Busy reading and editing and writing at the moment, inspired by the following:

Efterklang’s new album, Piramida:

From the Youtube page:

The making of Efterklang´s new album started out in unusual fashion in August 2011, when the members of Efterklang (Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen and Rasmus Stolberg) went on a nine-day audio expedition to an abandoned Russian settlement in Spitsbergen, an Arctic island located just shy of the North Pole. Spitsbergen is home to more polar bears than people and also to the ghost town of Piramida, which was abandoned overnight in 1998, and today stands as a slowly decaying ruin still full of physical memories like the world´s northernmost piano.

As you can see from this performance of The Ghost it’s a rather special album.

The short stories of Swedish author Stig Dagerman, whose collection The Games of Night I am taking my time over (inbetween mammoth novel reading sessions for my MA):

My writing and editing is being fueled by the new sampler from Hawk Moon Records, a free download by the name of Hawk Moon Records, Volume III.

From the website:

For our third Hawk Moon compilation, we charged a small band of selected artists with the brief of creating ‘music to sleep to’. If you look right back to the very roots of ambient and drone music, this idea is something that’s been explored many times over the years. Not striving for mere cliché, we wanted to give a current crop of artists the chance to express themselves with this oft-explored theme. We wondered what new techniques and textures might crop up and if our chosen few would draw influence from sounds explored previously for this conceptual venture…….the sound is drawn out to allow the subtle nuances of a drone to develop and activate the subconscious; an ideal state of mind for drifting off to sleep.

As well as being excellent sleeping music, it makes top draw writing music. Well worth a download.

From the MA reading list I have so far been disappointed by Everything is Illuminated and Going Out, but Will Self’s Dorian is proving great fun. Nice to finally be reading something wholly engaging.

Other than that, Happy Camper’s ‘Made To Be’ wanting is the latest track to get my story cogs turning, chewing up stuff ready to tackle round two of my MA novel:

What’s inspiring you at the moment?