Recently: living in cold places
Reading
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga by Sylvain Tesson, a journaled account of the six months he lived in a small cabin next to lake Baikal in Siberia. I'm reading it in Romanian but the English version and has a much nicer cover.
Thinking about expanses of snow and ice reminded me of this essay from The Morning News about a dog sled race across the tundras of Russia.
And on a completely different scale, the Lykov family spent 40 years in complete isolation before being discovered in 1978 by a group of geologists. Agafia Lykov, the last surviving member of the family, still lives there.
Watching
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, a documentary put together and narrated by Werner Herzog based on footage by Dmitry Vasyukov that I wanted to watch for a while sounded like a good complement to Tesson's book. (It was.)
Listening
Soused, a collaboration between Scott Walker and Sun O))) sounds like boiling tar, anvils and nightmare fuel. In other words, it's perfect and I can't stop listening to it.
Atomos by A Winged Victory for the Sullen is the much anticipated follow-up to their excellent self-titled debut and it might very well be my favorite record of the year.
Flying Lotus' latest offering, You're Dead!, is denser than his previous album but maintains the latter's dreamlike haze and submerged thumps.
Now seems like the perfect time to give Zola Jesus' Taiga a listen.