23 Comments
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Good to hear from you Tonx, and I know you resonated with the tunes as well as the thoughts. I really do believe some of that music we fell in love with back in the ambient daze has something for us now...

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and hopefully Boards of Canada are about to grace us with some new music too...

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Yes Repo Man held up amazingly well, and its communication and cultural texture was, as you say, both terribly familiar and now increasingly exotic. I am looking forward to Furiosa as well!

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May 25Liked by Erik Davis

Excellent ruminations. And I hereby sign off on that insight: “whenever there is the choice, move from hatred or fear to the terrible sadness.” The harder, straighter path, and probably the only one to sanity.

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Erik this is brilliant. Thanks. I needed this.

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I love it! Nothing intentional there (at least from me, I can't speak for the synchronicity gods...)

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As I enter my "late fifties" next month, I would say it's almost the ultimate mantra for the aging process!

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I actually don't mind the post-partum blues so much anymore, partly because I am used to them, and partly because I have developed an appreciation for the "morning after" as a calm and insightful moment of truth telling. "It" is never in the thing, or in the time.

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Yeah there is a lot lurking in High Weirdness, waiting to spring. One of my favorite things is to see people's heavily marked up copies. That's how the memes SPREAD....As for the Selected Ambient Works 33 1/3, that's by my pal Marc Weidenbaum, a total classic.

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Thanks for responding here, it's good to know the words resonated. And I suspect there will be calm as well as storm ahead.

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Good reminder Zayne! I've read so much that absorbed Frankl, and for so many decades, that I have to remind myself that I have never read the book itself. It may well be time.

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Yes a number of people really responded to that track; for some other readers, it was already one of their most listened to ambient tunes.

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a great Burning Shore, with a few fistfuls of words I really needed to hear right now.

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Are you the same Tonx from FiPilele? IFYKYK 🤓

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[this is correct]

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Fun! No surprise we appreciate Erik’s eclectic blend of weirdo scholarship [this is good]

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Thank you for introducing me to Stars of the Lid, what a wonderful find.

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May 21·edited May 21

By strange coincidence I just watched RepoMan this past weekend and it held up surprisingly well. I find it almost like a kind of vacation from social and ubiquitous iPhones to watch movies before all of that, where information is exchanged through xeroxed signs and the bard speaks over a barrel full of flaming trash. Also dipped into some of the old Mad Max movies (though I couldn't watch for a sustained 2 hours the way I could Repo Man) to prepare for the May 24 upcoming release Furiosa.

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Great post Erik, I’ve got a lot of mixed feeling about the world these days too and it’s nice to hear you articulate your own mixed mood. Stars of the Lid were a favourite of mine back when I was listening to a lot of moody instrumental music (post-millennial blues?) along with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think, Tortoise and Boards of Canada.

You might be interested to know that the opening melody of Dungtitled is in the 3rd mode of the A Major scale, C# Phrygian, which gives it that melancholic majestic feeling (Plato said that soldiers should only listen to Phrygian music).

This moody mysterious opening sets the table for the triumphant major scale swells that follow, invoking the rising of the sun after a long, dark night.

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"Being alive today means being immersed in a sea of good-byes" very poignant. thanks for your reminder to take time to mourn in real-time. I hope the years ahead are calmer in your circles too. great reading, thank you

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