“There are different ways to do almost everything, there isn’t just one right way” Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy explored on BBC Radio 3’s Afterwords. Including insights from Todd Barton, with whom Ursula collaborated on Music and Poetry of the Kesh, the “soundtrack” for her 1985 novel Always Coming Home, reissued by Freedom To Spend in 2018.
Ursula K. Le Guin in 1988 by Marian Wood Kolisch
Almost an exact month after the release of Tin Iso and the Dawn, the new album from New York based composer and puppeteer Tristan Allen, we offer a look behind the curtains of Tristan’s world building with a documentary video portrait by Travis Hood and Ross Mayfield.
Filmed in Tristan’s Brooklyn home studio, the portrait offers a view of the shadow puppetry process and performance that brings Tin Iso and the Dawn to life, and some intimate, insightful musings from Tristan on their relationship with music making and story telling. “I want to make things that feel like they were made by a culture, but a culture that isn’t one that’s on earth.”
If you weren’t in attendance at the lovely release show at Public Records in Brooklyn last month, the premiere of the first iteration of the second part of the trilogy that Tin Iso and the Dawn leads at Tristan’s La MaMa residency earlier this month, or if this special album just got lost in the inevitable shuffle, Hood and Mayfield’s portrait is a perfect portal to Tristan’s world.
As with the visual for “Quiet Joy,” Posy Dixon and Isaac Cohen collaborated to create this video for “Cult of Isis” from Pauline Anna Strom’s debut album, Trans-Millenia Consort 𓇣𓇣𓇣
Of their collaboration and interpretation, Posy notes “I’ve heard Pauline speak at length about her appetite for reading—audiobooks providing a portal free of the constraints of space and time, and ancient Egypt being a topic of interest she referenced frequently. In consideration of this, some time was spent reading about the Egyptian deity Isis, and her enduring cult that spread across multiple ancient civilizations, surviving over two thousand years.
I shared this story with Isaac and we talked of this orb (also frequently pictured atop Isis’ head) as a pulsating force of energy spreading through endless fields of life, color-palettes borrowed from the paintings of Belgian surrealist painter Jean-Michael Folon. Somehow ringing true to Pauline’s nomenclature as the Trans-Millenia Consort.
Big caveat: this isn’t a work of scholarship, but an appreciation of storytelling and the practise of world building, I hope in syncopation with the way Pauline worked.”
We’re just two days from the release of Echoes, Spaces Lines, the definitive collection of Pauline Anna Strom’s first three albums (and an unheard fourth from the era, Ocean of Tears), remixed under her guidance by Marta Salogni from the original tapes and remastered + cut by Anne Taegert at Dubplates Mastering.
Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it 👁🌷👁 Visible and audible far and wide today, Sign Libra’s Hidden Beauty. the third album from Agata Melnikova, Hidden Beauty is as eloquent as it is mysterious. magical music. Find from RVNG, your favorite indie retailer, or streaming from all of the .
Thank you Agata for your patience while waiting for the right time of this beauty to reveal itself. and thank you to Oshi + Plancha for the assist in Japan.
