1. |
Techno Pets
02:19
|
|||
|
Techno Pets
We looked down mostly stroking techno pets sometimes raising heads from a stoop that had our necks aching for corporeal stars. We sang rehashed anthems of distant victories, confused sacrifice incapable as we were of conceiving in a line true to its causes. We didn’t know what the clouds were singing or that the trees were waiting for us to catch up. We saged with that pre-requisite confidence concerning luminary liminals at which we grasped assuring ourselves of a generous profundity in the above.
All around us the encompassing nature of nature gave a peaceable stillness to our deaf recognitions and it continued unremittingly like music behind a wall or a door or a party in a garden a few streets away. We continued the teasing out of a random speck of DNA like cooled ash falling far enough from the fire onto our skin reminding us of our residue and that that might even save us. What was gone? What might return in passing? We were transients making shelter with a constant grief knowing that we’d forgotten. We examined the cartography like illiterates pretending to read the newspaper most of it lost besides the pictures.
|
||||
2. |
Crow Time
04:13
|
|||
|
Crow Time
I cut a crow out of a white mist sky. I put the shape in a notebook and call it a line on the crow. Now, and each day since, I see the shape I left in the sky, in front of the sun, flying perfectly crow-shaped, prowling the air without the detail I took for the page. This crow-gate stays open for death tolls. I see it for myself with the red-eyed doves, in the loft above the locked-up chapel, who also have eyes in the picture, skin in the game. I see the gates opening to and fro on this hinge-creak reckoning.
|
||||
3. |
How Late It Was
03:28
|
|||
|
How Late it Was
Catastrophe filled the seating on the dry side of the window. The dystopian big band lined the walls between the radiators and dreamt of the dead they might find in the scripts of their shadow plays. Panicked campanologists keenly took up the brass and sirens were hand cranked with gusto. The cacophony persisted as though the hour was not yet at hand. Where on the clock did we think we were? With each swing the ice cap calved another and its unheard birth lapped up the beach. We engineered grand prevarications, running engines, filling bags, discussing the subtleties of phrasing and the children of course, the reverent children. It was all we could hold, the howl was pushing our teeth apart, screeling rages tore ways out of our skin, straining buttons, twisting clasps. We tarried relative qualities, like values had value, while the source was pushing us to claw at each other’s skins, the walls, the packaging.
We may have ended there but it was replaced by relentless laments, grievous keenings, living wills began printing themselves at the checkouts, swept round the aisles as vespers, coaxing us toward a home we only knew as rumours in our lungs. The sounds we shaped deftly for gravitas were outplayed by the prayers we made for feigning love in our demise. We still didn’t know new shape.
We held onto our familiar burdens, faulty misshapen knowledge, documentation, honed and tested memory. We prayed for fire, an end to knowing. We only knew more of the same. Claiming otherwise was, at least, a tonic for the desire to run, anywhere, to call somewhere somewhere.
They were never here.
Scan an item. Finish. Pay.
|
||||
4. |
Course To Naming A Brook
04:15
|
|||
|
The Course to Naming a Brook
Something like you begins here, as a spring, running from a pipe, buried through a drystone, brimming a half-circle cow-trough laid into the wall. Overspilt in limestone silt, moss grown deep, haired with long grass, you’re a last mammoth, leaning into an era’s end.
Or what I see when I listen to some cellular reverb plying atomic time. Or random memory. Or a limestone trough, with this man stood in front, hearing a quiet corner of the Dryhill field, under the Havens house. The moss wrings itself out and you well in hoof-prints, smoothing them down and begin your fall again. You let slip under the elder hedge, hop down a half dozen faezy pools, as wide as hands pushed into the bank. You are only water now, a membrane wetting the boot-smooth, ragstone path, before a switch back, down a sheep-drove track and disappearance into your sound’s pooling. You go through the houses’ clearcut, under elder nettle briar, the air full of flight, bees on the bramble flower and a pair of cryptic wood whites, who flit out and over the old man’s beard like eloping brides. Meadow browns hang down on blood-green dock leaves until it stops. The wood appears, the light drops and you reveal yourself, a full twelve strides wide, as a roll-stone rattlebed of ovalled fists. I wait on the edge of you, for time, in the ash scrub, where each stem, ivy-clamped in varicose jackets, hangs heavy with fallaway vine. I listen for your leak-trickle through barbed wire, into sound in the next clearing. The bramble push-over waves, crest astral, blackberry milk-pink flowers, docking with the hive. From under them, a bedrock surfaces, like a whale’s head, its skull ridge heavy, stepped downhill in your song’s mirror. Stream as sound, sound as briar wave, as stone sound, your polyphony falling faster, louder now, plummeting the lumpen shelves, like a hurried explanation and making for the relief of the meadow’s slowing. I clamber into you here, head for a home in your leaps, where the human path crosses your stones, scattered and dam-strewn, turned and turned again in re-arrangement.
