Li'l Andy - "The Powers of Our Day"

Three place settings. Three simple promises. Three long horizons. Dinner was either dipped in sunset or cold night crickets, and people were allowed to say things they didn't mean. They could do that, and nothing happened to them, they just went on. There was no God under the table or in the closet or in the furnace or in the floor. There was no God anywhere and people just said and did whatever they wanted. Three empty fields. Three ragged fenceposts. Three lousy words.

[Buy]

Jon McKiel - "Quils". Something came over Suhrid as he was watching his fourth straight episode of Sportcenter. His body was resting half-embedded in the purple couch; a dirty plate was sitting guileless on the coffee-table's glass; the street's sodium night-light had blurred across the vertical blinds. But Suhrid felt an eruption of impulse, of action, from somewhere deep within him; an arrowhead of will, somewhere under his heart, beside his stomach, lifting through his blood. He didn't budge, at first, just clenched his hands. Bulky men's voices filled the room, like tooting birds. Suhrid sat with his clenched hands. At a commercial break he got up and stood, kinda thrumming, in the middle of the carpet. He didn't know what to do to himself. He did two pull-ups with the pull-up bar in the kitchen doorway. He rubbed his face. He checked his phone. He wanted to write to his former lover, Stef, but he knew that he shouldn't. He started to do another pull-up. He stopped and he went upstairs, into his study, really what he still thought of as his father's study, with his father's books and his father's exotic office chair and his father's old strong sturdy beautiful wooden desk, more beautiful than any other desk Suhrid had ever seen, all polished mahogany and faded brass, where Dad used to sit for hour upon hour, writing long stories in wide notebooks, tiny handwriting between sea-blue lines, with a fine-nibbed pen and india ink. Suhrid came into the room and sat down behind the desk. He covered his eyes with his hands. He still felt this impulse within him, this spirit, this jump. "No, Suhrid," he said out loud, to himself. Then he ransacked the desk-drawers looking for a blank pad of lined paper, one of his father's old pens, some ink. And when he found these things he arranged them on the surface of the desk, unscrewed the cap of the ink-bottle, the cap of the pen, dipped and began to write. Dear Stef, he wrote, I'm writing you from a feeling of devotion that is probably just fondness but which feels, tonight, like a fortune-teller's-- But Suhrid stopped and looked at what he had written, and particularly the colour of the ink, which was faded and brown, like a coffee-stain, like the text in a forgotten Victorian ledger. The sentence was not yet finished and already it looked bygone.

So he searched the drawers for other ink, for jet-black ink which he unstoppered and wrote with, but this too was faded, leaving letters that looked like insect-tracks. Another bottle and another, all oxidized or dried-up; his note was becoming a rainbow of tired shades, old ambers, and Suhrid sucked back a deep breath through his nose, to keep from crying. He leaned back in his dad's chair. Stef had a level voice, an unwavering look. Stef had thick eyelashes. Everything about their relationship had taken place in a present. Not a future or a past but a true, cruel present. Suhrid didn't want to write any more. He didn't want to be in this empty house. He wanted to be by the ocean, or in the forest, where the consolations were not as obvious, or comforting, or false.

[bandcamp]

(image by Sophie Lécuyer(

The Pandamonium - "Waiting for the Summer". These English chaps don't even know the degree to which this song is correct. Yesterday, T said to me, "I've hit a wall with this weather". The road was lined with sheaves of hard gray snow. Salt-stains all over the sidewalk. Bare trees, with wood wet and sickly. "Yeah," I said, kicking some gravel. March in Montreal is like that. It feels like purgatory. We see the blue skies and feel Sunday sunshine and can think only, soon, soon, soon! We eat hotdogs and drink beers and pretend like it was barbecue. In the 1960s, what did the Pandamonium do? Did they shiver under willows and eat July-style pasties? Waiting for the summer is different in Quebec and in Kent, but the soundtrack seems the same: pattering drums, balmy guitars, a coaxing, hopeful voice. We don't want to play too loud; we don't want to scare the season away. [buy / via hoot.ch]

Girl Tears - "You're Nothing"

Focus on the out-breath. Feel the out-breath and let it go. Accept yourself as an animal. Accept that you will bellow and howl and stamp your feet and lose control. Honour your impulses and be gentle with your wild urges. Let go of self-punishment like it were the out-breath. Do not dwell on having behaved like a depraved teenager with a gun. Do not begrudge yourself the thoughts that keep you in the shower. Know yourself. Know the sticky, ragged caverns of your own dripping soul, it is the wealth and beauty of your place in the world. See the thick, buttery layers of baseless aggrandizement and the scuffed and swollen membrane of the stubborn switch that's stuck on 'run'. Know it. Measure it, with your fingers. And then take your fingers away and look at that space. That space is the distance between complete self-actualization and total annihilation. Out-breath in that space. [$5 USD]

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Hot 8 Brass Band - "Sexual Healing"

Today would have been my friend Joel's 35th birthday. He was responsible for recommending this gem that has been one of my most "I loved that one" posts ever (NB: Joel AND the Hot 8 show up in the comments!), so I think of him every time. He was an incredible soul and he is dearly missed. [Buy]

Edmund was tired. 2% battery life and last night's clothes. Blood thick with sugar like raspberry jam. How meaningless a poker win seemed in the face of this grey morning. The morning seemed to have nothing to offer, it seemed to just stand there, stoic, ignoring him. The last year of his life could be titled I Wasn't Dressed For This. His winnings bought a breakfast sandwich and it seemed a cosmic injustice that terrible food tasted good. Edmund wondered where the line was between "knowing you're dying" and knowing you're dying. If you could feel it, with your hands.

Wild Beasts - "A Simple Beautiful Truth". The mathematician who saw sums as colours, numbers as different states of matter. An equation that is a skating rink, a proof that is a wood. In life, all day, the intersections can be translated into math. Every go and deceleration, every cause and effect, all are quantifiable; and every quantifiable figure becomes a metaphor for another thing. The mathematician glimpsed arcs of rainbow, crests of leaps, firing neural wants, and he imagined their arithmetic. He imagined their arithmetic and in turn this arithmetic became stained glass, golden lakes, trembling aspen trees. Everything reflects. [buy]

(photo by casey dienel)

Angel Olsen - "Forgiven/Forgotten"

This song will play on the day I am let out of jail. It will be cold and clear, and cars won't look like God's moving turds, and food will have a taste. Everything will look bright because getting out of jail is really just being given back your senses. And that will be the same day my phone grows legs and walks away.

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The immaculate Angel Olsen is back with Burn Your Fire For No Witness and it starts with rockers and it ends with softies, both of which I'm getting fully into. It's about loss in a sense that I feel especially today. Like knowing you can't ever, like someone asking you to please let me go.

[image from consumeconsume]