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AIM Awards 2014:
Poet Kate Tempest
for Independent Album
One of the nominations for this year’s AIM Awards is the wonderful Kate Tempest, who recently released her debut solo album Everybody Down on Big Dada. The album was produced by Dan Carey, and is in the running for Independent Album Of The Year.
The full list of nominees
INDEPENDENT ALBUM OF THE YEAR
Actress – Ghettoville
Arctic Monkeys – AMMixRadio
East India Youth – Total Strife Forever
Fred V & Graffix – Recognise
Gruff Rhys – American Interior
Kate Tempest – Everybody Down
London Grammar – If You Wait
Mogwai – Rave Tapes
Tune-Yards – Nikki Nack
Within Temptation – Hydra
The fourth annual AIM Independent Music Awards
takes place at London’s The Brewery
on 2nd September 2014.
# More on Everybody Down from Kate Tempest
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Art & Literature News, Kate/Kae Tempest, MUSIC, Tempest, Kate/Kae
Sara Teasdale
(1884 – 1933)
Other Men
When I talk with other men
I always think of you–
Your words are keener than their words,
And they are gentler, too.
When I look at other men,
I wish your face were there,
With its gray eyes and dark skin
And tossed black hair.
When I think of other men,
Dreaming alone by day,
The thought of you like a strong wind
Blows the dreams away.
Sara Teasdale poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Teasdale, Sara
Alan Seeger
(1888-1916)
Vivien
Her eyes under their lashes were blue pools
Fringed round with lilies; her bright hair unfurled
Clothed her as sunshine clothes the summer world.
Her robes were gauzes–gold and green and gules,
All furry things flocked round her, from her hand
Nibbling their foods and fawning at her feet.
Two peacocks watched her where she made her seat
Beside a fountain in Broceliande.
Sometimes she sang. . . . Whoever heard forgot
Errand and aim, and knights at noontide here,
Riding from fabulous gestes beyond the seas,
Would follow, tranced, and seek . . . and find her not . . .
But wake that night, lost, by some woodland mere,
Powdered with stars and rimmed with silent trees.
Alan Seeger poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Seeger, Alan
Erik Satie
(1866 – 1925)
La Pêche
Murmures de l’eau dans un lit de rivière.
Venue d’un poisson
d’un autre
de deux autres.
« Qu’y a-t-il ? »
« C’est un pêcheur, un pauvre pêcheur. »
« Merci. »
Chacun retourne chez soi, même le pêcheur.
Murmures de l’eau dans un lit de rivière.
14 mars 1914
Erik Satie: La Pêche
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, MUSIC, Satie, Erik
Alan Seeger
(1888-1916)
Do You Remember Once . . .
I
Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces,
The night we wandered off under the third moon’s rays
And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places,
Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais?
The city’s voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters
Mirrored the walls across where orange windows burned.
Out of the starry south provoking rumors brought us
Far promise of the spring already northward turned.
And breast drew near to breast, and round its soft desire
My arm uncertain stole and clung there unrepelled.
I thought that nevermore my heart would hover nigher
To the last flower of bliss that Nature’s garden held.
There, in your beauty’s sweet abandonment to pleasure,
The mute, half-open lips and tender, wondering eyes,
I saw embodied first smile back on me the treasure
Long sought across the seas and back of summer skies.
Dear face, when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them
Laid in some desert place, alone or where the tides
Of war’s tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them
Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides,
Out of the past’s remote delirious abysses
Shine forth once more as then you shone,–beloved head,
Laid back in ecstasy between our blinding kisses,
Transfigured with the bliss of being so coveted.
And my sick arms will part, and though hot fever sear it,
My mouth will curve again with the old, tender flame.
And darkness will come down, still finding in my spirit
The dream of your brief love, and on my lips your name.
II
You loved me on that moonlit night long since.
You were my queen and I the charming prince
Elected from a world of mortal men.
You loved me once. . . . What pity was it, then,
You loved not Love. . . . Deep in the emerald west,
Like a returning caravel caressed
By breezes that load all the ambient airs
With clinging fragrance of the bales it bears
From harbors where the caravans come down,
I see over the roof-tops of the town
The new moon back again, but shall not see
The joy that once it had in store for me,
Nor know again the voice upon the stair,
The little studio in the candle-glare,
And all that makes in word and touch and glance
The bliss of the first nights of a romance
When will to love and be beloved casts out
The want to question or the will to doubt.
