“After a month of hard listening, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman has become my own kind of internal soundtrack. I whistle these ballads as I walk down the street, but mess up their difficult melodies. I try to sing them, but can’t really, not the way I’ve heard them. So I put on my headphones and play the record again and furrow my brow as I marvel at its mysterious beauty.” Read more of Matthew Kassel’s reflection on the 1963 jazz album here. via: theparisreview. A wonderful piece of writing about one of my favorite jazz albums. 

“After a month of hard listening, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman has become my own kind of internal soundtrack. I whistle these ballads as I walk down the street, but mess up their difficult melodies. I try to sing them, but can’t really, not the way I’ve heard them. So I put on my headphones and play the record again and furrow my brow as I marvel at its mysterious beauty.” 

Read more of Matthew Kassel’s reflection on the 1963 jazz album here.

via: theparisreview.

A wonderful piece of writing about one of my favorite jazz albums. 

I do listen to his words. Not always. But when I listen, they’re remarkably visual and evocative: Blue blue windows behind the stars.Yellow moon on the rise.Purple words on a grey backgroundTo be a woman and to be turned down How did those windows get behind the stars? I don’t know, but I can see them clearly. Sometimes as a child’s drawing. Sometimes as a reflection on an airplane window. There may not be logic involved, but there is something deeper than that. Read more of Brian Cullman on the poetry of Neil Young here. Thank you, theparisreview.

I do listen to his words. Not always. But when I listen, they’re remarkably visual and evocative:

Blue blue windows behind the stars.
Yellow moon on the rise.
Purple words on a grey background
To be a woman and to be turned down

How did those windows get behind the stars? I don’t know, but I can see them clearly. Sometimes as a child’s drawing. Sometimes as a reflection on an airplane window. There may not be logic involved, but there is something deeper than that.

Read more of Brian Cullman on the poetry of Neil Young here.

Thank you, theparisreview.

Feist | “Caught A Long Wind”

From a little Tumblr music blog I started.

I think that being artists in a time like this, we have a lot to give. It is a time that does not encourage that kind of space. It’s a time that’s very restless and very noisy, and it is unable to tolerate space and silence. If that is something you need to express as an artist, it’s a wonderful thing to hold firm to, at this time. I believe that a lot of people have a longing and a hunger for the kind of work that affirms that kind of spaciousness and silence. So it almost seems like a political thing to me.
Meredith Monk, Interview, Spring 1991 (PDF)

(via silencesounds)

When I am silent, I fall into the place where everything is music.
Rumi (Thank you, theantidote, human-voices & thatkief)

(Source: fuckyeahrumi)

track Cover Me
artist Bettye Swann
album Bettye Swann

Bettye Swann | “Cover Me.” This delicious dish of Thursday morning soul brought to you by silencesounds.

Suddenly dissatisfied with the fluid form that had evolved in the fifth [symphony], he [Sibelius] began to dream of a continuous blur of sound without formal divisions - symphonies without movements, operas without words. Instead of writing the music of his imagination, he wanted to transcribe the very noise of nature. He thought he could hear chords in the murmurs of the forests and the lapping of the lakes; he once baffled a group of finnish students by giving a lecture on the overtone series of a meadow.
Alex Ross on Sibelius in The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Thank you, mythologyofblue)
Girl Playing guitar on the Veranda of Camulos Ranch, California, 1882. Thank you, killerbeesting & kvetchlandia.

Girl Playing guitar on the Veranda of Camulos Ranch, California, 1882. Thank you, killerbeesting & kvetchlandia.

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Patti Smith by Thurston Moore

Patti Smith

“I fell in love with Tibet because their essential mission was to keep a continual stream of prayer. To me they kept the world from spinning out of control just by being a civilization on the roof of the world in that continuous state of prayer. The prayers are etched on wheels, they feel them with their hands like braille and turn them. It’s spinning prayer like cloth. That was my perception as a young person. I didn’t quite understand the whole thing but I felt protected. We grew up at a time when nuclear war seemed imminent with air raid drills and lying on the floor under your school desk. To counterbalance that destruction was this civilization of monks living high in the Himalayas who were continuously praying for us, for the planet and for all of nature. That made me feel safe.”

—Patti Smith

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments. […] Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heart beat, and landslide.
John Cage, “The Future of Music,” 1958 (Thank you, proustitute & floatingheart)