16/13 - Comedown

The last couple of weeks of exuberant moods have finally given way to a more familiar troubled state of mind. The dentist wants half of the money I won, I'm tired and uninspired, and I feel lonely. Music's still good though:

Tim Buckley - Pleasant Street

You don't remember what to say
You don't remember what to do
You don't remember where to go
You don't remember what to choose
You wheel, you steal, you feel, you kneel down

PJ Harvey - The Sky Lit Up

You know those albums that have been in your life for years and years and you're so familiar with you more or less take them for granted? Then every once in a while you sit down and listen – I mean, really listen to them – and they strike you with all their force and you remember why they form such an integral part of your collection? I had one of those re-revelatory times with Is This Desire? this week. The way Polly Jean uses more or less every guise of her voice across the album – from threatening whisper via vulnerable quiver to hysteric falsetto; the way the music ranges from industrial noise in Joy to circular piano melodies in The River, while still presenting the album as an undeniably unified sound-universe; the way extreme emotions and fates are packaged within cold and restrained little cells and all the ages seem to clash... What a masterpiece. As so many of her albums.

Jonny Greenwood - Prospectors Arrive

The more time pass the more There Will Be Blood stands out as one of the supreme artistic statements of the 21st century so far. One of the most brilliantly written, fantastically filmed, devastatingly acted, and of course perfectly soundtracked movies there are. The fact that I only need to listen to one track of the soundtrack to conjure up its drama in my mind is testament enough.

Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust

I was listening to a bootleg of one of the concerts of the Rolling Thunder Revue, and Joan Baez performed this song a few numbers before Bob Dylan came on stage for his set. Quite haunting, since, of course, the song is about Bobby and their strained and eventually lost loveaffair.

György Ligeti - Clocks and Clouds

This is where you crank up the volume one more notch and just float away in a zero-gravity field of pure sound.


Afterwards you may as well keep the volume up and play this marvellous remix (the kind that Nicolas Jaar churns out as though it was the easiest thing in the world) on repeat for the rest of the evening: