Month: November 2023

Mary Lattimore – “On the Day You Saw the Dead Whale.”

Hey people! 🙂 

 

I know I just shared a piece by Mary Lattimore very recently… I guess that was last week?… And this one is even from the same album as that one. But, first, it’s my blog, so I guess I can, lol; second, I just simply love her music, and third, I felt really compelled to do this because of a recent experience that I’d had with this particular piece. You may or may not know that I have the habit of listening to something quietly in bed, not just before sleep but also during sleep, to help me deal better with the things that I call sensory anxiety, one of which is a sort of fear of silence that might be akin to fear of the dark in sighted people, where my brain latches on to creepy sounds it’d heard in the past as a way to deal with lack of external sensory input. So sometimes I’ll listen to a radio station in one of my favourite languages, and other times I’d have some music on. It has to be quiet, because obviously otherwise I won’t be able to sleep well, but also has to be decently audible. Plus, as I’ve said on here many times before, it’s really nice and atmospheric having a soundtrack to your dreams. You also may or may not know that I have an indecently huge playlist on Spotify, it used to be public but is private now, which contains all sorts of harp music – i.e. anything that prominently features the harp (be it the orchestral harp or the Celtic harp or the baroque triple harp or any other) in all sorts of genres – as well as all the music of my faza peeps, and anything that is somehow related to my faza peeps like songs of other artists that I know that they like or music that I associate with them for whatever reason, and I listen to that playlist in shuffle mode, so sometimes I myself end up surprised with how erratically varied its content can be. And since Mary Lattimore is a harpist, you can sure conclude for yourselves that her discography has also made its way into that monstrosity of a playlist.

 

So, I was listening to that playlist on Sunday night. It was a very eventful night for me and I slept fitfully for the first half of it, so then I woke up for good and couldn’t fall back asleep, so after some time tossing and turning I decided to go try to find Misha. Misha can seriously help you settle down for sleep properly because if you sleep with a cat like Misha next to you, it gives you a really good reason not to move around too much, because he hates that and it makes him feel on edge so if you move a lot while lying with him, he will soon want to leave. So you have to lay as still as possible and hold him gently, which makes both of you start to feel very warm, and you can feel his breath as he’s falling asleep, so that typically at some point you just won’t be able to resist following him to Sleepland.

 

And so both of us did indeed fall asleep, but, predictably, I fell right into sleep paralysis, because that’s what happens to me when I have a longer break in between sleeps at night. Thankfully Misha helped me out from it, because just as it was getting really bad, he decided that he no longer wants to stay under the duvet and moved onto the blanket, which was very effective in waking me up. But even after that relatively short sleep paralysis episode I was so drained that I fell back into sleep, and for the rest of the night slept very heavily with very vivid dreams – weird dreams, funny dreams, creepy dreams and everything in between. – 

 

And the last one among those innumerable dreams that I had was so beautiful, joyful and funny, and just insanely cute. THe cutest, most adorable dream I’ve ever had! And no, for some reason it didn’t even feature Misha. I’m afraid though that I can’t tell you much about what it did feature, because who would want to read a detailed description of an entire dream series? 😀 I woke up from one dream, and then another followed, continuing from where the last one left off, and so on for I guess five or six times. Such dream series had happened to me several times before and I absolutely love them if they’re not creepy. 

 

And, as I was waking up, it was this sweet piece by Mary Lattimore that was playing from my speaker. It blended into the remainders of my dream so seamlessly, gently and uninvasively, just as if it was a part of it that decided to stay with me after I woke up, it was amazing! Obviously once I woke up for good, I was sad to realise that it was just a dream, but this piece, as long as it was (and as you’ll see for yourselves it’s over nine minutes), served as such an awesome connection between me and that dead dream that I could hold on to for a while. Because being pulled out of a beautiful dream, for example when your alarm goes off, is one of the worst feelings that are there, and this piece gave me the opposite, and ample time for accepting the reality that I woke up in, which I felt so thankful for. 

 

Dreams naturally are very ephemeral things, so even people like me who get vivid dreams a lot and pay quite a lot of attention to them usually just forget their dreams quite quickly. But I’ve always thought that one thing that helps preserving memories of dreams is to have something tangible that reminds you of that particular dream. And that’s what this piece does for me and will probably always do. It’s maybe not my favourite piece by Mary Lattimore, I’d heard it many times before and it had never stirred any deeper feelings in me, unlike some other tracks on this album. But now, I’m sure I’ll always have a strong connection to it, because I now associate it so strongly with that dream. 

