Revised ... under threat.
I had said if one of my kinder pals is right, you're in for a treat.
I've written nothing in The Orchard since February 15 and it's been longer still since you've had news of the Literary Lion, the would-be Al Capones of my part of Paris and other local tales. And there are new members of a cast of characters some of you mourned as if they'd died once I stopped blogging fables, perfectly factual, of one of this city's last real villages. I've also been asked to write about the so-called "side-effects" of a new drug, what I made of the Great French Upheaval of the past two months, and something many say you'd like to know: what Taliesin thinks of France's new copyright laws.
I think we're in for a magical mystery tournament in a glade bright with banners amid a number of stout trees and he's taken sides already. I've chosen my weapons for this joust too: words and music. More and freer music.
All that would be tiresome without shaking hands with a software genius ... or describing how I determined my weekly food shopping weighs about half as much as me ... or even straying into some white realms of witchcraft.
Yes. There is a musician in all this.
 The threat, mailed by Dom for the next log entry, was to cast an unpleasant spell if I left everything I'd said of a pagan musician there in The Orchard as well.
But it was a hunch, firmed up by Tia Knight herself at Blackwood Manor Music based on my admiration for quirky and stubborn classical musicians Glenn Gould and Scott Ross, both now deceased, that led me to hear their ways in this woman, who stepped forward to see me through Friday.
Ross was sometimes a harpsichord player. He was at home with J.S. Bach, G.F. Händel and Antonio Soler (as in this 'Récital de clavecin') and with the music of royal courts such as French ones. They usually had so little time for "witches" the poor women got toasted.
On her second album, Tia makes a 2003 'Homequest' return to such origins -- the simple, song-like and short keyboard piece 'Jester's Folly' does this beautifully -- while also using her woodwinds and electronics. She gets cast as New Age at the intriguing and varied Weed Music download site, where I pinched this picture. Now I'd really like to get to know a third album, 'Smoke and Mirrors' she announces as "swirling with sexy".
'Homequest' can have the same near hypnotic effect as high-flying mediaeval music, using repetitive forms and tonalities still widely thought alien to our modern ears until we simply listen to the music. It is an uplifting but laid-back album. Tones Tia borrows are almost outside time, like monastic Gregorian chant, a kind of "forever" music, coming and going as from nowhere yet simply being, here and now.
The smoke and mirrors will be sounds and how Tia plays with them. She offers an introduction to her range on a Knight music page, with no fewer than half a dozen pieces to download. The six songs are the kind of high-quality generosity and sharing I've come almost dangerously to expect from so many of the women about whom I write.
They are gifts.
Try 'Perfect Love', a track where the opening toll of seemingly vast ancient bells leading into an electronic drone -- very much a "dark age" and mediaeval thing, "drones" -- and overlaid departure lounge-type announcements make for motion amid stillness that can be conveyed only in music, not words of mine.
Still, until I've heard lots more music, given the stories I did tell in The Orchard, my feeling remains that 'In so dense a forest, we'll need a Knight like Tia' and how she came to my rescue. For watch out! Modern mediaeval ghosts are about...
..and some very powerful people did try to exile dreams.
11:59:09 PM link 
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