On Getting More Than You Expected

Admittedly most of this excess of Smoke Fairies freebies consists of postcards but it is always nice to get stuff like this. I am a wibbling fool for limited edition CDs/7" Singles/Picture Disks/Sumptuous booklets but purchase of these has been reduced in proportion to my trips to Probe Records and other such byways of alternative music. Stop Press - I see from this link that Probe have just moved to The Bluecoat which is excellent news. My first trips to Probe were when it was at its second location right in the centre of Liverpool - it was the standard alternative record store - vinyl on the walls - sticky carpets - exotic aromas and everything else. It was sad when it moved from there to an anonymous looking boxy building well out of the centre. Marriage and Children mean I rarely go except to pick up my free copy of The Stool Pigeon. The last things I bought there were a second-hand copy of Surfer Rosa and by coincidence a double-A side 7 inch of Gastown and River Song  by The Smoke Fairies (produced by Jack White). I will be at The Bluecoat as soon as possible. Well back to the Freebies. This is The Smoke Fairies first album proper - Through Low Light and Trees, a beautiful collection of modern folk from two smooth-voiced women from Chichester (rather than some prairie train halt as suggested by some of the music and some of the titles). They harmonise at a weirdly low-level which is so beautiful that it is difficult to say how much so. This album deserves a proper review but the several times I have listened to it so far have been in the car ... with children ... and so have not been entirely uninterrupted. For anyone desperately interested there is what I thought was an album called Strange the Things which must be a collection of singles.

There Will be no Demonstrations

Smoke Fairies - Frozen Heart

This came as a 5 track CD inside a beautifully austere 7 inch vinyl pack so it's back to the old days of limited edition music if only for a few minutes. And better still, they are supporting Richard Hawley at the Phil later this year.

It is probably this music which is making me feel slightly odd at the moment. Not unpleasantly weird but slightly offset from reality - maybe just the infinitesimal distance that hypothetically exists in the fourth dimension. I think Rudy Rucker actually suggested that we might have an additional sense that could actually detect this dimension. He also mentioned that educating oneself in the existence of the fourth dimension led one to be able to actually see it. he even gave techniques for imagining objects as collections of smaller units, actually keeping the internal structure of the object within your head. We actually do this with houses already - I can 'see' all the rooms in my house in my head and through the certainty and safeness of houses will be almost 100% certain to find the room I expect when I take myself there. Not sure if that ability has actually let me see a hypercube yet but I'm working on it. My current book is Finding Moonshine by the incomparably enthusiastic Marcus du Sautoy who is mainly writing about symmetry which can happily work with multi-dimensional objects - the maths works even if the visualisations don't. So I will look on my strange feelings as proof of my gradual moves into the fourth dimension. See you on the other side.