Old Splendifolia Swaying Boldly Afar. This is two people. One of them records for Morr and he sounds very Morr. German. Dull. Polite. The usual. I've not ever heard of the other person or of her "real" band. This is splendid doings. I know I did a fine job building up to that. It's of the sort of thing that seems to set my fancy alight these days. Off kilter, folky, minimal, female vocals, minor electronics. My pleasure system is wired for symptoms that derive from exposure the last Mum record. I think. From Joanna Newsom. From Kate Bush. First song was piano led, then it falls away to a trill on ukulele???...some rustic horn, then a descent into obscurity. A dream. Her voice is very faux rustic as well, a polaroid voice, shake her and she's got halo and shine. It's a conversational experience, her voice, over celestial seasonings about the weather in Bhutan, the price of petrol in Melbourne, the median home price of beach front homes on the Black Sea. Second song, minimal again, it's lovely, again. It is head-phone music. Perhaps this is at the root of my appreciation. I enjoy living inside my own head and the headphones allow me to seal off all sensory interaction with the world save from impressions from my increasingly poor poor eyesight. It's even more sensationless when I wear my expired eyeglasses and walk through near crowds where I lose focus when people are but ten feet away from me and the world turns to sea and sky and the words are my friends and my dreams and my loves and I build up a terrific arsenal of regret with a cracked face grin that means nothing at all. I have seen things that don't belong on my journey to blindness, my imaginary creations frighten but it's certainly a more brilliant exposure to the real life than people who possess 20/20 x-ray vision. People are always uglier than they allow and yet when the edges of that existence are fuzzy and glazed over then it is a more temperate exstence. I was listening to Frida Hyvonen while walking through the hometown airport and it was brilliant. Lost amid these cell phoned masses each exercising their banal reflexes and me, on the moving walkway, walking lowly, dreamily, drifting apart from all of these people who would despise me if they knew how little I thought of them while thinking of them often. What a dreadful thing to say. Are there that many worthwhile conversations to be had so that people must spend their entire life on the cellphone? What if human interaction is a zero sum gain and there is a finite number of syllables available to a species before extinction. What if. Is one so stultifying in your internal existence that you can't bear to be alone with your thoughts? I don't know. I interview myself. I dream of being interviewed. I write songs in my head. I work out entire storyboards for future novels knowing I will forget them as soon as I blink my 100th blink from the moment of conception but there are dozens more to take root after that. None will ever come to pass. And Ugg boots, ugh. Third song. Similar to the first two. This is much better than Gregory and the Hawk. It's sophisticated, or seemingly, it's much less yankee, it's from an electronic tendency so I think it's less wedded to the idea of formalism. Next song. Banjo, endless supply of rustic horns tapped once more, tender, wheezing, beautiful, wordless, Over. Next song Contch. I was out running this evening and it was not warm. The temperature is probably in the single digits. There is a palpable difference to the cold here versus the cold in none semi-arid climes. While in South Carolina I watched the evening's cheer collapse when temperatures tested support levels in the 20s. It was embarrassingly uncomfortable, for a pseudo Canadian indeed, the moisture allowed the cold access to the core. The moisture increased the permeability, calorimetry be damned, blast. Here cold is different. Even when running it doesn't enter except by inhalation and it feels exciting even in my preserved lungs. It is an external feeling, our cold, we can maintain internal body warmth, and the madness is sadly restrained, but the extremities become victims instead. The night stillness a thief of suppleness, tenderer of amputations and noseectomies. It has little to do with this music. It is weak prose. It could be tempting to classify this as winter music. It isn't definitely not summer music. It could be autumnal. I had a friend who was a perfume model, she stood in fancy dress at the Mall entrance and doused unsuspecting strangers with colognes and accepted the phone numbers of strangers in front of her boyfriend. She labeled me an autumn. Am I? I am pale. Music is delicate and fragile and wisps of it break through occasionally to capture minor moments that thrill. Her voice, very Joanna Newsom now without the Abercrombie and fairy tale production. Very sparse accompaniment, a guitar and some tiny trebled acoustics from an emaciated sampler. Multi-tracked voice, something almost mistaken for passion, it is all rather beautiful. Is it German? I am not expert on any thing german. I lie, I did pass the German citizenship test with flying colours. Look at my european spelling habits. A youth spent summering in Chatham, Ontario. Baseball cards with RBI's en francais. It's rather the best thing to have been released on Morr in a long time. Oh. Has it been released on Morr? Apparently not. Next song, more of the same, more amateur hour banjo. It feels charming. Her voice is a bit more spine curdling at the moment, more multi-tracked goodness though, I like the oddness, it's a welcome reverse from the sedate nature of the record opening. She's possessed of something more esoteric and decently adventurous, more than we would have suspected. Bravo. It would