Jazzy D's Soul Notes

E. Lockhart "We Were Liars" (Hot Key Books)




In We Were Liars, E. Lockhart carefully crafts Cadence’s character, focusing on her battle with a form of amnesia and the aftermath of an accident that is deeply tragic. The theme of facing truth, guilt, and accepting responsibility is the essence of Cadence’s character. Cadence’s development becomes critical as she unearths haunting truths about her childhood that took place during her fifteenth summer. She finally begins to surface from the fog of grief and confusion, volatility, and harsh realities she has long evaded.

Particularly, the use of fairy tales alongside Cadence’s physical pain serve as immense points of character development in the novel. Relatively to her fractured family dynamics, the fairy tales she tells throughout her life embodies her attempt at coping with the overwhelming reality. The island, striking yet isolated captures the destructive nature of Sinclair family; they are beautiful, escaping the realities occurring beneath them. The overarching message within these symbols highlight the antagonizing duality people face with maturing and the fact that to truly heal from anything, you must embrace every shard of reality, not just the appealing fragments.

Personally, I resonate with Cadence’s journey when reflecting on times in my life when I struggled to face painful memories. Reading We Were Liars reminded me that pretending things are fine doesn’t make the hurt disappear, true healing comes from honesty, even when it’s painful.

dash; 22 July 2021), also known as Pita, was a British-Austrian composer of electronic audio works. He was the head of Editions Mego, which he founded in 2006 as a successor to Mego.

In an interview conducted in 2016, Rehberg stated that he did not want to peddle music "in its own little box",which he felt was the norm at present. Describing his impression regarding timbre, he believed that "dissonance and resonance have to co-exist for the other to work". François Bonnet, who collaborated with Rehberg on Recollection GRM, felt that his music came to be more dense as his career progressed. He described how it retained its "radical and bold" character, while becoming "deeper, more ambivalent, more moving".



Peter Rehberg – at GRM



File under Experimental, Abstract, Noise, Glitch, Electroacoustic.

ENJOY

The Wire magazine tribute to Peter Rehberg.

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/walking-on-the-ground-you-broke-rob-young-remembers-peter-rehberg

GRM is Groupe de Recherches Musicales. The Groupe de Recherches Musicales ( GRM ) is a music research center specializing in sound and electroacoustic music . Pierre Schaeffer founded the GRM in 1958 , and two years later it joined the research department of French Radio and Television (RTF) . In 1975 , following the breakup of the ORTF , the GRM was integrated into the INA (National Audiovisual Institute ).

Rita Indiana "Made in Saturn" (And Other Stories)






We meet Argenis in the Havana airport--his father has sent him from the DR to detox. That doesn't go as planned, but we learn a lot about Argenis. When he makes it back to his aunt in the DR, we learn as he does.

Argenis struggles with his family history--and that is what this book is about. He is the younger and un-favored son of a former revolutionary. His parents were revolutionaries in the 60s. His father then flipped and took a position in Balaguer's government, and is now fairly high up. Argenis has little to no respect for his father, or his older brother who was a show-off as a child and is now a businessman who uses their father's connections. Argenis, meanwhile, is an artist and has attended art school. He started with cocaine before becoming hooked on heroin. Does he want to stop? It's unclear, but he DOES want to be able to function, to do his art, to not constantly be on the hunt for his next high.

As he manages to stay off the heroin, he learns more about what his parents, their friends, and his aunt went through--and about his grandmother's life as a maid--he gains some perspective. He has only ever wanted to do art. Not to perform recitations on his father's command as his brother did. Nor to use his father's connections to succeed in business--as his brother does. Yet he also finds it very sad how his grandmother--who now owns her former employers' house--still wears her maid's uniform and sleeps in her maid's room. Though she only serves herself. It seems he is ready to grow up and find a happy medium, if he can stay away from heroin.

Curiosity is one of my most defining attributes in the musicological diaspora of curating and the immersive enjoyment that it provides.

Connecting with likeminded people via a forum or website adds to the enhancementt of one's musical journey.