 

It’s easy to notice with Mary Lattimore’s music that she often uses short sentences as titles for her songs, which makes them feel like stories and I really like that. They usually refer to her own experiences of things that she’d seen or places she’d been to, and it’s no different with this piece, because she did see a dead whale, while on a retreat near San Francisco, which she understandably found a very sad sight. 

 

Question of the day.

Hey people! 🙂 

 

What is the last thing you took a picture of? 

 

My answer: 

 

I guess it’s not necessarily true of all blind people despite what you might think, but I’m really crappy at taking pictures, I can rarely make a decent one. So the result is that I don’t take very many. Even now in the era of aI, when we have GPT 4 which can describe images better and with more detail than anything else could before and I’ve heard several blind people say that it has resulted in them taking a whole lot more photos than they used to, I still don’t do it very much because my pics often are too bad quality, but also because I live with sighted people, so I can just ask a fellow human if I need to know what’s written somewhere or how something looks etc. unless they’re away. Instead, most often the way I use AI with images these days is for describing stuff online, solely out of curiosity because I want to know what something looks like, or sometimes I send screenshots to it, rather than for daily life necessities. That just makes more sense in my life situation. However, sometimes fellow humans are indeed away and I need assistance with something right this very minute, and I think the last such time was when I was upgrading my Mac from Ventura to Sonoma. I’ve had my Mac for almost two years so I’d only experienced one major system upgrade prior to that, and when upgrading to Sonoma it seemed to me like it was taking absolute ages. And I don’t remember now what exactly happened, but I guess either VoiceOver – Apple’s built-in screen reader – didn’t turn on for me while installing the upgrade, or it wouldn’t let me access the progress bar, so given how long it was taking I started to freak out that perhaps it got stuck or something went wrong and I’d have to recover it from a backup, which wouldn’t be the end of the world because I did have a backup of course and I more or less knew how to do it but I never did it before so it would feel just slightly scary. – The only human that was at home was my Dad, but he is as clueless about technology as it is possible, and even more clueless about Mac computers as it seems because every time I would want to show him something, he’d look somewhere completely different on the screen (like the menu or whatever) and insist that he didn’t see what I was telling him he should, although with Apple’s operating systems there’s generally quite a disconnect between how VoiceOver presents things and how they actually look visually on the screen so that may’ve been part of the problem as well. Anyway, I just didn’t trust him that he’d be able to do even such a simple thing as tell me if the thing was actually progressing. So I took a pic of the screen and showed it to GPT, but it said it was too blurry and only recognised the Apple logo. I took another pic, and another, but still not much more success, but after several trials it finally worked out and it told me where the update was. So after some five minutes I took another pic and it told me that it has moved. It indeed was progressing at a snail’s pace, but it was progress, nevertheless, so I didn’t have to worry. So I think that was the last picture that I took. Not very interesting at all. 

 

How about you? 🙂 

 

Question of the day.

Let’s finally have a question of the day ‘cause I don’t even remember when was the last one we had. A very simple and generic one: 

 

What is your favourite season and why? 

 

My answer: 

 

Well I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this particular question on here, or if I did it must have been years ago, but I suppose if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might well know what my answer is going to be. 

 

I used to really love summer for most of my life, like all school-phobic people I suppose. When I was still going to the blind school, it meant I could be at home for the whole two months and had a lot of stress and other shit going on, but even when I went to other schools closer to home, schooling, in particular its social and practical aspects, always stressed me out quite disproportionately I guess so I was happy with any break I was given and always waited for summer as the salvation of the brain. And I’ve always loved berries, and as a kid I lived in the country so we had a forest practically at our doorstep and would go pick berries every summer which I loved. 