You loved me once. . . . Under the western seas
The pale moon settles and the Pleiades.
The firelight sinks; outside the night-winds moan —
The hour advances, and I sleep alone.
III
Farewell, dear heart, enough of vain despairing!
If I have erred I plead but one excuse —
The jewel were a lesser joy in wearing
That cost a lesser agony to lose.
I had not bid for beautifuller hours
Had I not found the door so near unsealed,
Nor hoped, had you not filled my arms with flowers,
For that one flower that bloomed too far afield.
If I have wept, it was because, forsaken,
I felt perhaps more poignantly than some
The blank eternity from which we waken
And all the blank eternity to come.
And I betrayed how sweet a thing and tender
(In the regret with which my lip was curled)
Seemed in its tragic, momentary splendor
My transit through the beauty of the world.
Alan Seeger poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Seeger, Alan, WAR & PEACE
Erik Satie
(1866 – 1925)
Le Flirt
Il se disent de jolies choses, des choses modernes.
« Comment allez-vous ? »
« Ne suis-je pas aimable ? »
« Laissez-moi ? »
« Vous avez de gros yeux. »
« Je voudrais être dans la lune. »
Il soupire.
Il hoche la tête.
29 mars 1914
Erik Satie Le Flirt
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, MUSIC, Satie, Erik
Sara Teasdale
(1884 – 1933)
Alone
I am alone, in spite of love,
In spite of all I take and give–
In spite of all your tenderness,
Sometimes I am not glad to live.
I am alone, as though I stood
On the highest peak of the tired gray world,
About me only swirling snow,
Above me, endless space unfurled;
With earth hidden and heaven hidden,
And only my own spirit’s pride
To keep me from the peace of those
Who are not lonely, having died.
Sara Teasdale poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Teasdale, Sara
Kate Tempest
new album
Everybody
Down
There’s a
strong, vibrant
formal tradition
in hip hop:
the story rhyme
Rather than the bragging and boasting of many raps, in a story rhyme the MC presents a narrative – a street update of Ovid or Homer if you want to get hifalutin about it. Traced back by some to “The Message” by Melle Mel, few would dispute that it reached some sort of a peak with Slick Rick’s first album, and was carried forward by the likes of Biggie and Eminem. It also had a profound influence on rap in the UK, with artists like Roots Manuva using the form to represent themselves and their city in a myriad of new ways.
Kate Tempest is best known as a poet, perhaps a performance poet or a spoken word artist. She has a novel coming out next year with Bloomsbury. But ask Kate what she is and she’s more likely to say she’s a rapper who writes. That’s her first love. Listen to her voice, her cadences, the accent, and you’ll hear more of Skinnyman than Seamus Heaney, a veteran of Deal Real’s legendary Friday night rap battles but also someone at home doing a book reading at Foyles.
Kate Tempest understands the story rhyme, loves it. Which is why Everybody Down is something like a “novel rhyme” – twelve ‘chapters’ telling one long, complex story, a unique, one-off project, almost unique in the history of the form.
Dan Carey aka Mr Dan is one of the UK’s best known and most highly-rated producers. He’s worked with or remixed Bat For Lashes, Toy, MIA, Chairlift and Hot Chip (and just about everyone in between). When the two met, Carey invited Tempest to come through to his South London studio to muck about on a track or two. In a burst of intense creativity, they put down the whole twelve track album in a fortnight having spent almost a year developing the characters and story.
The result is a revelation. Tempest takes the tropes of the hip hop story – drugs, money, gangsters – and brings them to life in a whole new way, a London way, but also a completely personal way, where she inhabits the different characters and shows the boredom and fear in their lives rather than some faked glamour, shows more than anything their need for love.
Carey, meanwhile, sculpts soundscapes that pay tribute to the roots of hip hop while melding into the themes Tempest addresses, tough and gritty but intensely musical, the sound of a wet winter’s night out in London. He even got US singer-songwriter Willy Mason to contribute a chorus! In the end we get an audio story Dickens might have tried to write, one which is, in Tempest’s words, quite simply about “loving more.”
Kate Tempest has released records on Greco-Roman and Speedy Wunderground and for a long time fronted the band Sound Of Rum (Sunday Best). She won the Ted Hughes Poetry Prize for her play “Brand New Ancients” , which led The Guardian to describe her as “one of the brightest talents around.” Her forthcoming novel for Bloomsbury features the characters and the world built in Everybody Down, with a chapter correlating to each track.
