Tag Archives: Ambient

THE SUNDAY MIX – THE SUN

Here is this weeks mix of music and poetry and the subject this week is the Sun –

Great is the sun, and wide he goes
Through empty heaven with repose;
And in the blue and glowing days
More thick than rain he showers his rays.

Though closer still the blinds we pull
To keep the shady parlour cool,
Yet he will find a chink or two
To slip his golden fingers through.

The dusty attic spider-clad
He, through the keyhole, maketh glad;
And through the broken edge of tiles
Into the laddered hay-loft smiles.

Meantime his golden face around
He bares to all the garden ground,
And sheds a warm and glittering look
Among the ivy’s inmost nook.

Above the hills, along the blue,
Round the bright air with footing true,
To please the child, to paint the rose,
The gardener of the World, he goes.

Summer Sun – Robert Louis Stephenson  

    

The Sun—just touched the Morning—
The Morning—Happy thing—
Supposed that He had come to dwell—
And Life would all be Spring!

She felt herself supremer—
A Raised—Ethereal Thing!
Henceforth—for Her—What Holiday!
Meanwhile—Her wheeling King—
Trailed—slow—along the Orchards—
His haughty—spangled Hems—
Leaving a new necessity!
The want of Diadems!

The Morning—fluttered—staggered—
Felt feebly—for Her Crown—
Her unanointed forehead—
Henceforth—Her only One!

The Sun – Just touched the morning – Emily Dickinson

How valuable it is in these short days,
threading through empty maple branches,
the lacy-needled sugar pines.

Its glint off sheets of ice tells the story
of Death’s brightness, her bitter cold.

We can make do with so little, just the hint
of warmth, the slanted light.

The way we stand there, soaking in it,
mittened fingers reaching.

And how carefully we gather what we can
to offer later, in darkness, one body to another.

Molly Fisk – Winter Sun

Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sunflower wishes to go!

Ah Sunflower – William Blake

AN INTERVIEW WITH ELYSE TABET OF LITTER – AFRICAN PAPER

litter11

Space may just be what connects the senses.

An Interview with Elyse Tabet of Litter

Africa Paper

Todays Discovery – Liliane Chlela

This is a beautiful and evocative piece by the Beirut artist Liliane Chlela.

LILIANE CHLELA

TODAYS DISCOVERY – OBLAAT

O. Blaat with Ikue Mori

Kate Carr ~ Songs from a Cold Place

Kate Carr ~ Songs from a Cold Place.

Here are a couple of “cold” reviews from A Closer Listen –

SUNDAY MIX – WALKING

 Every Sunday I put together a mix loosely based around a theme, as I think that music and poetry go so well together and since today I went for a stroll along the seafront to blow the cobwebs away, todays theme is Walking

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)

Rain so dark I
can’t get through—
train going by
in a hurry. The voice
said walk or die, I
walked,—the train
and the voice all
blurry. I walked with
my bones and my heart
of chalk, not even
a splintered notion:
days of thought, nights
of worry,—lonesome
train in a hurry.

 

 

I will have been walking away:
no matter what direction I intended,
at that moment, I will have been walking
Away into the direction that you now say
I have always intended, no matter what my
intention was then, I will have been
Walking away, though it will not be clear
what it was that I was leaving or
even why, it seems that you will say
That always, I was walking away,
intending a direction that was not towards
you, but moving away with every step,
Or, even when I pretended to be walking
towards you, only making the place
for my feet to go backwards,
Away, where I will have been walking,
always away:   intention and direction
unknown, but knowing you will always
say I will have been walking away.
A Kind of Villanelle

 

 

Poems courtesy of Poetry Foundation

TODAYS DISCOVERY – SOUND AWAKENER AND GALLERY SIX

Here is another discovery for the Africa and Asian Electronics Season.

SOUND AWAKENER

GALLERY SIX

SUNDAY MIX – FORESTS

This weeks Sunday Mix is loosely based on the REVEIL / Soundcamp / Dawn Chorus this weekend (03/05/15) and has the theme Forests

Let us go now into the forest.
Trees will pass by your face,
and I will stop and offer you to them,
but they cannot bend down.
The night watches over its creatures,
except for the pine trees that never change:
the old wounded springs that spring
blessed gum, eternal afternoons.
If they could, the trees would lift you
and carry you from valley to valley,
and you would pass from arm to arm,
a child running
from father to father.

Pine Forest by Gabriela Mistral

“The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life and activity; it affords protection to all beings.
–   Buddhist Sutra 

“In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things.  In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.”
–   John Fowles   

TODAYS’ DISCOVERY – UNII

UNII

TODAYS’ DISCOVERY – SYRPHE WEBSITE AND LITTER

The Syrphe site is a treasure trove of wonderful electronic and experimental music and soundscapes from mainly Africa and Asia and was spotlighted by @reaktorplayer on Twitter. I thought that I would take some time this month and through May, to discover for myself and bring you some gems of female artists that are producing creative electronic music from these areas of the world, beginning with Litter aka Elyse Tabet  an audio-visual artist based in Beirut, Lebanon. As Syrphe says – “In her first album, omnipresent is the image of a machine running out of power while passing through a stream of hazy, often almost melodic sonic landscapes.”