 

Now that I don’t go to school, I don’t care for summer much anymore. I’ve never been good with heat and I really dislike it when it’s super hot and clammy (although of course “super hot” is very relative and what’s super hot for me in Poland might be quite cool for you if you live someplace that’s overheated all year round), it drains my brain and makes it feel sluggish, and it makes me feel weak and more migraine-y. Also it’s kinda low-key stressful. These days because we often go on these camper trips and stuff and then I always freak out about Misha. And when I want to stay at home with Misha, then Mum wants to stay as well because she freaks out about me being home alone because what if a zombie invasion happens while they’re away and I won’t be able to see them coming, or World War III breaks out and they’ll break in and pillage the house and lock me up with Misha and Jocky in the cellar. And then Dad loses his shit because he wanted to go on a family trip and no one wants to go. And then Sofi starts sulking because Mum tells her to stay home with Misha and me so that Mum could go with Dad and not worry all the time how we’re doing. And then Misha freaks out once Mum leaves because he wants Mummy. And then Sofi and I start having felinocidal ideations. And then I feel guilty for basically having caused all this shit storm so I go with them on the next trip. And then I can’t think about anything else but Misha on the trip. And the cycle repeats. So summer is rather brain-draining. 

 

Spring is very pleasant, it’s impossible to deny that, and my favourite flowers are grape hyacinths which are spring flowers, but spring is everyone’s and their dog’s favourite season so to me that means it’s overrated, just like the French language and sushi and the Game of Thrones. I always like to personify things – well actually I don’t know if I like it but I just automatically do it – and I’ve always thought that if spring were a person, she’d be full of toxic positivity crap and telling people what they’re supposed to think and like. So no thanks. 

 

I really like winter in theory, because I prefer the cold over the heat, and I love everything to do with ice (except for falling on it perhaps but even that can have some upsides because you can feel it). I also like the cosy aspects of winter like that you can go around the house in your cosy slippers and drink cocoa and eat gingerbread or other warming stuff, and you can sleep longer, or stay up longer at night. I once had a penfriend who said that he considers winter introvert-friendly. I think I see now what he meant, it does have a sort of introverted vibe, and if winter were a person, she certainly would be an introvert, but in practice, at least in my life, it’s anything but introvert-friendly. First of all, there’s Christmas. I love Christmas, but it’s not something I’d call introvert-friendly. And in my family, tons of people, including myself, have their birthday or name day in winter (if you don’t know what name days are, they’re a thing in some European countries that there are names listed for each day in calendar, and when it’s your name day you can invite people and basically do similar stuff that you would on your birthday, except people won’t sing you Happy Birthday and no blowing candles). 

 

So that leaves us with autumn. THe one season that I always used to dread. In fact, it’s so hard-wired into my brain that still, when it’s summer holidays for kids at school, like our Sofi, and I realise that they’re ending very soon, I get hit by a wave of nausea and an urge to go get a knife and slice it into my skin or pull off a nail or something, , before I realise that it’s actually not my business anymore, and I don’t even have to feel for Sofi because she’s excited for school. That means I can go round quite nauseated right at the start of the school year, and it’s really annoying because I know I don’t have to deal with that anymore, yet I can’t persuade my brain to stop freaking out, it just usually has to go away on its own. But when I can distance myself from all that and think more rationally, I always quickly realise that, concerning the present, I’m quite happy with the idea of autumn coming. It has all of the pros of winter (except for the ice perhaps, but at least you can’t fall on it), and none of its cons. It’s a time when I can recover from all the camper tripping and prepare my brain for all the winter peopling. It’s a time when Misha spends most time with me. He spends most time with me when he sleeps or right before sleep. In spring, he tends to sleep the least. In summer, he doesn’t sleep in my room so much or if he does, it’s high up on the wardrobe as it’s the coolest. And in winter, he prefers a basket on the radiator in the living room. But in autumn, he most often sleeps in my bed. Including right now. 

 

So, yes, autumn wins by a mile for me these days. 

 

How is it with you? Has it changed over time or has your favourite season always been the same? 🙂 

 

Cornelis Vreeswijk – “Personliga Persson” (Personal Persson).

Hi people! 🙂 

 

Today I’ve got a really good, if very dark, song by Cornelis Vreeswijk for you. It comes from one of his earlier albums “Tio Vackra Visor och Personliga Persson” (Ten Beautiful Songs and Personal Persson), (Personliga Persson does indeed stick out a bit amongst all those beautiful either love-themed or Brazilian-themed or both, songs), which is one of the best albums of Cornelis in my opinion (though for me it’s Poem, Ballader and Lite Blues that will always rule). 

