mend the choirs above
look at your right hand. look at its ring finger. that is the finger that operates a saxophone's f# trill key. i didn't use that key once on the album. even though there had been miles of notes to cover. covered and covered again in circuits and laps and relays. wheeling in and out and north and south and up and down. traffic invariably familiar. heavily congested at times.
once it's all done people need to hear it, which today means dealing with the streamers. not so long ago those who sought the blessing of the gods would offer up holocausts, orisons, exotic unguents, incantations, herbs, perfumes, sacrifices, but now if you are to propitiate or even - dare one hope - curry the favour of the algorithmic deities that lurk in the sacred groves of spotify and youtube, you have to surrender your metrics for them to guzzle down. apollo thirsting for clicks. astarte totting up her follows. osiris calculating listen durations.
these are capricious gods. they can raise a song to the heavens or cast it into the underworld as they please, and they show little regard for the music they conserve. we give them the sublimated heights of human experience and, a brisk and spiteful rainbow-unweaving later, we get our art back bound in urizenic ligatures: catalogued, codified, categorised, denuded of joy, and with the profits creamed away for good measure.
but music won't surrender easily. she has many lovers. if you've read this far you're probably one of them. benevolent souls strive tirelessly to make those places better and assemble motley playlist coalitions of those barred from the acoustic chillzone, those who spoil the balearic vibes. they steal in under numinous noses and, evading gorgon eyes, scribble seditious lists of the weird and the exquisite. as the almighty skyfather daniel ek sleeps they tiptoe about, rustling up a curator's feast from the ambrosial crumbs under the table.
meanwhile i shuffle up in supplication, degraded but hopeful, to place my songs on the altar.
playlists featuring the rising sign:
my playlists: