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"As with many artists, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to reinvent myself as a musician, and saw me pivotin...
03/04/2025

"As with many artists, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to reinvent myself as a musician, and saw me pivoting from being more of a performing artist to creating soundtrack music. What fascinates me about this genre is the simplicity with which music can function: the musical score provides the emotional content, setting the tone and directly influencing the dramaturgy of a storyline. This type of music-making has been a constant source of exploration, ever since I was involved in creating the score for the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary film, My Octopus Teacher. Ultimately I’d like to be involved in scoring a feature-length film or providing the theme music for a TV series. I’m always working on some sort of soundtrack music, and have made specifically curated library music for several labels over the past few years.

There is a downside to making this kind of music, though. It can be quite solitary and often takes hours of recording specific sounds in sequence, like a puzzle that forms over time. Also, this process can become quite self-indulgent, which is why I’ve been realising of late that the performer in me would like to get back on stage and be part of a new project that I could collaborate on.
.."

An excerpt from this month's Musician of the Month Ronan Skillen's article.

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/music/musician-of-the-month-ronan-skillen/

"To read and engage with Scruton’s writing is not to necessarily agree. One of his critics Jeanette Winterson, appears o...
02/04/2025

"To read and engage with Scruton’s writing is not to necessarily agree. One of his critics Jeanette Winterson, appears on the sleeve lauding the book as brilliant and horrible in equal measure. Scruton’s father lamented Old England’s vanishing but had little truck with countryside traditions his son was drawn to. My father, in contrast, was a hunt master and a GP heavily invested in the family planning movement in the West of Ireland (he was involved in legalising family planning as a medical resource). He saw little contradiction in sitting atop nature’s totem as a progressive modern. His interest in tradition did not extend to the Church, its hierarchy or the power it yielded. Like Scruton, my father was drawn to the cross-class dalliance of a sport I was introduced to as a child, a multispecies environment made up of horses, hounds and humans that left a considerable mark on me as a source of moral dispute. The impact of this involvement with the sport was not just experiential. It was philosophical to the point of being ontological. For in the throes of the chase, horse and human give up their singularity, adrenaline mounts and the normal limits of everyday life are transgressed. The horse jumps fence it would not normally entertain when removed from the collective embroglio of the hunt. An energy pulsates through the collective group, as Scruton notes, that engenders the primeval, pre-modern, beyond the boundaries of a day to day ‘identity’ that takes root as a singularising force. Like Winterson, I find Scruton’s text to be fascinating in parts and deeply problematic in others.
..

An excerpt from Dara Waldron's new article, which serves as an introduction and sideways preamble into his eagerly anticipated forthcoming book 'A Sheepdog Named Oscar'

https://cassandravoices.com/society-culture/the-inscrutable-mr-scruton/

"It feels like centuries must have passed, but it is only decades. Years grow shorter as they multiply. Back then a year...
01/04/2025

"It feels like centuries must have passed, but it is only decades. Years grow shorter as they multiply. Back then a year was long. Winters moved slowly through the seasons, bookending the boundless summers. I remember the newness of things then. When I was a boy, in my imagination, I could picture death, but it seemed unreal, like a dream that evaporates with the morning mist. I never thought about anything but life. Immortality was existence. Leaving church on a bright sunny day the thought that death could be overcome, outlived, outwitted even, was mere common sense. It seems different now, now that I have felt the rain. Maybe you remember that strange feeling in the early mornings when you were a child, the first minutes of a new day where a vague belly hunger is usurped by the rush of life. The seedling imagination growing, nurturing its petals under an indefinite sky. The day you say ‘I am’ and soon after, ‘we are’. Mornings absent of fear. A day in the sun’s warmth. Growing in the scent of cut grass that grew in the meadows of the town. I had a feeling then that all roads would be trodden, but only if I could harness time, the impossible trick. Between sadness and hope, lies adventure, and that’s where the story begins.

It was around that time, at the beginning of this century, I travelled around South America. What a beautiful time it was to be alive. I even knew it then, as it was happening. I didn’t need retrospect....
..

An from new fiction by Dominic Mallen in which a heart-broken traveller makes his way to the town of in where he encounters a remarkable creature..

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/literature/fiction/the-dog-that-sang-the-blues/



Image: Hector Perez

'Cut to the previous year prior, 2015, on a Sunday, the first of November, I had the worst hangover of my life, and want...
28/03/2025

'Cut to the previous year prior, 2015, on a Sunday, the first of November, I had the worst hangover of my life, and wanted to kill myself. I simply had had enough of being an alcoholic.

