The background story is this. My friends, the Berlin-based band, Feline and Strange, spent much of the last year preparing and recording a new album, financed via crowdfunding and personal loans.
The launch would have been on 4th April, followed by an extensive tour. Lockdown put paid to all that. The album, “trigger warning” is an unflinching look at aspects of our world: sometimes bleak; sometimes pained; sometimes funny; always uncompromising. Operatic in its scope. I have supported them via Patreon for about 4 years, and feel proud to be a small part of their story.
Listening to Vanity Fair, the final track on the album, put me in mind of a mediaeval Totentanz, a Dance of Death. The gaunt figure of Death waltzing with the revellers as the band plays...
Then I thought that maybe the whole album was a Totentanz – each song an encounter with Death in his or her many guises.
And also, of course, Death has been among us recently. As someone who succumbed to a maybe-COVID earlier in the year, I've also thought about him/her a lot recently.
So. This is my challenge. During #artweeksfromhome I aim to produce a series of little Deaths. Linocut postcards depicting the Reaper tripping the Light Fandango through our world. Each image drawing on one of the 13 songs on the album.
I will post on this blog as the project unfolds.
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