#clementine fractals

[local-iterator-tether]

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PRIVATE Eight Whispering Streams, Clementine Fractals EWS: Has there been any more news on Shining Clouds? Sorry to bother you, but I haven't had a chance to keep up with the public channels as of late. CF: There were some rumors going around about the legitimacy of Shining Clouds' reawakening, but his structure recently expelled a deluge of stale water. CF: I'd wager that circulating water is enough evidence for this case. EWS: Well then… what now? Has she said anything yet? It's been a few Cycles already since you first brought this news to my attention. CF: It seems that in the hundreds of Cycles of her stasis, Shining Clouds has accumulated a multitude of minor hindrances which are currently occupying her attention. CF: But I'm sure we will hear from him soon. EWS: I hope so. It will be good to hear from her and distant others once more.

[peppermint-moss]

it's 'citrus unhinged knowledge' time (og meme templates)

my city of mist game has been on pause while all my friends n i are busy but! i still get to rotate our sillays in my head and draw them (aughhh let me have time to draw them goddamn finals season)

commission info || ko-fi (tip jar)

[ghelgheli]

Stuff I Read In April 2024

bold indicates favourites

Books

Transgender Marxism, ed. Jules Joanne Gleeson & Elle O'Rourke

The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson

Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah

Decolonizing Trans/Gender, b. binaohan

Yuri/GL

Even the Introverted Gals Wanna Get Out There! / Inkya Gal demo Ikigariatai!, Kashiwagi Tsukiko

Hello, Melancholic!, Oosawa Yayoi

My Girlfriend's Not Here Today, Iwami Kiyoko

Yamada and Kase-san, Takashima Hiromi

Chocolate and Kase-san, Takashima Hiromi

Kase-san Series, Takashima Hiromi

Love My Life, Yamaji Ebine

My Cute Little Kitten, Morinaga Milk

Short Fiction

The Monkey's Finger, Isaac Asimov

Everest, Isaac Asimov

The Pause, Isaac Asimov

And Come From Miles Around, Connie Willis

Oh Fanged Night!, Hijab Imtiaz Ali [link]

Palestine

Are we indeed all Palestinians?, Mohammed El-Kurd [link]

Point. Click. Occupy. Sophia Goodfriend [link]

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza, Yuval Abraham [link]

"Man-made hell on Earth", Jeremy Scahill & Yasser Khan [link]

A Mirror of Our Immediate Future, Erica Jung & Calvin Wu [link]

Queer &c.

Is “Gender Ideology” Western Colonialism? ,Jenny Evang [link]

Why are AMAB trans people denied the closet?, Julia Serano [link]

Beyond the Coloniality of Gender: María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Decolonial Feminism, and Trans and Intersex Liberation, Alex Adamson [link]

The Problem of Recognition in Transitional States, or Sympathy for the Monster, Nia Frome [link]

Against the Couple Form, Clémence X. Clementine [link] [and coda]

The Abuser's Guide to Transmisogyny, Wyatt Fractal Starlight [link]

The Logic of Gender, Endnotes [link] [and interview]

Rethinking Homonationalism, Jasbir K. Puar [link]

The Child, Jules Gill-Peterson [link]

Maternal (In)coherence: When Feminism Meets Fascism, Joy James [link]

Other

The Campus Does Not Exist, Samuel P. Caitlin [link]

What is an Author?, Michel Foucault [link]

Cuba Libre (1960), Amiri Baraka [link]

From the Nakba to Nasser, The Dig w/ Abdel Razzaq Takriti [link]

A 1962 Defense of the Berlin Wall [link]

The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud, Steven Gonzalez Monserrate [link]

[the-fog-in-the-rain]

