sibyllic splendour

Here I present unto you a marvelous discovery: Jeff Buckley reciting my favorite Edgar Allan Poe poem "Ulalume" - so much beauty crammed into one six-minute segment it makes you wanna cry.

The track is part of a spoken-word album produced by Hal Willner called "Closed on Account of Rabies," a compilation of various artists performing Poe's best-known works. Other highlights of the album include Iggy Pop, in his ironic Midwestern drawl, delivering a pitch-perfect, and disturbingly funny, version of "The Tell-Tale Heart; Marianne Faithfull reciting a seriously heartbreaking and utterly exquisite "Annabel Lee" (another personal favorite); and Christopher Walken performing "The Raven", a task for which he was presumably put on this earth to do.

The only way to listen to these tracks, by the way, is by assuming a recumbent position, preferably on something velvet, in a darkened room devoid of any temporal (i.e. digital) distractions. Seriously, don't try to listen to this at your desk and/or under fluorescents - doing so would be a serious effrontery to Poe's (and Buckley's) legacy and may incur some kind of a haunting. (Though a haunting would certainly add to the desired ambience.)