“The prettiest landscape I ever saw,
Was when drawing on the walls
Of a dark room.”
This is, like, really beautiful. Ellen Zweig’s poetry throughout the 70s and 80s is compiled on this 40-minute-or-so record courtesy of Phantom Limb. Across four tracks, Zweig pours out compulsions to lick a collarbone, the basic logic of electric light, the effect of nuclear testing on a Los Angeles desert, and other molecular darts of impulse. Her voice is oddly consistent through the subject matter. It’s a quietly stunning performance. The sparkling ambient sounds, while mostly auxiliary to the words, move with extraterrestrial drifts, enchanting Zweig’s more prosaic human loops. Poetry is often at its most affecting when it is a paradox: clear and entangled.
25/30
A favourite: ‘Sensitive Bones’
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