Elysian Fields - Transience of Life '2020

Tracks list

       Cáo Xuěqín’s 18th century novel, Dream of the Red
Chamber, little known in the West, is a Chinese national epic, occupying a role
in the literature of China roughly akin to that of Shakespeare in English. With
its principal plot arc of two beautiful, sensitive and aristocratic young people
whose love affair is doomed, the play it most resembles is Romeo and Juliet.
Despite this resemblance, the fabric from which Dream of the Red Chamber is
woven is shot through with many unfamiliar and unsettling threads. Punishment
and power relations, sexuality and servitude, the supernatural and the
insuperable decrees of fate speak of a milieu doubly alien. Looking in
Cáo’s crystal we not only peer through the walls of strange and
distant mansions, but backwards through the ages, to a China in the waning days
of the Qing dynasty, still rapt in dreams of antiquity, as yet unruffled by the
western winds of modernity and mercantilism soon to buffet its shores.

We were asked to set some of Cáo Xuěqín’s poems, in translation
by Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang, to music. The unworldly mood and motifs of
love, disillusionment, concern and grief fit perfectly with our own sensibility.
The idea of the impermanence of all things has long been a central one for
Elysian Fields; in the author of these ancient lines we found a kindred spirit.
Another fellow traveler, cross-cultural storyteller Lu Chen, joined us to
co-write a song to go alongside these poems. A final song was found surprisingly
in the catalog of the late Warren Zevon, whose "Indifference Of Heaven" seemed
almost to have sprung from the same pages. 

1.01 - Elysian Fields - Prologue to a Dream of Red Mansions (5:09)
1.02 - Elysian Fields - Transience of Life (4:28)
1.03 - Elysian Fields - Vain Longing (5:03)
1.04 - Elysian Fields - Spurned by the World (4:00)
1.05 - Elysian Fields - Separation from Dear Ones (2:26)
1.06 - Elysian Fields - An Outsider Undeserving of Love (4:20)
1.07 - Elysian Fields - Sorrow Amidst Joy (4:03)
1.08 - Elysian Fields - A Life Misspent (5:19)
1.09 - Elysian Fields - Union of Enemies (3:33)
1.10 - Elysian Fields - Indifference of Heaven (4:33)
1.11 - Elysian Fields - The Birds Scatter to the Wood (3:38) 

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