La Belle Dame sans Merci
A Selection of Fairytales
Dear _____________,
I have loved this reading of Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ since I heard it last year; it is so mystical and transportive.
Here are some of my favourite verses:
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful - a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew
And sure in language strange she said -
‘I love thee true’
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes,
With kisses four.
*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
When I was younger I had this nanny who sometimes looked after me called Teresa. She insisted that she was a witch and she showed me and my brother 80s fantasy films like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal and Neverending Story. One time she lead us down to the bottom of the garden and told me to hold out my hand. She scooped something off one of the leaves and said that she had a fairy and placed it in my hand. Something in my child mind was so completely convinced that she had a fairy I genuinely imagined there to be weight as she transferred the fairy into my hands. I imagined it to be a squat sort of gnome-like fairy maybe like this:
This poem and her princess outfit very accurately encapsulate my own imaginary quests as a kid.
Once, I half woke up from a dream and saw out of the corner of my eye these pixies flying briskly down to collect the tooth I had left under my pillow that night.
When I came across the Cottingley fairy case as a tween, I was momentarily convinced - because at one time others had been convinced too - just me and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in some strange fairy reality. (Of course the internet quickly revealed that I had old informaton and that the Cottingley sisters admitted they fabricated everything.)
The appeal of fairies obviously comes a lot from nostalgia for my childhood, with its playfulness and mystery. I still get excited thinking about them and though I don’t believe they exist, it’s just fun to imagine that they could.
*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
MUSIC UPDATES
Last week I performed tudor songs at the National Archives from their collection, transcribed for harp. One of the songs was about ‘the wavering, wandering wiles of women’, another was just called ‘Who Lives To Hear This Song’. It took me forever to interpret them, primarily because the pieces were written in a very different style in multiple tenor and alto clefs I was unfamiliar with. To be honest, I am also just not very good at sight-reading as it is. The reward, however, was the feeling of playing pieces that were written literally hundreds of years ago in the court of King Henry XIII and also wearing this very dramatic dress:
I asked them if I can borrow it for a music video and they said yes! So I guess stay tuned for me in this dress again. The thing is, my album mixes are now done - so once they are mastered they are yours and the world’s. It has taken me 7 years, and I am finally finished. I have no PR plan - you are supposed to have those, but I haven’t played the game enough I guess. If you are one of the maybe five beautiful individuals who have followed me through everything, the ones who have been buying my stuff on bandcamp and coming to the shows, I have so much gratitude for you and would love to share the album with you as soon as the masters come back. If you would like that, just contact me however you want (instagram dm, what’sapp, email, whatever) and I will make sure you are the first to hear it.
If 🍄 you 🍄 are 🍄 in 🍄 London 🍄 I 🍄 have 🍄 two 🍄 shows 🍄 coming 🍄 up :
June 15th - The Bath House (in Hackney Wick)
June 20th - The Divine (in Dalston)
Here is another demo that never made it to the album
love,
ari xx