But I love a lot of other varied writers too, regardless of where they're from or what scene they were part of. There's the technical, so-called "L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E" poetry movement & associated people like Harryette Mullen & Phil Hall (he's a big deal here in Canada, as far as poets go, his book "Killdeer" was excellent), I love the way they play with linguistic elements most people take for granted. Not too long ago I was reading Karin Boye, who is best known for her anti-totalitarian novel that Deathspell Omega of all people namedropped in an interview, but her translated poetry is where she shines best imo. Vladimir Mayakovsky is superb, "Speaking to the Taxman about Poetry" is a classic. Guys like Frank O'Hara who was part beatnik with his jazz influence, part cultural critic with a slightly avant-garde twist at times. John Berryman's Dream Songs, "Aubade" by Philip Larkin, and I used to have a few favorite Shakespearean sonnets but it's been years so I've forgotten the numbers lol

And by the way you mentioned Keats (who is obviously great, I ran out of characters in the other posts) and I was just rummaging through my bookshelf and found this small book called "Odes Sonnets & Lyrics" I haven't read in like a decade, I think I'm gonna go through it today, I remember really liking the Melancholy, Nightingale and Psyche Odes.

I studied Literature and History/Art at uni and loved it tbh. I have tons of academic books about those topics so who cares about anything if one has books, right? You look like a bookaholic too, so you may agree with me. John Keats was an obsession of mine, have you seen the movie Brightstar? You may also like the movie The Dead, it's about the last tale from Joyce's Dubliners. I'm currently reading a lot of piano literature, so I feel really disconnected from everything else, but I'm actually a bit concerned about how literature has changed in recent years. Do you have hope in contemporary writers (in the 21th century), or do you think literature is dead and you'd rather read books by dead authors?

Plath went far too early, even considering her medical issues, it's hard for me to think of an artist who had a more challenging life and yet she still managed to follow her dreams as best she could. I've seen neither Brightstar nor The Dead but they sound like good recommendations; The Dead was always one of my favorite short stories from Joyce along with Araby and A Little Cloud. I definitely think literature in general has been in a steady decline, I think there are industrial reasons related to both world wars that played a big part in many important literary clubs and printing presses going down, plus of course radio and television becoming prominent. There are still very good writers out there but I don't think any of them are in the same league as what we got in the 1920s and 1930s.

And I studied English and Philosophy, which probably won't come off as much of a surprise. Literary Modernism and Philosophy of Language were my main topics, so I was lucky to have professors who also specialized in these specific fields. I was also lucky to have a few teachers who would also provide art history context as well. A lot of my favorite novelists and poets were inspired by a variety of painters, so I remember classes where we'd learn about Picasso's different eras, the differences between impressionism and post-impressionism, etc. Woolf in particular wasn't just influenced by Shakespeare and Byron, but Monet's paintings and Beethoven's string quartets too, so studying that stuff helps understand her rhythm and structure a lot better. I loved learning about how entirely different mediums could influence each other. Gertrude Stein and Picasso being close friends is probably one of the main examples of that.

I added interpreters and composers (both classical composers and contemporary classical). I hope that's ok. I just added an album by Hania Rani.

That's fine by me!

Great idea!

I choose Day is done and Place to be, atm i only learnt the first one with standard tuning and capo in 5th fret (6th in my case since i always have my guitar tuned half step down bc it sounds cooler), maybe i should share it somewhere dunno, i'm not good at recording myself tbh but Place to be needs a special tuning, i'm figuring it out atm! good songs to play on the streets

DUDE I used to tune my guitar in E-flat standard all the time and I thought I was one of the only ones! I love the sound of that tuning too! I could never really put my finger on why, I experimented with different tunings after getting my first capo, but E-flat always had such a perfect sound to my ears. D standard was one I always liked for electrics, but there's something about the way an acoustic resonates in E-flat that I always loved.

I want to experiment with open tunings like open C. I've heard its also called the Nick Drake tuning. Emma Ruth Rundle also composed a lot of songs with open tunings. But I'm paranoid of ruining my guitar if I try such extreme tunings, specially if I do it with the strings I have now which I think are quite light. My Blueridge has only one month with me so I didn't change the strings yet.

I'm planning on getting the game when it gets its first sale on Steam, everyone says it's great and I'm really looking forward to the combat and story. Hopefully we both don't die this year because of our age but ehh, that would just be my luck wouldn't it. I was also thinking of replaying Hollow Knight a few weeks ago, I only played it once back when it came out and enjoyed it, especially the art style and music.

Hollow Knight is one of my fav games. I'm really looking forward to the release of Silksong. There's also a piano book of Undertale. I don't have that one, but I've heard the song Fallen Down in an out of tune piano and it sounded incredible haha

About Gris: indeed, a very depressing album. It truly feels authentic and I liked that. I'm not really a dsbm connoisseur, tbh I didn't explote that subgenre at all (it'll happen soon tho, I'd gladly accept suggestions), but based on the few things I listened that can be considered dsbm, I place Il était une forêt at the top of all of them, along with Totalselfhatred first album. I'm actually revisiting the neocrust subgenre and looking for new music in general, so it seems a good idea to dig into more stuff like Gris too. Thank you for that suggestion, it really resonated with me!

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it, to me that album is a masterpiece of black metal in general. I don't listen to much DSBM anymore myself, but whenever I crave it, 80% of the time it's for that band. Some of my favorite raw lo-fi metal vocals ever, too. I thought I had heard Totalselfhatred before, but turns out I haven't, so I'll grab that album soon and check it out (after going through more Mono albums which I should be doing soon). de Visée also seems like a great recommendation, I still haven't felt even remotely finished with relistening to Dowland yet, he's definitely going to be one of my top discoveries of the year.

