"In the circle of birches" – a reference to Perunwit, of course, with their "W kręgu dębów" ("In the circle of oaks"). The birches are the ones that once stood in the fields behind my building. The birch trees remind me of both Siberia and the American Indians. Two things that are actually quite close. As a child, I used to roam these fields and shoot with a bow I'd cobbled together from a branch and a piece of string. It would be a good idea to become an Indian again.
This is the first release since Demo 96 to feature electric guitar (there was a classical guitar riff on "Rois d'ici bas").
Also the first release to feature spinet. Maelifell returns to its folk roots, while also moving in an increasingly electronic direction, with sounds that don't try to emulate ancient instruments. At the same time, the first three tracks have an unintentional cold-wave feel, which Perunwit also had to some extent. There's something about the release that makes me uncomfortable. The melodies are cold, sad. They remind me of lonely morning walks, "white sky walks", when I was a teenager, in the streets of Sarreguemines and Neunkirch, and in the fields, of course. As I wrote in a self-interview:
I took countless walks around the neighborhood on lonely mornings as a teenager, instead of going to school. With gray skies, loneliness and Joy Division on my ears. "Down the dark streets, the houses looked the same". It's an experience of emptiness that has stayed with me forever and that I can recall at will. The emptiness of life; the adolescent intuition, incredibly powerful and devoid of the slightest doubt, that the world is empty, that we wander in it and that there's nothing else to expect, that existence is purposeless, that no event, no encounter, that nothing will ever really happen. An intuition I've never been able to shake off. Except – on my good days – by means of Faith, which gives back to the world a reality it had lost or doesn't have on its own.
The photo of Xavier on the cover is 25 years old. It's obviously not a question of "making believe" (and to whom, by the way?) that this is his current appearance, but of being out of time.
The mention of the synths used is a reference to what was done on some old DS albums (Jim Kirkwood, I believe) and electronic music in general; on the cover of Lauri Paisley's "Reel to Real", for example.
Side A : the first three tracks are from our last session. Side B : the next three tracks come from earlier sessions – the piano piece having been done by me alone, at home.
Our music is badly played, wobbly, always on the verge of going completely wrong. It's deliberate: even if our incompetence isn't deliberate, we accept our failings and don't limit ourselves to what we've mastered, and therefore play poorly on this or that poorly mastered instrument on our releases.
The mix is deliberately low. We wanted our music to be distant, muffled, remote in time, as if under metres and metres of earth.
A demo with almost no content; short, aborted tracks, lots of silence, a few sound effects.
A music of emptiness, absence and oblivion.
