#he even has a whole album of birdsong music....

[technovillain]

songs for when you just get so tangled at the towers

[jezfletcher]

1000 Albums 2022: Albums #5-1

Top 5 time! All of these are worth a listen, at least to the representative tracks here! Remember, these represent the top 0.5% of all the music I listened to this year. Give them a try, and let me know what you think.

5. Christopher Tin, Voces8 & The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra - The Lost Birds (contemporary choral)

First up today, we have a really surprising but also deeply beautiful album from composer Christopher Tin, who is largely known for his work on video games. Here, he works with contemporary choir Voces8 on a cycle of pieces surrounding and evoking birds and birdsong. He sets different text to music, including the poems of Emily Dickinson into familiar but exquisite shifting harmonies. There's something wonderful about the way things swell and resolve here, and it turns this music into something exquisite. My top track is indeed a Dickinson poem, The Saddest Noise, which is undoubtedly more poignant for the fact that it's so bittersweet in content. You'll like it if you like: choral music, epic video-game music, and the vast overlap between the two.

4. Vancouver Sleep Clinic - Fallen Paradise (vapor pop)

Vancouver Sleep Clinic · Love You Like I Do

There are always a few albums each year that I really love, but which I may have very easily. Despite listening to 1000 albums every year, there are ten times as many which I don't listen to, even if I screen them. Vancouver Sleep Clinic's Fallen Paradise is one of those albums which very nearly slipped through the cracks—as it was a substitute added in at the last minute by Sam one week when we crossed over and both picked another album. I'm so fortunate he did, because this ended up blitzing the week it was in, and it finds itself here as my #4 of the year. It's a atmospherically beautiful album—finding itself with shifting harmonies, ambient dreampop instrumentation, and ethereal falsetto vocals—you almost get a blues groove underneath some of these tracks. But for all that, it has a wonderfully familiar pop rock structure to the compositions, so while it's taking you on a journey, you're comfortable in the swells and troughs. I love this kind of thing, and I could highlight about half the album as "my particular favourites". Nightfall has some wondeful harmonic shifts in it, Fallen Paradise reminds me of "artist of the year 2019" ViVii, and The Flow manages almost to feel like rock while sacrificing none of its atmosphere. I'll call out here Love You Like I Do, which feels like the most emblematic of the whole. You'll like it if you like: ViVii, dreampop, vapor pop, being assessed for apnoea treatment in British Columbia.

3. Ellevator - The Words You Spoke Still Move Me (indie pop rock)

The Words You Spoke Still Move Me by Ellevator

This one for a long time felt as though it was going to be my Album of the Year. It's a banging album of banging tracks, and albums like that have commonly gone on to top the rankings. We have the pop excellence of the opening number Claws which still remains my top track, or the sultry Charlie IO, or the slightly heavier Slip with a riff based on vibraphone chords. They also has the feeling of one of those bands who are just an album away from really being launched into the stratosphere—one of their tracks features on the next hit TV series, and suddenly everyone knows Ellevator. It's familiar and has all the key elements of popular music, but it also manages to spin it in a way that sounds like they've found their own distinct style. So why is this only #3 of the year, and not higher? To be honest, while this is a great collection of tracks, it lacks something in the whole—the tracks themselves make the album good, but there's not something more than that in the collection. The two (only two) albums above it this year manage to transcend being "a great collection of songs" and become "a great album". There's a difference. Still, this is a fabulous selection of music, and I'll give you Slip as a sample of it. You'll like it if: you want to be ahead of the next big thing, or if you want to be able to lament the fact that Ellevator never really struck it big in 10 years' time.

2. Dim Gray - Firmament (art rock)

Firmament by Dim Gray

In the end, I think my top albums were pretty easy to identify. There were three albums that absolutely gripped me on the first listen: Ellevator's, this one, and the one still to come. Dim Gray hail from Oslo, where they put a cold Nordic spin on atmospheric prog, and evoke a sense of vastness in their use of 70s style synths to build a layered symphonic experience. We start with the lightly shuffled Mare which then turns into the segmented but symphonic darkness of Ashes. But more than that, this is an album where everything is crafted for a whole listening experience. While there are exultant moments in individual tracks, they feel like they're in service of the album—even tracks which take on folk elements (like Cannons) feel like a capricious side-plot that serves as a comparison. Overall, it's huge and monumental. My favourite track is probably Abalus | In Time which has an otherwordly lyrical dance mixed with the wash of a thunderstorm rolling in over the ocean. I'll leave that one for now though, and stick with Ashes which has a better sampling of everything the album has to offer. You'll like it if you like: atmospheric prog; but I honestly feel like even if you specifically don't like atmospheric prog, you'll find something in this.

