Tree.fm
Scan the radio band at Tree.fm to take an audio tour of the world’s forests. You could listen to these field recordings as background music to your daily routine, but you’d be missing out. Crank them to a deafening level on headphones to get the message loud and clear. The forests have something to say.
Helen Adam, bard
Via Jay Babcock’s inimitable LANDLINE I’m just now learning of Helen Adam, an otherworldly SF-by-way-of-Scotland poet whose incantatory, freaky ballads hearken back to the bad, old days when ex-gods walked the Earth looking for children to abduct and night’s creatures spoke in riddles. Their power lays as much in their delivery as their words, as this video demonstrates. Check out the LANDLINE post for a deeper intro and paths to follow.
Guangxi “farmer tea”
I’d forgotten about this big brick of rustic nongjia or “farmer style” tea I ordered from white2tea a couple years ago. It’s awesome: funky, sweet-astringent, and packing a formidable caffeine punch. You can steep and re-steep a chunk half a dozen times without losing flavour. My tea budget is nil right now, so I’m counting on this brick to get me through the rest of the year.
Lizard Music
Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater is weird, wise, and hilarious. Watching TV late one night, the 11-year-old protagonist stumbles upon a live music performance by a group of lizards. What follows is a conspiracy theory mind trip haunted by uncanny reptiles, encounters with the mysterious Chicken Man, and what could turn out to be a secret alien invasion.
This book is a cult classic from the ‘70s (most recently released by the NYRB kids’ book imprint), one I can’t imagine being published today. If you enjoyed Louis Sachar’s Wayside School books when you were younger, or if you like subversive, strange fiction in general, Lizard Music has the goods.
Mdou Moctar’s “Funeral for Justice”
This new track by Mdou Moctar is crunchy as all get out, and the music video rips. That’s all.