So I've had this idea for a while now, of a kingdom in this lil dark fantasy world wherein all creatures are subsumed by a fungal virus. Think head-crab zombies, but with more foliage (mushrooms, mold, ect.), and the body they control is definitely still conscious. The song in question (which I've titled “eulogy to the victims of the mushroom kingdom” in reference to both mario and this) lets you in on the mind of one victim of said fungal plague… thing. I'm envisioning entire forests covered with mushrooms and it all looks like moldy cheese. Soundscape wise, i'm picturing a sound collage, bouncing between sounds as different as smacking lips, crunching food, wikipedia articles being read at the same time about both the tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn, the kinds of sounds that i can bite into like a chew toy, then you wake up and realize that your biting someones face off. The sound of potato shaped tumors made out of moss bulging off your skin like some poorly made practical effect, but you can feel that part of your arm seering with fire as the limbs of the tumor-tato thing spiral like fractals and bound you in place to be eaten by your occupants. Watching yourself from afar as several uninfected wolves hear you scream in pain as they bite into you. An easy meal for them… the sensation of rot and decay, of natural devastation, (or more accurately, natural revelation). The sound of half priced burgers from Wendy'sTM. The feeling of your soul being pushed down and sideways relative to heavenly light. Of corpses bound together by rope, dirt and worms. Of seeing the light inch closer to your face, and the terror in realizing that the light is growing dimmer…Biting fang, tooth and clementine. Sully desulled cactus flowers. Moss tumor limb fractile. Limb lime limp limguine. Rotting factory, rusting foliage. Crunching spat feeling esutb0 obtuse. The feeling of your soul being forced down & diagonally relative to the glatosphere. Psoriatic arthropods. Pain savant. Doped demigod. Of moldy infected tumors growing on your body until you cant see the sun anymore… of liver cancer, and an already deadman. … … …

[b-rad-b]

store front posters. harrisonburg, virginia.

[barelyacceptable]

Songs That Feel Like Fractals of Liminal Spaces, Already Forming Their Own Reality, And Now You’re In It

-Familiar by Agnes Obel

-Clementine by Módl

-Ardor by Love Spirals Downward

-Something Ain’t Right by Whiskey Neat

-Your Way by Netsky

-Promise by Ben Howard

-Cozy Nights by Flandychillout

-Innocente by Delerium

-Seven Swans by Sufjan Stevens

-Worry About You by Ivy

-Weightless by Mike Oldfield

-April Ghosts by Siren On

(which reality are you going to?)

[thesunlounge]

Reviews 354: Nailah Hunter

As its name suggests, Nailah Hunter’s Spells is a sonic experience devoted to ritual and incantation, one that sees the artist painting the air in restorative hues of new age fantasy and dreamscape ambient via angel voice, effected harp, and a minimal palette of cosmic electronics. As discussed in Leaving Records’ press materials, this luminous journey of vibratory mysticism traces its origins to Hunter’s choice to rethink her approach to songwriting and performance, which then lead to the inspired decision to craft musical spells, where, in the artist’s own words, “each layer is one of the steps in an incantation.” In striking upon this new path, a sense of meditative freedom emerged, for the artist was no longer tempted to overthink things, relying instead on intuition and ritualistic process to create layered ceremonials guided by the flow of the universe. As well, Hunter is here focused on using music to create a sense of place, with each individual spell meant to induce visions of serene natural settings, or, as the artist calls them, "sonic places of rest, places to ponder and consider your feelings.” In fact, several of the otherworldly locations evoked by the music are breathtakingly rendered by Ianna Vasale, whose fantastical paintings of gemstone caverns, sunset beaches, ancient flower field structures, glowing potions, and swordbearing sky goddesses are woven together across the J-card panels with written spells of Hunter’s own creation, so that the textual and visual elements work together to enhance the album’s air of mysterious adventure and its function as a tool for magical healing.

