Good afternoon cool friends,

What is up! Hope you're well. Today's newsletter is on an obscure theme, but I think you're going to enjoy it – it's all about lost music by women.

Here's the beautiful story of Mirry Lomer, who had… an entire music career for an audience of one. She composed music and her nephew recorded it. He preserved loads of secondary materials too, films and photographs and poems she wrote. A beautiful project to make this body of work and a beautiful project to bring it to wider light:

we invited director Camella Kirk to re-work some of the found footage, which has brought magical new insights into Mirry and her life, her talent, warmth and her character. Camella highlighted the poetic rapport between Mirry and Geoffrey, who had great fun creating these experimental, intimate vignettes together. We witness them playing with camera angles and set-ups, lingering sometimes at length on details of flowers and the landscapes close to where they lived, illuminated by trippy hyperreal colours. The dual stereoscopic slides demand you look and look again. We pored over them and chose a selection, which you see here and throughout the record artwork.

https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2020/12/mirry-music-album-release/

A near-contemporary of Mirry's, Zabelle Panosian, recorded for Columbia Records in 1918. This article was written, it seems, before more of her music was found, but you can listen to an album by her here and if you like podcasts there is one here, might be nice if you fancy a run this evening. Here's the article anyway:

Zabelle Panosian recorded her first sides, including her masterpiece, Groung. I first heard it about a decade ago on a broken copy of the disc and worked for days, obsessively, to restore it, ultimately publishing it on my compilation To What Strange Place in 2011. Tens of thousands of people have heard it since then, and it was arranged for strings and played by the Kronos Quartet in both New York and Yerevan a couple of years ago.

https://musicofarmenia.com/zabellepanosian

Connie Converse was folk singer/songwriter ahead of her time. There are links to her music in the article and I love these details of her life growing up and making things fun for her brother:

One of Phil’s favorite memories is of Connie painting on the sewing room wall a life-sized portrait of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, which she then used as the backdrop to performances for her brothers. “At the time,” he says, “I had no idea other little boys weren’t a tenth as lucky as me.” Phil is biased, of course, but Connie was objectively remarkable. She was a polymath, and when she wasn’t inventing games to cure her brothers’ boredom, she was reading and memorizing poetry or the biographical details of famous politicians and explorers. Once, she and Phil — “Mostly Sis,” says Phil — mapped out the entire journey in Pilgrim’s Progress, meticulously diagramming locations like the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Slough of Despond.

https://www.theawl.com/2010/08/the-story-of-connie-converse/

Have a lovely weekend,

A xx.