"Heirloom" was based on an existing instrumental track from electronic musician Console's album Rocket in the Pocket (1998), titled "Crabcraft" (which itself samples Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's "Sacred Heart").[21] Björk contacted Console in early 2000 and they met in London; she then added her vocals on top.[22] "Undo" was written during a two-week session with Knak that January in Reykjavík. Björk recorded her vocals on top of Knak's minimalist rhythmic backbone, and months later she had added a full choir and string section.[22][23] "Cocoon", also produced by Knak, was one of the last songs to be written for the album; its melody came to Björk in a sudden rush and she contacted him.[23] Knak took it as a chance to make a more minimal track, similar to his own releases.[23] His original treatment of "Cocoon", made with an Ensoniq ASR-10, appeared relatively intact in the final version.[23] Björk also worked with Bogdan Raczynski on the song "Who Is It", but the track did not follow the direction of the record and was subsequently included on the album Medúlla.[23]
Björk has stated that she wanted the album to sound like "modern chamber music", referring to the times where "the most ideal music situation was in the home, where people would play harps for each other".[27][28] She argued that with the popularity of festivals like Woodstock, the situation became "the opposite", and that with the advent of Napster, the Internet, music downloading and DVD, "we've come full circle and the most ideal musical situation now, [...] is back to the home".[28] She also considers Vespertine to be the opposite of her previous studio album Homogenic, the former being an introverted, quiet, winter record; the latter a loud, dramatic, summer record.[5] Writer and critic Mark Pytlik writes, "Her appetite for thumping techno had been, temporarily at least, subsumed by a desire for stark melodies and minimalist production".[11]
Empire Of The Sun Walking On A Dream Full Album Zip
"Heirloom" alters "between what sounds like a samba preset on a vintage Wurlitzer organ and skittering breakbeats, and is decorated with inverted synthtones and analog keyboards".[67] The song's lyrics tell a "fuzzy story" about a recurring dream,[52] while "[likening] the art of singing to swallowing and exhaling 'glowing lights'" as Björk sings: "During the night/They do a trapeze walk/Until they're in the sky/Right above my bed".[36] Film director Harmony Korine wrote "Harm of Will"'s lyrics. The Slate album review noted the minimalist nature of the track, pointing out a lack of hook, beat and melody.[68] It is a slow song, as is the closing track, "Unison".[69] The latter "[contains] a refrain directly inspired by [Björk's] experience in Dancer in the Dark and a healthy dollop of self-effacing humor evoked to counter the balance".[59] It "brings beats and strings together in a final crescendo that also manages to incorporate a little jungle".[70]
Why is a wrongfully jailed convict any better than drowned people in hyper-capitalist Haiti or our military's counter-revolutionary bombing victims in Opiumstan? These problems are all of a piece and will only be solved when empire and elitist faschism are pulled down. Luckily for your cause Doug, they usually bust down the Bastille gates the first day. Let's hope it will all go peacefully.
In world-historical terms, Alexander's dream of world conquest led him from Macedonia and Greece, to Egypt and the Middle East, to India's northwest. Throughout this realm he left behind Greek institutions and opened up the channels through which Asian cultural products would flow westward. In religious terms, he maintained his pious Greek observances throughout his expanding realm, while beginning to incorporate traditions that he encountered at the most ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian centers of human culture. Alexander did not spread his own religion as he spread his imperium; rather he incorporated the religions he met, giving them a place within a broadly cosmopolitan Hellenism. In most ways, however, he was impressed by the high culture of Persia (whose notions of divine kingship endured from at least 600 B.C. to 1721 A.D. and beyond), and adopted it rather than imposing his own, perhaps too rough Macedonian ways upon those he conquered. It is noteworthy that Alexander visited Athens only one time in his life, and after his return from India, settled in Mesopotamia to consolidate his Greco-Persian empire. He died prematurely from a sudden illness, but it is clear that he had certainly been in no hurry to return to Greece or Macedonia. His sense of world empire drew him to the most ancient centers of human civilization, while his sense of the divine depended on a Hellenistic reading of ancient polytheism.
Finally arriving back in Mesopotamia in 324, many of his Macedonian soldiers chose to retire home, but Alexander, maybe now fully inhabiting the role of Persian emperor ("Lord of Asia"), remained at Susa, just east of the Tigris River, where he married Darius's daughter and arranged a mass wedding of ten thousand Macedonian men and Persian women, a social experiment known as his policy of "racial fusion." He arranged a funeral in Babylon for his beloved companion, and while there, planned future campaigns into Arabia. However, at this point when he might have consolidated his empire, while residing in the ancient palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, Alexander suddenly died of illness at the age of thirty-three, and his empire soon broke apart, his successors including, among others, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria and western Asia, both bearers of Greek-speaking culture, and both known to Ashoka. For the next thousand years, Indians would write about "Greek" invaders (Yavanas, Yonas) from the northwest, ultimately applying that title to Muslim soldiers of largely Turkish stock. After Alexander, India was never to be cut off from contact with the Mediterranean world.
While Alexander was a man of action, much admired for his military genius, we have but a few tantalizing clues to about the nature of his religious beliefs and his dreams for a world empire. Perhaps his experiments in uniting Persians and Greeks grew out of his commitment to Greek cosmopolitanism, and a belief in a kind of destiny and natural law that gives legitimacy to the victor. Ashoka, however, provides us with a more clearly articulated religious policy. He proclaims that his primary role as emperor is to foster dharma, not in the narrow sense of Buddhist teaching (about which he mentions very few specifics), but in the broadest sense of good conduct, piety, and truth. After the time of Ashoka, the precise meaning of dharma becomes a primary point of debate between orthodox brahmins and Buddhists. But already in Ashoka's inscriptions, dharma is translated into Greek and serving as a broadly cosmopolitan policy toward religious diversity. Ashoka's "dharma policy" was an imperial meta-religion designed to manage the religious diversity characteristic not only of India but of the entire Eurasian oikoumene in the third century B.C. 2ff7e9595c
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