Beltane is celebrated in the southern hemisphere on this date. All throughout the land everything is rich, green and verdant. The celebration of Beltane involves lighting a bonfire, dancing and performing rituals and is a boisterous and passionate day to celebrate fertility.
Beltane
At least 7 years ago now, I WWOOFED in Andalucia, helping out with cleaning and cooking at an Andalucian B&B villa just outside of Vejer De La Frontera.The work was far from easy although I did happen to live in a mountainside cabin (cheap fibro, but yet still my own for a wee while). I loved the location and the cabin.
I will always remember the hillside cabin I stayed in fondly, even though there was a smelly compostable toilet that was infested with mosquitos, there was still a lot to love! There was a knarled vine of tomatoes growing around the deck area and dappled sunlight for most of the day, a cool breeze from the hillside and an immense sense of quiet and peaceful seclusion – it felt cozy and hidden away from the world.
Conil de la Frontera is a locale that many consider a party town, but for locals who are mostly older, their town is staunchly religious and steeped in Moorish history which dates back before Phoenician and Roman times, when the ancient people used it as a fishing port.
In 1299, after the re-conquest from the Moors, King Fernando IV of Castille ceded the town, along with neighboring Chiclan, to Guzman El Bueno as a reward for defending Tarifa in 1292. The town in the dark ages flourished due to a booming fishing and agricultural industry. The lush rolling hills nearby were later utilised for livestock farming.
In the 19th Century, this part of Andalucia was occupied by Napoleon’s forces. Today the mainstay of the economy is still agriculture and fishing, although tourism is becoming increasingly important. Conil’s puerto pesquero (fishing port) is to the north, around the curve of the bay, next to the lighthouse.
Devoutly Catholic, Conil De La Fronter’s heartbeat and snail pace is punctuated by periods of activity on Catholic holidays for the saints. This is when the town wakes up out of a long and enjoyable slumber for fiestas involving Catholic effigies and rituals dating back to medieval times.
‘Slice of life’ portraitures of twin medieval cities and thriving ports Conil de la Frontera (top) and Xeres de la Frontera (bottom) twin cities on the Andalucian coast. Braun & Hogenberg, 1575-1612.
Drone music doesn’t change much in tonality or tempo. The nature of this means that it can confuse some people and attract others. Unlike most other types of music, drone cultivates a unique emotional soundscape that allows people to sink deeply into it. Some drone music is less like a warm fuzzy hug and more like an assault on the senses, This is where many people’s opinions of what constitutes as drone music, and what is simply ‘white noise’ diverges.
Some people say that drone allows them to become intimate in a unique way with the music. Its monotone nature means that the music fits to your own mood and thoughts, rather than shaping and manipulating your mood like other music genres. The incredibly subtle shifts and movements in sound can be compelling when listened to with patience, over a long period of time.
In this unique programme on Australia’s ABC radio, legends of this much maligned and misunderstood genre of music come together to explain Drone to those who may or may not understand it. This mysterious genre of music can be either interesting or boring, or paradoxically both interesting and boring, depending who is listening.
Tibetan singing bowl chanting, Aboriginal didgeridoo music, Benedictine monks chanting and many types of Middle Eastern music have been around since ancient times. The common thread is that this ancient drone music from all over the world has inherently transcendental and magical properties and religious significance. People tend to love to worship their gods while listening to a form of drone.
Fripp & Eno: Evening Star (1975). The master of ambience meets the master of guitar drone; the result delivers equal measures of prettiness and weirdness.
zoviet*france: Shouting at the Ground (1988). From Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, one of the unsung masterpieces of the 1980s. Dreamy tape loop collages, half-buried percussion and a ‘tribal’ feel that manages to sidestep ethno-ambient World Music clichés.
Rosy Parlane: #1-4 (1998). A very sparse, stripped-back album of electronic loops from NZ, minimalism at its most compelling.
Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001). Two hours of deep-layered drone employing a rich array of sounds (strings and horns as well as digital instruments). An epic and emotionally affecting classic.