From here, where the people start, I look back to your pipe’s dream, pushing through the drystone, as some anonymous begin-again, from early rains to slow returns. I’ll call you Havens Brook, and keep to following your way home:
Havens to Lime to Frome to Severn, home to begin again,
Havens to Lime to Frome.
|
||||
5. |
Sonic Reel For The Sea
03:11
|
|||
|
Sonic Reel for Sea
Tides~yes~tides, heaving on these ends, disregarding our concerns for surviving, the shape of it, in variance, counterpoints which are passing, just passing, lilting to the tilt of the tides~yes~tides.
Tides~yes~tides, the fishers stayed to fish again, the grockles gone for good and the boats seen from the window, waiting,
harbouring the syrup-moon night, to be out again, to be home again, with the starry tides~yes~tides. Or the memory’s knotwork tying time to uncertain threads, sorrowed knowing, it was us who must return.
|
||||
6. |
Threshold Blues
03:40
|
|||
|
Threshold
Remembered sometimes, with some of this dying done, the nights hungering owl tides and drinking from their water. In the last wept prayer pushing out to the cold, drawing the true night west, know that a whole sun will come soon enough and dry what’s left of the demons laid waste on the threshing floor.
Dawn wakes wonder-eyed in the flames and the dancing shadows, we’re all held up in the night’s travails. This fleet redemption, like the sweet, sweet taste of a lover’s lips from opening or a thread, warm air woven into the whole, touching a fraction of skin.
|
||||
7. |
Dear Brook
03:00
|
|||
|
Dear Brook
Flow lowers its light so stream is a million silvered moth-wings jammed between the banks, rustling through dams from weekend dads, desperate for time that disappears below the hazels at the gate.
The truth, dear brook, is how home speaks to me now in a contrail’s dispersal, drifting to the shape of a kingfisher’s head and wing in flight, above it the next jet stream streaks shite yellow brown.
By sunset over Wales, the black hills’ horizon is a seabed in the depths of sky, where a giant cumulus floats, brushing the tree line like a seafarer before it was seal. Across the north
the cirrus spread into murmurations over the evening while other airlines knife score the face of it, silently. It has an innocent relief that’s shared with self-harming scratched all over it.
|
||||
8. |
Cloud As A Hawk
04:49
|
|||
|
Cloud as a Hawk
I am not making on any sky but this one, cloudless. I am the optic nerve, the cornea or compound curvature of particle to anywhere made in this relentless where-do-you-want-to-begin blue.
It is planeless, the air clear like the mountain reminds me of a real or half recalled lifeline. Nonetheless, a three-cloud micro system appears, out of nowhere, to the South like white steam in a minute’s life and becomes wings,
a head and, further in, a face. What I saw inside the cloud-feathered hawk as it hovered, drawing me in, was exceptional peace in the face of it, altered possibility, or someone much like me,
looking through a door the clouds made, revealing our animate worlds in each other, providence opening between us. I try naming this, into familiars like mirror or window and it dissipates, into a vanishing, into a where-d’you-wanna-go-now blue.
|
||||
9. |
Oaken
05:22
|
|||
|
Oaken
I have hidden myself between two rare oaks following the fall of a clay lick that slips down across the limestone and I remember the brothers,
the striven dealings of their hands, leathered in the lights of trade and purchase. What silencing made of these men died equally
with those who cried out for their quiet, together, true and even as the heft of Mars pressed on shoulders below the masks.
The dry callused skin-rub of the halter, the impact of an oaken stave made it hard to turn on them, the salt still to be weighed, the task tempered.
Here, between the oak stems, girded with straightening flames of hawthorn and ash, I can see its beams and bows, frames for houses unraised, boats unhewn.
I reach into the canopy, unhindered, unmade, anchored, gripping a surfaced root that keeps me still in a repeated instant before flight.
|
||||
Lensmen UK
Lensmen four piece are dark and atmospheric.
Formed in Stroud Gloucestershire in
2016 their explorations of the passions with diverse influences from post punk, new wave and psychedelia.
Drawing on themes of death, dying and property speculation they provide a soundtrack to our lives.
Alternating between hard and soft, quiet and loud, Lensmen tell the stories that bind us all together.
... more
Lensmen recommends:
Stumbled across Traams somehow... don't remember how or where but flippin' glad we did...
go to album
December MMXIII
by The Diamond Family Archive
Seeing these two multi-instrumentalist on stage is like watching craftsmen. It's like the unfurling of a train of thought: a truly creative and exploratative journey through sound and music making.
go to album
Bo Diddley meets Suicide: whats not to like? Stroud chums crowd funded their debut album and it sounds great. Equal Opportunity Friend is a fave amongst many... check them out!
go to albumIf you like Lensmen, you may also like:
Les Fleurs Du Mal
by Francois Atlas
featured on Bandcamp Radio Sep 18, 2018
go to album
CRYING AROUND AND IN COLOR
by BELOVED SUN
The duo of Artist Named You and Sol Galeano present their debut together, a conceptual and adventurous modern R&B album.
go to album
Four songs from Glasgow artist Eli Hermit that explore moods that are trancelike and hypnotic.
go to album
