Note from the Editors
Summer is dead. We killed it without ceremony, without ritual, with the ease of stepping from one room into another. On one side of the equinox was summer, ripe to bursting with berries and plums; on the other lie rosehips and harvests, mists and falling leaves, rivers swelling with autumn rain. Summer is dead, a season scythed and threshed, and birds pick through the chaff of its bones. Summer is dead — and this instead is the season of slain gods, of bonfires and bright lanterns, of foxes and apples and bare black trees. In Glasgow the darkness falls swift and thick as snow from another country, falls like a crow from a high place.
This issue is full of feathers, wings, and flight, though not always at once; it is a collection of sorrows, magpies, swans and snakes. It is an issue to do with divinity, lovers, family, and the sometimes-perils of these mixing.
So glove your hands against the threading cold, against nettle-stings and embers. Listen for your name in the rushing of a river's rise, and when you hear it, run — or stand your ground with an instrument and unwavering intent.
Thanks are due to the fantastic Grant Jeffery for this issue's art; to our ever-brilliant contributors for their searing work; and to you, dear readers, without whom all our music would stay slumbering on its strings.