Cut first, heal after: but what if a thought never heals? Sometimes the suffering and horror that suffuses the world brings you up short. There is no clear way out of the great collapse that gathers pace around us. Maybe, in those moments when we are brought to reckon with the dread nearness of it all, a way of thinking is severed, the thread is lost, and we can’t go back again. How To Cut A Thought was finished by Celestino in a FEMA work tent, under Arctic skies lit by the midnight sun, beside a flooded village, amid colleagues that had seen other worlds already end. Who hasn’t had their thought cut, their heart wounded by disaster? Everything is crumbling to dust, and this world is past the end of its allotted time. Who feels it knows it.

Side A, ‘How To Cut A Thought’, was created over a two year period; side B, ‘Late Fragment’ was a live improvisation, created without overdubs, in 2011. Both were finished in the Yukon, during 2014, at night on a Cold War base in the tundra. Celestino was the groundskeeper then, walking the grounds on the graveyard shift, absorbed by the vastness of the sky, completing music whose aim was to show us the abyss and honour those who struggle against it. This music exists to sound the depth of our loss, and its journey is made in the hope of returning with tokens of tomorrow, the good coin that promises the possibility of life, love and renewal. It is music that walks the perimeter for us still, an existential groundskeeper – taking care, watching out at the edge of the world, laying in the cut. -Francis Gooding

This cassette was dubbed in real time on chrome tape w/ j-card featuring a photo by G Celestino and audio mastering from Jae-soo Yi of Sonority Mastering.

Edition of 80