be lovely to listen to this in a crowd, if that crowd was fast asleep, anesthetized by an invisible gas seeping from the airport ventilation system, an entire airport asleep on moving walkways and me stepping softly on their flat heads while listening to fertile pop music in my ears. Song has now run low of steam, slow degeneration, a respite, a drift into the womb of electronic twinkles. Next song, louder than bombs. More electronics come to the fore in this section. Distant vocals recorded out of doors, along the beach , under wind swept Douglas Firs. Munich turned inside out. Morr, home of the eccentric skatting, I really enjoy this. It is better than Kuchen. Damnable. I have been listening to Stump the Professor or some other such on the local radio news station. It is their science "call in" show that they play on Sunday mornings and it infuriates me. Always. Allegedly the host is a PHD, I've run out of scare quotes, a lecturer in physics but I have been left searching for examples of radiant erudition and I can't find it. Will he sit next to me next Saturday? How much does a lightning bolt weigh? Argh. But gladly the Saturday Physics series is about to begin for this season. No answers for the lightning bolt enthusiasts but instead a delightful discussion of the world of the hypercold. It will be 61 tomorrow, how rude and inappropriate. I always attend these lectures on my own. If only I could being someone along and we would make fun of the footwear of the really very brilliant presenters. I have a keen memory for disastrous footwear. Strangely, the ones freshly arrived from MIT seem less brilliant than they believe. Why is this? Another song now, it's once more very indebted to Joanna Newsom or whomever she has ritually sacrificed for Bill Callahan's benefit. Harps are missing but there are squeezy wheezy strings and rustic guitars and a dash to irritation. It's lovely, all so lovely. I have teased a 10000 Maniacs explosion of love earlier. It will come. I can't stop listening to them. I was once madly in love with Natalie Merchant. Sure she's insufferable, sure she probably always has been, but I was young and strong willed. I was going to bring her around to my way of thinking. I was going to quote Lysander Spooner in earnest. Next song. Thump thump on the bass, clockwork electronics, it's all very jazz noodly. Morr would seem destined some day to accidentally metamorphose into a jazz label. Beards ahoy. Does FS Blumm own his own beard? I bet he does. The photo that accompanies this record is miniature German. I've just finished reading a biography of Harry Houdini! Allegedly he wrote over 150,000 pieces of correspondence in his lifetime. I am astonished. I am a prolific emailer. I email loads of people who decide not to write me back. But I am not that prolific. I write long diatribes of emptyheaded gibberish and then punctuate my randomness with a question like "So how many pieces of Werthers candy did you eat out of the community candy dish?". It's all inscrutable and far from enthralling. And I don't talk. I get nervous around my boss. I feel like he's sizing me up always when he's speaking at me. I do also get nervous around the one person I would consider a friend at work. She terrifies me. I have no idea why. Well I do. But it's work I should be able to ask her the mix rate for Oyster Shell Scale injection. Shouldn't I? This is jazz. It is an instrumental. It's nice, very nice jazz doodling but with banjos, homogenous whistles and tenderness. Next song. More jazz underpinnings, turning suspicious. I am going to need a better photo to make a thorough examination for facial hair. Her voice is less Joanna Newsom than I suspected earlier, I think, it's oddly phrased parchment chanting and then cheerful, dreamy choruses waft in under the blue skies. I really enjoy this record. I will make it a point to never use that sentence again as I do tent to use it always. Wanda Fleumer. Is this the Queen's English? I've never heard a FS Blumm record. I assumed he would sound the same as Styrofoam or Populous or Herrmann & Kleine or any number of suspected beards. It's easier to write about albums that I loved as a child because all of the records that informed my youth are deeply associated with specific events or dreadful habits of youth. I don't do anything at allto Old Splendifolia. I am writing about Old Splendifolia while I am listening to Old Splendifolia. Will I feel nostalgic for this moment when the record is over just 6 minutes from now. This song is beautiful, the multi-tracked vocals are somewhat call and respond but they seem to be exist in different songs I love that they used the word Verdant. The Houdini biographer, who also ghost wrote two Howard Stern books, now there's pedigree, used 'verdant' to describe a palm. That seems a thesaurus reach. No? I used 'verdant' in a work meeting. It went over unappreciated. I have minor goals, I long to use verisimilitude soon. There is a conference in town soon for fellows entangled in my profession and they are of the most fashion challenged sorts, more so than others in other industries that you might come across. The mullet lives. I am always desperate to search out a big plastic comb sticking out of the back of someone's Sassoon jeans but I am constantly disappointed by my lack of success. Another instrmental, all deep tones and low-end, sounds like an assembly line for bath tubs, now some distorted radio program jazz coming in over top and the harmony of the spheres afterwards, it's all very first album Bjorkness. Nice. What does she do on the instrumentals? Is she eating celery in homage? Banjo goodness and strings, banjos and strings, strings and banjo goodness. Erm...well those are horns actually. Sorry.