Catherine Graindorge - Songs for the Dead (2024)

Following her thrilling collaboration with Iggy Pop (The Dictator/2022) Belgian composer/musician Catherine Graindorge returns with a luminous ensemble album - Collaborators include Simon Huw Jones (And Also the Trees) and Pascal Humbert (16 Horsepower). Instrumental and vocal songs of life, love and death. Inspired by mythology from the Greeks to the Beats. "The dark sounds she produces have a strange beauty…a miasma of blues, greys and blacks." – The Arts Desk

Songs for the Dead is a quietly understated epic, with plenty of shade and light in the playing and the compositions. Yet throughout, it carries the creeping sense of foreboding and inevitability that befit its title. As a seasoned composer for film and theatre, Graindorge understands the power of atmosphere in music and uses it to the full here, especially on the instrumentals “Small Trees” and “The Unvisited Garden,” where her violin and voice create a trembling, fragile stillness. Melodies unfurl slowly, always lyrical, and the silences are as important as the notes.

“Musically, this album is an evolution for me,” she says. “I try to push myself where I haven’t been before.”

Tracklist
01 - Eurydice
02 - Small Trees
03 - Orpheus' Head
04 - Joan
05 - This Is a Dream
06 - The Unvisited Garden
07 - Where the Buzzards Fly
08 - Time is Broken