CONT'D

Well, speaking of Housman, he also says this:

"Well then, once we have recognised that knowledge in itself is good for man, we shall need to invent no pretexts for studying this subject or that; we shall import no extraneous considerations of use or ornament to justify us in learning one thing rather than another. If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason why it most attracts him is that it is best for him."

Yea.

The album inches towards completion. A few shows are coming up. Now, in lieu of real news, here is a great poem (written by a highly esteemed Latin scholar!):

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

                                      ASL.II. A.E. Housman

THE NEWS

We recorded an album! Depending on how mixing etc. goes, it will be 8 or 9 songs long and between 40 and 50 minutes. I know the title, but I am not going to tell you yet. I expect Disintegration Records will release it at some point in the coming year, maybe/hopefully as early as early summer. Happy new year to you all.

O yes, and thanks to Stefan for updating our bio on the Big Fun website and thanks to that festival generally. It's a good thing for Winnipeg, this festival, and we are excited to be a part of it.

NOT THE NEWS REFERENCED IN THE PREVIOUS POST

We gifted the Big Fun festival with an unreleased demo recording Cole, Marie-France, and I made one very hot afternoon last June. You may listen to it here: BIG FUN.

Note: our biography on the Big Fun website should read like this:

Glacial-paced, spacious, and beautiful -- Slow Dancers play music of gradual acquaintance; music of purpose and thought; music which fetters the restless spirit of rock and roll, strips her of her mercurial dress, reveals her bare, examinable, sullied only by our searching eyes. 

PHAEDRA DICIT

I know I should be updating this page more often than I do. Thankfully, I have 2400 years of human tradition to back my lack of execution. I cite Euripides:
τὰ χρήστ᾽ ἐπιστάμεσθα καὶ γιγνώσκομεν,
οὐκ ἐκπονοῦμεν δ᾽.
Natheless, here I am writing you to say: expect news in the coming weeks.

VALETE

Unexpected summer digression from lyric writing, August show.

Scrambling to finish the lyrics to this record we are apparently recording soon, I've been thinking often of the relationship between poetry and music. The more I read verse, the more pleasure I find in noting a poem's metre, rhythm, and, I suppose, music. I have wondered about relating traditional poetic form to song composition: maybe phrasing a song with iambic pentameter or something... ha, perhaps that's foolish. Nevertheless! with this subject floating around my head one morning while eating breakfast and reading my book of Graves poetry, I was struck by the muse (or "The White Goddess" as Graves would have it...), and composed a brief song taking one of that author's poems for the lyrics and trying, as best I could, to use his pattern of stress as a guide for my composition. Here's the result:

She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep by slowdancers

and, in case ya'll wanna read it, here's the poem:

   She tells her love while half asleep


She tells her love while half asleep
    In the dark hours
         With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
    And puts out grass and flowers
          Despite the snow
          Despite the falling snow

Honestly,  I'm not too sure how successful my attempt at translating his metre has been. In singing this, the accentual-syllabic metrics almost became quantitative, that is I mostly rendered unstressed syllables briefly held notes (as in the "She" of line 1) and stressed syllables sustained notes (as in the "tells" of line 1). Maybe this is a pointless observation, however, for sung poetry is music and poetic terms perhaps have little/no meaning applied to music. At the time I felt like line 2 ought to be a trochee followed by an iamb, but now I'm not so sure that was the right choice; perhaps that whole line is poorly sung.

In other news, we're playing a big old end of summer show on Sunday, August 28th. Here's the FACEBOOK EVENT. A stand-up man named Dan Holbrow from Regina, who performs under the name B-Side Champions, is also playing the night. He once featured Cole and my's rock and roll band, Right Through, on his podcast. Till next time,

VALETE

THE WEEKEND OF SLOW DANCERS

Thank you to anyone who was kind enough to come see us play at any of our shows this weekend. I think all of us Slow Dancers had a great time; I know I certainly did. 

I woke this morning alone in my home, feeling rather lonely and blue that those shows had come and gone. We have been playing live a lot these past few months, accepting every show we've been offered, and attempting to make people aware that we exist. I think some people have become aware. Regarding our live performances, we're going to slow down now, and will likely only play one or two more shows this summer.

Well, to conclude this rather pointless blog post, I've transcribed a Robert Graves poem which comes from a book of his I bought yesterday. As it often does, today poetry fills some little hollow in my chest. 

           THE WINGED HEART

Trying to read the news, after your visit,
When the words made little sense, I let them go;
And found my heart suddenly sprouting feathers.

Alone in the house, and the full honest rain
After a devil's own four-day sirocco
Still driving down in sheets across the valley--

How it hissed, how the leaves of the olives shook!
We had suffered drought since earliest April;
Here we were already in October.

I have nothing more to tell you. What has been said
Can never possibly be retracted now
Without denial of the large universe.

Some curse has fallen between us, a dead hand,
An inhalation of evil sucking up virtue:
Which left us no recourse, unless we turned

Improvident as at our first encounter,
Deriding practical care of how or where:
Your certitude must be my certitude.

And the tranquil blaze of sky etherializing
The circle of rocks and our own rain-wet faces,
Was that not worth a lifetime of pure grief?