Image by Liv Anastasia Ikkala, dress by Maja Brix.
Deerest friends, how are you all faring?!
I'm thinking of those of you about to go into national lockdown in the UK and those Stateside about to experience the elections...and so many more of you in other countries with their own particular new and constantly changing rules and restrictions right now.
To those of you feeling the different struggles and strains of loneliness or claustrophobia, overwhelm and anxiety on an individual and global scale, I'm sending a huge virtual hug. (Oh, and props if you're actually doing just fine thanks, you beacons of inner-stability and Zen).
So, I want to let you know that tomorrow (Wed 4 November) Light, Console Me, my new mini EP, will be released.
This three-movement piece also features the stunning playing of Gambian kora master Sefo Kanuteh. It can be pre-ordered exclusively as a download on my Bandcamp page now and you'll receive track 1 right away!
So, those of you here for the extended edition, let me tell you the story of how this work came about. I was sitting in my studio back in March, at the very beginning of these weird-ass times, when a very special lady called Daisy Lees, who runs Arts La'Olam, called me quite out of the blue.
I remember the sky that day was a gunmetal grey, a sulking day that was refusing to rain. I’d just made a filter coffee and the vapour daintily waltzed in the air. For a moment, things felt almost normal.
Daisy told me she'd had the idea that I should take the Mourner’s Kaddish - an Aramaic prayer from the Jewish tradition - as a starting point for a new work and write something that somehow reflected on those themes of grief and loss. It seemed relevant, given what was unfolding in the world.
That's interesting, I said.
I told Daisy that for ages I’d wanted to write a piece about the ways we mourn, the ways we remember the dead. I mean, I didn't intend it that way, but it has accidentally become a bit of a specialist subject of mine (gallows humour, I know).
But I've long been fascinated by the story of elephants who revisit the resting place of the matriarch, taking turns to touch and stroke the bones, forming their own kind of wake.
And in the human world, in my own life, I think of the rabbi who cut the silk scarf I wore around my neck at my mother’s burial over a decade ago, a ritual gesture that deftly acknowledges the rage and grief that comes with loss. I think of the rocks or flowers we place upon gravestones. And the Ugandan friend kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army, whose family wrapped a banana stem in a white cloth tall as a man and buried it, believing he was dead and gone.
Scattered bones, a severed shoot, a pebble, a torn up cloth.
It seems that it runs deep in us, the need to turn what is so incomprehensible, huge and ungraspable into something small and tangible: a moment, an act, an object.
I turned the challenge of writing a response to the Kaddish over and over in my mind as the lockdowns, closed borders, infection and death counts rose. I was in Copenhagen when this all began and I've been here ever since, feeling the strange dislocation of watching events unfold in my homeland from a distance.
And slowly the work found it's own feet, and voice. I listened to other artists' versions of or responses to the Kaddish: everything from the Hasidic Kaddish sung by a New York cantor, to Ravel, Barbara Streisand, Yemeni-Israeli diva Ofra Haza and of course, the wonderful Leonard Cohen (one of his final songs, 'You Want It Darker' references the Kaddish in many interesting ways).
(“You’re dying, but you don’t have to cooperate so enthusiastically with the process,” Leonard Cohen told The New Yorker a few years before his death between cigarettes and tequila. Legend).
The first song arose from an image of a hospital room giving way to a vast sky. I was seeing through the eyes of the patient themselves - who was longing to give up the fight but held back by the memory of the ones they'd leave behind - Movement I: Departing.
For the second song, I found myself in the shoes of that loved one, pacing up and down the hallway waiting for news (Movement Ii : Awaiting).
And for the third and final song (based on a beautiful folk song from Sefo's tradition), I was one among a congregation of many ('oh these nights, we have cursed and we have cried/Tangled in reeds before we’re swallowed by the sky'), finding comfort in the collective experience.
I was lucky enough to borrow some stunning clothes from Copenhagen-based designer Maja Brix for the shoot and when I visited her at her atelier in the centre of town, she told me she'd just finished a commission of her own : designing a silk robe for an elderly man to be buried in, according to his family's wishes. So coincidentally she had herself been thinking a lot about death and its relationship to ritual and ceremony.
Later, the brilliant Liv who took these photos and created the video for 'Light, Console Me' suggested we travel an hour south of Copenhagen to an old chalk mine to create the images. The night before, I read that this mine was once, 63 million years back, a huge web of coral, a sea bed 100 metres under the ocean that teemed with tropical life.
And as we shoot, the only sound other than the stormy wind, is of children chipping and chiseling the remains of these sea creatures - urchins, crabs, snails, ammonites, mosasaurs - who died longer ago than we can even begin to fathom. It seemed kind of apt.
I hope these songs provide comfort, space to reflect, maybe even form precious pictures in your own minds. And you hearing, interacting and engaging with what I do truly means the world to me, so thank you as ever and as never before!
Also, if you have the means and the inclination to purchase my music on Bandcamp, rather than just stream, please do - it's deeply appreciated.
