Black Hearted Love

PJ Harvey and John Parish have made a new album together: A Woman A Man Walked By. The Chapman Brothers made the video for the first single, Black Hearted Love.
They have a palpable chemistry together - you can feel it in their work. He's produced her for years, and they made Dance Hall at Louse Point in 1996. I love their elegant, enigmatic album titles.
This song really struck something with me: the minor key of the recurring riff, its slight messiness, but Polly's voice so crystalline and clear.

Fever Ray

Karin Dreijer Andersson is half of The Knife, a remarkable, enigmatic brother-sister band from Sweden. She has released her first solo album as Fever Ray: a heavy, atmospheric and dense thing that I can't rip myself from...

libertango

Grace and...yogurt? Last night, a new ad for H&M had a cover of Grace Jones' "Libertango" tinkling in the background, immediately followed by an ad for Liberte yogurt, featuring a healthy, yogurt-y couple dancing the...'libertango'. I suspect someone in the studio was having a little fun.

conrad williams: tight wrappers

The best story in Best New Horror 19. Absolutely horrid, stuck to my thoughts for days, involves scaffolding and True First Editions. Many thanks again, CW!

kate moss by bert stern

the scent of friedrichstrasse

From Chandler Burr's column in the New York Times T Magazine comes word of a scent exhibit - possibly the first of its kind: ‘‘If There Ever Was: An Exhibition of Extinct and Impossible Smells,’’ at The Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland, England.

Among the headspinning creations:

• Lethal Peruvian arsenic deposits
• Hiroshima
• A 16thC spell for eternal beauty (contents: murdered raven, almond oil)

and

• the scent of Berlin-Friedrichstrasse train station, the only connection to West Germany in the GDR.

SPLAT

Nice, slightly mental clothes from Marc Jacobs in NYC for these dour times. Looks like Stephen Sprouse...history's repeating, again and again and...