 

There is a clip on YouTube of Cornelis performing this song live in 1986, some twenty years or so after that album and a year before his death, where he talks about the backstory of this song. THe Persson, or Person, in question, was a guy who was part of a group of troubadours and other artistically inclined hedonists that Cornelis hang out with at a restaurant in Stockholm called Gyldene Freden – it’s the oldest restaurant in Sweden, I believe it’s been around since the 18th century, and a lot of Swedish VIP’s had been there. Persson was not a singer, but he wrote a bit and aspired to be a poet, which didn’t quite go well. He pretty much lost contact with his pals after he married, and later they found out that he decided to change his surname, as he found Persson to be a bit too prosaic (given that it’s one of the more popular surnames in Sweden). So he just left one S out and became a Person. I suppose it is also lightly autobiographical, but then most of his songs are really, in one way or another. 

 

I think it was last year that I stumbled upon a comment under the video linked above, where someone had a theory that the “Person” described in this song could be Leif GW Persson – famous Swedish novelist and criminologist. – I’d never heard of him before, or might well have heard but just didn’t really care and my brain didn’t register it, but I love going down rabbit holes, especially when they have to do with my faza peeps, so I slid down this particular one quite happily and, while I found no solid evidence to confirm it, and I don’t even know for sure if they actually knew each other, this theory sounds reasonable to me. He’s obviously a Persson, not a Person, but this could be just a minuscule detail that doesn’t need to be taken literally. As far as I know, Cornelis, like a lot of writers do, often based the characters in his songs on real people but most often they were only based on them, or even a composite of several different individuals, e.g. Fredrik Åkare, or even Cecilia Lind, and were not precisely like their real-life counterparts. I also haven’t found anything about Leif GW writing poetry, but he does write. Aside from that, Leif Gw is not a whole lot younger than Cornelis, and they seem to have a reasonable amount of stuff in common, so they could have hung out. He’s a criminologist and generally seems to have a lot of peculiar ideas, and Personal Person has a creepy, morbid mind and neither of the guys appears a particularly likeable individual. And Leif Gw is an alcoholic, just like Personal Person. So that’s quite interesting to think about. 

 

I think I’ve mentioned it a lot on here that one of the thing I like about Cornelis is how observant he was of people, as much on a societal as an individual level and the way he describes them, even if I don’t always agree with his observations or the conclusions he draws etc. Often, he writes about stuff in a derisive or sarcastic tone, but at the same time can convey it in a way that feels sympathetic and understanding towards the people whose behaviours/ways of thinking he describes, I really like that. We don’t see much of that here, but almost pure cynicism and irony instead, yet in a way, to me at least, this also is oddly appealing. 

 

Below is a translation by Bibielz (I do hope it’s decent), and further below is the song. I could have just shared the live version that I linked earlier in this post, but I thought perhaps it’s not the most accessible to non-Swedish speakers. So I’m sharing the album version as well, so you can listen to either, or both. 🙂 

 

Personal Persson sat one morning at the breakfast table. 

Read in the morning paper that the latest lust murder 

Featured a multitude of piquant details, 

The murderer had used certain parafernalia, 

They were mentioned in the paper 

And that was quite alright. 

Personal Persson’s wife and his odious daughter, 

Still sat in their shifts and their curlers. 

Person looked at them with little affection 

And in his quiet mind Person thought “Yuck!” 

Though he said nothing 

And that was quite alright. 

Personal Persson takes the bus like everyone else. 

In an overcoat and with gloves and a hat he lets his thoughts wander 

And his thoughts go just as they want 

And no one could have guessed 

What kind of thoughts he had 

And that was quite alright. 

Personal Persson heads home via the subway, 

Having with himself a small bottle of spirits out of old habit. 

Then he beats up his wife with a bang and a crash 

And falls asleep like a pig and wakes up like a wreck 

But see, it was fun after all 

And that was quite alright 

Personal Person is listed in the telephone directory 

And if you dial the right numbers he’ll answer cheerfully. 

Yes, of course there are a lot of Perssons, but there’s only one Personal Person 

And that happens to be me 

And that was quite alright. 

 

Astrid S – “2 AM”.

Hey people! 🙂 

 

Today I’ve got a cool Norwegian song for you. I already shared two other songs by Astrid S on here, I think it was at the beginnings of my blog. She’s very popular in her home country, but I guess also not completely unheard of elsewhere. I definitely like her music and listen to it fairly often. 

 

Mary Lattimore – “WInd Carries Seed”.

