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1. |
Still Friends
04:45
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A winter-white sky, the love of my life
That’s how it was on the year that we met
Now it’s winter again, seven years since then
We don’t share a bed, oh, but we are still friends
It all passed us by in the blink of an eye
And that’s what makes it meaningful and meaningless too
On the south west coast, you and I alone
The world looks more beautiful when you are in love
We woke to the sea and walked through the town
Your heart was my heart and my eyes were your eyes
You sat on the sand darkened by rain
And looked towards a distance that you couldn’t see
I want to believe that there’s more to this life
Than living to die for a moment in time
The simplicity of it scares me so much
A brief flash of light between two separate darks
That’s why I sing and that’s why I write
To capture the beauty before it’s gone
It’s why I still care for you, why I always will
I can’t bear to die without you in my life
But I don’t know about your life now
There’s nothing to know about my life now
Take whatever you want from me
And carry it with you where you go love
Cause I want to be as empty
As Oslo’s islands in the autumn
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2. |
Firethorn
04:20
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Staring out the window it is autumn I am still alone
The firethorn’s in shadow, oh, the endless bright days I can’t cope
I just saw a friend he stayed for days and then he took a train
He always cheers me up and I am grateful for him and our time
People come they always go right back to lives that are all their own
And then we’re left to wonder just how often they think about
All we ever have’s ourselves and sometimes I guess that’s enough
But then we get so tired and we just want to leave our own heads
Six years since we first met
In sea light on the hillside
On the western coastline
In the college town there
All those cold night we were drunk and high
And I’m still hungover
Now we live in the afterglow
Of the time we shared there, of the selves we shed there
Now you say that you feel so lost
Whatever it is, I hope you find it
I dream of cities I’ll never see
And long for a life that could fulfil me
Oh, my life might never change
I do a lot of nothing
I guess I’ll write another song
Try to write some poetry
If I could just stop thinking of
B-b-b-being dead
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3. |
I Never Want To Wake
04:01
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It’s a nightmare but I never want to wake
From the sweet love that surrounds me every day
From my best friends all their wisdom and their grace
From an old love and the beauty that we made
From everyone I’ve ever known
Because I love them all in their own way
I’m dreaming alone but only in dying
You’re dreaming alone but only in dying
We’re dreaming alone but only in dying
It’s a sad dream but I never want to wake
From the dead stars in their centuries of dark
From an island in the cold grey Nordic air
From the starlings in the setting western sky
From the river that runs green through my city
To the tragic end of everything
It doesn’t matter how I feel anyway
Happy, sad; I’m empty as ice inside
It doesn’t matter what I do anyway
Live or die or don’t live until I do
Another night alone in my quiet room
Reflections of myself in a dark window
What keeps me from my life is a pane of glass
My apathy and this indifferent world I see
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4. |
Landscapes & Portraits
04:29
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I’ve been alone since the night you left
In my room and in the world
On the western coast // With the Irish Sea
In the heatwave sun where I used to live
In the fields or the galleries
With the landscapes and portraits
Where I saw your face // In another girl
And I welled up in that quiet room
Or on a train through the Nordic day
Where I went just to get away
I saw beauty // I cannot describe
And I came to terms with my loneliness
Took a lot of time till I felt fine (Just living days without you)
I guess it was the same for you as well (In the autumn of your new life)
There’s nothing I can feel for you but love (Even from a distance)
I know Bergen was beautiful
The beauty filled my mind
As I walked alone through quiet streets
And felt at peace with everything
And I know my life is meaningless
But you were a meaning to me
When I was young and I didn’t know
You still lose what you won’t let go
Like the love of your life
On the third of July
In a garden of birds
And the memory still hurts
I was smoking in the garden in November
When I opened my eyes to see her there
It all feels like a dream now but I swear that
Her hair was the colour of moonlight
Then I lay in bed with the bird song in the blue sky
And I closed my eyes to see her there
Oh, I feel life more intensely drunk and dreaming
And the emptiness enters when I wake
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5. |
Wax In A Flame
05:35
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I think and therefore I am
Something, someone
Who’s stupid enough to think I am anything
Thousands of stars might fall for me anyway
But really it’s just winter
Turning to spring
Only a body born now and not again
Or maybe my mind is held captive by my skin
The world is wax in a flame
Malleable, it’s just what I know
And all that I know is I don’t know anything
Just that I am alive and I’m gonna die x2
I didn’t know who I was when you left
Cos you were my sun
And it got so dark in summer light, love
I went off to the city of rain then
