HEALTH - Before Tigers [mp3]
In the middle of the stream, in the rapids, on a log sits another universe. In this universe, spice and sand reign supreme without subtlety. On the banks of this stream sits still another universe and across the way on another log on another bank, another universe that is the same. In these mirrored universes, bombs drop like the upside down letter V, marking the places whereby sexual encounters will determine the fate of the Allied Powers. Further up stream, on a rock, another universe again, another again and again and again. The water sags on the rocks before rapidly flowing into the crevices of the centrally-located log. Time is frozen there, occasionally, for undress and with lavish care the clothing is re-adorned so as to give the impression of having never left. These universes all sit with legs dangling in the stream, the feet at the end cold from the water and bare for the travels. Up above through the tree limbs, the sun is meandering, a maundering steamy haze lifting in evaporative waves and it passes before the page, with each turn of the page and the light changes shape casting shadows on each next.
For each of these universes, time operates according to the rule of the page and in that stream, time passes according to the laws of the universe and after a different time, on a different page, in a different mind has passed its past, a rejoinder relieves the responsibilities inherent in literature. The universes step from their logs and their rocks and their banks to assail the foodstuff residing inside and they discuss the implications of such a peaceful passage of water through the graves, there are graves under the water and they agree that the earth is a grave.
HEALTH is a rhythm and blues band from Los Angeles. The featured song is from the album Get Color. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
Ah Holly Fam’ly - Loneliest City [mp3]
by Travis Meyer
We recall the shape of our dreams through the song of the break of day that clings to the evening, as if handling the places we’d been were a moth’s appeal to the ceiling, skimming invisible wings toward the big window’s view out into our lives like fixed dioramas of different, lonelier cities we’ve survived. The past isn’t a matter if you can manage forgetting the pulpy misadventures that brought you here, she said. And we can lie awake in the untamed air of this February indoors, pretending we’re at the shore of what our former selves imagined we’d have learned by now. No doubt they’d look at us like we’d returned from Antarctica, with mermaids for wives and fur aureoles encircling our chapped faces, our souls impossibly underwater, muted by an afterthought of the almond orchards along the gravel roadside. It was better to leave our clothes for later — our labors redivided — and pretend we were characters in an Antonionian reverie, spinning the globe and putting our fingers down, hoping we might catch ourselves where the ocean sprays at an igneous footing and evergreen ghosts sweat blueberry mists in the morning. You against the glass. You against the murk of an imitative pond tinted nicotine for the effect your eyes have watching the seagull ascend motionless in the Pacific wind. You against the white wall naked but for a black sheet draped like a night wind around your hips, goosebumped flesh from the cold that space heater doesn’t make up for, you’re spinning the globe again for a lonelier city, a place for coffee and bare boughs and ice cream with a matinee alone.
Ah Holly Fam’ly is a rhythm and blues band from Portland. The featured song is from the album Reservoir. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
The Blind Shake - Midnight Scream [mp3]
There is this little white orb and it bounces. It is of a plastic polycarbonate slightly perforated construction and it bounces. We in our hands, each right, each night, hold tight, we rhyme a paddle with our saddles and it bounces. Probably it is not polycarbonate but it bounces. We drink beer and it bounces. He looks across the table with a glare gleaming as I lay in wait dreaming and it bounces. A sip, we sip, another sip before he lifts into the air slightly tumbling a trembling, it nearly nears the pergola ceiling before neatly attacking the near nothing and it bounces. For a time our gaze guides little lasers into the corner without so much as a shuffle, our weight leaning back and forth before a slice recoils and it bounces. He is no grander gardener than I as he tramples the dying daffodils daring a playful prayer, it propels into the air and it bounces. Something like a scuffle with the fence, a left and a right into the wooden planks before a kick dislodges with might, we might, she might, let’s might and say we did but it bounces. “Holy shit!” and it bounces. Consecutively we flail forgetting the laws of physics, we slide a cradle under the little brittle blur bouncing leaps and bounds, it travels leaps and bounds, I leap and he bounds bullets blasted and bucked, bending and ending with a “pong” neverending and it bounces. Something like awe overcomes the contestants competing for no prize, a thirst for a sip abates with rapt attention, the ball travels together with hopes healing a long dormant rivalry recalled, he thinks, “Remember when we used to do this all the time?” and it bounces. These clicks, his clack with such power performing under pressure was never his game but it bounces. A blast for the win is caught from his knees but then an elated return, a deflated reply, the point is his and it bounces underline.
The Blind Shake is a rhythm and blues band from Minneapolis. The featured song is from the album Carmel. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
Bibio - Haikuesque [mp3]
She asked, “Have you been in a perpetually liminal state for a long time?”
Out the window, the dark side of the road passed slowly shifting shapes and shadows lifting up into his eyes sifting through his thoughts and inside resides, sitting upon a rocking chair without a rock the bus burling a beast bowling down the icy lanes and highways drifting drops just right of insight outside of momentum. The days December deceive and become January joining. Those nights watching the little litany weaving wisps of wherewithal, they would laugh at the convolution contorting control over a crevice of discovery, designing doubt and delight with delicate care. He wonders where it all began before, and being existence extols elaborate ideas brewing beyond. But this is all a ploy he would ponder, perfunctory remarks reveal a revolving relapse rehearsed and repeated. She felt forever that way last night and he believed because.
