A bumper batch of summer discoveries - music, books, games and places that have been feeding a summer break.
Book - essential reading on understanding statues, monuments, propaganda and political memory, Alex von Tunzelman’s Fallen Idols.
Game - Éalú is a delightful little puzzler featuring a delightful little wooden mouse - all the more delightful for being painstakingly created through stop-motion puppetry by an Irish company, Beyond the Bark.
Shortform - regular readers know that I love discovering tiny strange museums in cities I visit (especially if they involve puppets, automata, general creepiness and/or general pointlessness). Well so does James_visits_museums! He even has a searchable map of weird museums around the world.
Music - Australian artist Lawrence English’s wonderful new solo record The Rest Is My Ghost - questioning the tension between comforting nostalgia and future imagining through encounters with images and spaces that are made both familiar and unfamiliar. Also looking forward to catching him perform live in Brussels in September.
Book - there’s a good chance I have mentioned James Tiptree Jr’s (real name Alice Hastings Bradley) Her Smoke Rose Up Forever in a previous post - this book has been living with me for a long time while I dip in and out of its stories. At once brutal and beautiful, these stories (all written in the 60s and 70s) still seem utterly radical, presenting visions of a future that is at once dark and strange and compelling.
Game - escape-room puzzle-makers Rusty Lake have come out with another instalment of esoteric weirdness in Rusty Lake Hotel
Shortform - ink, ink and more ink. Watching Ink Dry is a gorgeous and gentle experimentation with different inks - their colours, textures and, of course, how they dry. Not as dull as it sounds, really.
Newsletter - Bille’s Ear (also with an Instagram account to match) regularly rounds up lots of the best and most exciting sound artists working today with short features and photos and videos of new work.
Music - another stellar release from Fort Evil Fruit, Abhaile is a new album from composer Finola Merivale and performer Catherine Sikora. The album’s own liner notes describe these artists work as making you feel like you have been ‘swept up in an ocean wave’, which seems exactly right.
Book - Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance - alright, I recognise the irony but so far I have only gotten around to reading the intro to this book by Claire Bishop - and found myself, my expectation and my assumptions instantly challenged in this uncompromising look at attention, art and performance. I can’t wait to read more.
Website - a reminder not to take for granted the small wonders of the modern world in Jordan Dworkin’s Ordinary Abundance.
Book - For an upcoming project I have been delightfully immersed in Sappho, partly through the translations by Anne Carson (previously featured for her influential Gender of Sound book). I am obsessed with the gaps in our knowledge of this ancient work, especially those where we only have one-word fragments…”I might go…honeyweaver…mythmaker…celery”
PLUS
Trieste signs
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