Clara Engel, by Yuki Komura
The girl says the Source is a person and at the same time a mountain of water, vitreous as emerald. That she has no arms, no face, and cannot see; that she glides forward without moving so as not to disturb the folds of water she wears draped around her presence.
Marguerite Duras
Here are some words on transcendence, on going beyond form. That is what I am drawn to, what moves me to make music, and what my work is about. Disclaimer: I am not capable of saying what I want to say using words alone. I write music.
My dizzy footprints leave carnal marks on white sand.
You appear, a wrinkled bird, stripped of shimmer and feather. Old and mad.
You appear, a wrinkled bird, stripped of shimmer and feather. Old and mad.
You leave me. I dream of you. In my dream, there are no words for your lustre.
I will find you again, when I have stopped looking. When I have stopped waiting.
Without any effort, you will come to me.
I will love you and leave you untouched.
The edge of fire is no colour.
The edge of fire is sky.
Not light or absence of light.
You are always leaving me. There is rapture in letting go.
Giving away everything at the moment of possession.
I want to give everything away until nothing is mine.
Until I am like a sail on a ship with no will or desire, only purpose.
To hold out against the wind, until I am cracked and singed by time and light.
Until I rot from exposure to the elements, to disintegrate and drift in particles over a dispassionate ocean.
Without any effort, you will come to me.
I will love you and leave you untouched.
The edge of fire is no colour.
The edge of fire is sky.
Not light or absence of light.
You are always leaving me. There is rapture in letting go.
Giving away everything at the moment of possession.
I want to give everything away until nothing is mine.
Until I am like a sail on a ship with no will or desire, only purpose.
To hold out against the wind, until I am cracked and singed by time and light.
Until I rot from exposure to the elements, to disintegrate and drift in particles over a dispassionate ocean.
Like sea lions
On a distant shore
Bark their praises
To a great sea god
I sing my song.
I sing my song.
Track one, Ghost Opera (from Secret Beasts)
Track two, Last Horse On The Sand, by Dirty Three
Track three, R.D. Laing talks about love and freedom
Track four, The Beauty Of Your Design (from Secret Beasts)
Track five, Arvo Part, sacred minimalist, on the ‘need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower’
Track six, I Wear Your Coat (from Tender)
Track seven, from Benjamin Smoke
Track eight, Chorus Of Murderous Bells (from Secret Beasts)
Track nine, from Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmóniák
I thought I'd better briefly introduce this week's mixtape from the comments box, so as to avoid getting in the way of something that we're really fucking proud to publish, frankly. Consider this a mixed-media introduction to the work of Clara Engel, a Canadian musician who was good enough to get in touch with us at music@silkwormsink.com a few days ago with a stack of music, video and prose that goes some way to making sense of a multi-disciplinary approach to music-making that produces textured, melodramatic, cinematic, poetic, consistently extraordinary songs. That sound, to my ears, like the daughter that Nick Cave and PJ Harvey never had writing a score for a short film about a psychopathic bluesman’s attempts to rewrite the Book of Common Prayer.
ReplyDeleteClara embodies, in short, many of the things that we are trying to explore and celebrate with the Music As Reading project, and we’ll be doing our best to introduce her work to as many people as possible over the next few weeks. In the meantime:
Read a recent interview with her here: http://maneshakinfolk.blogspot.com/2011/03/interview-w-clara-engel.html
Visit her myspace here: http://www.myspace.com/claraengel
And visit her bandcamp page here:
http://claraengel.bandcamp.com/
Also, we’ve now set up a Silkworms SoundCloud account which will, eventually, make sending us your music considerably easier. Just give us some time to work out how to use it. We’ve now done SoundCloud, mixcloud and YouTube mixtapes alongside our legendary Spotify playlists – I wonder what we’ll try next.
SKS