(3/6/5) 010: ML Buch - Fleshless Hand
I've been away all week, in Sicily, a small break from the day-to-day, a few days of reading, eating, aimless wandering around towns and cities, trying to find their secrets in the little time we have. This morning, our final morning, we were woken early by an orange sunrise peeking through the slats, projecting their shape upon the back wall of the apartment for a few minutes before the day properly grew into itself. The kind of moment you only remember to remember when you're far away from home.
I think often of a solo holiday I took a few years ago during a strange and shifting time in my life. It left such an impression, in fact, that I recently got a photograph I took on that trip tattooed on my arm. I have a memory from that same holiday of wandering around the small French town I was in listening to Geotic's beautifully hazy Abysma LP (the perfect summer record, if you've never heard it) and thinking of a feature for the GoldFlakePaint blog, which was still a daily, full-time project at that time. The feature would be a series of (digital) postcards, album recommendations funnelled through fictional writing sent from a holiday in a way that tried to capture the spirit of the music and the place.
I don't know. I'm not sure it would have worked. In fact, I'm not even sure it makes sense now that I've written it down – but I like that idea regardless; using whatever music has latched onto your day as a guide for tangential prose.
I thought about it again when I woke early to walk the steep climb up to the castle that sits high above the town, earlier this week. It was perhaps the warmest day of the week, but the heat wouldn't fully arrive until mid-afternoon.
Flanked by cacti and wildflowers, lizards dashing into the undergrowth, I walked along the dusty paths and up the odd cobbled steps cut into the rock. I had a single headphone in, listening to ML Buch's Suntub LP, with an ear free to hear the birds, the sounds of the day. Occasionally a lone tree offered the grace of shade but it was mostly unrelenting sunshine, eased only by the gentle breeze that grew the higher I got.
At the summit, I walked along the old castle walls, mostly fallen now, over the centuries, but still offering the best view over the other side of the headland. A few hundred metres below lay the sea, small coves where rocks jutted out into the ocean, shades of green and blue you can't quite make sense of. If you looked for long enough you could see some movement, a car crawling along a dirt road, dogs in their running as the day began to grow into itself, the heat producing the kind of smell you shouldn't try to describe.
I wish you could have been there to see it.
Listen to Suntub on GFP / Bandcamp
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three / six / five is a daily music-sharing project from gold flake paint; read more about the idea here
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