Artwork by Mike Paré (@easyjammer) for The Four Horsemen in Brooklyn
We don’t suffer these days from any lack of communication, but rather from all the forces making us say things when we’ve nothing much to say.
Gilles Deleuze
“I don’t want more, I want less. I want to have less, so I will have more time to devote to this gift that I have. Because in the final analysis, the only thing that we have that is not renewable is our life. When I am dead, they will still make money. My time, I have decided, is more important. To claim my time to do what I want to do in that time.”
—Amos Kennedy, Jr.
h hunt, Playing Piano For Dad
Recorded in one comfortably-seated take at Studio Ferber, Paris, France in 2015 - h hunt’s ‘playing piano for dad’ was initially conceived as a Christmas gift to the composer’s father. Intimately recorded, ‘playing piano for dad’ is a heartbreakingly gorgeous & sincere work of eleven vignettes which capture even the most nuanced sounds of the recording session - the composer’s breath, the shifting sounds of the piano pedals, the ambient noise and conversation within the studio. With minimalist tendencies, h hunt’s compositions are earnest and heartfelt, evoking both the jazz sensibilities of Bill Evans as much as Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s classical piano works - with pieces from the album having even been championed by Ryuichi Sakamoto for his Kajitsu Restaurant playlist.
Palette Cleansing with Tasty Morsels
What is the story behind the title of h hunt’s album Playing Piano for Dad? Are these really songs he would play for his father?Harry (tasty morsels co-founder, AKA artist h hunt) and I were in Studio Ferber (Paris) doing something, I can’t remember exactly what. He told me his dad played piano and is a fan of jazz, and he didn’t know Harry could play. So he wanted to record himself to give to his dad as a Christmas present. The piano in Ferber is probably my favorite piano, so I set up some mics and left him to record it.
He sent me it after he’d given it to his dad and it was very obvious to me we should release it. I love it and I know plenty of others who do too. It’s a bit like seeing a non-actor in a film, it’s so shocking because sometimes actually being normal and not “acting.” He really at no point in the process realized we were making an album, so it really is very sincerely not trying. That’s extremely rare, I think.
Pauline’s Proverbs
On her Instagram, director Lisa Rovner posted a few excerpts from a little booklet of sayings by composer and musician Pauline Oliveros. (Oliveros is one of the artists featured in Rovner’s documentary, Sisters With Transistors.)
Artist Linda Montano made a video of the whole booklet available on her YouTube:
A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The ‘you’ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the ‘you’ of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, ‘We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.’
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
I tried to remain flexible and open to the vagaries of chance; like Napoleon, I figured that luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to exploit accidents. I grew to welcome the ripply flaws caused by a breeze or tiny mote of dust, which ideally would settle right where I needed a comet-like streak, or the emulsion the peeled away from the plate in the corner where I hadn’t liked that telephone line anyway. Unlike the young narrator in Swann’s Way praying for the angel of certainty to visit him in his bedroom, I found myself praying for the angel of uncertainty. And many times she visited my plates, bestowing upon them essential peculiarities, persuasive consequence, intrigue, drama, and allegory.
Sally Mann, Hold Still
It’s flotsam and jetsam. It’s the sign hanging on a telephone pole. It’s an overheard conversation. It’s a magazine, a specialty magazine that mentions some odd thing and it’s bur that gets stuck on your jacket and it just clings and you think, wow, what is that? I need to know more about that.
Susan Orlean on where she gets her ideas
I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up. It’s important to put it like that: not ‘I am a writer,’ but rather ‘I write stories.’ If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you’re in danger of thinking that you’re the most important thing. But you’re not. The story is what matters, and you’re only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order.
Philip Pullman
fireland
