Morning haikus and afternoon ragas on the long road to Tiznit


Stop Clickbait is a Slipped Disc killer - a Chrome extension that claims to identify clickbait, allowing the user to block similar content. Which prompted me to create that 100% click-repellent headline by fusing together the titles of two new albums I have been enjoying*. The headline definitely won't bring me 164,189 'readers' in a day or a phony blogging award. But if one person is swayed, it's job done. Ramon Goose's Long Road to Tiznit is a compressed - 37 minute - blues-inflected road trip from Marrakech to Tiznit on Morocco's Atlantic coast. Tiznit is a Berber settlement where, for me, the true Morocco begins. It was the scene of some of Paul Bowles' classic location recordings, and Ramon Goose juxtaposes old-school blues with jam sessions featuring local Berber musicians. Strange how in an increasingly blue world, blues as a music artform is so neglected. On Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas psych-folk exponent Buck Curran strips his art down to the bare essential of, mainly, acoustic guitar, aided and abetted on one track by bansuri flute master Nicolò Melocchi. This album occupies the penumbra between creative tension and creative pretension. Which is infinitely preferable to all the current exploitation of the penumbra between creativity and clickbait. Neither album is a masterpiece. Which is not a problem: because as explained in Jack Hawley's priceless translation of the Bhagavad Gita:
Release yourself from always trying to evaluate and judge everything. Disentangle from your habit pattern of seeing things as good or bad. The tendency to get trapped in apparent opposites is a common and debilitating malady.

* One of the unbreakable design rules for On An Overgrown Path is that the headline must not 'bust' - split into two lines - in the blog's non-mobile format. When I tested that unwieldy 61 character fused headline I was amused to find it fitted exactly into the blog's 985px width. Click-repellent lives!

No review samples used and no, I'm not endorsing Stop Clickbait. Instead my social media accounts are deleted. But new Overgrown Path posts are available via RSS/email by entering your email address in the right-hand sidebar. Copyrighted material is included for critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

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