Poppyhead.WAV

The Quiet Woman of Montevideo

First Light on the Pechora Sea

Radio Traffic, 3 am

I walked from the station through the unfamiliar streets, listening intently. It was a freeing, a lightening experience, as if the world were presented to me anew, with much more in it than I had ever supposed. Even the harsh sounds were like greetings. The clattering of the trams and the hum of the traffic were pierced by a bird’s cry oddly like that of a child, there was a smoky croak of laughter, a market trader mumbled a song to himself, I heard a gramophone’s entreaties from a shuttered room. Whistles, whines, rumbles, bleeps, whooshes and crashes played all about me like a transient symphony: yet in a moment there would come a sudden pause, where the noise was dimmed and only footsteps and a murmurous undertone could be discerned. Then it seemed as though the city was withdrawing into another world.

01 Phantom Cities.WAV

Without language, would we have instead a finely tuned apprehension of each other’s moods and feelings, quite close to telepathy? How carefully and attentively we would look at each other’s faces, hands, postures. Might we see, hear, smell and feel everything around us more intently, more intensely? Could we become closer to the immediate, the imminent world, ‘things as they are’? We are apt to convert each moment into a code of itself. We are surrounded by words, those cloaked assassins, while beyond the wind blows and the world speaks in a wild tongue we no longer understand.

02 Tales Of The Assassins

A discreet blue wicket gate. The grounds lying beyond are overgrown: a great rotting tree-trunk has been colonised by fungus, in black horns and parchment cones.  ‘Private’, reads a sign on the gate in chipped black letters. Some way in, since the word invites curiosity, can be seen the gables, sharp triangles, and the tall chimneys, of a house sheltered by shrubs, and the gaze might catch glints from its otherwise hidden windows, as the sun finds flaws in the glass. Who lives and dreams here? But a hollow way may just be discerned leading through the great serrated nettles and where it turns towards the house is an arched shrine. A statuette of Hermes-Mercury has its place of honour here, in a niche, with missing hands and a blurred face.

11 Strange Houses Of Sleep.WAV

The Sodality of the Shadows is R.B. Russell, Rosalie Parker, Mark Valentine and Cousin Silas.

The Sodality of the Shadows

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