Teho Teardo - Grief Is the Thing with Feathers '2019

Tracks list

Description
Teho Teardo - Grief is the Thing with Feathers - LP, CD, DLD (Specula Records)
Cillian Murphy of Peaky Blinders fame gives an astonishing performance in Enda
Walsh’s adaption on Max Porter’s award winning novel, Grief Is The
Thing With Feathers, a hear-wrenching meditation on love, loss and living.
For Teho this is the third episode of this ongoing wonderful collaboration with
Irish writer and director Enda Walsh and there’s more coming in the near
future!
It’s the story of a crow, two motherless children and their dad. Dad is
haunted by both terrible and funny memories.
Crow just wants to take care of them all and won’t leave the house until
he’s done.
Music has such a strong role on this play because it evokes their dead mum, it
passes through the walls like in a membrane and becomes something else,
it’s not what you hear, it’s what you think you’re
listening to. Music becomes the sound of thoughts, like sonar echoes it measures
loss and grief. 
On A Bit About Ghosts the wall of sound of cellos that opens the album is a
continuous dialog between strings and electronics, percussions and slide
guitars. Track after track Teho investigates several possibilities of
interaction between strings and electronics, completely dependant on each other:
one is wave and the other is shore. 
Strings aren’t a matter of arrangement, they build a powerful structure.
Nothing needs to be adorned here, no embellishments here, it’s about
grief. 
Even when the music evokes mum, her warmth and safety are delivered through
distant voices full of debris, like a dark matter whose limits we don’t
know.
This is probably Teho’s darkest work to date, an emotional lesson in
survival where all elements involved are waiting for their reinstatement into
the sphere of light.
The music for Grief Is The Thing with Feathers sounds to me, now, like my
childhood. It sounds like the loss of a parent. It sounds like playing with my
brother. It sounds like listening in to adult conversations. It sounds like
growing up, making mistakes, writing things down, tearing them up, failing,
trying again, falling in love. It sounds like remembering and mis-remembering
realising they are in tune with each other, teaching us gently how to live in
this strange world. 
Its hard to listen to Tehos music without feeling profoundly sad, and very
hopeful. And this is good. It is his gift to us. 
It sounds like imaginary territories perfectly bleaching into real ones. 
To me it sounds like the scratch of my pen on a page. Like the pitter patter
scrape of bone-on-wood, an imaginary crow walking across a real stage. It is
bird-like. It is children talking in their sleep. 
Tehos music doesnt sound like these things, it feels like these things. 
Its a part of me, and a part of you. 
Teho understands. He read the book, he looked me in the eye, he watched the
director and the actor whispering, huddling, dreaming how a literary thing could
become a theatrical thing without betraying it, and he understood immediately.
As if he could already hear it. 
He has always been hearing it. We simply needed to meet. 

Max Porter

Musicians
Written, recorded, mixed, produced by Teho Teardo at The Basement Recordings,
Roma, January 2017/September 2018
Teho Teardo - guitars, bass, rhodes piano, celesta, organ, modulad synths,
electricity, electronic objects, percussions, bells, autoharp, plastic crows.
Laura Bisceglia, Giovanna Famulari - cello
Ambra Chiara Michelangeli - viola, violin
Vanessa Cremaschi, Elena De Stabile - violin
Susanna Buffa - vocals
Elena Somarè - whistle
Gabriele Coen - bass clarinet, clarinet
Joe Lally - electronic tablas, bass
Mastering - Michael Schwabe at Monoposto, Dusseldorf

Tracklist:
01. Teho Teardo - A Bit About Ghosts
02. Teho Teardo - This Is The Story Of How Your Wife Died
03. Teho Teardo - London Offered Us Possible Mothers
04. Teho Teardo - A Demon Who Fed On Grief
05. Teho Teardo - Hop Sniff And Tackle
06. Teho Teardo - What We May Lose And What We Have Already Lost
07. Teho Teardo - You Fucked A Dentist
08. Teho Teardo - Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything

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