Get all 6 Annika Bentley releases available on Bandcamp and save 20%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Silver Recovery, Live, Sampler, With Leak, Blink, & Breath, Leisuretron, and See You Around, Lifeguard.
1. |
What a Spell
04:09
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Forget the aeroplanes which can't save you now. Habit habit, little rabbit, I will drown in this skin. My golden memorial, scratch scratch scratch, flutter car-fast and plain. Pirated my diffidence and you let your lashes down to fly. Penchant pendant round and round it flickers faster than your moths. Stick this needle in my eye, my words left you so unsatisfied. Arrest within my every sigh and bear these losses by and by and by. I can weight the picture box in currency of robins now. You can sing a mother song with thumbs like rocking paper horses go, tracing how I came to set this package out. Don't fight the civil service, I am the postal man.
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2. |
Red Moon
04:39
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Hey red moon,
get up,
get up high.
I measure stillness
by your presence in my eye.
I don't think that you'll stay
by a birdless sky.
Hey pale hands,
catch up,
you move so slow.
I don't know how fast
a heart can beat
before it goes.
I don't think that you'll stay
in a crowd of sorrows.
Hey sharp tongue,
shut up,
I'll sew you down.
Heaven help you if you speak,
if you ask the tide
to help you drown.
I don't think that you'll stay,
you won't stick around.
I don't think that you'll stay
unbound.
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3. |
Lucid Lucitania
03:41
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I'll eat nothing of this, it's in my blood because I've not been vaccinated for hi-fi love. Armor for this catching skin because your fingers they are contagious. my ribs, my waves, my words, my tide. But just in Texas there's a sorry and a space suit for a soldier who doesn't want to breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe, BREATHE. My ribs, my waves, my words, my tide. Love grafts on these trees. My tick-tock mechanics heart the metal sparks could not ignite. A little happier, a little frostbite in my mascara. I could not stop or begin again. I could not seal my lips. I could not smooth the sea. Contagious. My ribs, my waves, my words, my tide. A little happier. I thought I kissed a pair of wings. A pair of wings.
(All at six, all of a square, all from a roof encompass me, awash and affix my hair with all the confessed adornments of your throat. Fist in hand, bring me under your deadly locks. Chewed up and caressed I'm time for moths. Quiet my voice, tremble my fingers, tremble, a treble yearning and grasping amongst these teeth. Every single one. Lest we forget. A moon-stroke. That's all. In an eye of the biggest circle. I saw and was a star. A flip-switch switch top vacillation role-reversal makes me into here and there and back again. The finest of delicate and muted lines I thought I kissed a pair of wings. No lips equal to this butter-lion-fly. I don't ever want to consume again. Born and Borne again of a scratch and a sound I know is resonating within your chest. I'm searching for this echo in my ribs. All my air smells like honey and your skin. Eating the seeds to conceal them in your tummy. Nothing can grow through such thick skin. A taste, I wouldn't start, continuation nil, what's over nearly happened retrospectively. I'll soon have miles of fabric if this pattern holds its threads. I am a needle of insistent flight. This is right now, she says. I married him for all his masquerade. I trusted an aphoniac. I wanted talk like narcolepsy. He spoke of pyrophobia and I now believe this was his incapacitation, not a fleeting or a flickering stranger. Wobble wobble, indeed. I can't bear these blisters any more than a distance or a lying nod. I'm trafficked and forgotten. Could you be more like cartilage? Bend, a way to implore, I encourage it, bend. I can feel you like cancer in my wanting cells. I desire of you osmosis. All I wanted, to plug this nightmare vacuum with a tear. Taste the self in this constellation. I've tried so many ways of lying down. The finest of delicate and muted lines. I thought I kissed a pair of wings. No lips equal to this butter-lion-fly. The water holds better than arms. It holds forever.)
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4. |
A Spreading Stain
03:02
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Like a river, like a tree,
like my veins are growing out of me.
Does it seal you up inside?
Does it keep the wolves away?
Do you touch these sewn-on lines
to see what's left of you today?
I found a worm growing on my skin
and the harder I scratch, the deeper it digs in.
Like an undesired map, we mark the passing time
in flesh with tiny rivulets and the scars of carving knives.
Like a second spine, a highway to the brain,
you can shout out all you like and it gets there just the same.
Does it pierce your every thought,
are you a puppet of your own design?
Can it pump your blood for you, or help you stay immobilized?
No amount of hope undoes this damage done.
Once it's nestled down inside,
the parasite's as good as won.
An enemy of skin, not a tumor but a spreading stain,
with the highest hopes to overtake and then erase.
A flashing call to arms, my body bat signal,
a beacon of our enmity ensnares the less careful.
I promise to resist,
I swear to keep the inside in.
My ears are deaf to every beat against this armored skin.
As the sun is my mirror, my witness
I will burn all the skin upon my chest.
Will it cut the exit off, or will you find you are your own disease?
Will you watch the pulsing breast
as you give up your autonomy?
Like a ribbon, like these trees
like my veins are choking me
Does it seal you up inside,
does it keep the wolves away?
Do you touch these sewn-on lines
to see if you're still here today?
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5. |
Plant or Animal
03:22
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Grace-green is my outside,
my inside red red red
like a ribbon candy in a nest.
Hold fast, hold fast.
My skin so like a photosynthesizer
I sprout and lay my egg shell creases
down along the ground.
We all came from this dirt anyway.
Hold fast, hold fast.
Inside, outside, organ, shell-case,
seed pod, lung, vein,
stalk, ground, and sky.
Polarity still, still,
polarity prison.
Conjunction and escape,
these stitches are only made of tape.
Waxed and planted, contradiction
in stem and meaty self.
Do I need the nothing?
Ceaseless circumvention.
Hold fast, hold fast.
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6. |
Gloria Wrist
04:11
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Heavybound like heaven trucks through the night to bring you sky, don't leave your wings on the table, you need them to leave this behind. The cyclops holds my views didactic and ships me off to learn the nature of my crime. Gentle one, don't lose those hands. I sleep now knowing of them. The light beneath your skin is paler than truth and just as blue. I will ask every star, what's summer worth? Every time, it dies. Gloria, gloria.
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Annika Bentley Rochester, New York
Singer-songwriter & composer from Rochester, NY
Photo by Keith Parkins
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Hundreds of Days
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Magnificent new work by super-talented harpist/composer, my friend & yours, Mary Lattimore! Spooky & sublime, soothing and a little bit sinister.
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Love these gentlemen and this, their latest effort. Catchy couplets, melodic basslines, equally hard and sweet--a perfect mood for all activities!
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I'm a huge Aloha fan & this is my favorite of theirs. Shimmers, shivers, polyrhythms, and super satisfying vocals that may have been recorded in Tony's closet. Nostalgic and also timeless.
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