motel de moka

I was born in 1924. If I were a violin my age I wouldn’t be one of the best. As a wine I’d be first-rate or I’d be vinegar. As a dog I’d be dead. As a book I’d just be getting expensive, or be thrown away by now. As a forest I’d be young; as a machine, ridiculous. As a human being, I’m tired, very tired.
- Yehuda Amichai.

Biosphere - en trance
(Patashnik / 1994)

Standing in the hall of my house at 3:23 am while trying to remember what was I looking for in the first place this song pops out from my headphones. It seems to me that Geir Jenssen (Biosphere) has joined me in my insmonia and that this song was originally captured at high hours in the morning with the same swathe of pronounced nothing that surrounds me. I hear an erotic pulse hidden in the ethereal groove of “en trance”. The guitar circling as a backbone that doesn’t allow any of the other subtle and fleeting elements of the soundscape to fall apart. The eternal struggle between the submissive and dominant rituals in relationships.

A Silver Mt. Zion - 13 angels standing guard…
(He has left us alone but shafts of light… / 2000)

Six years ago shortly after A silver Mt. Zion had dropped their debut I was at the height of my post-rock love. Around that time though, with the proliferation of bands trying to achieve the same effect on their music, the genre’s aesthetic became increasingly wearisome and the droned-out post-apocalyptic utterances from the Montreal rooster suddenly seemed a bit wee irrelevant and annoying. I stopped my listening obsession. Nowadays, my post-rock indigestion is still not entirely gone for good but I’ve found my love for this gem of an album persists. “13 angels standing guard ’round the side your bed” is one of many highlights for me, a sad piece that drifts along ghostly filtered voices and lovely layers of violins. Ever since I heard this song I’ve always related it to the chapter in Homer’s Odyssey with the sirens. For me, this is my siren song, that song that I imagine myself crashing boats to.

Alexander Knaifel - In air clean and unseen
(Svete Tikhiy / 2003)

Last week, while studying for my exams, I was listening to the radio and heard a song that struck me hard in between my guts and the entrails. I stopped whatever I was doing and sat listening to it, feeling everything around me slowly moving down. When the music was over I took my pen waiting for the announcer to name the composer but she never did. As my first guess was that of eslovenian composer Arvo Pärt I started listening to samples of each one of his albums and of other minimalist composers, hoping something that sounded familiar would come out. Nothing did. In an attack of frustration thinking the song would be forever lost in my subconscious I drove to the radio station asking for answers. I got one. Alexander Knaifel. Not only that but after some heavy persuasion one of the staff members from the radio station agreed to give me a copy of the album. I’ve been listening to it in bed every night and I find it excruciatingly solemn. Too soon to give it such a high rank but definitely among the more touching pieces of music I’ve ever heard.

Oren Ambarchi - Remedios, the beauty (edit)
(Grapes from the estate / 2004)

Remedios the beauty was not a creature of this world. The most impious men, those who would disguise themselves as priests to say sacrilegious masses in Catarino’s store, would go to church with an aim to see, if only for an instant, the face of Remedios the Beauty, whose legendary good looks were spoken of with alarming excitement throughout the swamp. It was a long time before they were able to do so, and it would have been better for them if they never had, because most of them never recovered their peaceful habits of sleep. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One hundred years of solitude.)

Stars of the Lid - articulate silences pt. 2
(And their refinement of the decline / 2007)

I was tip-toe-ing round the house trying not to wake anyone. But they heard me. However, by the time they arrived, it had long been since I got swallowed over by the miasmal bliss of twilight.