The sour taste in my mouth - I should have known when we crashed down; the look that flashed upon your face.
Now I find myself backed against the wall.
And I find myself where the atmosphere will drive me underground.
And the air out there’s not enough to go around.
And I’m heady now and the air is getting thin.
And the oxygen’s not enough to live in.
I need to breathe oxygen, need to breathe oxygen, need to breathe oxygen.
And I find myself quiet in the dark,
And the air out there’s not enough to make a spark
Why’d you have to bring me here? Now I’ve got to fight you to survive
Need to breathe oxygen but there’s not enough for us both to stay alive.
*Fiora
“Oxygen” - Moguai feat. Fiora
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
Pyramidal, funereal and Earthen
Born like shadow and aimed in vain
Like the raised point of an obelisk
Set towards the sky.
Climbing and striving in vain for the stars
Which, though beautiful ,
Sparkle and are exempt,
Far from the vapour of war,
From it’s fugitive shade
They mock at a distance.
The frowning bronze of their rays
Failing to touch the convex surface of this globe.
Property of the Goddess,
Who is thrice beautiful,
And Boasts three beautiful faces
And who owns the air that she blots and soaks
With the denseness of her breath.
So that in this quiet and contentment
In this imperial silence,
Even the voices of the night birds,
So dark and grave
That even the silence won’t interrupt them,
Consent.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
(Source: mysticmedusa.com)
From the Epiphanies…
That is no dancing. Go down before the people, young boy, and dance for them… He runs out darkly-clad, lithe and serious to dance before the multitude. There is no music for him. He begins to dance far below in the amphitheatre with a slow and supple movement of the limbs, passing from movement to movement in all the grace of youth and distance, until he seems to be a whirling body, a spider wheeling amid space, a star. I desire to shout to him words of praise, to shout arrogantly over the heads of the multitude ‘See! See!’ …His dancing is not the dancing of harlots, the dance of the daughter of Herodias. It goes up from the midst of the people, sudden and young and male, and falls again to earth in tremulous sobbing to die upon its triumph.
“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel.” — Albert Camus (via totrulyexist)
(Source: totrulyexist, via apoplecticskeptic)
“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” — *Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart via Christmas Cracker via Fiora
“
“We are all of us participants in a world of concrete music, geometry and number … a world of sounds, forms, motions, colors, so mathematically related and coordinated that our bodies, equally with the farthest star, vibrate to the music of the spheres.”
Claude Bragdon and the Beautiful Necessity
” — Morphic Resonance & Beautiful Necessities
For the past 4? months, Robot Koch and I have been working on a song called “Dreams of You.” It uses the track “Away from” from his previous record Death Star Droid. I loved “Away from” and innocently asked him one day over noodle bowl if I could sing something I had written on it. He was like “yeah sure” … no doubt we were both thinking “What could be simpler?!”…
Now, today - however many sessions, months, bowls of fried rice and changing seasons later I *THINK* we have it ready for mastering. The thing about “Dreams” is - it’s basically … BENDY music.
What drew me to “Away from” was this organic musical thing in the track - simple melodies that push and pull that make it breathe - without analysing it at the time what I later discovered was - this was actually 2 parts slightly out of tune with each other that get louder and softer within the mix so it’s very dynamic.
But then - the more dynamic parts you add; an orchestra, a dynamic vocal - not only did the whole thing start to become blatantly out of tune with itself - then you have to balance the dynamic of what is natural to the vocal on its own, with making sure you don’t lose words to the huge beat, how to fit in with this bendy melody thing jumping in and out of the speakers and then the “overall” dynamic of the arrangement - this one being totally unconventional just to make matters worse.
The thing that kept hitting me on the head (figuratively speaking) in this process, apart from how cool Robot Koch is! - was - music is always in transit. It is worlds within worlds tied to emotions tied to the inevitibility of time. It is the feeling you get coming FROM somewhere and going TO the next place and all shades of the spectrum in between. Working on it to create that emotional roadmap you can’t just listen to one bar or work on one section. You have to navigate the feeling through the whole piece. When you change one tiny detail you change other things in relation to that detail and though this can start to drive you completely bananas! - in the end it is ONLY about Instinct and trusting the flavour of your own feelings.
In the most beautiful way, making music shows me over and over again how Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is affected by a myriad of choices - but almost more importantly - where those choices fall in a timeline.
“Dreams of You” will finally be released January 5th 2011… you can find a very early demo of Dreams here; http://soundcloud.com/fiora/dreams-of-you-away-from-feat-robot-koch
Thanks for reading this lyrical wax ;-)
*Fiora
(Source: soundcloud.com)
Flavors.me is the coolest website - it lets you stream all your feeds to one pretty site you set up yourself - Hallelujah! This essentially means you don’t need another homepage that you have to pay $$$ for. So as an artist with a tumblr, twitter, soundcloud, flickr and now bandcamp account you can stream all those feeds to one page you set up on flavors - for free! Really easy to use and ofcourse you can use your own url. I know I sound like a salesperson here but gosh! here’s to logical tools that make life easier for the DIY.
Thanks to ”The webniscients” David Noel and Uwe Viehmann for the heads up; Those two - always on the bleeding edge.
Fiora
OK this may seem mundane - but Christmas Carols… do we love them? or do we hate them? I must say as someone who studied classical singing & forced into caroling for a seasonal december job I am somewhat scarred… but I wouldn’t say I’m a complete Humbug. “Little drummer boy” I always liked… “Silent night” and “Oh Holy Night” … have I forgotten any?