Black Foliage

Listening to Olivia Tremor Control's second album Black Foliage (1999), outside it's raining from a passing tropical storm buffeting the southern coast of Massachusetts. The album is a remarkable mix tape of pop songs, static noise, repeated melodies. Music that sometimes approximates the sound of crickets and frogs two weeks ago at night in Durham.

Reading Enrique Vila-Matas's memoir/novel of his two years in Paris in the 1970s, París no se acaba nunca (Anagrama, 2003).

I associate the New Order song below with the sound of the entire Low-life album. I bought the cassette in the winter of 1986 somewhere in Connecticut before getting on a train to Boston. In the ensuing months, the songs are tied to a remote winter landscape of woods and suburbs west of Boston, music's private references.