1. The Blackheart Orchestra - Hotel Utopia (progressive folk)

Hotel Utopia by The Blackheart Orchestra

As a final example of what a great boon At The Barrier is to me as a source of new music, I came across The Blackheart Orchestra solely via At The Barrier, and their monthly Spotify listener count sits currently at about 344, so it was unlikely I would have bumped into it otherwise. But I'm so glad I found it because this is without a doubt my top album of the year. Nothing, as it happens, was ever going to top this album from the moment I first heard it. This was a behemoth for me—I thumbed every single track on my first pass through the album, and had at least three tracks which I identified as potential Tracks of the Year (all from the one album!). Moreover, on relistening I was just greeted time and time again with a track that made me shiver with delight. It flows so wonderfully between orchestral folk, to dreampop, to chamber pop all with the sense of progression and scope you might get in art rock. There's also a distinction provided by the ethereal vocals of Chrissy Mostyn. Compositionally, this shows off so much inspiration and brilliance, and I find myself just letting myself get enveloped by it time and time again. I really do think this is an album that's up there with some of the very best we've listened to in the music project, including some of the all time classics (even though it's foolish to do that—I'd only be setting myself up for disappointment). While the album is brilliant in its entirety, it's also filled with individual moments of brilliance: the tempo-shifting, atmospheric and slightly menacing Alive, the harpsichord-toting Safe with its unstable vocal harmonies, the driving rock of Astronaut, or the surprise fucking sleazy sax solo in A Dangerous Thing. That last one is the one I'll leave you with—it's not all that distinctive of the album as a whole, but it will give you a example of the type of delights you will encounter if you take the time to spend with this album—truly my favourite album of the year. You'll like it: and that's all I have to say about it. That's it for the year of albums. I'm still going to post my Top Tracks (probably in one shot) in the next couple of days, as well as a big list of all my favourite music in order (I have about 100 albums and 200 tracks ranked), with playlists available for all of them. Until then, enjoy!

[threeminutesthirty]

Björk - Utopia (LP) (2017)

On her ninth studio album Björk offers up hope after heartbreak. In fact, in places Utopia feels so palpably like a reaction to what has come before that It’s almost impossible to think about it without reference to its predecessor.

First, let’s start with the palette Björk is painting with this time around: flutes – and a lot of of them – give the record a semi-pastoral feel (think Moomin Valley x The Wicker Man), together with harps (an appropriately celestial choice if you’re crafting a utopia), sputtering and lurching beats (no surprises here), field recordings of exotic birdsong (very much my jam, and captured using the same Calrec Soundfield Microphone beloved of 1980s popmongers, Stock, Aitken & Waterman) and, as you might expect, soaring vocals and rolled Rs aplenty. In short, it’s a bewildering and kaleidoscopic array of sounds, and the whole album feels alive and airy… and kind of urgent.

Lyrically Björk is at her best when her observations are filled with introspective, introverted wonder at the world, and Utopia more than delivers on this score. But Utopia isn’t all beer and skittles (or Friday Flute Club and Venezuelan birds, in this case); far from it. The ghosts of Björk’s past make for a troubled mind in paradise, and twinges of resentment, sorrow and heartbreak regularly rear their heads (most notably on the Loss, Sue Me and Tabula Rasa trilogy).

But make no mistake this is a mind resolved to stop dwelling on the past, to imagine a better future, and to be present with that future as it comes to pass (“imagine a future and be in it, feel this incredible nurture, soak it in… your past is a loop, turn it off”). Utopia represents a yearning for fundamentally simple pleasures as a means of rediscovering happiness and forging a new future. Read in this context, the album’s preoccupation with the open air and the instinctual – feelings, muscle memory, breathing – makes total sense. Hell, even the flutes represent something of a return to a simpler time in Björk’s life. And even when the pain resurfaces, she is perhaps more sanguine and positive about these moments too (“this pain we had will always be there, but the sense of full satisfaction, too”). When it comes down to it, what I like about these songs is the simple honesty of them, as brutal as this honesty can sometimes feel.