Hey people! 🙂 

 

For today, I chose another beautiful piece by Mary Lattimore. It’s the bonus track from her solo album Hundreds of Days. This was the first album of hers that I heard when I was first introduced to her music earlier this year, and my feelings for her music have changed a lot since then as you may know if you’ve read my other posts where I shared her pieces, and at this point, I believe this is my favourite album of hers. 

 

Gwilym Bowen Rhys – “Ceinion Conwy” (Conwy’s Beautiful Banks).

Hey people! 🙂 

 

Today I’d really like to share with you this beautiful song from the latest album by Gwilym Bowen Rhys, the second album in his Detholiad o Hen Faledi (Selection of Old Ballads), series. While I wrote on here before that my favourite song from this particular album is unquestionably Deio Bach, I love this one very much as well. One reason for that is because it is set to quite a haunting traditional melody. Besides, it is one of the songs on this album that Gwilym sings a capella. I’m absolutely in awe of his versatility as an instrumentalist, but it’s also always a treat to hear his voice unaccompanied. But the most important reason is that it is one of SO many Welsh cultural works that deals with the topic of hiraeth – that Welsh word which is untranslatable to English and about which I’ve written like a dozen times on here before. – It describes a kind of longing, and if I understand it correctly, it can come in different shades and flavours and can be used quite broadly, But most often, “hiraeth” is simply defined as a very deep longing for your homeland, specifically Wales since it’s a Welsh word. And that’s the sort of hiraeth we’re talking about here as well. While I am not Welsh and have no familial connection to Wales, and have never been out of my home country for longer than a week, I have had ample experience with various other flavours of hiraeth, including, as you might be aware, a chronic hiraeth for home, in the more literal sense of the word, so this topic always resonates with me deeply and I love “hiraeth-ful” songs. It is from the perspective of a Welshman who lives in England, and is as much a song of hiraeth for Wales in general, as it is for Conwy – which is a region in the north of the country. – 

 

This song was written by a man called John Jones who was originally from a village called Glan Conwy in Conwy county, and lived in the 19th century. 

 

The translation below comes from Gwilym’s website where you can also find the original Welsh words. 

 

Despite having had pleasures in the Englishman’s country
and having seen his bright inventions,
the land of the stunning muse
is twice as good.
Her healthy breeze and sweet waters,
and the temperament of her people.
when I recall her bards, a longing
seeps through the nooks and crannies of my weak heart.


I can almost say with certainty
that Wales is a heavenly land,
Oh, were not my feet treading her now -
on the beautiful banks of Conwy

The Englishman shows me every day
his honesty and courtesy,
and by night I receive from him a bed
and more than enough good treatment,
but when my body rests peacefully
on a comfy feather bed,
my spirit ascends and flies away
to visit the land of Wales

And after raising with the day
my heart is so sad,
My place will not be the soil of Wales,
but the centre of Manchester town.
before the sun rises over in the East,
the spirit returns to its lodgings  
to sadly reminisce how things were
amongst Wales’ family

My father is in the Conwy valley
amongst my good friends,
and there he will be until God calls
upon the gentle dead.
To borrow a grave on those banks
is what I truly wish,
to rest until the dead return
from the woeful prison of death.

 

Golden Bough – “The Stolen Child”.

HEY Hey people! 🙂 

 

Earlier this year, I shared with you guys The Stolen Child by Loreena McKennitt – a fascinating poem by Yeats that she set to music. – Today, I’d like to share the same song performed by Golden Bough, with Margie Butler as the vocalist. They have used Loreena’s melody. I think Loreena’s version has a vibe that is more fitting for this poem, but I really like this one as well as I generally just tend to love any music that Margie Butler does. 😀 

 

Anne Crosby Gaudet – “The Mist Covered Mountains of Home”.

Hey people! 🙂 

 

Today I have for you a beautiful tune played on the harp by Anne Crosby Gaudet. Most of the music she plays are her own, harp learner-friendly compositions, but she has also arranged various Christian hymns as well as traditional Celtic folk music for the harp. This piece belongs to the latter category, as it is a Scottish folk song, written in the 18th century by John Cameron – a Highlander from Ballachulish. – I believe originally it actually even had Ballachulish in its title, but nowadays the Scottish Gaelic original is known as “Chì mi na mòrbheanna”. It is in praise of Ballachulish, or perhaps more broadly Scotland, its people, and its language as well. 

