Amor de Días—the duo of Alasdair Maclean (Clientele) and Lupe Núñez-Fernández (Pipas)—just released debut album Street Of The Love Of Days via Merge. (Those of you who speak Spanish know that the band’s moniker translates to “love of days,” hence the album title.) Maclean and Núñez-Fernández worked on the 15-track LP for more than three years, and it features guest spots by the likes of Louis Philippe, Damon & Naomi, Gary Olson (Ladybug Transistor) and Danny Manners. Maclean and Núñez-Fernández will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with them.
Maclean: We had one of those real moments of tension in a bar recently: Two friends were drunkenly arguing over whether hares could change sex. It almost ended in dueling handbags, but the crisis was uneasily defused. As a precaution against this ever happening again, I decided to read up on hares. As far as I’m aware, I’ve never knowingly seen one. I knew that they were somehow linked to the moon and appeared in myths and legends, often as a “trickster” figure, often as a companion to witches. But beyond this, I realised, these graceful creatures were a mystery to me. A friend generously leant me The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thompson (a compendium of facts on every aspect of the hare, from mythology to zoology, written in the 1970s, which I can definitely recommend to any hare-curious readers) and from this I learned:
1. No, of course, hares cannot change sex, although it was a widely held folk belief that they could.
2. Unlike rabbits, they’re not good to eat at all. Their flesh is oily, dark and stringy.
3. In olden times, if a fisherman in Scotland was baiting his line, it was bad luck to even mention a hare. To see one was a disaster; the skipper would refuse to leave port.
4. In Renaissance painting, hares were used as a kind of nudge-nudge visual symbol for the female sexual organs.
5. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Celts all saw the hare as a sacred or magical animal.
And that’s only five things I learnt. I’m relieved to say I can now defuse pretty much any hare-based arguments that break out.
Video after the jump.