“.. I like really open situations – being on the dancefloor at three in the morning, losing myself, but also going to my cabin by the lake the next day and playing the flute. That, for me, is also utopia. Being in love, in the countryside, in nature, with the lake and the sky. That’s enough. You don’t need anything more.” - Björk (from the Autumn 2017 issue of Dazed)

If you’re looking for something resembling the more structured songs of Björk albums past, then you’re not only looking in the wrong place, but you’ve also missed the point. And like Vulnicura before it, Utopia isn’t made with the intention of having its tracks pulled out and inserted into playlists; it’s a singular piece of work – in every sense. It is, by turns, fascinating, hypnotic, challenging and uplifting. If you’re looking to travel to a place you’ve never heard before then Utopia is worth your time.

–

And if you’re not asleep yet, here is my track-by-track:

Arisen My Senses opens with birdsong, what sounds like an electronic bird, harps and soaring vocals. Björk is “weaving a mixtape” and, as the song draws to a close, vocal tracks crash over each other in waves. Among the confusion she ponders to herself whether she is “keen or not keen, to be seen or not seen, with him a he, but he sees me for who I am.” Beautiful.

Blissing Me is a seven verse (no chorus, obvs) love song over harps and beats. It veers between platonic to entertaining the idea of something more and then back again: “is this excess texting a blessing, two music nerds obsessing… sending each other mp3s… the interior of these melodies is perhaps where we are meant to be, our physical union a fantasy, I just fell in love with a song”.

The Gate: “if you care for me, and then I’ll care for you, didn’t used to be so needy just more broken than normal, proud self sufficiency”. I mean, we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

Utopia: here come the flutes, here come the flutes!

Body Memory is about your body’s instincts kicking in to carry you forward and keep you going, when your head and heart appear to be failing you. I think? Musically we’re in a much darker region of Björk’s utopia , and it’s ten minutes long, so you have been warned. Naturally I love it.

Features Creatures continues the darker sound, but here the vocals weave around a whispy, eerie choral backdrop. Again, this is about instinct and memory - specifically your heart’s muscle memory: “when I hear someone, with same accent as yours, asking directions, with the same beard as yours, I literally think I am five minutes away from love”. Björk is truly all of us, but probably better than us?

Courtship sees the flutes returning, alongside sputtering percussion that - somewhat curiously - reminds me of an engine turning over but never quite starting.

Losss’s harp + flutes + beats combo makes this feel like Vespertine + Utopia + Homogenic. “This pain we had will always be there, but the sense of full satisfaction, too”.

Sue Me is about a mother wanting to protect her daughter from the fallout of a broken relationship. Sonically this is very light and breezy. Just kidding, it’s dark again.

Tabula Rasa, or clean slate, is about not wanting to pass your emotional baggage and fuck-uppery on to your children, so in this sense it very much follows on from Sue Me.

Claimstaker: I don’t have anything to say about this song, other than I really like it. It feels like it was included to provide something of an emotional respite from the the previous three tracks.

Paradisa is the twelfth track and an appropriate point to sound the flute and birdsong klaxons again. It’s something of an interlude and helps to make the whole thing feel more cohesive.

Saint: a beautiful song, containing all of the elements we’ve heard previously, but perhaps managing to draw them together in a way that feels more integrated and less jarring than elsewhere on Utopia. Am I sounding repetitive yet? Frankly this wouldn’t sound out of place as part of a film score.

Future Forever is a suitable coda for the whole thing. Shimmering and exquisite and, well, kind of meditative. Her vocals are probably about as straightforward as they’ve ever been.“What I gave the world, you gave back to me”.

Favourite songs: Arisen My Senses, Blissing Me, The Gate, Features Creatures, Loss, Claimstaker, Saint, Future Forever…

[jefferyryanlong]

Fresh Listen - jakubazookas, Makiki (Bandcamp, 2019)

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not-so-recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

Crossing over. Switching sides. Going electric. It’s a naive nostalgia in me to imagine that there was once a less cynical intent in popular music. Performers would experiment with the conventions of oppositional, and sometimes antagonistic, forms of expression. The reward for their labors was a kind of perverse artistic fulfillment, or the fulfillment of a buried, seething love; not simply to disburse their brands to a more expansive demographic.