The scenario was that I was at Birmingham International Airport’s train station, lying on a bench in the small waiting room, suffering from a desperate hangover, holding onto a sausage baguette with congealing red sauce in a paper bag, murmuring in pain. I didn’t see how I could continue in life, having failed at it so badly.

I wanted to throw myself under an oncoming train.
..

A new article by Neil Burns 'The Powerful Nature of Addiction' opens up on his history of , its impact on his body, and the powerful nature of .

https://cassandravoices.com/current-affairs/comment/the-powerful-nature-of-addiction/

This conversation with Patrick Cockburn is his second with Cassandra Voices. One year ago, Patrick was our very first gu...
26/03/2025

This conversation with Patrick Cockburn is his second with Cassandra Voices. One year ago, Patrick was our very first guest. Back then we mostly spoke about his father Claud, the subject of a new biography by his Cork-born son. This time, we jump to more familiar terrain: the battlefields of the present day, Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza. Cockburn once praised his late friend Robert Fisk as a “historian of the present”. Like Fisk, Cockburn began in Ireland, then spent decades doing mostly Middle-east-based journalism, mostly in person. This meant cultivating friendships, survival skills and a sense of discernment for the historical roots of ongoing events. More sedentary now than, say, the start of the Syrian Civil War 14 years ago, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (both of which he covered while on the ground), he is better placed than most to share useful perspectives on far-off theaters of fighting. We’re honored to have him back.
..

Renowned journalist Patrick Cockburn joins Luke Sheehan to discuss the situations in and

https://cassandravoices.com/current-affairs/podcast-patrick-cockburn-on-syria-and-ukraine/


"It needs a little while to let go of the rest of life, of everyday thoughts, to feel into yourself with your eyes close...
25/03/2025

"It needs a little while to let go of the rest of life, of everyday thoughts, to feel into yourself with your eyes closed and then – finally to dissolve in the darkness accompanied by flashes of coloured light, immersed in the mass of moving bodies. You become part of the whole, swaying as one, moving uniformly, like a vast, flowing, breathing organism – connected here on the dancefloor where identity dissolves and perception reshapes itself: time blurs, bodies merge, the individual dissipates into the collective.

It can be truly spiritual. In this experience, you forget yourself entirely, your body, your thoughts, your presence. You let go of everything. You don’t think, you just feel, you follow, you become. Like water you adapt, you yield, you move with the currents, faster, slower, dissolving into rhythm, merging with vibration. Water is fluid, like identity, layered, ever-changing, in a constant process of becoming. It carries both clarity and ambiguity, flowing freely yet shaped by its surroundings, suspended between movement and stillness. Boundaries shift, the line between self and environment blurs. You are neither fixed nor defined; you are in motion, open to change. Everything is allowed, everything can happen.
..

An from Clara Pistner's new article on electronic music.

https://cassandravoices.com/society-culture/electronic-music-stepping-into-a-space-of-anticipation/



Image: Saskia Schramm

“Hello,” he says and shakes my hand. He picks up my nephew and brings him to the table. Then he greets Papà affectionate...
20/03/2025

“Hello,” he says and shakes my hand. He picks up my nephew and brings him to the table. Then he greets Papà affectionately. He calls him Papà. A stupid laugh escapes me. Linda notices and asks me if I can give her a hand in the kitchen.
“Jimmy, Ricky loves dad. Do you think he likes seeing him in this condition?”
My blood runs cold.
“Do you think he likes seeing him in this condition?” She doesn’t have the least idea that she’s a bit of a bitch. I don’t understand how she doesn’t. Linda doesn’t even consider that being a bitch is part of her. It’s incredible. There’s no sense in answering her. She’s won.

New fiction by Irish-based Italian writer Walter Comoglio

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/literature/fiction/horses/

Image: Daniele Idini

"The guide went on and on like this, flooding me with fairly useless information while holding back the only thing I wan...
18/03/2025

"The guide went on and on like this, flooding me with fairly useless information while holding back the only thing I wanted to know. It described these houses only as structures that let air circulate in certain directions, that let sunlight fall across them at different angles throughout the day, shadows rotating and lengthening. But hadn’t people lived inside them? There was something creepy about this obvious omission.

The feeling of unease crested outside the doctor’s house, a simple two-storey square building with pillars at the corners. After a detailed description of the cornice where the airing holes of the attic were disguised by a zigzag pattern of more bricks, the guide uttered this staggeringly creepy sentence, in the same smooth monotone: The doctor made house calls to visit patients not only to cure them, but to make sure they really were as ill as they claimed.

