Céline Dessberg // Selenge

Post by Misha //

If possible, I suggest pairing this song with a landscape containing some form of desolation.

Yesterday I drove five hours across the state to visit my parents and this came on just as I was careening through a canyon of two striated rock faces, products of an ancient glacial flood that tore through the middle of the state sometime during the last ice age. In this part of the country there was once a waterfall three times higher than Niagra Falls and a riverbed over a mile wide and 400 feet deep.

Today, what remains of those brutal flood waters is their memory on the land. It is a breathtaking, alien expanse without gentleness, especially before the green of spring comes in. Cold lakes that look like hard jewels set in the redbrown earth. Deep channels and scrubby plains of sagebrush carved into the basalt. Enormous boulders hundreds of feet high dotting the horizon, left stranded there thousands of years ago by a rush of water that defies imagination. Today, you can drive your car through what was once the path of destruction.

This song is far from desolate. And yet it is also not entirely un-otherworldly. Plucky and obscurely haunting. The perfect lush vacuum from which to view a 15,000 year old flood.

Buy Selenge (aka Сэлэнгэ) here. Out via That’s Love Records.