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Written pre-covid, the third single from Time for Dreams upcoming album Life of the Inhabitant: ‘Death to All Actors’ is a pandemic themed song about rituals, the fear of death and plagues.
The duo's luminous Amanda Roff muses, “when I wrote the song I was thinking of Norman Mailer’s “Ancient Evenings” where at one point in the afterlife you must swim through a river of actual human shit”.
‘Death to All Actors’ reflects on the shift of actors' societal status historically, Roff explains, “Does anyone really trust actors? Society seems to idolise them now, but there was a time they couldn’t even be buried in consecrated ground. Travelling groups of actors were suspected super spreaders of the plague from city to city.”
‘Death to All Actors’ is a triumph of balance - beautiful sub bass thuds softly, dusted in Carlyon’s soft signature post punk guitar while Amanda’s vocals and stories sit like crystal, “musically Death to All Actors is the most cheerful song on the record - a snaky beat that opens out into a rather ecstatic instrumental interlude about enjoying life while you can,” says Roff.
To celebrate the release of Death to All Actors the band collaborated with bio-chemical art director Lichen Kelp. Lichen makes lurid liquid landscapes with plant matter, ice, water and domestic chemical ingredients that investigate the materiality of process.
DTAA is situated lyrically in the heightened materiality of life when death is looming, a song written before covid but with a strong plague theme – disease, corruption of flesh and bacteria, in contrast to the idea of the clean and clear spirit world beyond this realm. Real dirt, ash, shit, cracked and calloused hands working on splintered oars, insect bites, sores, fever, contagion, decomposition, bodily fluids, poison and fungus, all these things I imagine being considered fondly when one is leaving the world.
Lichen’s practice creates a performative time period of lush visual decay, where soft living plants saturate and disintegrate in technicolour detail. Filming the processes closely allowed us to revel in the tiny details of bubbles bursting, ice melting, life wilting, emphasizing the protean vigour of the materials. Lichen made several floating, floral paintings which were filmed by Thomas Hyland in close-up while the chemical processes flowed and festered. Lichen conducted the movements of various plants within the landscapes to create an erotic choreography of transition.
lyrics
Ring the bell
Now the guests are leaving
Draw the veil
On the ancient evening
Scorpion
Accelerates your breathing
That’s my gift to you-
Sting
For the sake of the city, we buried the actors outside the walls
No one was really sure
Where they’d been
We burned their clothes in an empty boat
And divided up their things
The boatman sings:
Ring the bell
Now the guests are leaving
Draw the veil
On the ancient evening
You can’t forget the taste, you can’t forget the feeling
That’s my gift to you-
Sting
credits
released April 22, 2021
Written and performed by Time For Dreams
(Amanda Roff & Tom Carlyon).
Produced by Tom Carlyon.
Mixed at Super Melody World
in the Macedon Ranges by James Cecil & Tom Carlyon,
at Phaedra Studios in Coburg.
Mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk Studio, Berlin.
Single cover art by Luke Fraser/AHR+
Featuring a video still by Thomas Hyland & Lichen Kelp
Amanda Roff & Tom Carlyon are Time For Dreams, an Australian duo making bleak, smoky, dehydrated bad-dream pop. Their music
is at once stark and lush, vivid and hazy.
Their work has a strong fantasy aspect and speaks to the existence of multiple realities. A perfect soundtrack for the end of the world....more
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