What do you do when the world is ending before your very eyes? You internalize the pain, you weaponize yourself. “Some kind of violence you feel in the body, my body, my body,” sings Emily Wells in “Blood Brother.” This empathy to the point of self-sacrifice runs like a red thread through REGARDS TO THE END – the twelfth album of the American multi-instrumentalist.
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On a total of ten songs, Wells sings about the end of man – both on the material and on the apocalyptic level. The AIDS epidemic is of particular importance to the 40-year-old musician, as is climate change – two issues that at first glance don’t seem to have much to do with each other. Only when you listen closely does the importance of the body, of human destruction, appear to be the focus of both.
Words become images
Pieces such as “Come On Kiki”, “David’s Got A Problem” and “Arnie And Bill To The Rescue” are dedicated to the life and work of important artists who or their partners died of AIDS – including the German-American sculptor Kiki Smith and David Wojnarowicz, a well-known artist and AIDS activist from New York. All of them are not forgotten by Wells and receive a musical requiem on REGARDS TO THE END.
And what a thing. With her new record, Emily Wells has created an extremely complex work of art, half orchestral, half minimalist. Electronic elements are joined by flute and violin loops, the sounds waft and mix into a homogeneous sound mixture. And above all lies Well’s voice, which itself becomes an instrument when it stretches the tones unspeakably long, encompassing octaves in one breath. Words become images here, her poetic lines of text are intended to convey feelings, not facts. And the feeling stays.
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