In clear blusters, they hold hands and recite, “Hello, I’m glad.” Walking willfully bliss, a theoretically blasé affair predicated on an airing of grievances an airing of gravity an airing of gratuitous thinking for the sake of feeling, a thought about felt and he felt he thought he feels she thinks and a circular conundrum of collected misunderstandings and interpretation imbues something like mystique mistook for an always myopic perception. This mystery of movement of massive drifting and the snow falls fleeting filament landing lashes and batting, they speak in mistakes and poorly translated traversing telling tales tallied toothlessly and perfect, performed aside alleviating an alienating ellipses until.
He answered, “Yes. But you would understand.”
Bibio is a rhythm and blues band from the UK. The featured song is from the album Ambivalence Avenue. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
Biosphere - Daphnis 26 [mp3]
We would wallow up willing
our ways and our eyes
upon a prize so wrought with
mystery and unknowable satisfaction
warring our once thought-over union
untold to untruth and
unlike another
from above
we could view in fits and trembles
a train traversing
the mirrored body of water
the mirrored body of sky
the mirrored convalescence of
our conversation consuming the counsel,
currying cries of shuttered delight
dealing blows to the reunion,
regaling tales of told miracles
murmured from that point in the atmosphere,
an almost aimless atomizing
accrued and accredited
to the nearest institution
enlisted and instilled
we still we stand
a friend a friend
they wander while and wonder
while we wonder while they wander
wiling
whereto we go
where do we go
from here
and the train
it scoots across the most picturesque
scene
sauntering
in our minds
as a backdrop to our blight.
Biosphere is a rhythm and blues band from Norway. The featured song is from the album Dropsonde. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
Cluster - Gissander [mp3]
Dave had just finished smoking his cigarette when I came out.
“Ah hell. I guess I’ll have to smoke another.”
“Yeah, if you want. We could discuss things over a cigarette.”
Dave lit his cigarette and mine too with a struck match. I had my hands in my coat pockets looking for a lighter and instead I found a piece of paper with the words “Actually, it’s a John Hancock jumper long sleeve shirt” written in sloppy cursive. I handed the paper to Dave and he said that she must have been cute.
The porch is attached to the back of our second story apartment. Below us is a parking lot for the convenience store found in the first floor. We stood smoking in silence for a moment, staring ahead at whatever objects filled our vision. I was looking at a squirrel when a familiar car pulled into the parking lot. It sat dead, the engine hissing slightly in the cold, it’s sparkly silver glistening in a way that concealed the possibility of sentience. The door burst open and a man hopped out, all nerves and withdrawal.
“There he is,” says Dave. I just nod. The man paces the length of his luxury sport utility vehicle, looking left and right as he nears the street. Once he determines that the parking lot is secure, a lit cigarette materializes and the man begins to smoke feverishly. Dave takes an audible drag on his cigarette, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs and blowing it out with above average force. He observes, “This is the fourth time I’ve seen him out there smoking in the last two days.” The man’s glance darts left and right and for a second I wonder if he might finally notice us up above, watching his every movement. I say to Dave, “How does he not ever notice us? We’ve been watching him smoke cigarettes in this parking lot for the last week and somehow he never notices.” Dave thinks maybe since he’s so distracted by the notion that someone (who?) might catch him smoking street level that it never occurs to him that someone above him is fully aware of his strange habit of rapidly smoking cigarettes in the parking lot of Lulu’s Deli.
“I’m gonna go down to talk to him.” I tell Dave. I stub out my cigarette and Dave raises his eyebrows. “I am going to tell him we know. I’m curious how he will respond.” I go downstairs to meet the man in the parking lot. He jumps into his vehicle and quickly rolls the windows up at the sight of me, his cigarette disappearing as neatly as it always appears. He doesn’t start the engine though. I knock on the driver’s side window and make a motion that he should roll down his window.
Above Dave is watching with interest and he holds his breath to hear our interaction. It’s all mumbles though and he starts to wonder what we are saying. He guesses that I am telling him about our perch above and that we know he smokes. He guesses that the man is excusing our perception that he is a secret smoker and maybe the man is suggesting that from our perch it is difficult to understand the world below. Dave wonders for a moment if maybe the man is right, maybe looking down on the parking lot from a porch one story above ground does cause a misunderstanding of the world below and then he finishes his cigarette.
Dave goes back inside before I finish talking to the man. We have been talking about Colombia and the man has just invited me to his villa down there and Dave too. I tell him that’s not what I came down to talk about but he just shrugs and turns the key. I take a step back and watch him drive off. Back upstairs Dave asks me how things went. I say, “We talked about his villa in Colombia.” Dave kind of laughs and then he selects a book from the shelf standing next to the desk where he is seated. He hands it to me and says, “Sometimes we don’t see things that are there. Sometimes our eyes play tricks on our head.”
Cluster is a rhythm and blues band from Berlin. The featured song is from the album Qua. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.