i love the…. almost horror aspects of this album. all the references to ghosts and death…. and sonically, the unexpected shrieking in WAOLOM and the banging and screaming during “old habits die screaming” and even the way the tension subtly builds across the sixteen tracks and by the end you’re so stressed and shaken it’s like! losing your sense of self and feeling like you’ve become a monster is horror. and i’m sooooo glad she leaned into it
As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.
pressure to party by julia jacklin / gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir / next of kin by lucy dacus / harrow the ninth by tamsyn muir / bluets by maggie nelson / ketchum, id by boygenius / being alive from company
"my friends love me" "my future is bright" ok???? my life is awesome??? this beat is awesome??????? robots are awesome?????? 0101011?????????????? take a look baby hes the real kaching??? and ill say it again???????????
i love it when my playlists on shuffle because i was just bawling to lifeboat and the next thing i fucking hear is YO YO YO IM HERE TO TELL YOU THAT WHAT YOU IS IS WHAT YOU GOT