But it’s here on this stunning, sustained piece of work, where each track works on it own, that music fans will hear beyond doubt just what a talent she is.
Kate Tempest started out when she was 16, rapping at strangers on night busses and pestering mc’s to let her on the mic at raves. Ten years later she is a published playwright, novelist, poet and respected recording artist. Her work includes Balance, her first album with band Sound of Rum; Everything Speaks in its Own Way her first collection of poems, the critically acclaimed plays Wasted, Glasshouse and Hopelessly Devoted. Brand New Ancients, her self-performed epic poem to a live score, won the Ted Hughes prize 2013 and the Herald Angel at Edinburgh Fringe.It has sold out tours in the UK and New York and is published by Picador. Her second collection of poetry, Hold Your Own, will be published by Picador on October 2014. Her debut novel, The Bricks That Built The Houses, sold in a highly competitive auction to Bloomsbury and will be published in territories including the UK, US, France, Holland and Brazil in Spring 2015. Excitingly, each track on the record correlates with a chapter in the novel, in a groundbreaking cross-genre experience.
Her single Our Town, with producers letthemusicplay was recently released on Greco-Roman records. Kate has featured on songs with Sinead O Connor, Bastille, the King Blues, Damien Dempsey and Landslide. She has toured extensively, supporting Billy Bragg on his UK tour, as well as supporting Scroobius Pip, Femi Kuti, Saul Williams and John Cooper Clarke. She is 2 x slam winner at the prestigious Nu-Yorican poetry cafe in New York and has played all the major UK and European music festivals either solo or with Sound of Rum. She’s headlined Latitude festival and has been featured on the BBC’s Glastonbury highlights, Channel 4, BBC Radio 1,4 and 6, as well as XFM and the Charlie Rose Show (Bloomberg) in the US.
Kate’s new album Everybody Down is released in May 2014 on Big Dada records. It was produced by Dan Carey aka Mr Dan who is one of the UK’s best known and most highly-rated producers. When the two met, Carey invited Tempest to come through to his South London studio to muck about on a track or two. In a burst of intense creativity, they put down the whole twelve track album in a fortnight having spent almost a year developing the characters and story. Kate is currently working on a new collection of poems, (to be published by Picador in 2014).
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Art & Literature News, Kate/Kae Tempest, MUSIC, Poetry Slam, Tempest, Kate/Kae
Alan Seeger
(1888-1916)
Resurgam
Exiled afar from youth and happy love,
If Death should ravish my fond spirit hence
I have no doubt but, like a homing dove,
It would return to its dear residence,
And through a thousand stars find out the road
Back into earthly flesh that was its loved abode.
Alan Seeger poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Seeger, Alan
Eunice Tietjens
(1884 – 1944)
The Beggar
“Christ! What is that–that–Thing?
Only a beggar, professionally maimed, I think.”
Across the narrow street it lies, the street where little
children are.
It is rocking its body back and forth, back and forth,
ingratiatingly, in the noisome filth.
Beside the body are stretched two naked stumps of
flesh, on one the remnant of a foot. The wounds
are not new wounds, but they are open and they
fester. There are flies on them.
The Thing is whining, shrilly, hideously.
“Professionally maimed, I think.”
Christ!
(Hwai Yuen)
Eunice Tietjens poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Tietjens, Eunice
Alan Seeger
(1888-1916)
Sonnet IX
Amid the florid multitude her face
Was like the full moon seen behind the lace
Of orchard boughs where clouded blossoms part
When Spring shines in the world and in the heart.
As the full-moon-beams to the ferny floor
Of summer woods through flower and foliage pour,
So to my being’s innermost recess
Flooded the light of so much loveliness;
She held as in a vase of priceless ware
The wine that over arid ways and bare
My youth was the pathetic thirsting for,
And where she moved the veil of Nature grew
Diaphanous and that radiance mantled through
Which, when I see, I tremble and adore.
Alan Seeger poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Seeger, Alan
Sara Teasdale
(1884 – 1933)
Pain
Waves are the sea’s white daughters,
And raindrops the children of rain,
But why for my shimmering body
Have I a mother like Pain?
Night is the mother of stars,
And wind the mother of foam–
The world is brimming with beauty,
But I must stay at home.
Sara Teasdale poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive S-T, Teasdale, Sara
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