel to the point where you don’t really understand what’s going on. It’s bombardment, and the struggle in making sense of what’s going on typifies the way the ‘I’ is struggling to hold onto sanity. And while the dystopia of The Moth Apocalypse makes for a terrifying read, it’s also met with such beauty, I don’t think I’ve ever read a more beautifying approach to apocalyptic writing. You can take deep pleasure in the way Joseph articulates natural disaster. From ‘one rain drop falls out of the sky’: ‘I went to see the cherry blossoms in the glowing forest / [...] / THE SKY IS PURPLE LET ME SLEEP / [...] it smells like strawberry / pop tarts outside’. This “glowing forest” alludes to a forest fire, the purple sky alludes to light pollution, making it hard to sleep. Strawberry pop tarts goes without saying really, probably one of the best examples of describing consumerist culture in a nutshell: pre-cooked, chugging in artificial colours and flavours. But when you read these sentences alone, you don’t get the impression that the world is dying awash in blood and fire, rather the violence is extinguished. It reads and feels more like a painting, this gradual description of shades and experiences. There’s something kind of Eva Figes-esque about his writing style, just the way he colours in scenes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s glamorised, but rather, the apocalypse is beautified.

I want to bring this review full circle and come back to the collection’s title: The Moth Apocalypse. By the end, I came to think of humanity, us as being the moths, here, roused by darkness and addicted to rectangular devices emanating blue-light. We frantically flap around its notification, its constant stream of information as the world around us is plunged into dark mode. The points where you’re thinking that the collection is relenting and giving up, are actually the most profound moments where it gets up. Joseph writes it best in ‘Everything Is Peachy’: ‘if you’re / looking for a sad and hopeful story / just sit / back and watch this rain.’ This collection begs us to be present, to consider and amend, and if nothing else, to laugh wildly as you don’t remedy it. It is an incredibly self-aware read, an invaluable perception of the “way things are heading”. The composition and structure of the poetry is masterful, art in its own right. The Moth Apocalypse is a promising and brave debut from Joseph Turrent.

If this review’s piqued your interest, you can purchase The Moth Apocalypse from HVTN Press here but they have stopped postal orders for a while due to Covid-19, so you may have to hold on. In the mean time you can find more of Joseph here on Twitter.

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