Hands up to this – I’m bored and can’t sleep. So this is pointless musings about where the new album is coming from. It started cos’ I was trying to answer my own question about the artwork in another thread. So I started googling…………… Oops.
A few clicks later, I’m getting reference to Jean Genet’s book Prisoner Of Love (never read it but wouldn’t surprise me if someone had) a few clicks more & found this translation from the book about the phrase Between Dog & Wolf:
"...the expression entre chien et loup [literally, between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can't be distinguished from each other] suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day. The colour grey, for instance, and the hour when night approaches as inexorably as sleep, whether daily or eternal. The hour when street lamps are lit in the city, and which children try to drag out so that they can go on playing, though their eyes, suddenly active, are closing in spite of themselves. The hour in which - and it's a space rather than a time - every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment."
Then these:
"Entre chien et loup is a multi-layered expression. It is used to describe a specific time of day, just before night, when the light is so dim you can't distinguish a dog from a wolf. However, it's not all about levels of light. It also expresses that limit between the familiar, the comfortable versus the unknown and the dangerous (or between the domestic and the wild). It is an uncertain threshold between hope and fear. "
"A dangerous time, Uncertain.
When human nature turns.
Our own certainties disintegrate, illogic arrives.
Fear replaces certainty.
We are alone and naked, defenceless
And the dogs start to howl"
All of that feels like an NMA kind of thing – if you see what I mean. Especially when reading a review of the book which said: “a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.”
Onto the art work and looking into the Wild Hunt you get:
“The Wild Hunt is an ancient folk myth prevalent across Northern, Western and Central Europe.[1] The fundamental premise in all instances is the same: a phantasmal, spectral group of huntsmen with the accoutrements of hunting, with horses and hounds in mad pursuit across the skies or along the ground, or just above it”
“Seeing the Wild Hunt was thought to presage some catastrophe such as war or plague."
“People who saw the passing hunt and mocked it were cursed and would mysteriously vanish along with the host; those that joined in sincerity were rewarded with gold”
“Whatever the case, the Hunt was most often seen in the autumn and winter, when the winds blew the fiercest”
Seems to me that could follow from imagining what that “hour between” could bring.
I reckon that’s a pretty well reasoned thesis for where the new stuff could be coming from. Mind you it’s also, no doubt, complete and utter bollocks. Whatever, it occupied me for an hour and a half and might be interesting for some other family member who can’t sleep. Oh and yes – sometimes I do worry about myself.