I remembered the free therapy sessions I received during my time working as a content moderator one hideous summer after university. My therapist was a kindly gay Chilean man who I lied to week after week, inventing dying family members and killing them off in increasingly unlikely and tragic ways, all in an attempt to get more time off work. The office was in a long glass building with a gym in the basement and a rooftop cafe where I would go along with my colleagues to play ping pong and get abjectly drunk on sugary sangría at the end of each day before stumbling home. I remembered reading about offices with built-in sleep pods and Silicon Valley work campuses so convenient that nobody ever leaves. I remembered my elation the morning that I decided that I would not go into work that day or ever again, that if I spent a single moment longer in that place it would permanently damage my capacity to see beauty in the world. This is what it finally came down to: an instinct to protect beauty, which is really an instinct towards survival. I remembered the faces of my colleagues like a deserter remembers the faces of the ones he left to die.
...

Ruby Eastwood finds an early vision of paternalistic capitalism at

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/arts/at-the-colonia-guell/

Lovely Deadby Nicholas BatteyIf I were to let you gowho would I show this garden to;who would be there to tell me ‘no’it...
15/03/2025

Lovely Dead
by Nicholas Battey

If I were to let you go
who would I show this garden to;
who would be there to tell me ‘no’
it’s not enough to say it’s blue

in June, when echiums greet the bees
(just as later they give finches seeds)
and turns yellow in summer sun,
burns to red with heleniums

in autumn. I leave their raw
s**ggy stems all through winter now —
food and shelter for birds and mice,
hope and remembering too — but more
for the texture they bring to cold light;
though to say it’s not enough, I know.

"Sometimes they just come to me. I dreamt the Killi Willi Waltz. It was funny. I wonder was it the s**t loads of B52s I ...
14/03/2025

"Sometimes they just come to me. I dreamt the Killi Willi Waltz. It was funny. I wonder was it the s**t loads of B52s I had consumed the night before! Luckily, I crawled over to the fiddle and managed to extract the tune to the fiddle before I forgot it!

I have dreamt other tunes, but they have slipped away. I think the best tunes come to us in unexpected moments. Wandering down the road, after chatting to a friends; while trying to learn a tune; after a good s**g. You just never know.
..

As a youngster Kila fiddler Dee Armstrong never imagined she would play traditional music but it was always there in the background. Her solo album Deichtine's Daughter is out now.

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/music/musician-of-the-month-dee-armstrong/

Where beckons the quiver…?by Paul DownesAre there no spirits moving in the air_                       ruling the region ...
11/03/2025

Where beckons the quiver…?
by Paul Downes

Are there no spirits moving in the air
_                       ruling the region between earth and sky ?

And do you shine from the sky
_                       goddess in decay,
_                                   as respite from the spit of day ?

For this world could not hold you ?

Whose arm twitches with your pulse,
_                       as your ghost drifts through the lining
_                                   of the throat ?

Whose voice crackles as it shouts,
_                       Whose chest wheezes like a blade of grass,
_                                   split for air to move through ?

Were they torn by tongues of anguish,
_                       the remnants of your melody,
_                                   stretching a voice into a cry
_                                   thwarting the borders of a heart ?

You leave behind that crumpled piece of paper,
_                       Not the wrinkles of your face.
If language should leave you,
_                       alone to the touch,
where beckons the quiver of
_                       ageless almighty ?

Each one of us a teardrop,
_                       enters the world’s heart chamber
_                       and congeals before your eyes?

Do you kiss the half-flown ivory tongues
_                       that swipe across the many lips ?
And do the stars cluster,
_                       as though gulls in search of comfort,
_                       their screams of spirals broken,
_                       their feathers like stilled flames ?
And were eternal chasms or a breath
_                       to fill the shells
_                       of their lost melodies ?

Feature Image: The Flammarion engraving, c.1888.

"After the big 4-0, female representation in tv and film is generally reduced to variations of ‘matriarch,’ ‘spinster,’ ...
10/03/2025

"After the big 4-0, female representation in tv and film is generally reduced to variations of ‘matriarch,’ ‘spinster,’ or ‘embittered housewife’; it has certainly not been the standard in Hollywood to explore (or even acknowledge) the sprawling erotic realities of women from whom the bloom of youth has departed. The film is self-aware enough to showcase Romy herself facing this pressure and subsequent insecurities—despite her high-powered position—and receiving Botox injections. In a moving, intimate n**e scene, she is fragile and unable to accept Samuel’s assertion that she is beautiful. We can and ought to credit writer/director/producer Halina Reijn’s vision for liberated, integrated female sexuality defined by the mutual emergence of self-acceptance and at any/every age.
..

