Hearth & Horn

Extracts from Why The Future is Analog by David Sax

The pandemic was so stressful because it obliterated our sense of time. On the one hand, it seemed as though the world were spinning out of control. We turned on the news or checked our phones, and information just cascaded past us, faster and faster, more violently and with terrifying consequences. Keeping up with it was impossible. There was always another email to answer. Each refresh brought more grim news to digest and respond to. The Slack thread never ended.

But your body was still. You hadn’t gone outside in three days and had been wearing the same ragged outfit for so long, you actually forgot you owned other clothes. Had you showered this week? What week was this? How much of this was due to the unique circumstances of avoiding a contagious virus, and how much was simply the by-product of more time spent online?

More at the link.

Marvellous find! An academic of old English, reading out one Anglo Saxon verse a day, for a treasure trove of downloadable renditions (for inclusion on playlists, for learning the pronunciation from to speak them yourself...)

http://mdrout.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu/category/seafarer/

ASMR: it is June, and the morning is sunny and fresh, and you are on a train heading to the beach your parents took you to as a child; you're drinking a cup of tea on the train, it's 1925 and you have taken some slight reading with you ahead of the Michalmas Term, but when you get there you will most likely loosen your tie and lie in the long grass in the sun and forget



"Kraftwerk, but make it English, and unworried by modernity, because the summer of 1935 will never end, and there's scones waiting at the pub"

Anyway, so in that Haunted Generation article that changed my life, they mentioned two labels: Ghost Box, and Clay Pipe Music. This is Clay Pipe and I've just started exploring it, and it is immediately perfect - good music for lockdowns, I think, good music if you miss being on trains and watching the sun and the fields flow by and know there is no demand on you at all now, and the holiday lasts forever.

This is Adelstrop by Gilroy Mere, and I recommend listening to the entire album, perhaps sat next to a window with some tea so you can see the birds and feel a bit of breeze. It is surpassing loveliness, and I can't wait to collect this one as a beautiful physical object as soon as possible - the cover is so lovely, so homely.

I'm really excited to dig more in their back catalogue. A lot of their songs have names that are evocative of place: Yarmouth, Nightscapes, How to Get To Spring; Plaint of Lapwing, The Land and the Garden, A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes. Shapwick. The Fields Lie Sleeping Underneath. Even a list of album titles soothes and rocks the reader. It's lovely stuff, and I look forward to listening more.

And for Fencraft followers, this album is Solar, tending Solar-Stellar, that idea of imagined Englishness meeting the afternoon that never ends; I think also, something about this album is implicitly the dream of the office worker, the man who has had the same respectable job for 15 years, who has quiet habits and never married, but some weekends he wakes early and he catches the train, and goes to Adlestrop. This album feels like it has an awareness of what is not a briefly snatched holiday, to long for it so whole-heartedly.

(future me will produce one heck of a mix tape, I promise)