Brian Grainger & David Tagg: Pillbox Series (2008). More stunning low-key minimalism from two prolific US experimentalists. The entire series spans 48 tracks, each one a 20-minute piece. That’s a lot of drone.
Gregg Kowalsky: Tape Chants (2009). Low-fi, grainy drone that soothes and stimulates at the same time. Maybe the sonic equivalent of an exfoliating face scrub.
Fescal: Moods and Views (2012). From Seoul, an extended two part piece that moves subtly from delicate processed guitar tones to rumbling, cavernous washes of sound. Another excursion into low-fi aesthetics: tape hiss and crackle never sounded so lovely.
With her unforgettable warrior voice, Poly Styrene became the anti-hero for punk women in the late 70’s with her distinctive style of braces, wild surreal clothes and military hats. Her lyrics talked about the plasticity of city life and consumerism, and the shallow, toxic and mindless nature of modern life, a good 20 years before anybody else started talking about it.
Poet, singer, maverick and mother. Sadly taken from the world too soon.
“I once said I would shave my head if anyone tried to turn me into a sex symbol, and I did it. It was more for emotional reasons, too, but I really felt strongly about not prostituting myself in order to be heard.” – Poly Styrene
I’m a poser
And I don’t care
I like to make people stare
– Poly Styrene
My mind is like a switchboard
With crossed and tangled lines
contented with confusion
That is plugged into my head
I don’t know what’s going on
It’s the operators job
Not mine, I said.
Poly Styrene
Is dark and eerie
It’s really late
Come on kids don’t hesitate
We’re going down to the underground
The subterrain is a bottomless pit
The vinyl vultures are after it
Molten lava
Sulphur vapours
Smoulder on to obliterate us
If you’ve got the urge
Come on
Let’s emerge
Poly Styrene
My mind is like a plastic bag
That corresponds to all those ads
It sucks up all the rubbish
That is fed in through my ear
I eat kleenex for breakfast
and use soft hygienic weetabix to dry my tears.
Poly Styrene
It’s funny to consider power plants and sewerage plants as beautiful, but these old buildings certainly trump any industrial building built in the last few decades. Relics from the dawn of the industrial age, they were designed with immaculate attention to detail and a timeless aesthetic. Nowadays they either accumulate weeds and cobwebs in obscurity, or they are earmarked for urban revival, with apartments and new precincts popping up all over the place in London and elsewhere in Europe.
This unique and stunning sewerage plant from the Victorian era was designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette as part of a solution to cholera and typhoid outbreaks that crippled London in the 19th century.
A trust caring for the pumping station received £99,000 to restore one of the plants magnificent engines.
Located in the London Borough of Bexley, the Crossness Pumping Station was lauded as an engineering triumph at the time. It was a vital part of London’s 85 miles of sewers laid all over the city. Containing colourful and intricate painted ironwork, this sewerage plant is something unique to behold.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
First commissioned in 1927, the coal-fired Battersea Power Station generated electricity throughout London for almost 50 years. At a whopping 560 feet wide and 338 feet tall, the power station become a iconic part of the London skyline.
For its time, it was the biggest brick building in all of Europe, comparable to 15 London double-decker buses standing end to end. Although the city was beseiged by war in the 30’s and 40’s, the Battersea Power Station escaped unscathed. Production finally stopped at the power plant in 1983 and since then the power plant has been left in disrepair, empty, roofless and grown over.
In 2012, a Malaysian property developer bought the power station and has reignited the public’s imagination with lavish apartments, eateries and a shopping mall all due to open in 2014/2015.
The iconic chimneys were deemed as unsafe in their original form. So they will be painstakingly built from scratch and constructed to look exactly the same, built from steel reinforced concrete. A new sweet pad will set you back between £500,000 to £4.5 million.
