Aufklarung: My mistress eyes

In the end is the beginning

Five "cornerstone" poems by authors whose work marked Europe's (and the whole world's) literary history - the famous Shakespeare sonnet My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun, Wordsworth's The Solitary Reaper and She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, Home Is Where One Starts From by T. S. Eliot (from the Four Quartets) and When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats - set to music in an ambitious yet unpretentious album, merging past and modern resonances in a peculiarly attractive mix.

Melodies that sound both unusual and weirdly familiar, like almost forgotten lullabies from a faraway childhood, are accented by dainty instrumentations (My Mistress' Eyes), engrossing atmospheric pads, rocking rhythms and crystalline violins (The Solitary Reaper), sweet flutes, piano arpeggios and heavy strings (Home Is..., She Dwelt..., When You Are Old) and what has to be the biggest oddity of this album - the vocals. It was a really daring move on the composer's part to use exclusively synthetic "female" voices on songs comprised of poetry set to music, of all things - a decision that could easily defy the purpose by ruining all the immaculately constructed architecture of the album. But thanks to precisely its own particularity, it does not.

That said, I must confess my mixed feelings about the software generated "voice" - the handiwork that was done on it so it could actually pronounce the words is decidedly admirable, but on the other hand, the awareness that it's not a real singer we are listening to, risks becoming more and more nagging and somewhat uncomfortable; at the same time, though, this eerie mechanical sound often takes on a texture that feels curiously warm and "alive", a hybrid quality which gives the impression that some kind of strange creature is singing these verses - a half-human robot or an alien mermaid. There is a childlike purity in the "voice" which manages to be expressive, and even touching, in a riveting, although a little unsettling way.

The five poems in the collection have been wisely chosen and arranged in order, recounting the infinite circle of love, life and death, from which no one escapes: in our beginning is our end, and in our end is our beginning (it was probably not by chance that, deliberately or subconsciously, the poem that contains exactly this phrase was placed right in the middle of the tracks, signalling the simultaneous end and beginning of the cycle, the meeting point of opposites around which everything revolves). A serene philosophical contemplation of joy through sorrow, light through darkness and the inverse - of the intricate web of nuances and contradictions that make up our existence.

NOTE: This album is no longer available on Jamendo. It has been replaced by a newer, reworked version with a lot of improvement in the arrangements and synthetic vocals but missing three of the original's titles.