Eric Satie - Socrate

It's Sunday morning. You've got a pot of dark roast fresh in the french press, maybe a couple of eggs or pancakes working for you and your squeeze. The hard floor is cold on your bare feet, but the sunshine streaming in the kitchen window promises the day will get better. Your routine is your routine on Sundays. The only choice left is whether some Marley or some easy Coltrane will soundtrack the morning.

Ease up, break the routine... try this.

'Trois Gymnopedies' has been force fed to us all of our lives and as a result the name Satie has become synonomous with stale syrup. Not so with this; not so with Socrate.

It's blessings are many. It's beauty sublime. It's solemnity appropriate. And even if the coffee sucks, the eggs burn, the sun never shines, and your squeeze gave you back your key, this will make up for all of it.

My Sunday mornings have blissed with it for 18 years. Your Sundays should be so good.

from NME upon its release:

Satie's 'Trois Gymnopedies' are so well known to the general public that even a twerp like Gary Numan has given their timeless melodies a mauling. Rather less popular is his long cantata 'Socrates'. This wonderful piece, at the same time serene and passionate and whose fragrant modal tunes and mechanical rhymes predate Glass and Reich by the best part of a century, forms the centrepiece of this collection of Satie's vocal music. Terrific.


And for all you hipsters out there who may think Satie just a little quaint, take note of these lyrics from the small song called Spleen*:

In an old square where the ocean
Of bad weather sits on its behind
On a sad bench with rain eyes
Is it a plump
Blond little bitch
You are missing
In this cabaret of uselessness
Which is our life?

*translated from the french

Hear pt1

Hear pt2