Ray Charles, who gestated in the chrysalis of Nat King Cole’s sophistication and, once slickly emerged, satanically defiled the pure, earthy tones of the black church with his pebbled, honeyed voice pounding like tom-toms between clusters of piano keys, very respectfully recorded an album of country and western hits of his time, transfiguring his exhortations, street shuffles and come on’s to operatic pathos swelled by a string section. When the psychedelic swirl could no longer be summoned from the twelve strings of Roger McGuinn’s guitar, the Byrds made a similar change--with a blade of grass between their teeth, they switched out the Rickenbacker for a pedal steel, going whole hog for a shit-kicking sound that carried over, for the most part, to the rest of their recorded output as a band. And lest one forget the curly-headed kid who disposed of his Goodwill garments and political tongue-twisters for a black leather motorcycle jacket, and acid, visionary hipster jive popped off with supreme contempt and confidence, surfing atop the crest of an electric wave that crashed down hard on the balding, disapproving heads at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965. And shortly thereafter, he’d too abandon his visions and try out a mellow country croon, which drawled out moon, spoon, and June rhymes as effortlessly as he’d once sang “A question in your nerves is lit / yet you know there is no answer fit / to satisfy you, ensure you not to quit / to keep it in your mind and not forget / that it is not she or they or or it  / that you belong to.”

We might all agree that commercial genre distinctions in popular music are only convenient signifiers for selling product more effectively. But we might also agree that beyond the superficial textures enwrapping each genre--funky bass, mercurial fiddle, distortion, shouting, rhyming, singing through one’s nose--there is a spirit that crystallizes each music into a unique expression, which in turn defines the form. Musicians, past and present, have tried to tap into those spirits beyond their established ken with mixed results, sometimes succeeding in only a pose. (Apart from “Torn and Frayed,” the Rolling Stones, despite the quality of some of their country-tinged output, were never able to master the sound of the South without oozing their standard irony).

Consider jakubazookas’s Makiki, an arresting full-length departure (or, as the record's Bandcamp description reads, “a score to a film yet unwritten”) composed on and played through, primarily, secondhand, decades-old European synthesizers. The album’s auteur, Christopher Claxton, has involved himself in a side project that feels like a culmination, distilled from a rich musical history. It is a detour that could just as well be a radically remodeled home.

Chris’s jakubazookas music is hardly representative of his principal aesthetics. Though he has incorporated electronics into criminally off-the-grid alter egos Buford Brixton and Summatyme Playerrrz, those digital colors were primarily at the service of an often nostalgic lyric entwined with a melody that seemed to have been imprinted upon the throat of forever, indestructible and immortal. Essentially, though, Chris has been a guitar man, in the singer-songwriter mold (though a seriously effective bassist and shredder when called upon), his melancholy voice spinning short films from his never-dull lyrics. 

Makiki disposes of melody (mostly) and words. On every track Chris hammers, coaxes, sprays and blows replicant instrumental textures from his synths in a single-minded pursuit of setting a groove. In some of his greatest songs (”Happy Ending,” “Lula”), Chris has either presaged or debriefed the events of apocalypse within our little blue world. As jakubazookas, he continues to do so, though through funky, discordant, palpable, and hopelessly antiquated keyboards. 

Tension bordering on paranoia informed by sinister intent is essence of “Blowhole,” Makiki’s first track. Its discomfiting arrangement echoes the national mood, the descent into civic belligerence about the most trivial disagreements. “Blowhole” is simply an apt expression of our times, its recurring percussive motif rising and falling in the background, manifesting in the imagination as distorted chanting, or marching, as if the ancient armies of hate were being mobilized under our noses, just outside the screens of our cell phones. 

The irony of our infatuation with technology is that, in our extreme egotism, we want our technology to be more human-like, even as we despise the true humanity around us. As in our quest to usher in our own obsolescence through the creation of a legitimate artificial intelligence, we want our electric things to talk to us, to anticipate us, and to do so in comforting human speech.

The Mellotron, once of the early synthesizers, for which rolls of tape informed each of the keyboard’s back and white ivories, was built to mimic the stirring fullness of a classical orchestra. Thankfully, it was never used correctly--on songs from the Moody Blues, King Crimson, or Led Zeppelin, the notes of the Mellotron are inevitably uncanny. Despite the haunting quality of the instrument’s tape rolls (when warm, the tapes tended to stretch, giving them a human-voice fallibility), the Mellotron generates a very contemporary unease by the nature of its artificiality. 

