I look up from the table and see the Moon, or half of it at least, hanging surreptitiously in the cloudless evening blue. “Hello Moon” I say, as I often find myself doing when I’m surprised to see it again after an absence, remembering She exists in her silent dance overhead. By the time I’ve finished dinner and another chapter of my book, I glance up but the sky has rotated its frame to pivot her behind the corner of the house: out of sight again. Just another fleeting meeting.

I go inside, tonight’s cooling off after the last few stifling days of heatwave; just as well, I’m tired, the heat’s kept me up and work’s been busy. I think again about trying to put some words down on music but I don’t know where to find them, don’t know what to say anymore. How can there be all of this but nothing comes out?

And I think that it’s in the not that everything lies. The unwritten, the unspoken, the unmade: dams and barriers behind which vast reservoirs of life and feeling reside. The scale of the “un-” betrays the depth of the matter built up behind, and it’s as though some miserly and frugal controller guards the outlet. Those downstream waiting for it to be opened again.

I sit down, close my eyes as I listen to Félicia’s Promenades, and forget that I can’t.

Piano chords, present and intimate beneath fingertips, are doled out sparingly but passionately into the echoic space that awaits them. We press our ear so eagerly to the source of this grateful newness that we hear all their components: the hammers and keys resetting in “Green”, the soft shifting of fabric and a creaking stool as our unseen pianist adjusts position in “Mauve”.

A warbling hum and jangling synths suffuse “Ocre”, as thought tiny beads of beryl glint out of a piece of ruddy earth as their facets catch the (moon?)light that examines them. Amazed and surprised to be picked up, “let me show you at last” they say quietly. It sits somewhat opposite opener “Blue”, who hangs in veiled reverb like black silk, life and instrumentation both a distant and helpless thought. The dam stands between.

I open my eyes and the words are all there in front of me. Permitted? Revealed? Escaped? Loosed regardless, like Felicia’s recordings, set free in Summer air to be dragged in the Moon’s wake away behind the rooftops.

Until next time.