 

Vasas Flora och Fauna – “Di Tror Int När Jag Säger” (They Don’t Believe When I Say).

Hi people! 🙂 

 

I think I’ve mentioned on here several times how much I love Finland Swedish. It’s definitely one of my favourite – if not the most favourite – flavour of Swedish. It’s both overwhelmingly cute (at least to my Polish ears, that’s how it feels), and kind of creepy at the same time, in a cool way, because it doesn’t have that world-famous sing-songy quality and the pitch accent of standard Swedish and sounds comparatively monotone, just like the Finnish language. But I haven’t shared al that much music in Finland Swedish on here… probably because I don’t know a whole lot of it. If you were to ask me out of the blue though, what artists I know who sing in Finland Swedish, I’m sure the first one that would come to my mind would be Vasas Flora och Fauna, as I think out of all the few Finland Swedish-speaking artists I’m aware of, I like them most. Especially the earlier period in their history, when they were a duo comprised of Mattias Björkas and Iiris Viljanen. Sadly, Iiris Viljanen left the project after they released their debut album, for unclear reasons. Currently, the group consists of Björkas, as well as singer Tina Kärkinen and pianist Daniel Ventus. 

 

Vasas Flora och Fauna are based in Sweden but, as the name of the group suggests, their homeland is Vasa in Ostrobothnia, Finland. They sing in their local dialect, which is, as far as I’m aware, a very new thing on the Finnish-Swedish music scene, as in the past, Ostrobothnian musicians would only use the dialect as a way to convey humour and otherwise would sing in standard Swedish. I believe it’s quite a widespread phenomenon when it comes to music, not confined solely to the Swedish-speaking world, and I’m really happy that things are changing and various beautiful dialects of various beautiful languages get their deserved and long-overdue attention. But even beyond the dialect, there’s something really quirky (I’m tempted to say something very Finnish, because Finnish culture, be it music or literature, has always stood out to me as particularly quirky) about their lyrics. They’re like little short stories of daily life, sometimes a bit humourous, or a bit abstractive, reflective and introvert-friendly. 

 

I attempted a translation of this song, so that non-Swedish-speaking peeps can have some idea what it is about, as their music is a lot more about the lyrics than the music, but I’m afraid it’s not exactly great. There was one line which I totally did not know what to do with so I left it out, because clearly it exceeded either my Swedish linguistic abilities as a non-native or my cognitive abilities. Then towards the end of the song there is a line which uses a phrase “hem till garden”, which I originally thought must be some idiom that I didn’t know, but found nothing to confirm this little theory, instead, I found out that Hem Till Garden is the Swedish name of the English soap opera Emmerdale, so my best guess is that it was a reference to that. However in the lyrics that I found, it was not capitalised, so I’m not perfectly sure. And there likely are many more glitches in this translation, or things that could have been phrased better. 

 

Sometimes you must pretend that you know a little bit 

Like yesterday when I picked plants and dried them 

Put them in some book I could have gotten from my mother 

Who suddenly up and died 

And I saw that I had found nettles 

Amidst the clutter in the backyard 

And thought whether you could actually cook them 

I wonder if we could live together 

Vasa’s flora and fauna 

A fox had been in 

I’d forgotten that could happen 

[…?] 

I thought I was a city kid 

But I found no peace 

So what do you do in such a situationThere’s nothing that really keeps me here 

I’m so tired of the company manager 

And they don’t believe when I say that we’re going to live together 

Vasa’s flora and fauna 

No moss clung to me 

And you’d think it was good 

TO never stand still, never lose speed 

But at last I’m starting to understand 

That it wasn’t such a simple metaphor 

I guess it sounds a little fake 

When I’m trying to explain 

It’s not some fucking Emmerdale [?] 

And they don’t believe when I say that we’re going to live together 

Vasa’s flora and fauna 

 

Song of the day (14th November) – Vanessa Falk – “Back”.

Hey people! 🙂 

 

I meant to post this song yesterday, but I got struck with a massive migraine, so here it is today – an introspective Swedish pop ballad. – Because I guess we haven’t had any Swedish pop in a while on here. I believe Vanessa Falk is a pretty well-known artist in her homeland. She’s a singer and songwriter, but also a podcaster, hailing from Stockholm. Her parents are also famous people. Her father – Christian Falk – was a musician and music producer, who was the bassist with a famous Swedish band Imperiet and a music producent of Robyn – and her mother – Tove Falk Olsson – is a photographer. 

