Music

Songs often seem to call out in the absence of a lover, whether that person is next door or in the next town over or even waiting somewhere 'Beyond the Sea'. I want you, I need you is what so many love songs tend to say whether you're really quite close and perhaps have already been intimate or whether the object of your desire remains frustratingly out of reach. frances chang though captures something more rare, not longing nor quite a sense of absence in presence...

In February of 1800 the great Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt headed inland from the coast of present day Venezuela with his travelling companion, the French botanist Aimé Bonpland. Their quest was to explore the course of the Orinoco River and its tributaries and to solve the long-rumoured question of a connection between the Orinoco and the Amazon. In fact...

'It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends'. Taking her title from the essay by Joan Didion which closed the author's debut collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, this week Jess Williamson introduces her new album A Mile South of Heaven by way of the single and record opener 'Goodbye to All That'. The singer duly notes: Didion's essay is about leaving New York after eight years and how 'it's distinctly possible...