We Speak Music
The Violet Mine Share New Album ‘White Night’
When up is down and black is white, how do you make sense of what makes no sense? Maintaining equanimity, innocence, and authenticity within a world of deep fakes, media manipulation, and 24-hour news is what inspired many of the ten songs on The Violet Mine’s new album White Night. Slated for release on February 16, 2024, White Night is a collaboration between singer-songwriter, Meredith Minogue and songwriter-guitarist, Jim Barry along with an all-star cast of local New York City musicians who have collaborated with the duo for years.
On their latest compilation, the band delivers their eclectic blend of alternative, melodic indie-folk and rock and roll. White Night is an atmospheric tapestry with splashes of new wave and dream pop that explores themes of vulnerability, exploitation, and faith.
The duo approaches the recording process like painting a picture. The recordings start as live band performances in the studio that are then layered with textures of other instruments to create the perfect environment for the lyrics to shine and tell the story of the song.
The opener, Perfect Host, begins with an organ swell and acoustic guitar sending an innocent songwriter into the uncertain world of the music business. The frantic, off-kilter rhythms of Some Say are reminiscent of a Punch & Judy puppet show going off the rails. Air Ride’s sleek stylized rock tells the story of a paranoid, panic-stricken traveler and a slick hijacker intersecting during the golden age of air travel. So, the Devil, an apocalyptic rainstorm drenched in a harmonium drone, closes the album.
Speaking of the focus track, The Violet Mine comments, “‘Do No Harm’ was written and recorded at home on the first day of the COVID lockdown in New York. The lyrics focus on the historical character of the plague doctor. These unqualified doctors traveled from town to town grifting desperate people who were dying from the disease. Their appearance, which included a primitive “respirator” fashioned from a beak stuffed with herbs to ward off bad air, signaled to townspeople that death was near.”
We Speak Music
Michele Ducci releases “Why You?” and full “Film for Songs: The Great Book of Nature” videos!
“Why You?” is the second part of “Film for Songs: The Great Book of Nature”, an animated short film by Michele Ducci and Letizia Mandolesi. The film, which contains two new songs, “Why Do I Wake Up Every Morning?” and “Why You?”, tells the story of an animated book called “The Great Book of Nature”, which itself purports to tell the story of a printed book by the same name.
“Why You?” is a jaunty fairground waltz with a big uplifting chorus, which appears to run counter to the on-screen events, evoking the Brechtian concept of the disengagement effect, in which the audience is encouraged to engage with the story intellectually rather than emotionally.
Set in a police state where music is banned and real thought is suppressed by the introduction of a dumbed down language (‘Bla Bla Bla’), the film introduces a man named Elpino, who buys an animated AI book called “The Great Book of Nature” and embarks on a Kafkaesque train journey, where an alien creature, Marsia Joy, who represents music, is pursued by a policeman for merely existing. Marsia can cry a flood of tears to put out fires caused by the oppressors and enclose violent pursuers in cocoons, turning them into butterflies.
Rather than talking about other things, the book talks about itself. Says Ducci, “The thing that interests me about AI is that at the bottom of what should preserve remembrances, and memories seems to be a memory without remembrance and remembrance without the memory that precedes each remembered memory.”
The “blink and you will miss it” ending provides a final bizarre twist to the tale.
Michele Ducci will perform live at ‘Nursery of Freedom’, an all-day event of live music, art, film and tattoos at New River Studios in London on Sunday 27th July.
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