 

Aine Minogue – “Planxty Power”.

Hey people! 🙂 

 

For today, I have for you a lovely tune by New England-based Irish harpist and singer Aine Minogue, to whose music I have a huge sentiment as I’d listened to it a lot during various difficult times in my life and I’ve found it a great source of escapism and nourishment for my Brainworlds. It’s certainly not the first Aine Minogue song on here. This one is her rendition of an old tune by famous Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan. I’ve shared lots and lots of various tunes by O’Crolan on here, because many harpists, Irish and not, play his music and arrange it in very interesting ways, so if you’re into Irish music or just happen to have read any of those earlier posts I wrote about his music, he composed a lot of music for his patrons, who sponsored his music career, so to say, and tunes like that are called planxty. This planxty originally has lyrics, and was composed for a woman called Fanny Power. She was the daughter of his patrons David and Elizabeth Power who lived in Galway. Fanny married one Richard Trench of Garbally, which is why this tune is also known as Mrs Trench of Garbally or under other similar titles. She had several children and lived until 1793. 

 

Rachel Hair & Ron Jappy – “McLeods of Waipu”.

Hi people! 🙂 

 

Today’s song comes from this year’s collaborative album between harpist Rachel Hair and guitarist Ron Jappy. The name of this piece refers to a place in New Zealand called Waipu, where Scots from Nova Scotia emigrated in the 19th century and founded their township there. It is still one of the places in New Zealand which is very proud of its Scottish identity and where a lot of Scottish traditions are celebrated. The man who led that Scottish emigration to Waipu was called Norman McLeod. This piece is Rachel Hair’s original composition. 

 

Welsh Argentine Guitar Duo – “Lliw Gwyn Rhosyn yr Haf/The White Rose of Summer”.

Hi guys! 🙂 

 

Today I’d like to share with you a guitar rendition of the traditional Welsh song Lliw Gwyn, Rhosyn yr Haf. There have already been two versions of this song featured on my blog, one by Pendevig and the other by Gwenan Gibbard. In those earlier posts I shared more about the origins of this song. 

 

I guess it’s not common knowledge, unless you’re Welsh or Argentinian yourself, that there is an interesting link between Wales and Argentina, specifically Patagonia. At least I certainly didn’t have a clue about it and it came as a huge surprise to me when I started properly learning Welsh. There used to be a Welsh colony in Patagonia, established in 19th century for preserving the Welsh language and cultural identity. People still speak Welsh there, and celebrate many Welsh traditions such as the eisteddfod, a Welsh festival of literature and music, where people compete in singing, reciting poetry, playing music, drama etc. The Welsh Argentine Guitar Duo draws on that link between the two nations and play both Welsh and Argentine music, as well as that of Patagonia which blends the influences of both. The duo consists of classical guitarists Luis Orias Diz from Argentina and Adam Khan from South Wales. 

 

Margie Butler, Florie Brown, Kálmán Balogh, Pablo Carcamo – “The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby – An Caitin Ban.” (The Little White Cat).

Hi people! 🙂 

 

For today, I have for you a set of two very beautiful Irish lullabies from American singer and harpist Margie Butler. The first one is The Gartan Mother’s Lullaby, which I think is a pretty popular and well-known one in Ireland, I’ve heard lots of different versions of it, although I believe the first time I heard it, it was sung by Órla Fallon, and I’ve loved it ever since, simply because it’s so beautiful but also because of all the Irish folklore references, like the Green Man or Siabhra (the Irish fairies). As the title says, it is sung by a mother from Gartan, county Donegal. It is actually a poem written by Seosamh MacCathmhaoil, set to a traditional Donegal tune collected by Herbert Hughes. Margie sings two verses of it. The other – An Caitin Ban – is an instrumental tune, although I don’t really know anything about it. This is the first version of it that I’d ever heard, and I only recently learned that it actually has lyrics, because I heard Mary O’Hara’s version a couple weeks ago (yes, if you’re also into Irish music, believe it or not, but I only found out about Mary O’Hara last month, I had absolutely NO idea about her until then! :O ). 

 

Here, Margie is accompanied by violinist Florie Brown, Hungarian cimbalom player Kálmán Balogh, and Chilean multi-instrumentalist Pablo Carcamo.