(If you’re in a dark place in the northern hemisphere the next two weeks or so and you wake up a few hours before dawn you’ll be able to see the zodiacal light – the “false dawn,” sometimes mistaken for the glow of phantom cities.)

infinitely patient

Virginia Woolf, writing in 1927: “For prose is so humble that it can go anywhere; no place is too low, too sordid, or too mean for it to enter. It is infinitely patient, too, humbly acquisitive. It can lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind.”

(Which is so perfect, so true, and so her.)

“only sick music makes money these days”

A double-header, two perfect tracks that could not be more different. First, Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14”, covered by the brilliant pianist Vanessa Wagner and the spacious electronica composer Murcof (from their album Statea) with surpassing gentleness – the texture of a sweetly melancholy memory evoked through JPEGs and lossy audio files and archived social media. Second, Tyranny’s “Sunless Deluge”, from Aeons in Tectonic Interment, an impossibly bleak ten-minute slab of funeral-doom metal from Finland: mood music for silt swirling through ruins on an abyssal plain.

and finally

The Rite of Spring brilliantly performed – on melodicas

“It is to defend the honor of everyone involved who did not take part in it willingly”: The Beatles Never Existed, an exhaustive analysis

A neo-Shinto Spiritualist religion that revered the creator of Esperanto as a god and changed both Aikido and Yamantaka Eye of the Boredoms and V∞redoms: Oomoto

A toilet tank filled with mercury is somehow the most vaporwave thing

The Final Journey of Anders J. Smedsvik

(Thanks for reading, as ever.)