Such a website is Now Spinning Magazine, which is an online forum and site dedicated to the physical product. No streaming or downloading is include, since these aren't tangable. You don't own the music there, you rent it.

This morning, whilst doing the chores of hoovering and son on, I blasted oot some deep slow heavy doom metal by Sunn 0))) - a perfect antidote to the tedium of chores.

I had an Angus beef and caramalised onion sarnie for lunch with a Scotch egg on the side. I listened to the dulcit tones of Sarah Vaughan from one of the Brazilian albums she made late in her career.

I followed this with three Cds from the recent Ian Dury box set and then towards the evening I dug out four albums from my Bill Fay collection. Bill Fay (9 September 1943 – 22 February 2025) was an English singer-songwriter. His early recordings were released by Deram, but following the release of his second album in 1971, Fay was dropped by the label. His work enjoyed a growing cult status in the 1990s, and his older works were re-issued in 1998 and 2004–2005. Fay's 2012 album Life Is People was his first album of all-new material since 1971.
Bill said, learning of his cult status, "Up until 1998, when some people reissued my albums, as far as I was concerned, I was gone, deleted. No one was listening. But then I got the shock that people remembered my music. I was doing some gardening, and listening to some of my songs on cassette, and a part of me thought they were quite good. I thought, "Maybe somebody will hear them someday." That same evening, 14 years ago, I got a call from a music writer telling me that my two albums were being reissued. A shock is not gonna get much bigger than that. It was astonishing to me. I won't ever really be able to believe that it happened. That's how I feel about it. I had come to terms with the fact that I was deleted, but that I had always kept writing songs anyway and that was good enough".
"Who Is the Sender?" was a new album by Bill Fay and released in April 2015. The second album track, "War Machine", came out as a single in February 2015. It nudged the charts but the album did well.
I just need to obtain two more of his albums to complete the section, his second album and the one before Who Is The Sender. Both should be able to find without difficulty, and like the others I have by Bill will be on CD.

Rupi Kaur "Milk And Honey" (Andrews McMeel Publishing)




Rupi Kaur was just 21 when she wrote and illustrated this collection of poetry, somehow managing to do the impossible and selling millions of copies of a genre that typically doesn't often top the bestseller charts.

Milk and Honey is a raw, honest and gutsy collection of poems about abuse, falling in love, having your heart broken and healing. I enjoyed the sections on falling in love and breaking up the most - for those of us who passed out of our teens and twenties quite some time ago, it was an enjoyable reminder of the passion that burns so fiercely at that point in life, when sexual relationships are all consuming and break ups so terribly hurtful and destructive (I'm not suggesting break ups aren't upsetting at any stage in life, but there's a particular rawness to those early breakups when you're just discovering life and trying to figure out who you are).

your name is
the strongest
positive and negative
connotation in any language
it either lights me up or
leaves me aching for days

Bam! I'm rocketed straight back to the late eighties and thoughts of an ex who sent me head and heart spinning in all sorts of great and awful directions.

I don't know why
I split myself open
for others knowing
sewing myself up
hurts this much
afterward

I loved this collection. It's so raw, so open, so painfully, brutally recognisable to anyone who remembers the immense joy and pain of falling in and out of love for the first time or even second time.

My favourite new artist in minimalism.

Organist Kali Malone: 'It was a point of departure for me to work with language' • FRANCE 24



I have ordered two more albums by her after selling quite a lot of stuff from eBay, Vinted and Discogs recently.

Joe Comarroe "Six American Poets: An Anthology" (Vintage)





Editor Conarroe distills the works of six unique American Poets in this 281 page volume. For each he provides a concise but enlightening introduction, but it is the poets themselves whose words speak loudest. Whether it is the rapture of Whitman, the surface simplicity of Emily Dickinson, the puzzles of Wallace Stevens, the plain truth of the observations of William Carlos Williams, the sober musings of Robert Frost, or the unforgettable impact of the lyrical prose of Langston Hughes (who seems incapable of even a single boring line), this book is a treasure you should give to somebody who has bnever read a poem or literature. Or you can kep it for yourself and, as far as I am concerned, it is a highly recommended introduction to these famous poets. .

