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From The Desk Of Amor De Días’ Alasdair Maclean: “Picnic At Hanging Rock”

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: I avoided this trippy, weirdly frightening Australian film for many years, because for some reason I thought it was about Dingoes stealing a baby. (Why? I have no idea.) Anyway, it’s not. The story goes like this: In the heat of a perfect summer afternoon in 1900, a schoolgirl disappears while exploring a strange rock formation in the bush. She’s never found, but odd and inexplicable clues come to light as the story progresses. The overall atmosphere is best described by the movie’s epigraph, a poem by Edgar Allen Poe: “All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream.” The heat rises and shimmers over the countryside, besieging the stultifying rooms and corridors of the Edwardian academy the girls are taught in. Like Jonathan Miller’s classic 1966 TV adaptation of Alice In Wonderland, the sinister, dreamy heat of summer itself should have been given a credit as a character.

Video after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08e9QqQP7sY