Post Partum

Dash Snow [from Polaroids]

Geneviève Castrèe - Post Partum (mp3): This song is how the trees silently applaud when you've climbed to the top of your roof and can climb no further north. It reminds that all great successes on foot have been immediately followed by the unimpressive action of sitting back down and taking a deep breath. And we all need to breathe.

Party Tonight: Your House

Erin Colleen Williams - Sonance Amplification Agent or Minnie Gramophone (2007)

It's time for a party, kids. An old-fashioned, 2oz at a time, scream 'till it hurts, and tell me what happened in the morning party. Join me on the street corner outside your window with these songs in a paperbag. We will reenact historical atrocities with humorous masks until we get sufficient change thrown at us to invest in a brighter future. We will dance until tomorrow comes.

You Say Party! We Say Die! - Teenage Hit Wonder (mp3)

Okkervil River - Our Life Is Not (mp3)

C.O.C.O - Youth Think But You Don't (mp3)

Surrounded By White

Sean Healy - Egghead (2006) [resin, chewing gum, table]

I'll attempt to proceed while the layout is in disarray. It's like composing delicate strategic plans amidst the stuttering Auto-Formatting of Microsoft Word. Or like writing poetry atop the roof of a hurricane-drowned house while columns of chaotic whitewater rush around me. My inappropriate affective response to a heightened level of danger and immediacy is sleep, so here's a lullaby about swords. Listen to it to drift asleep while you should be attending to your trashed bedroom, to your plunging bank account, to getting an oil change, to a ruinous filing system, to the knocks at your door, to forgotten motivations for self-improvement, and to an overseas war.

Billy Harvey - Soft Blade (mp3): Hooray for musician websites as creative installations that complement the mood of music. Billy's is award-winning.

Who Have I Become

Julee Holcombe - Self As Narcissus (2005)

Sorry, the site is going through some changes. Like us all, it sometimes wakes up and doesn't recognize itself in the mirror. It says things like "has it been a whole year already" and "who have I become".

Patti Griffin - Crying Over (mp3)

A Textbook Lesson in the Mystery of Anatomy

Ursula Sokolowska - Automation #10 (2002)

Ursula's projection art is the visual biology that Vid Libert diagrams in this song "No One Knows". His words point in straight black lines to how her pictures show anatomy as animated natural mechanics. The pair could be a textbook with one chapter on growth and another on its inversion via the wear and tear of days and weather. The prologue would warn about how the danger of teaching linearly misrepresents the very art of the subject. And the epilogue would be written in disappearing ink that footnotes the mystery that no one really knows the truth of what we are made.

Vid Libert - No One Knows (mp3)

Accidental Eulogies

Marcy Adzich - Large Surface Area (2006)

Press kits and promotional emails are usually formulaic, hyperbolic, and meaningfully barren. But sometimes the paperwork is a fittingly ironic and subtle vehicle for art. In such a vehicle, on tour and one flat-tire shy of a good story, I found this description. It's about the band Eulogies and even more about the process of accidentally starting a band.

"They became a band in any one of a hundred truck stops, dozens of late nights in motel rooms, in between telephone busy signals and botched driving directions, at sound checks and in dressing rooms."

I'm not sure why that struck me, perhaps because it speaks of the relationships that happen organically during a travel through life with someone, sharing a forgettable number of passing words but an entire world of rearview memories. I picture this Eulogies song playing on some high and raspy AM station while driving across the surreal landscape of the Marcy Adzich sculpture "Large Surface Area", reminding of Ireland and smallness and the simplicity of life on the individual planets of the Little Prince. And mostly reminding that this time it's without you.

Eulogies - One Man (mp3)

Snapped Heart Strings

Erin Colleen Williams - Heart (2007)

The Underpainting - Some Strings (mp3): An ode to disgusting but unavoidable truths... and the days when they all come to a head.

The Shadow of Saint Anne

Izel Vargas Virgende - Alamo (2007)

UNKLE (ft Ian Astbury) - Burn My Shadow (mp3): This is the terrifying sound that quakes the silent resting flesh of a nursing home in the middle of the night... shaking porcelain birds off of their shelves, fake plastic flowers out of their hand-woven baskets, and all expectations out of their routine comfort. It becomes the white noise that drowns out the clamour of the ice machine. It's the feverish sound of life-shaking transition.

Lashes

Kathryn E Martin - Some Things Are Perfect Where They Are (2006)

Bat for Lashes wears flaws with pride in ways that mature our very mechanisms of appreciation. It teaches a needed lesson without PowerPoint or logic models that the challengingly beautiful yields correspondingly rich rewards. This untangleable vocal mixture of Bjork, Arcade Fire, Joni Mitchel, Tori Amos, and PJ Harvey is one of those rewards. Together, the songs create the score for drinking whiskey in the back of an Indian film, somehow heightening the ability to feel the immediacy in subtitled poetry.

Bat for Lashes - What's A Girl To Do? (mp3)

Bat for Lashes - The Wizard (mp3)