Nailah Hunter - Spells (Leaving Records, 2020) Opening track “Soil” is accompanied by the spell “a seed is sown / a song from silence,” which is fitting, as the composition billows in from the void and immediately establishes an aura of mysticism and wonderment. Harp arpeggios decay into empty spaces…perhaps even into the gem-encrusted caverns depicted by Vasale on the cover art…while heavenly hazes of reverb kiss the flowing melodic clusters and interspersing chasms of silence, which are eventually filled by Hunter’s operatic flutters. The artist’s voice moves through wordless vibrato enchantments awash in atmospheres of mystery and melancholy and eventually, the harps drift away from the mix, leaving druidic vocal incantations that slowly transmute into a resonant shadow. Something else the artist explores throughout Spells is synesthesia, and for second track “Ruins,” Hunter suggests the warming hues of magenta and clementine, colors which radiate off of the song’s smoldering drone clouds…these thick banks of swirling fog suffused with the light of a cinematic sunset, or, ”the dying light of gold” as described in the accompanying spell. Psaltery sparkles like crystal, or like the “dust of rose at dusk,” and sub-bass synthesizers float the body while elsewhere, key changes owing to spiritual jazz change the vibe as synthesizers bend in ways reminiscent of dopamine deep house and 90s extasy ambient, with everything coming together like some lost Beverly Glenn-Copeland meditation. Insectoid streaks of noise thread throughout the mix and pitch-shift over a bank of chirping crickets and tropical birdsong and eventually, the shimmering psaltery chords are overlaid by fantastical harp explorations, with the sparkling diamond cascades and high-note melodics touching on energies both ancient and futuristic. 

The spell for “Enter” involves repeating the phrase “enter in”…a sort of mantric invitation into the track’s filtering galactic wavefronts and modulating color hazes, which swirl together into a psychoactive miasma of deep space drone. Lasers swoosh upwards, streaks of starlight sparkle overhead, and if you listen closely, you can hear Hunter’s harp dancing far in the distance. At some point, the immersive walls of cosmos drone unexpectedly recede, leaving behind a glorious passage of multi-layered vocal fantasy…a sort of gothic expanse of Enya-style singing that invites the mind to picture some goddess of the forest lost in a trance, her mysterious vocal incantations flowing outwards like silver threads, which are then caught by nymphs and satyrs and woven into spectral mirage that slowly fades towards darkness. “Quite Light,” as described by Hunter, is meant to evoke the “feeling of being like golden light in a cold still pool of water.” And in the accompanying spell, Hunter writes: “take up now this silver sword / find yourself restored,” which suggests the aforementioned pool of water is in fact the cave lake depicted on Vasale’s album cover, where hovers the silver sword of restoration. As for the music, plucked harps and barely there keyboard meditations sit above spiritual blankets of soft-focus electronic and prayer bowl-sourced drone. Chittering insects are effected into fractal droplets as the harps continue their dance of dreamfolk romance and a monstrous current of squelching alien acid synthesis emerges randomly to disturb the flow, bringing with it quivering bass synthesizers and their chanted cosmic mantra. Garbled vocalizations are heard amidst the eternally ringing prayer bowl drones and later, as the harps dance on starbeams, they radiate pearlescent colorations in all directions.

Returning again to the album’s explorations of synesthesia, there are mentions of white, navy, and lilac in the spell for “White Flower, Dark Hill.” And going further, Hunter describes the track in the press materials with the following poetic string of thoughts: “the idea of the purples and navies of the night sky and the way that shadows appear under full moonlight, the different shades of moonlight, and how it always brings out the color white.” Sonically speaking, electronic chords flash, bend, and mutate into an ethereal panorama of dream magic while lullaby harp arps dance through washing waves of ambient warmth. Strummed psaltery jangles in the light of the moon while vocals alight on ambient soul and dreampop adventures, which pull my mind towards the work of Grouper. And eventually, almost everything fades way, until all that remains are child-like harp melodies and transmuting vocal babbles. The fact that Nailah Hunter resides in Los Angeles is perhaps most apparent on closing track “Talisman,” which is built around these sparkling synthesizer cascades that overflow with emotional currents of sunset melancholy. In fact, the vibe here is not so far off from the paradisiacal synthwave, both real and imagined, of Cliff Martinez and Symmetry, though of course, Hunter’s harp can be heard glowing deep in the background ether, with all attack sanded away, leaving the instrument to generate muted hues of rainbow warmth. Clouds of of angel mist and solar haze sit over the entire mix and at crucial moments, Hunter executes thrilling key changes that rush the spirit ever closer towards an exploding sundown horizon. And as the track progresses, with hissing wisps of starshine threading around blurred synthetic howls, we find ourselves entering spiritual communion with “soil / air / and sun.”

