– Jon Rafman (Nine Eyes of Google Street View)
 

It is a great pleasure to announce that our friend & long-time collaborator J. Allen’s solo debut ‘Wonder City’ is out today!

The album is an epic, atmospheric collection of lo-fi gems, and was written, played, and recorded by J himself in his Brooklyn apartment.   

You can buy it here (if you dig CDs) and here (if you prefer MP3s.)

Be sure to catch him live this month on his Wonder City tour.

WHITE KEYS from SOLO PIANO II from Chilly Gonzales on Vimeo.

“See how the true gift never leaves the giver: 
returned and redelivered, it rolled on 
until the smile poured through us like a river.”

– Don Paterson  

Imperfect, beautiful like faceted blood.  It came from India where they wash up on the shore.  Thousands of them — the beads of sorrow.  Little droplets that somehow became gems gathered by beggars who trade them for rice.  Whenever I stared into its depths I felt overcome, for caught within my little gem was more misery and hope than one could fathom.

It frightened and inspired, and I kept it in my sack, a waxed yellow packet the size and shape of a razor blade.  I’d stop and take it out and look at it.  I did this so often it was no longer necessary to see what I was looking at.  And because of this I can not say for certain when it disappeared.

I can still see it though.  I see it on the foreheads of the women.  In the poet’s hollow.  I see it at the throat of a diva and in the palm of the deserter.  Pressing against a wire fence.  A drop of blood on a calico dress.  I open my bundle and dump the contents in the furrows of the earth.  Nothing — an old spoon, a rudder, the remains of a walkie-talkie.  Spreading the cloth to rest upon I take breaths as long as the furrows.  As if to quell the spirits; hold them from shaking and clanging.

  — Patti Smith (Woolgathering)

(via Reham)