RARE SOUNDTRACKS III

05/05/19 • 66 min

Emil and Alex recently got off a massive Grails tour that took them to places as disparate as Poland, Turkey, Estonia and Lithuania, ending up in Copenhagen where they recorded this cast at Alex's apartment. It begins with the two reflecting on how traveling as a band can reach heavy emotional impasses that require a kind of comedic release and Grails have established a dense list of guilty pleasures that've eased their morning hangovers after touring Europe for over 15 years. The conversation eventually moves into their love of British and Italian library music and ends with record shopping in Greece underneath the Parthenon. Because this season has been consistently thematically 'heavy', "Rare Soundtracks III" serves as a necessarily lighthearted entry for this run of 6 episodes. The next episode will return to Emil's breakdown, gradual breakthrough and eventual move up to Portland, Oregon to begin the next chapter of his life.

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Previous Episode

LOST DECADE

This episode dives completely into the field of extreme, paralyzing alienation and the hovering spectre of the failure of your childhood dreams. It also features a tribute to the healing power of the music of Daniel Johnston... a singer that has the power to build a profound bridge out to you when you are in the most debilitating pain.

Although this cast unrelentingly focuses on the sensation of floating in the space of a certain kind of loneliness, it posits a central wager that if you follow that Alone-ness ALL the way through to its logical conclusion, being alone can eventually transform into a kind of superpower... and point the way towards a crucial kind of inner redemption and spiritual understanding.

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Next Episode

I WANT TO LIVE A PEACEFUL LIFE

We've reached the Final Hour of this season... for now...

Emil went out to his mother's farm and recorded the finale of these 6 episodes in the middle of the night while drinking a significant amount of moonshine. He enters a strange and dazed state of mind, temporarily entering a flashback of the 'religious episode' he experienced in 1998. After several years of being held captive inside an extreme and crippling depression, he had a dream where God came to him and said that it was finally time to experience what actual happiness is.

This cast is about the epic struggle to appreciate life itself, and how, if we are lucky enough to achieve any kind of peak experience of what enlightenment is, we have no idea how long that insight will stay before releasing us back into the world as it is generally seen. The cast ends in 1999 with Emil moving up to Portland where his artistic life began all over again. Because of the eerie quiet and meditative quality of this cast, its best listened to while alone, late at night.

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