No Longer a Place But a Condition

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a decentralised urban landscape emerged in which the differences between centre and periphery, city and country and culture and nature are no longer clearly defined. The city no longer seems a place but rather a condition. According to the Italian urban planner Stefano Boeri, “the city has exported its genetic code”. Furthermore, since an urban culture has also settled in rural areas, nature has become, to a large extent, an urban artefact. City, suburb, countryside and nature are all touched by human management. All have become cultural landscapes. The contemporary city no longer stands opposed to nature, but encloses large parts of it. 

Steven Jacobs
from The Photoresque: Images Between City and Countryside

Lovely song off of the recently released album by dulcimer player Sarah Kate Morgan and fiddler Leo Shannon—traditional musicians living and teaching in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Beautifully captured by the fine people at June Appal Records—the non-profit record label of the legendary Appalshop.

Adrianna Ault, from The Impeded Stream

“...a meditation on rural land and how it sustains us and maybe, also, family and how we're sustained by those who came before us. I didn't come by this understanding until I made the work. My work is my teacher. I listen what it tells me to do and, in this way, I learn from it.”

More

In honor of Jack DeJohnette’s incredible life as a drummer, we’re listening to him play with John Abercrombie and Jan Hammer on this ECM release from 1975

Agnes Martin

The underside of the leaf
Cool in shadow
Sublimely unemphatic
Smiling of innocence

The frailest stems
Quivering in light
Bend and break
In silence

from Writings

Agnes Martin, The Tree, 1964