Spring Special

If an object’s density is less than or equal to that of a liquid, it will float on the liquid’s surface; otherwise, it will sink. This is the principle of buoyancy, where an object displaces a volume of liquid equal to its weight. A buoy, designed specifically to float on water, serves as a perfect example.

People can float too—in saltwater, for instance, or metaphorically. During deep relaxation, you might feel as though you’re “floating” as well as during moments of emotional detachment or stress. Such feelings can stem from a broken heart, as beautifully captured in Julee Cruise’s dream pop gem “I Float Alone,” which is today’s song.

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Julee Cruise’s “I Float Alone” was written and produced by director David Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti. Lynch featured the song in Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, a concert performance he directed that starred Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Michael J. Anderson and Cruise herself. The avant-garde play was staged twice in 1989 as part of the New Music America Festival in New York. Footage from these performances was later compiled for a home video release in 1990, which is available on YouTube.

Danish composer and viola player Astrid Sonne’s first two albums were purely instrumental: “I’m so awful at writing [lyrics], I would do anything to avoid it,” she said in an interview back in 2019. Fortunately, she’s changed her mind: Sonne’s third album Great Doubt is filled with careful singer-songwriter-style lyrics while losing none of her experimental, classical-meets-electronic sound.

The track “Staying Here”, for example, features no percussion, but winds itself around a melody played on a church organ. Combined with the lyrics, “Lost my ring, here’s my palm,” the image is crystal clear: Someone is getting married.

Sonne has chosen a particular and evocative storytelling element: Wedding rings were already a thing in Ancient Egypt as well as in Greek and Roman antiquity. They have remained the symbol of loving devotion ever since.

Throughout the centuries, the rings varied in style: In 17th-century Europe, they often included an engraved “Poesy”; the Puritans, ever, uh, puritan, gifted their brides a thimble instead of a ring (although they were allowed to cut off the bottom of the thimble and wear that as a wedding band. My, my, Jeremiah!).

Some elements of the tradition are, however, a lot more recent: Men only started to wear wedding rings in the last century, and the diamond ring reached its fairytale-standard-status only as recently as 1948 when the jeweler house De Beers launched the slogan, “A Diamond is Forever.” As with all the other ring styles, the diamond will probably not really be forever—but the symbol of the ring itself, it seems, just might be.

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Although clouds seem to be as light as feathers, a typical fair-weather specimen can weigh something between one and two million pounds (500 to 1,000 tons). This weight is due to the large amount of water droplets that constitute the cloud.

Think about this the next time you see clouds moving on [sic] the sky. And make sure to turn on today’s song while watching the big fluffs. The listening experience, and the life story of the woman who composed the song, is just as sensational as the thought of millions of pounds floating above your head.

The creator of the song is Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, an Ethiopian woman who got to be known as the piano-playing nun. Born in 1923, Gebru was an acclaimed musician in her youth. At one point she even performed for Emperor Haile Selassie. However, Gebru’s life changed dramatically after she wasn’t allowed to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London under mysterious circumstances. 

She gave up music and for the next decade, she lived a secluded life in a hilltop monastery. After her new home had to close due to the patriarch's death, she returned to her family in Addis Ababa and gradually resumed playing the piano, composing idiosyncratic pieces that are equally influenced by ancient Ethiopian music and Western classical music. In the 1980s, Gebru fled Ethiopia due to the persecution of her religion under the dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam. She relocated to Jerusalem, where she lived and worked—as the first woman—for the Ethiopian Orthodox Patriarchy until her death in 2023. 

Before her passing, Gebru focused on publishing her work, editing bags full of manuscripts with the help of musician Maya Dunietz. Her debut vocal album Souvenirs, recorded between 1977 and 1985, was released in early 2024. It opens with today’s song—the beautiful and somehow feather-light “Clouds Moving on the Sky”.

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