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From The Desk Of Alasdair Roberts: Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry

Alasdair Roberts’ songs are difficult to digest. Like a large pill you can’t quite swallow, that lodges toward the back of the throat, they are dense, layered, poetic ballads coupled with a forcefully picked acoustic guitar, abrasively fragile vocals and a thick Scottish accent. His new self-titled album is not the kind of thing you put on while washing dishes. But it’s the kind of album you go back to again and again, trying to parse the lyrics, trying to understand why these songs grate at the base of your spine. Roberts will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new feature on him.

Tivadar

Roberts: In the summer of 2014, I was fortunate enough to spend some time in the grand and beautiful old city of Budapest. There, of course, I beheld myriad marvels, which other writers have covered more thoroughly than I can here; I also spent some time in the southern Hungarian city of Pécs, home of the Csontváry Museum, dedicated to that artist whose work I first discovered on that trip. Something about his paintings appealed to me greatly when I first set eyes upon them. His style was largely self-taught and very much his own, although his work engenders in me similar ineffable feelings as those I get from other painters (whom, I note with interest, all seem to be male in this instance) whose work I admire—artists who, on the surface of it would appear to have not so much in common: Samuel Palmer, Paul Nash, Lars Hertervig, Caspar David Friedrich, Nicolai Roerich. There’s a sort of mystical, spiritually infused atmosphere to all of their work that my inner romantic finds very captivating indeed.

Video after the jump.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndo3d98frZg