Whither have they gone?

I have tried to entice them back but nothing I do makes them reappear. This does not happen with books, you see. One puts a bit of grammar here and there, introduces a space to give the words room to breathe and there it stays. Not so with this virtual contraption. It removes my spaces – selectively- without so much as a “by your leave” and tucks them away into mysterious voids from whence they can never be recovered. Give me a good, honest book any old day!

If anyone in the WordPress world knows a way to right this dreadful wrong… do share your notes. My poems do not like to be squinched up.

Composer, painter and poet Richard Moult is the Newcastle-born author of innumerable songs, miscellaneous musical settings, field recordings and works for solo piano and classical ensembles, with a clutch of beneath-the-radar-albums and EPs to his name. Richard is also known for his work with the group Far Black Furlong and for collaborations with the David Tibet’s apocalyptic folk mavens Current 93, Irish psych-folk band United Bible Studies and Dorset sound sculptors Plinth.

His debut for Second Language, is a three-movement suite of stark, immersive, beauty. Celestial King For A Year began life as a work for string quintet but was gradually pared back to a numinous essence. “I wanted to write something spacious and to my mind, completely spiritual”, says Richard. “I took as my influence very early Christian chant (‘Old Roman’ – circa 6th Century AD), but I wanted to strip the work down even more, doing away with any rhythmic and harmonic embellishments and creating something that seems quite static, quite still. I then expanded the work to include two extra movements for voice, strings and electronics.”
The album is named after a poem of Richard’s and refers to the seasonal cycle and how offerings were once made to the fields in order to propitiate the gods. While the music doesn’t seek to literally describe any specific ritual/seasonal fest, it was Richard’s aim to, “try and presence a general ‘pagan’ sense of the sacred”. That he has succeeded magisterially in his aspiration is evinced by even a cursory listen to this haunting, compelling album.

Celestial King For A Year comes in a hand-made envelope with a postcard of Richard’s painting of harpist Áine O’ Dwyer.

Limited edition of 300 copies.

This is SL010 available online at: http://www.secondlanguagemusic.com/

Text from Second Languages Music

Video of Richard Moult’s  music and artwork by Anne Wallace

http://motitare.wordpress.com/

I wandered many years alone and wordless

In the midnight shadows of cloister walks

Breathing in the coolness of air infused with spent incense

And feeling the echoes of plainchant still reverberating in my soul

In the silent darkness I would steal away into the library

That housed in over a hundred thousand books

The arcane knowledge of clever scholars and pithy priests

Scorned novelists and languishing poets

Because my mind burned for sacred knowledge

And my heart yearned for a numinous breath of life

Which I secretly possessed but did not yet know

At the break of dawn

When the sun rose in glints of majestic hues

Nature would open her book of secrets

And she turned its pages for me unceasingly

As the cycle of the seasons progressed

Holding nothing back

She would lead me time and time again

Along the curve of the cloister wall

That led to the hedge hidden within a tangled copse

That had been cultivated into a shape

Which reminded me curiously of a womb

- Like an ancient Celtic burial ground -

Until one day I crept inside and wept

I had wanted to be the Bride

I had come to seek holy ground

But instead I found scorched earth

Broken mirrors of human virtue and submission

Which reflected no light

So I found the key to the hidden gate

And carried the cloister of my heart

Into the expanse of the world

I constructed a hermitage made of paper

And arrayed myself in Nature’s gifts

Original poem by Anne Wallace

Music used by permission of the artists of the album Chartres: Catherine Braslavsky and Joseph Rowe
http://www.naturalchant.com/disco.htm#chartresplace
Cello piece “Night in the Cathedral” by Thierry Renard. With gratitude.

This site will be dedicated solely to my literary pursuits and photography. My poetry, literary critique and general blog will be housed here. My illumination and bookbinding will still be found at Atelier Pigmenta Peregrinae. Another new addition will be The Lepidopterarium which is where my silversmithing and ephemeral art will find a nice niche. Finally, The Habit of Silence will be a new thanatological journal that I am going to keep specifically addressing the work that I will be beginning at Covenant Hospice in January. Everything will be a wee bit chaotic as I move things about. The links will be in the sidebar to all the rest. Thanks to all who have visited and will visit these quiet realms of mine.

One lovely thing that happened in 2010 was the publication of two of my poems in The New Art Review.