This sewerage pumping station was built between 1865 and 1868, another of Bazalgette’s designs. Located in E15 it was designed in an intricate Byzantine style with two Moorish inspired chimney stacks. The neon lights here certainly emphasise the eerie and otherworldly nature of the design. Amazing that this sort of design is now considered beautiful, when once it was considered simply utilitarian.
Everyone is always in transit and a great metaphor for life is that we can only ever trust in the constant flux of change. Forget about the serenity of temples, impermanence is ever-present in JR stations, subway stations and airports. There is something magnetic about these places because as you flow through there, you are forming into someone new, literally moving away from the old and outdated version of yourself and evolving into a different temporal and physical state. Although this man looked extremely tired. Many Japanese people seem to work really long and punishing hours and never complain about it. I can’t make up my mind if that’s admirable or crazy.
Sit back with a cup of tea and enjoy this one. It’s a compilation album inspired by the themes and evocative words in celebrated nature writer Robert MacFarlane’s book Landmarks. The book focuses on showcasing poetic landscape words, gathered from the dialects of Britain and Ireland.
The book Landmarks separates out words into types of terrain: Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands and Woodlands.
I love to meander through these haunting and unforgettable landscapes around the world, while listening to spacey, atmospheric ambient and drone music. So Place Language immediately appealed to me.
The aural textures of this album are rich, deep and sonorous love letters to soulful landscapes. There is plenty of light and dark drone and atmospheric ambient that is perfect background music for all kinds of activities – writing, coding, walking, meditating and reading.
The liner notes of the album are written by the book’s author Robert Macfarlane, where he talks about how Place Language is all about his desire to rewild and reinvigorate the world’s sacred natural places.
Place Language by Various ArtistsThis is a heavenly and sublime jumble of soundscapes was made by 28 different field recordists and musicians. If you’re a fan of MacFarlane’s nature writing, or simply love nature walks or ambient music, I think you will relish this one. It’s truly magical.
I filmed our recent road trip. The track you are hearing is Halcyon&On&On by Orbital, a rave-era classic I love and it always makes me feel uplifted and happy and ready to embrace life with an open heart and open hands.
I superimposed some of my interesting oil, glitter and water experimentations over the top of my footage to get the full wavy-gravy trippy effect.
I hope you enjoy my journey through the Eastern Cape.
Many of us are introverts but are in denial about this and trying fervently to be extroverted, pushing ourselves to exhaustion trying to make small talk about bullshit that doesn’t matter, often dealing with obnoxious people who have loud voices and often (but not always) boring and generic thoughts on the world.
Here’s a list inspired by a conversation I was having on here with a fellow blogger recently. It’s actually really fun to be an introvert if you have a couple of friends who are also introverted. Or you may actually have one particularly special and amazing introverted person who you can spend time with. This kind of arrangement can be a win-win for introverts who congregate together.
Shyness is nice, shyness can stop you, from doing all the things in life that you’d like to…
[Unless you find others who are quiet like you]
Morrissey and Content Catnip
It’s not that extroversion is bad, it’s the way the entire world communicates and runs after all. Extroversion is the YANG energy. The active energy of doing. But often the quieter people, in touch with the YIN energy of ‘being’ rather than doing, who are far more compelling, complex and full of surprises.
Landschapspijn comes from Dutch and translates to “landscape-pain”, “place-pain” (Dutch). This is a word with no real equivalent in English. It’s the distress and sadness one feels at seeing familiar and much loved sanctuaries and habitats destroyed or depleted.
Loving the earth, seeing what has been done to it,
I grow sharp, I grow cold.
Where will the trilliums go, and the coltsfoot?
Where will the pond lilies go to continue living
their simple, penniless lives, lifting
their faces of gold?
Impossible to believe we need so much
as the world wants us to buy.
I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips
than I could possibly use before I die.
Oh, I would like to live in an empty house,
with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass.
No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass.
And I suppose sometime I will.
Old and cold I will lie apart
from all this buying and selling, with only
the beautiful earth in my heart.
Content Catnip
You must be logged in to post a comment.