Caldera
A language, the ways of speaking that it grants, is a beautiful thing. In its twists and turns and alleys it is a medieval hilltop town, a gathering of unlikelies arms-length from each other.
Bring one word close to another, and things happen. They lean and jostle and avail, and meanings are made.
Think of passion, all that swirls around and in it. Then add com-, and there before and within you are the mechanics of a better day laid bare: compassion.
Think of sensual, all of the self-satisfying freight it can carry. Add con: suddenly there’s the other person, no longer in satisfaction-eclipse: consensual.
Think too of tempo. Add con- at the front, -rary at the back, and you’ve gone beautifully from the groove, through the one-off and impermanent, to a faithful visitation of the tenor of these very days: contemporary.
And, naturally, you might start with a visitation of the muse, and add a not so sonorous ic, and springing from that union can come a most compelling reason to live: music.
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Nights of Grief and Mystery has been one such gathering of unlikelies. Gregory Hoskins and myself met, a decade of life between us, a lifelong singer/songwriter and non-compliant shy spokesperson for no programme in particular. Then we started touring. And then recording our allegations. It’s gone beautifully well these twelve or so years.
Then, not so long ago, a break in the fragile sequence, and gone was feeling that we were just at the beginning of something. Moreso, we were at the end of something. Or, maybe, the end of all but everything we’d done. But Mr. Hoskins pushed, and I got the timeline wrong, and before we knew it, there were the makings of a new project. We started with chord, and agreed to not being entirely done – accord – and brought time passing into it, -re, and behold: record.
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Caldera is the new Grief and Mystery recording. It is how we made sense of and peace with the multifoliate blossom, the storm in the heavens, the surge in the fundament and the flirt with infinity that is love. It is nine tales of human frailty and grace under pressure, of the dread and the dreaming of grown up human love.
Caldera: the heat in the hothouse, the cross and crucible and excruciata, the cauldron and the crucial news of the heart in arousal and arrears and at rest.
Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
