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I went to see a performance of the Nutcracker on Dec 24th, and this has got me thinking about the style that I write in. MADLO was the first album where I was really consciously trying to fit lyrics into the phrases of the song, so something like da DAH, dah DAH, dah dadada dah dah dah, just slowly whittling it into words: “I crawl, I crawl, an animal to ya…” When I was younger, this would have either been a total gibberish phrase, or I would have abandoned the melody for a lyric written just as text. With MADLO I wanted a certain incantatory quality to it, where I didn’t have to give up a certain melody for something that scanned logically, but the words still pointing towards a meaning, not just being placeholder or roundabout expressions. So this was a major challenge of the record, filling in these lines word by word, waiting for the right word that sharpened the meaning without derailing the melodic line of thought. 

But now as I get more into writing for a new album, I’m realizing that to the extent that I have any sort of natural style, a large part of that is having lyrical phrases that don’t fit into the melodic momentum, that jut out oddly into the room. This is why when I was finishing the MADLO songs, I felt they were in some sense folk songs, because a folk song needs to adhere to that tight rhythm and meter, so it can be retained and passed along from one singer to another easily. It’s much easier to remember a repeating melody than it is to remember a string of words - not only easier to remember but to participate in, to have the song be a group activity. The farther it deviates from these standard, simple rhythms, the more it turns into a sort of solo display, away from folk dances and towards a practiced, virtuoso display of emotion, like the dancers in a ballet or singers in an opera. Instead of equal participation we get observation, reflection, meditation; instead of the thrill of the dance we get a richer and more nuanced taste of a particular emotion. 

I’m excited now to use what I learned in writing MADLO - having clear melodic lines as anchor points, perceiving those lines clearly and developing the song from them - and start to stray from that towards my natural tendency to complicate and obscure simple shapes into something more gnarled. What I am always most opposed to is straying into territory that feels random, arbitrary, lacking any connective tissue that makes it feel like art. What is laid out in the track should always feel like the tip of the iceberg, not a scattering of flakes melting in a glass. The structure of a song should feel ordained by ghosts, not produced by the composer’s whims but bowing to unseen, ancient guideposts. If we could not see the trees but we could see the wind, then the wind would tell the story of the trees. That’s what a song should be, a wind that lets you see those invisible branches of life; so a writer has to sense what those trees are like, and they have to understand how wind works. The former is done by living, meditating, experiencing, developing your connection with the unseen; the latter is done by study, by pulling apart songs like a mechanic pulls apart cars. The last few years I feel I have really learned a lot, learning how to put a song together so it does what I want it to do rather than fighting against it, like a pilot fighting against a poorly-constructed airplane. Now I perhaps know at least the basics of flying, and I can have some clarity when I’m circling around these big subjects, hoping to return with a little piece of it in song form.

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“Speak only when your words are more beautiful than silence.”

— Imam Ali

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“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realise they were the big things.”

— Robert Brault

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This just gets better each year

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all sorts of echoes in these caverns

twitter / store

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Alfred Kelsner

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The Mephisto Waltz (Paul Wendkos, 1971) Female Vampire (Jesús Franco, 1973) Cathy’s Curse (Eddy Matalon, 1977) Death Steps in the Dark (Maurizio Pradeaux, 1977) Slumber Party Massacre II (Deborah Brock, 1987) Haunting Fear (Fred Olen Ray, 1990)

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Drawlloween 12: Grave

Ink and acrylic

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Drawlloween 22: Wizard

A forest mage and some friends :) ink on paper, 9 x 12"

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The Forest Guide, oil on canvas

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Lit up. Oil on canvas, 5 x 7"

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Others might say I lost my way Look in the mirror Take a good look at yourself Find yourself, love yourself Do you notice

I Am Me - GOT7

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“Do you remember a night when I came along the dark passage to your room in a thunderstorm and we lay talking about whether we were afraid of death or not? That is the sort of occasion on which the things I want to say to you,–and to you only,–get said.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West written c. June 1933

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Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

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sitting around wasting my 20s while thinking about how i sat around and wasted my teens

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From @motherthemountain: “Nasturtium the flower girl, greeting every new season with a special flower hat 🌸🌺🌻” #cutepetclub [source: https://instagr.am/p/CUAnsJeNLHY/ ]

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“What you say about me it is saliva and it is earth that you knead to give me the shape of a horse, the shape of a mound, the shape of a mole, the shape of your back, the shape of any of my fingers slowly closing all your orifices one by one (and it is more saliva and more dirt you take to give me the shape of a hut, the shape of a bat). What you say about me is a lie that manages to tell the truth. What you say about me, translates me to a language we still don´t know.”

—

Fragments from Jesús Aguado “Lo que dices de mí”. (My clumsy translation).

http://amediavoz.com/aguado.htm#1.%20LO%20QUE%20DICES%20DE%20M%C3%8D…