Olan Monk - Love/Dead (2020)

For the record:

You are tuning into something that has been playing on an endless loop. These recordings come from a time when the dystopia called but life stood still, imagining other horizons. Love and new life in a place once used to house the dead. This was all we had: a shared dream. Dragging the harmonium from the top bedroom and down to the court, playing it until the fabric tore and it would no longer breathe or sound. Gold echoes reflecting on the roof. A memory, entombed. The familiar sound of the ferry engine roaring and the cold salt water blasting out beneath us as we went out to Inis Oírr, the smallest of the islands, like we did most summers.

Love as a refusal to die, yet. This album survives as a vanitas—a reflection on the transience of life and certainty of death. A love letter to a dead city. Dripping paint over lost texts. Enticing the shadow self and embracing the anima, attempting divination. Live from an archive of past performances. All recordings are both dead and undead in that every time they are played back, they are re-lived. A mortuary of crystallised feelings, doubtful (self-imposed) exile and the long-gone sentiment of any romance in isolation.

‘But there it is, either you love or you don’t.’*

*Samuel Beckett, First Love