Oh I missed Virginia Woolf!
Flashes of brilliance from Susan Taubes, Rachel Cusk, Milan Kundera, Tim Winton, Andre Aciman, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo.
Need to read more Proust and Musil…
Roberto Bolaño, James Baldwin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Hisham Matar, Cormac McCarthy, Gerald Murnane, Leo Tolstoy.
Almost: Olga Tokarczuk, Orhan Pamuk, Karl Ove Knausgård, Salman Rushdie, Saul Bellow, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Arundhati Roy.
Who have I missed?
Roberto Bolaño is the best. He’s become one of my favourite writers.
We will debrief on Friday
Mah boy ❤️
Friends! We have new music for you - from contemporary compositions for the oud, to cathartic post-metal, hypnotic musical cells, ambient minimalism, nostalgic breakcore and rapping through the grieving process.
disassembledforms.substack.com/p/new-music-...
A beautiful new classical Afghan Rabab composition by Sareban.
Check it out: sareban.bandcamp.com/album/echoes...
Btw if you’re into death metal - do you know Convulsing? Aussie band. One of my favs.
Ooh interesting! A few names I don’t know there. CoL, Wiege and Kowloon of course.
I’d loooove to see them live! Who are you having out for at Roadburn?
Zu absolutely kill it on their new record. Molten grooves meet deep atmospherics.
zuhom.bandcamp.com/album/ferrum...
Rad
“It doesn’t help at all, as the years swagger brutally by, to recognise that much of one’s trouble is produced by the really unreadable and unpredictable convulsions of one’s own character…”
- James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone
My boy
I’m sorry to hear that mate 💚 I hope things get better for you soon.
Annoucing Art As Catharsis' label sampler 2024 - 2025. Expect lush nu-jazz, cavernous sludge, polyrhythmic escapades, cinematic doom, hypnotic ambience, earthy psychedelia and much more.
open.substack.com/pub/disassem...
“Is there a technology the left is excited about?”
Yes. Granular synthesis
Sometimes its nice to listen to a song that crushes your soul.
In this case: Julie Byrne's Moonless.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czke...
I try To Listen To The Rain by Rebecca Baggett
I’ve been exploring ways to try and open up through meditation. After eight years, everyday phenomena like sunlight through the trees can strike deeply. It’s a beautiful thing to be moved by the world, instead of being numb to it.
New music recommendations! We've got sublime music for our dark times - including ethereal ambient music, poetic rap duos, Afghan classical rabab, deconstructed art rock, and unique fusions of the traditional and the contemporary.
disassembledforms.substack.com/p/new-music-...
“Any time I’m willing to come into simple embodied immediacy with an attitude of kindness and no interpretation, I poke a small hole in that cocoon of self-absorption… The more holes we poke, the more we perceive beyond our conditioned history and all its apparently solid forms of experiencing.”
“meditation exposes us to the reality that life is complex and not organized around our comfort. As biological organisms, existence is inherently disturbing. Practice doesn’t fix that. At best, we discover that disturbance is not a problem.”
- Peter McEwan
Great article, from one of the sharpest contemporary thinkers on the Left:
“the far right often finds the efforts of liberal rationalists to fact-check them … to be unbearably naive and funny… liberals are fools to imagine logic, truth, and facts have anything to do with whose values prevail.”
“the "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the capitalist dynamics, while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.” - Slavoj Zizek
www.lacan.com/zizek-self.h...
This piece perfectly captures the moment in the US, and the tech industries complicty and naked support of totalitarianism and fascism.
open.substack.com/pub/bloodint...
Jesus, you’re taking me back to childhood car trips in the early 90s. Dad had the cassette.
Whatever practice you do, begin with awe — awe that makes your jaw drop, brings tears to your eyes, silences all thinking and stills your heart — awe at this extraordinary compassion, the compassion your teachers live and the potential for compassion that lies in you.
- Reflections on Silver River
Attraction to those close to you catches you in its currents;
Aversion to those who oppose you burns inside;
Indifference that ignores what needs to be done is a black hole.
Leave your homeland — this is the practice of a bodhisattva.
