The nighttime is not made for sleep, but it can accommodate in a pinch. Sometimes it pinches back, and sometimes it whispers a quiet message to instruct your skin how to crawl properly. Illusory shapes might seem to pool and writhe and pull apart and hover in the near-darkness, but it is unnecessary to attribute any importance to them -- although ordinary courtesy will hardly kill you. The bland faces that appear are merely the impolite regions of your brain seeking to resolve a pattern that isn’t there: the tools that we have developed to unravel the night so often lie to us. But they are comfortable lies so we don’t actually mind.
The nighttime is not made for sleep, but the dawn is made to creep -- and creeping is what it does best: creeping with the best of them, since the best of them learned to creep by watching the dawn. What a fortunate thing it seems that the lens and the retina and the optic nerve were all stimulated into being, drawing aside the dusty veil that once covered the world to give us the illusion of placement and perspective, and providing us with the means to orient ourselves towards and sometimes away from harm.
There is so much to see here in the domain where light is free to play! Although it is important to point out that the light came first: it was not put there for our benefit, and it does not function in the way that it does for our convenience. We are simply accessories fashioned in correspondence with the nature of light.
A vast, upright column of agitated molds and mosses -- not to mention the sordid, mucky enthusiasm of algae -- is suddenly set into action, startled out of a deep sleep by a premature sunrise (or protesting an early bedtime brought on by a premature sunset); it lumbers into view, teetering precariously amongst the uneven, rippling peaks of distant foothills, so similar in appearance but so different in substance to the crumpled texture of aging flesh. The column collapses in disapproval, and the weight of its judgment is impossibly heavy; yet it is so dissipated in nature that, rather than crushing everything beneath it, it bleeds through the spaces between molecules, disrupting covalent bonds and stripping away electrons, subtly changing whatever is in its path into something else. The results are sometimes tragic and sometimes amusing. A bright, golden semi-colon might be reduced to a tarnished tungsten ellipsis… its meaning disfigured beyond recognition. Or a sad heap of human remains might suddenly find itself rejuvenated as a latticework of flowering selenite, now blissfully unconcerned about the state of its breath and armpits, or whether it will finally receive a promotion at that job that it doesn’t even enjoy doing.
A clustered wodge of other remains, not so fortunate as to be transformed in such an elegant manner, continue with their more prosaic transformation into stinky ooze, and slouch off towards the periphery, carrying with them whatever comfort they can muster from the situation. Perfectly normal impulses in regards to the enjoyable aspects of life become an embarrassment and a burden; they form rigid shells and flee the scene on veiny, brittle, buzzing wings like those of cicadas. Their passage causes alarm to all those that can hear, and some of these are themselves inspired to flee. It’s only a temporary upset, and soon enough we return to our grazing, and the circumspect chewing of our respective cuds, and the gentle expulsion of methane that has a much more sinister scenario in store.
Collated from accidents and surplus materials generated during the creation of the ‘Vacuous Truths’ album, November-into-a-tiny-bit-of-December 2020.
The right foot went in, but it never came out, regardless of how much shaking was done to dislodge it.
All deeds done with a dubious disposition at Rock Creek Tributary, which remains in Hillsboro, OR as a result of the enduring & unflagging nature of gravity.
Official download resource for the titillating & inscrutable At Jennie Richie. Well worth investigating for anyone with a pair of ears and one or more lungs. irr. app. (ext.)
Field recordings intertwine with hushed acoustics and gentle ambience to create songs that are hypnotic and immersive. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 13, 2020
A stellar compilation featuring shoegaze and indie favorites like Drowse, Midwife, and Mount Eerie benefitting Project Onward in Chicago. Bandcamp New & Notable May 11, 2023
