warm coursing blood

ritual upon ritual today, cleaned my sheets, moved my bed to a new place, decided to have an only new music policy for my ipod for a few days, so thus far i've listened to volume 1 of ethiopiques, courtesy of one of my students (i have volumes 2, 3 & 4 waiting there for me), and then ian_nagoski's warm coursing blood which was the focus of this ritual i just did:

actually his music came to me through that same student, a webpage of mp3 links he gave me... i downloaded the album last night and put it on my ipod this afternoon...

i left my house around 7:30pm, hit play on the album as i stepped onto my street, a lovely day, late sunlight making the world beautiful... i walked up to wray crescent where a cricket match was going on, wended my way through those streets up to the top of stroud green road, pausing only to bemoan the knocked down library, then across to the disused railway...

i'd decided to walk as far up it as i could while listening to the album, then i'd turn back and play it again... seeing if it finished as i arrived at my door,

i also decided not to take any pictures, just let it be a feast for my eyes and my memory, walking up that path with the sun ahead and to the right, one final decision was to walk only in the middle path, not to take any of the many side paths that i've been exploring recently...

it was a little like taking acid, the music being electronica, no beats, just electronic textures, track 1 - feather finished just as i got to the top of stroud green road, track 2 - rain kept me company at least as far as crouch end, this one just a little too nosebleed for me, relentless high pitched sounds for 15 minutes, track 3 by contrast is heavenly - the stars are beautiful, just my cup of tea the filtered, dark, washes of sound, this got me almost all the way to highgate, which gave me a dilemma, i didn't expect to reach the highgate end before the end of the album...

track 4 - a joy forever, began near the highgate end of the disused, carried me over the road there, down another path, along another road and into an enchanted place i'd never been to before by the name of queens wood...

true to my plan the track finished and i stopped... went a little further out of curiousity but turned back and hit play on the album exactly where i'd reached when it finished...

the sun going down rapidly behind me now i came back through the roads to the highgate end of the disused and plunged homewards, the first 2 tracks on the album building this fearful sound as i took in the darkening trees and most of the same faces i'd seen on my way out, mostly lone walkers, some with dogs, a man who'd been whistling as i came off the disused on the way to queens wood... a group of 4 boys pushing each other about on the halfpipe, track 3 the stars are beautiful, probably my favourite, kicking in nearer where i'd joined the disused, lasting past stroud green road, past the demolished library, track 4 beginning as i threaded my way through the streets, choosing a slightly different way home so as not to walk through wray crescent after dark, i'd paused a couple of times on the way up, firstly to take a picture of the demolished library, secondly to half heartedly look for a beautiful mosaic in the mud i'd seen on a side path a few weeks back, to compensate for these stops i looped around the other end of my road, the track finished within about a minute of me arriving home...

beautiful album, if challenging at times, highly recomended if you like abit of electronica,

now i'm about to do one last ritual on this day of rituals, take a bath with my back door open, not done it for years but i used to do it a fair bit when i first moved in here, before we had a catflap for balthazara so she'd always come in and say hello...

then maybe food, or maybe just sleep, work tomorrow, lovely to have had this day off, for once i feel centred in myself before the end of the week, good sign...

x