The equivalent to the Mellotron on Makiki is a synth effect that appears first on “She Stay on Display” and recurs through the album. I think of it as a “Panophone”; it seems an ill-advised crossbreeding of Pan flute and saxophone, as well as several wind instruments in-between. Through careful overlays and ad-libbed pitch-shifts, Chris is almost able to evoke human breath through his Panophone. Dizzyingly, it chases its own tail between radiated mutants clustered together at a dystopian dance party, the DJ an algorithm spitting out rhythmic equations via a mainframe from 1980′s digital tech.

The soul of Chris Claxton can be discovered on “Coral Cavern,” where the most organic sway of these intricately programmed, wind-up birdsongs lives. Chris’s intimacy with hip-hop, though mostly absent from his guitar-based compositions, is evoked through an infectious call-and-response pattern, which plays out over a droning hurdy-gurdy of doom. 

Tipping his hand on the track “Floor Delete,” Chris at last goes all in on Prince--or at least an abstraction of Prince, projected hologram-style. The inspiration of the method behind Makiki becomes clear: a solo savant layering his electro bumps and buzzes, zapping an imitation of life from the overlapping electrical currents. “Floor Delete,” with its funky, Prince-ian bass-lessness, aspires to that ineffable spark that switches one from listening mode to dancing mode, while in our minds we picture flying cars lifting off from the dunes of deserts.

The Panophone emits some serious Lonely Shepherd feels on the meditative, New Age-style “Sloe Jam and Tonic,” while “1CH1″ and “A Death” lean into Makiki’s soundtrack nature as if the accompanying score to some horrifying onscreen discovery a la Air’s Virgin Suicides record. Though the discovery could be less cinematic than existential--both songs play as if some awful thought has just occurred, “A Death” propelled by the hateful riffing of an electric guitar just loud enough to be imposing.

Both “Grazie 001″ and “Internal Demands” are more complete compositions, as opposed to sustained vibes repeating their technological truths as mantras. While imperfect, each song has a definitive life cycle, a spectrum of modes and tones that begins and ends. “Rebirth,” with its hovering helicopter FX and unholy call to obscene prayer, seems much more terrible than its title would suggest, unless that suggestion is that we are born again in some hideous form we lack the capacity to comprehend. Rather, the song comes across as the end of a cursed life, the part where, trapped within a haunted canyon, you realize the hellhounds have at last tracked your scent and are baying in their bloodlust. 

The expression of dread--of inevitable climate disaster, of racial violence, of the erosion of protective institutions, of atavistic impulses we were sure we’d overcome through learning and a broader awareness--might as well be the lingua franca of our age. With Makiki, Chris Claxton temporarily eschews the artist he was born to be for the artist he must be, gently demanding listeners contextualize our shared predicament as filtered through the psychology of artifice, of saying (through an electronic simulacrum) one thing in an effort to convey a deeper, scarier, other thing.

[pinelife3]

Music I Can’t Understand

Getting into hip hop in my late teens was like learning a new language: slang, cars, food, drugs, brands, gangs, locations. For example:

What does it mean to be sitting on 44s?

44 inch rims on your car - highly coveted, a desirable rim size.

What about coming from the 504?

The area code of Hollygrove, New Orleans: the neighbourhood Lil Wayne grew up in.

Please double cup me?

Kindly serve me lean in two double stacked Styrofoam cups.

Ice cream paint job?

Cars again - clean exterior with creamy white leather interior.

Finna hit a lick?

Fixing (intending) to rob a liquor store.

Wavy Brazilian?

Human hair grown from the scalps of the fine people of Brazil, harvested, treated and then sold to be used in wigs and weaves. The hair has a natural wavy texture and is typically long and dark.

Cop dome? 

Receive a blow job. Confusingly, I’ve also heard ‘domed’ to mean shooting someone in the head. 

Chopper?

You might be thinking of a helicopter or a motorcycle, but in hip hop a chopper is almost always a fully automatic weapon - I guess because it cuts people down?

A bird?

A kilo of drugs, typically cocaine.