The irrepressible Haley Hodges explores a film starring celebrating unreserved expressions of female sexuality in an ostensibly middle aged woman.

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/who-let-the-dogs-out-a-review-of-babygirl/

"They were stationed over Britain during the industrial revolution and watched with contained alarm as six million tonne...
07/03/2025

"They were stationed over Britain during the industrial revolution and watched with contained alarm as six million tonnes of coal was ripped from the ground each day to feed mankind’s growing appetite for boiling water.

“You can see why they might think this is a good idea,” one noted.

“What could go wrong?” another sighed.

They saw Hi**er coming from miles away. Literally.

“The facial hair doesn’t exactly scream stability,” one observed.
..

New science fiction by Damien McKiver sees two humorous aliens land in Dublin with a stark message, which they deliver to the Irish President..

LINK IN BIO or STORY for full story.



Feature Image: Mark Bryan, Prime Directives

In a turbulent period in European history, and beyond, we are delighted to draw on the sage input of the former Irish am...
05/03/2025

In a turbulent period in European history, and beyond, we are delighted to draw on the sage input of the former Irish ambassador to Russia, poet Philip McDonagh in our latest , who also worked for a long period on the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. He explores the possibilities for a lasting, inclusive peace between Russia and Ukraine. He also laments the expansion in military investment in the U.K. and the rest of Europe, calling for a new global vision to contend with the troubles of our time.

https://cassandravoices.com/current-affairs/podcast-we-urgently-need-a-global-vision/

"In this part of my story, my father is no longer a small child in his parents’ Moscow apartment on the eve of their esc...
04/03/2025

"In this part of my story, my father is no longer a small child in his parents’ Moscow apartment on the eve of their escape from Russia in February 1918. He is a young man in Riga, trying to talk his mother into escaping back to Russia before the Germans enter Riga. She said no, she would not leave Riga. He knew she would say no, and she did, but he wanted to try one more time to talk her into escaping. She remembered too well fleeing from Moscow on that teplushka train and had ample reason to believe that the Bolsheviks would be after her, not only for being a “burzhuika” (a lady bourgeois) but, most importantly, for leaving Russia twenty-three years ago. That is why, in the summer of 1941, she opted to stay in Latvia. Like many others who chose to stay, she believed the Germans were a civilized nation, especially compared to the Bolsheviks, and she feared them less than the Soviets. My father thought he was the only one in real danger because his work as a reviewer of Riga’s Jewish Theater productions for Cīņa, a Communist Latvian newspaper, made him a prime target. He thought he had missed the right moment to leave because boarding a train to Russia was getting harder each day. The place was empty when he walked into the editorial offices of Cīņa with an article about a recent production at the Jewish Theater...

Russian-American author Nina Kossman tells the tale of her father, who leaves Riga for Russia only days before it is taken by the Germans during World War II.

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/literature/fiction/a-grand-lady-must-be-a-hundred-years-old/

Image: Soldiers of the Soviet Red Army in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga in 1944.

When I was ten years old a blind man by the name of Mr. John Mitchell taught me how to play the piano accordion. I learn...
26/02/2025

When I was ten years old a blind man by the name of Mr. John Mitchell taught me how to play the piano accordion. I learned how to read and write music over the next two years and I could play a good selection of waltz’s and marches. The Centenary March, The Boston Burglar, You and I are a few I can remember. It’s a tricky instrument to play, with the bass keys on the left the piano keyboard on the right and the pulling and pushing it in and out. You feel a bit like Silas Marner at his loom when everything is trundling along together. With each new tune you learn you go through the process of feeling that this is impossible; this is barely possible; this is okay; I can do this without thinking about it.
..

Musician of the Month Johnny Jude of Dublin-based electro-hiphop bank says you just have to keep showing up at the office and something will eventually happen.

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/music/musician-of-the-month-jonathan-jude/



Rentalby Deborah DiemontMotes swirled in windowslike stars in The Starry Night.Water stains framedmirrors in bursts of g...
25/02/2025

Rental

by Deborah Diemont

Motes swirled in windows
like stars in The Starry Night.

Water stains framed
mirrors in bursts of gray-gold.

The landlord’s lips were thin,
her lipstick coral.

She braved the tropical storm
to unlock closets:
her Waterford crystal.

Branches needed pruning
but all I seemed to do

was dream of Heathcliff.
I never scrubbed

or mowed enough.
I leaned my bike—created tracks—
against the accent wall.

She said No.
No need to search

for my replacement.
She’d done living with my choices.

Feature Image: Daniele Idini

https://cassandravoices.com/culture/literature/poetry/poem-rental/



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