England – Page 2

Paraadiso, Unison (2021)

August 28, 2021 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“TSVI & Seven Orbits debut their Paraadiso* project with a whorl of sweeping choral arrangements and staggering rhythms for Shanghai’s SVBKVLT powerhouse. Inspired by Italian folk music, noise, ancient compositions and rituals, the result is a sort of widescreen 4D soundworld, something like Enigma/FSOL’s Lifeforms bolstered by smashed/syncopated hard drums and emo arpeggios rendered in slow motion.

“Unison is the duo’s conception of ritual music for contemporary, collective physical experience, aka the rave. With a masterful grasp of technoid dramaturgy, its 10 tracks draw on ancient choral traditions as much as up-to-the-second rhythmic diffusion styles to suggest new ways of moving and being moved, with a pointed focus on synchronising social action and reaction.

“Following their 2020 debut, Seven Orbits approaches the project from an audio-visual background, bringing a highly animated structure to TSVI’s rugged rhythmic proprioceptions. Unison was created by the pair to be performed in live context with visual accompaniment, and clearly conveys a strong sense of movement through the audio alone, coming close to the kind of balletic dynamics of Jlin and Second Woman.

“For the strongest examples we advise checking the lush choral lather and polymetric slosh of ‘Liquid Matter’ finding the duo at their most uplifting, the knuckled scuzz of ‘Berserk’ for their rudest workout, or the killer arrangement of haunting ancient chorales and bombed out dembow swag in ‘Riflesso,’ coming off like Laszlo Hortobagyi meets Paul Marmota at their darkest and most theatric.” —Boomkat, see also their artist statement on bandcamp

The final track is titled “Paradiso terrestre.”

* The spelling of the group’s name as ‘Paraadiso’ is intentional

Ned Denny, B (After Dante) (2021)

July 19, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“Gustave Doré’s Beatrice is disappointingly bland, a strapping damsel in a nightgown, not that fierce beauty whose name the poet can barely utter. His angels, however, are sublime. It was important to me that we have an uplifting image on the cover, Dante being so associated with the infernal regions and the austere features of his face (which the large B was originally to have overlaid). A comedy is, of course, a story that ends well, and what better end could there be than coming face to face with ‘eternal light’? Such is, moreover, the ‘joy that man is meant for.’

[. . .]

“B was supposed to have come out in 2020, seven hundred years after the original’s probable 1320 completion (this latter number inscribing itself, miraculously, into the actual structure of the poem). Yet, happily perhaps, and due only to a delay in the editing process, it is instead appearing on the 700th anniversary of not only Dante’s death but the last Cathar’s prophecy – spoken from the flames – that ‘in seven hundred years the laurel will grow green again.’ It is also May, month of the Virgin, with the sun having just entered Gemini (Dante’s natal star and mine).” —Ned Denny for Carcanet Press, describing B (After Dante), his 2021 translation/adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy

“Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, Ned Denny’s baroque, line-by-line reimagining – the follow-up to his Seamus Heaney Prize-winning collection Unearthly Toys – shapes the Divine Comedy into nine hundred 144-syllable stanzas. Audacious, provocative and eminently readable, tender and brutal by turns, rooted in sacred doctrine yet with one eye on the profane modern world, this poet’s version – in the interpretative tradition of Chapman, Dryden and Pope – is a living, breathing Dante for our times. Hell has never seemed so savage, nor heaven so sublime.” —Carcanet Press

Purchase B (After Dante) from Carcanet Press here.

Read Denny’s full blogpost here.

Emma Safe’s “Between Three Worlds”

April 1, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“Taking influence from personal experience, classical mythology and Dante’s Commedia, concentrating particularly on existential and ontological themes, the works collected as Between Three Worlds explore human potential and human transience. Space and time is radically questioned. Figures are pulled between states of being; through sublime ascent, catastrophic destruction and the uneasy predicaments in-between. Avoiding idealism and with no certain answers, these works attempt to question different types of love, different states of being, examining the edges of existence and beyond.” [. . .] –Emma Safe, Between Three Worlds.

Tom Stoppard’s Bookshelf

February 17, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“Stoppard is a maniacal reader who collects first editions of writers he admires. Asked on the BBC radio show ‘Desert Island Discs’ in 1984 to choose the one book he’d bring to a desert island, he replied: Dante’s Inferno in a dual Italian/English version, so he could learn a language while reading a favorite. His idea of a good death, he’s said, would be to have a bookshelf fall on him, killing him instantly, while reading.” –Dwight Garner, “‘Tom Stoppard’ Tells of an Enormous Life Spent in Constant Motion,” New York Times review of Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life (February 15, 2021)

Contributed by Guy Raffa (University of Texas, Austin)

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (1947)

November 24, 2020 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

Chapter 3. 65.6: “In Canto XIII of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil enter a pathless wood full of withered trees. Hearing a mournful wailing but seeing no one, the poet stops and is advised by Virgil to break off a twig from one of the trees. Dante does so; the tree becomes dark with blood and begins to cry: ‘Perché mi scerpi? / non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno?’ (‘Why do you tear me? / Have you no spirit of pity?’). The trees are the suicides, those who have wantonly destroyed their lives and poisoned their souls and are therefore fixed for eternity in barren sterility. [. . .]”

Chapter 3. 65.7: “In Mexico, figures of Christ or the Virgin Mary are common features of house or garden walls as reminders of the suffering Christ assumed on behalf of all. The words also evoke the suffering figure of Faustus: the earlier ‘Regard’ recalls his hellish fall, but the emphasis here, as with the echoes of Eliot and Dante above, is on blood and sorrow and compassion. Faustus, in distress and anguish, cannot look up to heaven for the mercy that is there; one drop of Christ’s blood would save his soul, but he cannot avoid despair. Like Faustus, the Consul is unable to ask for relief, even though it is so immediately at hand. In an early draft [UBC 29-8, 1] Lowry was more explicit: ‘You have always secretly longed, like Christ, even like your own brother, to die.'” [. . .] — The Malcolm Lowry Project: Under The Volcano, June 2012.

See these and many more Dante-related annotations to Under the Volcano at the hypertext resource the Malcolm Lowry Project, sponsored by University of Otago (NZ).

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