Catwyrms
ISSUE #64
Meow.
Places where the land ends are pure—you can hear water like that a mile away. Oceans are perfect, even radical, in their isolation. You could swim out into the sea as far as you like, if what you wanted was to drown, yet this desire to be free is forever compelling.
Bon Iver will be releasing the fifth album of their two-decade career this Friday. The elation this gives me is hard to overstate. Judging by the singles, it’ll be a masterpiece, for me—one that speaks to those silent floods that make up a private life. In truth, so far he has made four of my dearest albums on planet Earth.
As I listened to the long list of songs for this issue, over the many weeks it took me to get my groove back (jury’s still out), I was surprised at how sad this project was making me. I’d been more than ready to revisit the dull bite of those pandemic memories, obviously, but this emotional hedging made it only more of a shock when I was blindsided by intense anti-nostalgia,
For years, my favorite song was 7 minutes long. I never chose to have “All My Friends” hit me how it did, but I can justify it: 7 minutes is the perfect length. Temporal mathematics have divine standards too—like the Fibonacci sequence in the natural world, in music, 7 holds liminal significance.