left me feeling...well, in the amaranthine words of Clueless’ Cher Harowtiz: “like, du-uhhh.” Burner babes have known this all along. I’ve consciously known it since I was nine years old, when the opening strains of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake made my fingers tingle and I quite suddenly felt something for which the English language lacks a word, but that the Spanish call duende (roughly translating into ‘the mysterious power of a work of art to deeply move a person’). Maybe everyone else in the room felt it too. Maybe they didn’t. Regardless, I can’t think of a single human being I’ve encountered who hasn’t experienced this kind of magic in the presence of music. Call me crazy if you will, but I’m of the mind that most writers are frustrated musicians (and vice versa). Music is the most intangible of forces. Words have a permanence, a weight and sometimes even a heaviness. Music is as inexplicable and as transient and as diaphanous as a breeze. Words explain. Music doesn’t have to. The grass is always greener, as they say. Trying to place music within the confines of words is, as Haley Cullingham’s elegantly writes in A Love Letter to Lester (page 6), an exercise in “complication and confusion and the cruelty of irony”; in the same way that I can attempt to wrap adjectives around the heady pleasure of a first cigarette, the syllables will, in fact, never “be beautiful enough to do justice to the thing[s] they describe.” None of the words that follow in this issue of Burner capture what it is I feel when I listen to Tchaikovsky. Instead, what they do is equally valuable, and most certainly more immutable. They tell of experiences and interactions with the thing that cannot be named. The duende that comes with them. So adios for now, Burner babes. Enjoy the issue, and don’t forget to say thank you to Science (with a capital S) for proving what you and I knew all along.
Sarah Miniaci Editor in Chief
and past him. What is evolution but ecstasy and honesty? It is outside “the box”, whatever that means. Who made this box anyway? And why insist I be in it? Some powerful, dull ideologue, I imagine. I ignore boxes, am very wary. They’re boring, bland and induce involuntary fits of anxiety. For all that is good about human beings – truth, beauty, art – is made by love, and music is our most basic beautiful instinct. (Even if it’s purposefully ugly.) Before language, we made music. We sang. Song gave birth to language; the story is (un) certain. Meanwhile, musical genres are like dialects, flavours in musical meals. A great chef channels influences, in time with the rhythm of the moment, creates art aligned with the zeitgeist. That usually makes it very popular, or very unpopular. Sometimes both. Sometimes at the same time. Genres are for journalists. I mean, did the Beatles emulate skiffle? Were they afraid to mix rock with classical with backwards, chopped up tape? Why did Jimi Hendrix have effects pedals built out of Russian tanks and Tesla tubes? Why did he stack amplifiers on top of each other into walls of sound, strapping LSD around his brain? Beautiful, burning boys and girls make, play, dance, dream. Whether its two step fidget techno electro trance dub stop is irrelevant. Whether its country thrash punk blues garage soul twee matters not. Drum and bass punk. Folktronica. Does it move us? That’s the question. Answer that. Understand genres, but obliterate boxes. Weave all your influences together in different ways, until your soul jumps. With Love,
xxx.
Leah Stephenson Executive Editor