From Brighton Beach to Santa Monica

'The sky over Tenochtitlan darkens; flashes of lighting; then rain sweeping off the lake. Down by the docks, Cortes and Montezuma take shelter in a doorway. "Dona Marina translated it; I have a ...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2016/11/2016-dreamlike-year.html

Iain Hamilton Finlay - The world has been empty since the Romans, 1985. Tate Gallery. I coincidentally read two quotes saying much the same thing in the last week. The first, in an article a...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2016/05/not-in-dark-wood-but-railway-tunnel.html

 "That night, alone in new surroundings, Prince Andrei was unable to sleep. The night was fresh, bright, and very still. In front of the window was a row of pollard trees, black on one side, sil...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2016/02/natasha-on-balcony.html

Sigmund Freud thought he saw a stranger entering his train compartment. "I hurried to help him but was quickly taken aback when I realised that the intruder was none other than my own image refle...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2016/02/fear-of-mirrors.html

oh yeah, forgot to say - this is out on LP and CD : And the Clientele are playing a one-off show at Islington Assembly Hall on October 23rd, with none other than psychedelic legend Mark Fry...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-best-of-clientele-record.html

Never anyone but you despite stars and loneliness Despite the trees mutilated at nightfall Never anyone but you will follow her path which is mine The further you go the bigger your shadow get...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2015/08/never-anyone-but-you-despite-stars-and.html

A great cover of the old Clientele song 'From a Window' reminded me all of a sudden of this passage by Proust: 'Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to start on a j...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-great-cover-of-old-clientele-song.html

... everything, by nature's law Tends to the worse, slips ever backward, backward As with a man, who scarce propels his boat Against the stream: if once his arms relax The current sweeps it h...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2015/02/virgils-melancholy.html

'The outer suburbs have almost a moorland fascination when fog lies thick and orange-coloured over their huge flat wastes of grass ... but does not quite conceal the stark outlines of a tract...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2014/07/carved-in-air.html

I had no idea where the phrase 'Halcyon days' came from until I read this beautiful lyric by the ancient Greek poet Simonides : 'During the winter solstice Zeus orders fourteen days of peacefu...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2014/05/halcyon.html

Our first record, Suburban Light, is getting an expanded reissue by Merge Records in May. Both vinyl and CD versions will have an extra disc with 30 minutes of rare and unreleased stuff, whi...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2014/03/suburban-light-reissue.html

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of t...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2013/11/virginia-woolf-mrs-dalloway-p86-harvest.html

Sounds from Birch Well, Epping Forest (3m extract of 17m piece). On Sunday 9th December 2012 I cycled out to Epping Forest to record the sound of the woods for my friend Julian's art exhibitio...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2013/07/sounds-from-birch-well.html

There's a new Amor de Dias record out on Merge Records And half the Clientele are on it! James Hornsey plays some lovely bass for us and Howard Monk , who drummed for us for a short while aro...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2013/01/some-new-music.html

Perfect at this time of the year. Carel Weight , The Battersea Park Tragedy (1974) and the Prescence (1955)

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2012/11/carel-weight.html

Ern Malley was an Australian poet and auto-mechanic, insurance salesman and watch repairman. He was born in Liverpool in 1918 and died in obscurity in Sydney in 1943, at the age of 25. Ern Ma...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-darkening-ecliptic.html

Last month I read an interesting article in the London Review of Books which put forward the idea that Pop Art is now over. Finished. Historical. "Pop’s irrevocable pastness ... lies in the f...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2012/10/images-and-pastness.html

...is a large, derelict Victorian building. Its courtyard is separated from the Tottenham street by a high barrier, part-overgrown with even higher fireweed. It's for sale, although the estate ag...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2012/08/7-bruce-grove.html

Balloon, c. 1940 I found this artist in a 1979 book called 'Naive Painting' published by Phaidon. Gertrude O'Brady was an American pianist who travelled in Europe and ended up staying in Paris...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2012/06/balloon-c.html

I first saw this film as part of a kinetic art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, some time in the last decade. The blurb said something vague and art world-y like 'James Whitney was profoundly ...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2012/03/lapis-short-film-by-james-whitney-1966.html

Clérambault (1872 - 1934) was a photographer and psychiatrist (apparently he invented, ahem I mean discovered, the concept of erotomania). He travelled to Morocco and obsessively took photos...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2011/10/gaetan-gatian-de-clerambault.html

I've been enjoying the British Masters series on BBC4. Oxbridge Art Historian Dr. James Fox stares at symbolically thorny twigs in front of a sunset glow and roves up and down damp northern stre...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2011/08/more-about-painting.html

This week Amor de Dias are 'editing' the online version of the USA's Magnet Magazine , which means writing 6 or 7 pieces each about some of our favourite things. One of mine is about Ida Ekblad ,...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2011/06/vanishing-map.html

On Friday, Amor de Dias played at the Scandinavian Seaman's Church in Liverpool. It was magical. We played in the church itself, a whitewashed room with lovely natural reverb. If you got bore...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2011/06/liverpool.html

I tried to put my heart and soul into every Clientele record (succeeded with some more than others I expect). Maybe one day we'll make another record. I hope so. But for now we are resting, ...

http://theclientele.blogspot.com/2011/05/o-you-brittle-concrete-swans.html