Indie Folk Sounds #2 - Emily Jane White
"Wild Tigers I Have Known" is included in the Dark Undercoat album.

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space
Directly from the Soviet Archives. This is Valentina Tereshkova, minutes before being launched aboard Vostok-6 as the first woman in space, June 16 1963. The photo is a cover of the book "Propaganda: Photographs from Soviet Archives by Mark Holborn".

In 1963, Valentina married Andrian Nikolayev, another Russian cosmonaut. Their daughter, Elena Andrianovna, became an object of medical curiosity for being the first child born from parents that have both travelled into space.

Valentina Tereshkova won the International Women of the Year Association's "Woman of the Century" award in 2000.

Indie Folk Sounds #1 - Marisa Nadler
This is the first of a series of posts on Indie Folk Sounds.
For the first post I chose this hypnotic-psychedelic live version of Marisa Nadler's Fifty Five Falls. Enjoy!

Courage
We know what trembles on the scales,
and what we must steel ourselves to face.
The bravest hour strikes on our clocks:
may courage not abandon us!
Let bullets kill us—we are not afraid,
nor are we bitter, though our housetops fall.
We will preserve you, Russian speech,
from servitude in foreign chains,
keep you alive, great Russian word,
fit for the songs of our children's children,
pure on their tongues, and free.

Anna Akhmatova, 1942



A good selection of bi-lingual poems by Anna Akhmatova can be found on this page. Translations by Andrey Kneller.

"If you could say it with words, there would be no reason to paint"
Edward Hooper