“Once he was showing me a book of twentieth-century art he liked, and there was a picture of an automated sculpture called Dead Birds Fly Again, a thing that whirled real dead birds around and around on a string, and he smiled and nodded, and I could see he felt the artist was a spiritual ancestor of some kind.” —William Gibson, “The Winter Market”
I put together this mix over the past few weeks, and then dedicated it to our Jessica, whose heart had coincidentally been rendered metaphorically akin to a dead bird, with the hope that it might be of some help to that organ, or at least make it feel dizzy.
What we have here is some very, very sad music, mostly classical in nature, together with some less-sad but still fitting tunes to impart some momentum. Hopefully by the end the old ticker is whirling around like, if not quite its old self, then at least like an actual living heart and not a dead bird.
Gabriela Friðriksdóttir — “Tetralógia”
Zoe Keating — “Legions (War)”
Victoire — “A Door Into the Dark”
Alan Morse Davies [after Claude Debussy] — “Claire de Lune [Hotel Commodore Ensemble, 1927; remixed]”
Aram Khachaturian — “Gayane Ballet Suite, Adagio”
Arvo Pärt — “Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten”
Kalter — “Svalbard”
Murcof — “Ulysses”
Kyle Gabler — “Jelly [from the “World Of Goo” soundtrack]”
Philip Glass — “Pruit Igoe”
Victoire — “A Song For Arthur Russell”
Terry Riley — “Half-Wolf Dances Mad In Moonlight”
Marsen Jules — “Brouillard”
Eluder — “Moon Plea”
Gas — “Oktember”
Âme — “Rej [A Hundred Birds Mix]”
Listen, download, etc: “Dead Birds Fly Again”