Beyond the slang, I also found some of the accents difficult to understand. Lil Wayne speaks in a hoarse, treacly voice, he’s usually fucked up, his word association is crazy, he loves puns, and he rapidly jumps from topic to topic. So, initially, listening to Wayne was like trying to speed read Shakespeare. It took me a while to be able to properly tune in and listen to the lyrics - but when I did, I found hip hop so rewarding and fun. This is all from one song:

‘Cause I’ll serve anyone like a blind waiter

I work out in my office, guess I’m fit for business

Your flow never wet, like grandma pussy/ I’m always good, like grandma cookies

You niggas best not slip, Ice Road Truckers

I also appreciate the trite but appealing throwaways:

felt like rockstar, might die later idk

(Music critics under the misapprehension that rappers didn’t glorify hard drugs and depresso partying before Future need to go back to school.)

I have memories of rapturous repeat listens of Good Kid, Maad City, trying to decode the story. Falling in love with the mythology of Kanye. Digging through forums. Listening to famous classics and thinking I was the first to uncover an unknown treasure, like an oblivious archaeologist. The golden age of Big Ghost’s blog. MF DOOM super fandom. Discovering old artists online and stuffing my ears with their back catalogs. Visiting country towns and thinking ‘I bet no one here has even heard of Aesop Rock’ like a smug fuck. Pouring over lyrics on genius.com. Sweating profusely at gigs. Hoarding mixtapes from DatPiff. Weirdly, I associate a lot of my fondest hip hop memories with being by myself on my laptop. 

The interface hasn’t changed one bit:

Over time, though, I’ve gotten bored with hip hop. I feel like I haven’t really fallen in love with anything released since ~2014. Piñata might be the last hip hop album that really worked on me (exception: the Hamburger Helper album Watch the Stove from 2016). Even To Pimp A Butterfly has serious issues: listen to “Mortal Man” and tell me it’s not the corniest shit ever. The extended butterfly/chrysalis/caterpillar metaphor throughout the album is like bad high school poetry. For a while, I thought my cynical outlook on modern hip hop was just a product of getting older and being wistful for the music I liked when I was younger. But now I’ve decided that this is a problem solely between me and hip hop, because I still find music that I get obsessed with. But that music is exclusively Celtic.

I would timebox my Celtic music obsession to the past year or so, but Spotify went to great pains to inform me that Enya was my artist of the decade, so this must have been latent within me for some time. 

When initially dipping my toe in the Celtic genre, I started with instrumentals and songs sung in English, but I’m waist deep now and have started listening to Gaelic music. It’s like birdsong: I don’t know what they’re saying, but I like the way it sounds. Throaty, clear. Choking, sweet. Windswept, warm. Profound, unknowable. Ancient, important. Echoing, intimate. They could be singing about stale muesli bars and stubbed toes for all I know. 

(If you don’t listen to these songs - especially the one below - I don’t think this blog post will work on you. See please listen.)

Take the song “Thig An Smeòrach As t-Earrach” (above). Obviously ‘Thig An Smeòrach As t-Earrach’ sounds like something Gollum would hiss under his breath, but I find the song itself practically spiritual. Gaelic is so foreign - the words bear no similarity to words I’ve ever heard before - but I feel like I still understand what’s being said. It’s like a fiery angel has appeared at the foot of your bed and is telling you something important: but the angel is so beautiful and bright, your eyes are watering. You can hardly look. And you certainly can’t listen. But the message is burned in your brain. You didn’t understand a word, and wouldn’t know how to repeat what the angel said - but you understand their meaning perfectly.

Do you think the past or the future is more important? And not in terms of your own life (e.g. will your retirement be better than your time in high school) - that’s chickenshit, that’s two turns in early game Civ V, that’s low stakes table. No, I mean in terms of the whole timeline of the planet: neolithic magic in stone circles, valleys where no human has ever walked, unturned stones beneath deep water, dead languages. Should we protect the physical remnants of history or privilege the possibilities of the future? Would we crush Grecian pottery if it unlocked clean, sustainable power which allowed us to create AirPod batteries which never lose their charge? Without even asking, I will tell you that anyone making Celtic music thinks the past is more important than the future. And while you listen to Celtic music, you will agree. 

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Celtic music is humanist, but ancient humanist. It is not interested in what Elon Musk is doing, it doesn’t care what shirt you’re wearing, or whether you’re an Episcopalian vegan, or if you can finish The New Yorker crossword puzzle, or really any modern concerns - at least, I don’t think it cares. In a way, I don’t care what they’re saying, because I like the way it makes me feel: peaceful and romantic and connected to something eternal and profound. Like when a huge rock is warm to the touch. These are underrated feelings.