Mountain*7 - Music, Books, Culture

Sardinia

Away, away to Sardinia for a time; and today I have been listening to some of the island's traditional polyphonic singing and have been amazed. Take a listen to this Andy Kershaw show where he explores the music of both Corsica and Sardinia. Great radio. The music sounds ancient to me, from ago - there are elements of plainchant to this, but something else also, something almost Arabic in ornamentation. It makes my hair stand on end.

The Bees Made Honey...

There is something in the deliberate sloth of Earth that fits the new coming of summer; and this new album, whilst at times following the deep-furrowed plough lines of past albums, has something brighter about it, at times clean and new. Gone are the massive buzzing one chord drones that took the fibrous walls of Tony Iommi's riffs to some logical if bastardised extreme, to be replaced by something more structured and architectural. At times I find myself looking into the rafters of these tracks looking for crows, looking for hideaways...

'Miami Morning Coming Down' is as shimmering a track as Earth have ever produced, and one of the sweetest, with Dylan Carlson's guitar tolling like a huge bell matched and layered by a gentle piano.

Listen: Earth - Miami Morning Coming Down


Download: Earth - Miami Morning Coming Down

Because the same come out fierce hot today...

Griot Lamin Saho




Mandigo Trio - Kora, Djembe. Senegal, Gambia and Tanzania

Catacombs (picture by christosnyc)

Erik Davis explores the Paris catacombs

The catacombs I wanted to explore was the immense labyrinth of mined limestone passageways, galleries, and halls that extend beyond the official ossuary...For generations, this shadowy underground city has attracted the unauthorized attentions of decadents, communards, poetes maudits, Nazis, freaks, and punkers, and I’ve been dying to go since I first heard about it. So I felt more than your average thrill when a pal of the Pilkdown Man hooked us up with a crew who were gathering at a metro stop in the 14th arrondisement 10 pm last Saturday night in order to make an illegal foray below

He's not joking about immense, either. I'll get down there one day...

If you're stopping by Erik's site is really worth a look around, some fantastic pieces on all manner of stuff. This piece on Joanna Newsom, which he wrote for Arthur Mag, for instance, is great.

Albert Hoffman

Albert Hoffman the man who first synthesized LSD has died aged 102.

You can read his book, LSD - My Problem Child online

'The pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway' (image by Simon Sellars)

Simon Sellars over at the ever fabulous Ballardian has posted a brilliant piece on Shepperton, the Surrey suburb that has been Ballard's home for the best part of 50 years. In it Sellars takes a walk through the area and, as he puts it, takes 'photographs of the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing.' And as such, it's a piece that charts the incongruity that sits at the heart of this statement, that comes to terms with the shock of just how ordinary and banal Shepperton is. In truth, and this is the same with any writer's sacred geography, the 'arena' of Shepperton is a mythic one, not only in terms of Ballard's recreation of it and adumbrations within it - evident in Simon's totemic guidebook, The Unlimited Dream Company - but also in the magical creative gap between a personal lifetime's reading and meditation, and the dulled bricks of the real. Sellars is obviously well aware that this incongruity must exist but it's still fascinating to watch him drift through the landscape and remap this mental space as he goes, seeking out the lush meadows around the River Ash, the frozen scream of the M3 and of course the squatting reliquary of memories that is the Shepperton Studios. I wonder if he found the psychic hub of the place not in the studios themselves but in the edgelands around them - in the discarded sets that fan out into the wasteland around the tributaries of the Ash and in the housing estate that butts up against the fencing around the hulking warehouses of the outer lots where the artificial dreams of one world and the collective dreamlife of another bleed together, coalescing into some viscous churning emanation... Bring on part 2.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless

Hemingway, speaking of F. Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast

Trees, Scotland

A great gallery of tree photographs from the camera of Stuart Franklin, taken over the last 10 years.