In late October
To mend my broken heart and get over you
But in all of our lives there is sorrow
You take it with you
And then it’s gone and you cry for nothing
I just can’t quite believe
It’s 25 years//Since my first breath//Of this cold air
And I just can’t quite believe
It’s 7 years since//We first met in//My friend’s garden
Time is a ruthless stream
It takes my breath away//Took my love away//Takes my life someday
Have a long and beautiful life, love
Show the world all the poetry I saw
In your eyes, in your mind, in your warm heart
Let it in to yourself like sunlight
Alone in the brilliant light with death heavy on my mind
There’s no transcendence, it’s just dark
And I’ll never quite get over that this is our only life
It’s transitory and therefore light
I may never live this life but I will watch from the sides, love
I’ll take it all in and write it down
And now I just crave connection with someone outside my bedroom
I’ll walk through spring light and meet you there
Forever in search of something invisible and weightless
I’ll find it somewhere in someone eyes
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6. |
Bergen
05:06
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It’s been an awful year since I was here with you
You walked me through the autumn cold
Through the pretty streets to park of statues
And that feels like our love now, suspended in
Frames and songs and poems I wrote
And memories of yours I don’t know
It’s that I feel lonely only that I know
How it felt to share air with you
And see your dying eyes take it all in
Then I took a train from Oslo’s afternoon
I saw the moving window’s view
All the mountains under snow
And all the little towns I’ll never visit
I will never capture them in words or song
And that’s okay with me
I’ve got memory
I sat there every night and I watched the water-lights
From the traffic and the tops of buildings
And boats that moved through the black harbour
I smoked to keep myself warm, to feel the nicotine
With some music just to keep me company
Oh, Elliott you’re always with me
On every street I walked down I saw new beauty born
The painted white clapboard houses
And the fjords so dark under the grey sky
I didn’t have to talk or to prove myself
Sometimes I don’t have the fight for
This life that feels like a contest
I found a solace in all the pictures on the wall
A history of transposition
Transcendence in the paint on paper
And that is all I want now, to make something true
Something that moves beyond my death
To be heard or read or felt for centuries
Then I took a train from Bergen in the rain
I saw the lights shimmering below
Oh, what a sight and what a life
I thought of living, thought of dying
How could I be satisfied with only this?
And how could I not be
Satisfied?
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7. |
Disconnected
04:13
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Morning, with the thin grey clouds above me
Till they pass in a breeze as brief as life
Nothing can fulfil me
And nothing fills this emptiness
Afternoon in a bright green garden
Where there’s so much life and it passes by me
No-one can transcend this
And no-one can find rest in this
Evening, longing in the falling blue light
Till it deepens to a black as dark as death
No city can complete me
No winter town more meaningful
But I’ll be okay // In the modern world with
All the riches of the western sun
All the screens that take away my time
All the shit I buy to feel fulfilled
All the pleasure that they sell to me
I need some connection, I feel disconnected
From the screen-dulled world
But I scroll from page to page to page
I’m choking on the hollow air
Until I want my breath to stop
Always our lives are a kind of fracture
Between the one outside and there’s one inside me
Only love can bridge this
And beauty alone can make me whole
But I’ll make my way // Through connected days with
All the history of human art
All the books I read to feel alive
All the poetry that fills my mind
All the songs I write to mark my time
I don’t remember the last time in my life that I felt alright x2
I need some connection, I feel disconnected
From the screen-dulled world
So I read from page to page to page
Until I find a meaning there
In a heaven of imagined life
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8. |
February 27th 2019
04:16
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Winter felt like spring outside today
In a garden in the city
Dear Life and coffee in the city
I read of trains and that’s my longing
Blue sky, no clouds, gold birds, deep shadows
It’s exhausting, all this beauty
Alone all afternoon and I don’t speak
But there’s a language in my silence
Night now, inky blue sky, orange light
In the windows, lives I don’t know
The kind of day that makes me want to live
Almost makes me want to die to
Stop pretending this won’t end
Stop indulging all my daydreams
Stop pretending I’m a poet
Stop indulging simple pleasure
There’s a ghost of a man in the mirror
There’s a shadow me in the window
Doesn’t look like me anymore
Saw the ghost of you in the winter light
Saw the shadow of you in a happy dream
She doesn’t look like you anymore
All my life’s an illusion I know that
God, I know that
All I think, all I feel is a dark cloud
In a soft wind
Everyone in this world that I love is
Gonna die too
And everything that I’ve made is a mayfly
In the autumn
But I’ll live and I’ll live and I’ll take in
All this beauty
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9. |
A Constant Loss
04:58
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I felt the slow clap of her heart
Solitary // in its cage of white