If you're in the mood, try The Hawk is Howling by Mogwai too. It's a timeless album, I can confirm now that I revisited it. It's even helping me with a new project I'm working on. I truly needed that, being focused on something fully creative and forgetting about the world... and about myself but that's another story, at least I remember to breath and hold the pencil, the only two things on my mind these days tbh.

Thank you. I hope more people answer to this, since I like to see that we, as humans, still connect with music on a deeper level.

For some reason, that album triggers me so much to the point that I cannot listen to it. It really is intense, for sure. However, I loved Il était une forêt by Gris and I'm looking for something similar. I also like the first Totalselfhatred album, but I connected way more with Gris.

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🖤🖤🖤

The last part of your message left me with the usual frustration. We all already know about this but, somehow, each time I remind myself that I end up in a loop of negative thoughts about how everything changed in these last years, in the music industry and everywhere. I can understand that when one comes from other generation tends to be too nostalgic and see old times as better (specially in the music sense), but this is another story. What the fuck happened, really?

I hope my comment didn't make you too angry, but I think I've been there so I know what you mean. I doubt I'll ever know the full story, but I do know that record producers used to want to take risks every now and then. They'd still primarily want conformist contracts and most albums to be commercially friendly, but every now and then they'd want to experiment. Sometimes they'd hear a weird album and say "fuck it, maybe people will like this, let's give it a shot", and I think that attitude has just been lost since roughly the 1980s. No one wants to break any rules, they just want to be the master of all the pre-established rules. It's like the opposite of that famous Debussy quite, where rules dictate works of art instead of the other way around.

The internet is kind of a double-edged sword here. Anyone can release anything, anyone can attempt to look for anything, but if someone wants to officially release something weird on a big label, they might just get told to release it themselves online, so even then it's not gonna have any major mainstream breakthrough. Worse yet, there's this study that says that all of the music that was released globally in 1989 is the same amount of music that's released these days on a daily basis. One year's worth of music per day. To me, that means standing out from everyone else is even more vital than ever before. Only smaller labels like Tzadik or NoEvDia are actively releasing stuff that's truly out there.

Thank you so much for the suggestions, I'll check them all out soon. I know Alice Sara Ott and especially Martha Argerich, her famous Chopin album is something I discovered years ago and frequently revisit. With Mary Lou, her Black Christ album is fantastic and maybe her masterpiece, but she wrote a lot of stuff for piano that merged jazz with gospel and classical, so she's very special. I don't play any instruments anymore, but I used to frequently play clarinet and guitar. I played piano very little, but not with any real proficiency. From what I've heard from Bach, his fugues and sonatas deserve the reputation they get. I'm honestly tired of seeing words like "under/overrated" thrown around, I think there are lots of musicians who are neither. Some people are rated perfectly fine, and Bach seems like one of them. I've heard some Rachmaninoff, I remember especially liking Op. 33 & 42, and Dowland sounds like exactly what I'm looking for these days, especially with Lear/Hamlet vibes.

By the way, if you ever wanted to check out really dark, sometimes dissonant classical, two of my favorite composers for that are Alfred Schnittke (his gravestone is my account picture) and Arvo Pärt. Schnittke's Requiem is a really ominous but exciting work that always gets a physical reaction out of me. Pärt is famously known for his very soft, delicate and repetitive pieces like Spiegel and Alina, but Te Deum and Miserere are much more unrelenting and disturbing, while still being minimalist. I'm very curious to see your reaction to this stuff.

Schnittke seems like it's gonna be an obsession soon. I need to listen to more 20th century composers tbh, I like Messiaen, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Scriabin, Lili Boulanger, Ravel, Debussy... but I need to dig more into it. I'll write back with my impressions. Thank you.

I still have faith in humanity, after all. I've volunteered in some non profit organizations, animal sanctuaries and the like... only to see with my own eyes how fucked up humans can be, that even in those places people can be cruel to vulnerable beings, it was all a pyramid of power. Nothing was worth it anymore. It took me time to recover from the shock of realizing that the majority of us aren't inherently good, and that it's all about power, not money tho. A bee hive structure, zero percent emotional intelligence for the mass in the middle supporting the zero empathy psychos at the top, the ones who rule this world, and at the bottom are the rest of us, the people who can't fit into this System. Some of us can live with a mask, others just can't. I personally prefer to work from home and forget about the world, for now. "For whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man."

I know what you mean, it seems that any organization or institution can be corrupted by powerlust, unfortunately. There's this famous American vet named Kwane Stewart I watched a couple videos of years ago, and he talked about some extremely morbid stuff that goes on behind the scenes at animal shelters that still stick with me. Whatever you went through, I hope you recovered from it. I'm not an optimistic person generally, but even I think most humans care about animals' well being, I think. A lot of people talk about how certain professions need to have IQ tests and checks, but maybe we need to somehow standardize an empathy test, because that seems to be much more sparse and necessary these days.

And now the new trend here is creating fake events with sexually explicit gifs and users commenting nonsense in the shoutbox. All the accounts who do that are fairly new here. Yes, this place is gonna end up like Twitter. The funny thing is, you cannot report those events, so whatever.

Ildfar, Fides Inversa, Pale Riders, Kuupyr, Naqke, Nyrst y Order of Nosferat. Ya pondré más.

Both books sound very interesting - same issue here in the US, I can't find the Chopin biography available anywehere.

I've recently got a book called The complete pianist by Penelope Roskell and tbh this is saving my life. Idk about your skill level, probably way higher than mine, but this book talks about every aspect of piano technique and I'm finding it very helpful. Sometimes teachers never talk about some of these things and this is helping a lot in covering those gaps.❤️‍🩹

Thanks. I will definitely check it out.

I swear I'd sell my soul to Liszt.

Patroclo; el peor y más gay personaje de la Ilíada.

Chopán.