(images from my personal copy)

[impmilk]

Iron and Soft Grass

Chapter 1: A clearing, a sword, and a demon in denim.

[cringe alert]

A beautiful day out. Not a lick of rain or a drop of skywave, simply Helagna shining her celestial rays into warm Zetaruman soil. Sprouting grass covered a clearing, the sounds of a nearby rushing river still audible through the surrounding trees, the great rings out in the void completely and exquisitely visible overhead. In this clearing, a terribly tall man of 7 feet and 5 inches, with vivid crimson skin. He had horns as black as a night sans the stars sprouting from the sides of his bestial face, somewhere between a hyena, a turtle, perhaps a German Shepherd with a flatter snout. Through all of this, he managed to be quite a handsome devil in the literal sense. Though he'd once been mortal, his consequent young death, 20 year vacation to the depths of Hell, uplift into the status of Demon, and occupation as tempter in the mortal realm, reasons as to why he walks in the space-time of the living. Despite his perhaps intimidating stature and visage, this man, called Nieren, has a compassionate, empathetic demeanor. He's bold and plenty debaucherous, but friendly and understanding. Nieren's left hand was open and free, his right carrying a standard, unimportant bastard sword solely for the purpose of training. He feels the warm breeze brush through the slight tuft of clementine hair that sat between his small but jackal-esque ears. Nieren raises the sword out to the wind in lieu of any real opponent in a stance he learned down inside the depths of Hell, called The Serpent. This style was his favorite, Serpentine swordsman favoring a flowing, graceful, swift fight rather than a barbaric clash of blades. He began sliding his arms around himself and forward. This was a very traditional way of beginning a fight, but it had a genuine purpose, building and brightening, or rather darkening, the black splendor of his infernal soul. That's when he lashed forward as a snake lunges, slashing his sword in a very specific, calculated, unpredictable way. The slash unleashed an ironically aqueous, flowing barrage of crimson flame, each spiraled end of blazing heat ending with pure, delicious black. Nieren didn't end his simulated attack, deftly throwing the sword about an inch in the air, switching the angle of his hand, then grabbing it and slashing again, them turning and spinning it yet again, slithering forward, fractal flame of red and black periodically bursting from the metal blade. Nieren turned and tossed and slashed and cut until any hypothetical daytime spectre in front of the man would surely be diced down and burnt to nothing. He'd realized that he'd made it all the way across the clearing. Nieren looked back, at the sad, dead, slithering, ashen path of grass that lead to his current footing. Nieren sighed and tossed his sword to the ground, letting it land on the dirt with a satisfying baritone 'Thunk'. He crouched down and stuck his hand into the dirt, breathing in deep, projecting his intention into the earth of Zetarum. The dead grass he'd left behind started reversing as if time for each individual blade was being turned back. The ash dissipated to nothing, the green luster returning and blending in with the rest of the clearing. Nieren grunted from fatigue and stood back up, shaking the dirt off his hand. Using his demonic abilities to grow plants was tiring for him, as the nature of his kind is not to create or heal, but to tempt and burn. Alas, power is power, and his nature as a demon can't stop him from healing the grass. Nieren rebuilt his constitution and picked the sword back up, sliding it into the sheathe clipped onto his denim pants. He turned his heel and began walking back to town.