Ursula K LeGuin "Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books" (Canongate)




A great collection of essays and book reviews, many of which I've never read, in which Ursula K Le Guin manages to talk about imagination in ways that are smart, unsentimental and never cornball.

These are prescient, as everything seems to be now, as the designer for this book must have realized when they excerpted "Hard times are coming... We'll need writers who can remember freedom," but none of these essays predict the future, they just demonstrate an extreme intuition for human beingsand the things they do, including the fact that every book benefits from animals in it. "Then the dog showed upand I knew everything was all right."

Wonderful lie-in this morning. Too cosy to get up early. In fact, I listened to the radio and got out of bed around ten. Never feel guilty, I say.

I did pop into town this morning, as there was chores to do, and some other items I needed. It was cold, but sunny and dry, and around 2 degrees centigrade.

I posted off one item and then headed towards my local pub. I met Ewart for a few drinks and gave him his late Xmas pressie. The present was the Guardian Yearbook in hardback. It was from 2025 anyway, and I remembered buying it from the Fleurs Bookshop.

When I arrived back home, I hit the decks and spun some vinyl. An excellent LP from Rare Vinyl had arrived. It was the classic 1974 album by The Crusaders called "Southern Comfort". Just £17 for a copy in near mint condition.



I just love really good jazz, jazz funk and fusion.

Rie Qudan "Sympathy Tower Tokyo" (Penguin)




Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a thought-provoking novel that begins with the presence of generative AI, but quickly reveals it’s not really about machines. It’s about people. While it may seem at first like Qudan is simply exploring the novelty of AI-generated language, the real power of the novel lies in how that technology becomes a lens for deeper questions. When a machine offers us words, does that reduce their emotional impact, or is it just another form of collaboration?

At its core, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is a meditation on the changing nature of language. In the neon-lit glow of Tokyo, languages blend as Japanese and foreign sounding imports mix in subways, menus, ideals, and inner thoughts. Generative AI, able to mimic tone and idioms, highlights how flexible language has become. But the novel goes beyond this. Language here isn’t just a tool. It’s a living thing, shaped by context, gesture, even silence. The AI’s fluent but mechanical voice contrasts with the messiness of human expression, showing that meaning comes not just from grammar but from emotion, memory, and history.

Although the story presents itself as forward-looking with themes of AI, emotional design, and restorative justice, it’s also shot through with more conservative undercurrents that complicate its message. These aren’t overt, but they surface in character dynamics, language choices, and ideological tensions.

The architect of the tower is a particularly complex figure. She’s a woman leading a radical project meant to reimagine criminal justice. Yet her thinking is steeped in cultural nostalgia and linguistic conservatism. Her dislike for katakana, for example, goes beyond aesthetics. It reflects discomfort with Japan’s shifting cultural identity. To her, katakana signals dilution, euphemism, even avoidance. Her preference for kanji isn’t just about beauty. It’s about control and preserving meaning within a fixed cultural tradition. This linguistic purism mirrors a broader conservative instinct, a desire to maintain clarity, hierarchy, and cultural specificity in an increasingly fluid world.

The novel’s central irony is that its most innovative elements, the tower, the AI, the justice model, are all created by people who hold deeply traditional views. This tension feels deliberate. Qudan seems to suggest that real progress often stands on the shoulders of older, sometimes problematic foundations. Even the most forward-thinking ideas can carry traces of the past. The result is a story that embraces empathy, technology, and change while cautioning us to examine the ideologies quietly embedded in them. The tower may rise high, but it’s still grounded in history, bias, and contradiction.

In the end, Sympathy Tower Tokyo isn’t really a story about AI, architecture, or even justice. It’s a story about language, how it shifts, how it connects, and how it fails to define. Through its layered narrative and philosophical depth, Qudan invites us to examine language and its cultural underpinnings more closely. I loved it.