It beats for nothing
My mother asleep beside her mother
Their beauty bright // in the strange spring light
I sing for their lives
In that sad and sweet side I saw
That all our lives // are a constant loss
Of what we hold dear
Outside I saw the fields
And powerlines // under a wide grey sky
Time keeps on passing
Life’s just a lucid dream and
Death’s what we wake to // when it ends someday
So wake before then
I saw the death in her eyes
And I felt that weight on me
A history of mothers
A progeny of loss
All that time and grief astounds me
Every life an afterglow
I didn’t know the depths of her life
Or the achings of her heart
A century of longings
Unheard in silent dark
The banality confounds
She’ll never get another go
Death in the sickroom // her body a statue
I wanted to see her breath
Because I know consciousness is air
The length of a lifetime // is never a long time
No matter how far you get through
Your body’s slow return to dust night
I am so scared I have made myself sick with it
Death-thoughts in the darkest rooms of the night
I repress and pretend that I’ll never die
But oh, God, I’ll never wake from this
Sad dream, this beautiful nightmare
So take me back to the womb that birthed
Me almost 26 years ago
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10. |
Blurred Horizon
04:45
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We drove through the summer fields, country roads, gold light
Oh, my God, there was a strangeness to your whole life
That you retold to me there as the world passed
Far behind us like our better days
I’ve been sleepwalking through days since I saw you
All those years just disappeared, they never happened
And I feel like I’m cast adrift in the present
Oh, the past; that blurred horizon
As I move away from it close to death’s shore
Where you said it is just peace inside a white light
No, I never believed in that, but I still hope
There’s a truth in it for you, my friend
We moved east through England as evening light fell
To see an old friend, to learn of his life
A comfort, a fear, there’s really no change
The fields are still fields, his heart’s still his heart
River bright, summer night, the city alive
Life amidst life, dust amongst dust
On Sunday we parted in a downpour of rain
It wasn’t quite sad, profound or an end
More like the streams of our lives intertwined
As one for a while, to flow alone again
We’ll always have those days of youth and rain
Clean littoral light // The end of childhood
The start of this love // That I have for you
Drunk and high one warm spring night
The moon-rippled sea // We talked for hours
The distant lights shone // Our future dark, unknown
All those years away, my God, we’ve aged
But I feel the same // I will forever
Cos I can’t transcend // This numb, static state
Oh, my friends, my broken-hearted friends
You’ll be alright // Tonight, tomorrow
Wherever you are // But I’m lost, I’m lost
The lonely weight of life’s the same for you
As heavy as air // So full and empty
So, you’re not alone // A truth we all share
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11. |
Dublin
04:46
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We walked west with heavy heads
Our mouths were dry from cigarettes
But just to be in Dublin for a moment
I felt alright
You made me smile, you made me feel alive
Phoenix Park in sheets of rain
Your sombre face, our silent pain
There’s nothing to be done and nothing to be said
I want to be quiet
I want to be still, I want to be nothing for a while
In nocturne Liffey’s black and gold
Glad I was with you not alone
Your body has a kind of beauty that my body does not contain
I know it does
I see it every time I see you
The fallen stars of city lights
Flickered in to sudden life
As we descended through the purple evening air
And in to the fields
I saw the nothing of my life right then
Life keeps quickening
It’s more than a decade since we became friends
Even now I have
Nostalgia for days that have only just passed
But every one is lost
Oh, to find some rest
Here in the rushing dark river of time
Night-time, August, drunken orbits
Passing by through other people’s lives
Consciousnesses side-by-side
Oh, the distance is almost intangible
Walking cities ghost-like lonely
The place remains our bodies disappear
Twilit Ireland heavy rain
Over all the living and all the dead
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12. |
Weltschmerz
03:18
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It’s been so long but I’m still here
Stuck inside of a state of mind
An absentee in my own life
But this lost love and this sadness
Just the pain of a single heart
Unknowable under my skin
There’s still crying on the border
From a child who was never young
Her beat’s as beautiful and brief
And then Pete died, he was 35
Left a wife with a child inside
She’ll never see her father’s eyes
And my mother lost her mother
Left so much that was never said
That silent dust is all we are
What could soothe the raw wound
Of that it’s like to be alive?
Oh, it hurts, oh, God, it hurts until it doesn’t
All the pain and beauty
Will intertwine throughout your life
Find a why and any how can be endured
Meaning’s in the small things
Her hand inside my hand that night
Looking in to someone’s eyes and there’s a world there
Drunk at dawn in a field in Dorset
Seven hearts all awake in the same dream
You were high, held my hand I felt so alive
I’m reminded of you, my first love
Another field, another life, another autumn
I’m the same, haven’t changed in a long time
All I need is to know and to love sometimes
And to keep in my mind all this suicide
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