Joan Didion famously wrote “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but more often it’s other people telling us the stories, which we choose to believe or to disbelieve. Faith is powerful, even when it’s misplaced or misdirected, and stories have consequences. Contradictory stories sew division and conflict, stories revealed to be fiction can result in cognitive dissonance.

Digital Album

This EP and its title track take their name from ‘Enemy of the Sun’ by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim, first published in 1970. The fact that it is perhaps even more relevant today makes it easy to be despondent, but reading poets like al-Qasim and June Jordan can at least offer some moral clarity and a direction of travel.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Nostalghia,’ the character Domenico is trying to carry a lit candle across the length of a mineral pool without the wind blowing it out, believing that if he can make it, the world will be saved. The task seems almost impossible, but sometimes persistence is the only available option.

Digital Album

The main thread that weaves through this album is the idea of the physical, of being present and being embodied, of culture as experienced through physical objects like photographs, books, clothing, and through physical activity like dancing. We are all bodies in motion, expressive, attracted, compelled, seduced, and sometimes, betrayed. Meanwhile the digital realm, once seductive, is now degrading into something that feels like a betrayal, a casualty of financial interests and individual egos.

The album takes its name from a collection of essays by Elizabeth Hardwick looking at women and literature, and the effects their personal relationships have on them as authors, as characters, or as literary inspirations. Also, one track, ‘George Eliot’s Husband,’ takes its name from a separate essay by Hardwick where she somewhat idealises a literary romantic relationship, in contrast to those in Seduction and Betrayal and to her own marriage to Robert Lowell.

The sleeve image is of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands as photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, who, had they been a literary couple rather than in the visual arts, could easily have featured in one of Hardwick’s essays. The other element of the sleeve design is a solid violet field, which is a nod to Robert Mapplethorpe’s diptych Mercury, 1987, also referenced in a song title.

LP / CD / Digital Album

Mina Loy is guiding us to the moon. We will hear tales of misdemeanours and regretful episodes, of unfulfilled destiny, faded glory and forgotten dreams. The Weather Underground are on the run. Martin Kippenberger has blocked the exits. Thomas Mann is at the beach. And all the stars have faded in the Zodiac Carousel…

CD / Digital Album