Two women recite 19th century odes to thunder and lightning over brooding guitar loops, their voices haunted by otherworldly echoes turning their verses into prescient dogma. The guitar is joined by bass and extra layers are added to the abstract guitar sounds as the music builds in intensity. Finally drums and the cries of a man trying to warn his fellow man about a future of ever more frequent and more powerful storms bring the music to a thunderous crescendo. His cries become more desperate as he struggles to be heard over the sounds of the machines. Eventually tiring, his voice becomes consumed by the mechanical noise he tried and failed to overcome.
"Storm Warning" began life as unsunset by afternatural (afternatural.bandcamp.com/track/unsunset), a track they describe as "an uncanny looped figure slowly drowned in shoegaze-inspired fuzzed-out reverb swells. Improvised in a single take in late November 2021, and released just days before news of the Omicron variant relit the fires of pandemic panic, “unsunset” is a reflection on a crisis within a crisis, the great plague becoming a fading distraction from the inexorable crumbling of the biosphere, forcing the world to look the other way while throwing into sharp relief the woeful inability of the human condition to respond with any sort of effectiveness to impending existential doom."
When I heard the track it immediately made me think of a storm brewing, so I asked if I could build on it, found some poems about storms and set to work building to a crescendo warning of ever more frequent and powerful storms driven by an ever warming climate.
The track was finished just days before storm Eunice tore through the UK leaving us stranded in Bristol waiting for the train service to be restored. There are more storms to come.
lyrics
The lightning is the shorthand of the storm,
That tells of chaos.
Midnight and moonlight...
As one in Hell may see the sudden form
Of God's fore-finger pointed as in blame.
...and bright shining stars.
How weird the scene!
Roaring like thunder,
The Dark
like soft music sighing,
is sulphur-warm
With hints of death;
Shadows on shadows
And thunder-clouds, whose lightnings intertwist,
Rack all the sky, and tear it into shreds,
Lightning-bright flashes,
And shake the air like Titians that have kiss'd!
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come,
The more storms come.
credits
from 0 To 1,
track released March 4, 2022
Music: Jim Purbrick and Jamie Matthews
Guitar: Jamie Matthews
Bass: Jim Purbrick
Vocals: Maria Kasper, Elouise Oyzon, Jim Purbrick
Words: Eric Mackay, Emily Brontë, Jim Purbrick
Photo: Jussi Ollila
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