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I may well get laughed out of town for this, but I've been making a Kabbalah playlist - songs which express what I currently understand each of the Sephiroth to be about, and how they relate to my own life. It's been a really interesting exercise. Partly because the fact that it's been much easier to find a perfect song for some than for others has spotlighted which of the spheres I understand best and which I'm still a bit hand-wavey about. Partly because they're all songs I love, which have meant a lot to me at one time or another, so it helps me think of the spheres as internal states, not just a system of ideas external to me. Also because, with no deliberate planning, each sphere seems to have its own genre or style. Hod is all about the verbose indie bands, jangly major-key stuff with wordplay. Netzach is all sweeping and cinematic with lots of piano. Malkuth is lo-fi fuzzy guitar. And so on. You may laugh me out of town now.
My favourite choice on the whole list so far is this - "Wickerman" by Pulp, from the album We Love Life, for Malkuth. It's full of mundane detail, canals and factories and traffic islands and little old cafes with formica tables, but it's sung/spoken with a sort of reverence that makes it all seem numinous. It's about the places we live and how they shape us, the stories we tell each other about them, and the way the most mundane stuff can be magical.
Ahem. Heartily second Stars of the Lid and Shpongle, by the way. Also Biosphere's album Substrata - otherworldly, unsettling, drifting glitchy ambient supposedly recorded in sub-zero temperatures in northern Finland. You can hear the crunching snow and the huge empty spaces. |
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