Live your life

Déjà un nouvel album de Mt Eerie. Phil Elverum avait visiblement encore pas mal de choses à chanter après le décès prématuré de son épouse Genevieve.

Musicalement peut-être un poil plus varié que le précédent, Now Only est toujours emprunt de l'infinie tristesse de son auteur, qui s'interroge désormais sur lui, son existence et son devenir. L'auteur semble recourir à l'écriture libre, de telle sorte qu'on suit son esprit vagabonder d'idées en considérations, et vice versa.

Dans "Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup", il fait ainsi référence à deux peintures de cet artiste norvégien du début du XXème. Il m'a ici paru intéressant de les mettre en regard avec les paroles de ce morceau.

On commence par "Midsummer Eve Bonfire"

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[...] I sit and notice the painting of bonfires on the hillside and hanging smoke in the valleys wrapping back up through the fjord at dusk, hovering like scarves of mist draped along the ridges above couples dancing in the green twilight around fires, and in the water below the reflections of other fires from other parties illuminates the depths and glitters shining and alone.

Everyone is dancing and there’s music and a man climbs up the hill pulling a juniper bough to throw into the fire to make some sparks rise up to join the stars. These people in the painting believed in magic and earth and they all knew loss, and they all came to the fire. 

I saw myself in this one young woman in the foreground with a look of desolation and a body that looked pregnant as she leaned against the moss covered rocks off to the side, apart from all the people celebrating Midsummer. I knew her person was gone just like me. And, just like me, she looked across at the fires from far away and wanted something in their light to say 

“Live your life, and if you don’t the ground is definitely ready at any moment to open up again 

to swallow you back in, to digest you back into something useful for somebody". 

Meanwhile above all these Norwegians dancing in the twilight, the permanent white snow gleamed. [...] The man who painted this girl's big black eyes gazing, drawing the fire into herself, standing alone, Nikolai Astrup, he also died young, at forty seven, right after finishing building his studio at home where he probably intended to keep on painting his resonant life into old age but sometimes people get killed before they get to finish all the things they were going to do. 

That’s why I’m not waiting around anymore. 

That’s why I tell you that I love you. 

Does it even matter what we leave behind?

(à suivre...)

Mount Eerie, Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup

Now Only (P.W. Elverum and Sun., 2018)

Nikolai Astrup, Midsummer Eve Bonfire (1915)

[détail]