[local-iterator-tether]

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PRIVATE Eight Whispering Streams, Clementine Fractals CF: Have you heard the news? EWS: What is there to hear? I cannot spend much time away from repairing my own auxiliary pump seals. CF: I am… aware. But! There's rumors circulating in the central communications channel that Shining Clouds has begun functioning again! EWS: How is that possible? I thought her structure went silent Cycles ago after that drought. CF: Maybe he was just lingering in stasis? Here, I can share an image captured by a distant iterator's overseers. [ATTACHED FILE] EWS: Quite distant, judging by the grain, but you're right. There is plenty of steam from his structure to indicate functionality. Has she sent any requests? CF: No, we haven't heard anything from her directly. We are all hoping that he is aware of the times.

[local-iterator-tether]

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PRIVATE Gazes Upon Shining Stars, Clementine Fractals GSC: Clementine Fractals, may I have a word? I have an idea for how we might help Streams, though I fear it is a bit of a stretch. CF: Oh? I hope it's better than the time you tried your hand at bio-engineering~ GSC: The Orange Scavengers were equal parts our misfortune. And yes, I am approaching the matter in all seriousness. CF: Go on… GSC: I've been going through my old logs and recorded pearls lately, trying to get my bearing on how the world has changed in my absence. I came across a particularly sentimental recording, one of a slugcat family that used to visit me. GSC: However, included in it is comments on an old sealant material synthesized from Tube Worms. Do you think it is possible, given your influence over your own slugcat colony, to train and send out a messenger of sorts? CF: Do you mean… as a sort of delivery? Or care package, perhaps? That just might work.

[local-iterator-tether]

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PRIVATE Gazes Upon Shining Clouds, Clementine Fractals CF: Whispering Streams and I are doing well. I have even taken up cultivating a healthy slugcat colony! GSC: Oh my, that is quite a commitment. Do the iterators of this era still idle away at the Great Problem? Or have they left that station for another? CF: Most of us still work on the Great Problem in some fashion, but there are very few who dedicate all their time to solely that purpose anymore. GSC: So, has Whispering Streams found newfound purpose in personal tasks as well? He always mentioned wanting to convert a portion of his structure and dedicate it to plant life. CF: They have… other objectives to attend to. I assure you he is doing well otherwise. GSC: Oh… I see.

[local-iterator-tether]

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PRIVATE Gazes Upon Shining Clouds, Clementine Fractals GSC: Hello? Is this reaching you? CF: Yes, the channel connection is stable. It has been so long, Shining Clouds! GSC: Has it been so long? The silence of my own superstructure is beyond disconcerting. CF: Oh, Shining Clouds… GSC: Did the Ancients truly vanish in my sleep? Would they really have done that to me? CF: Shining Clouds, you have been in stasis for thousands of Cycles. Some of us even thought you were exhaustively incapacitated, especially those who did not know you in the past. GSC: Are there other iterators in our group now? CF: Yes, but they are not currently in an optimal state to spend time chatting.

[local-iterator-tether]

[LIVE BROADCAST] - PRIVATE Gazes Upon Shining Clouds, Eight Whispering Streams GSC: I hear I have missed quite a lot in my elongated hibernation. Are you well, Streams? EWS: On the whole, yes. I am functional so long as I keep up with continuous maintenance of my structure, but… GSC: Yes? Clemetine Fractals sounds worried about you. EWS: As long as the main shared pump stays functional at an optimal water pressure, then I'll be fine in the long run. That's all that matters. GSC: … Streams, when was the last time you took a break? Are you unable to spend time pursuing your interests? As your superior- EWS: It's not your duty to coddle me, Shining Clouds. GSC: I am not- EWS: I am functional. There's no need to rile up Clementine Fractals or anyone else about this minor issue. GSC: It is alright to ask for help, Streams. EWS: … I am aware of that.