Transformed into 45 minutes of breathtaking beauty, ‘Invisible Cities’ opens with the numinous ‘So That the City Can Begin to Exist’, as Wiltzie and O'Halloran draw breath from distinctively enthralling and vastly expansive worlds. Originally conceived as a touring project, its last performance was in Brisbane, Australia before COVID-19 changed the world as we know it. Described by The Sunday Times as “a beautiful frenzy of movement”, it fuses theatre, music, dance, architectural design, and visuals and brings to life a series of fantastical places and disparate worlds, centered on the tense relationship between Kublai Khan, the volatile head of a vast empire, and explorer Marco Polo. Premiering to a sell-out audience in July 2019 at the Manchester International Festival, the duo was commissioned by Warner’s 59 Productions to score the music for the 90-minute multimedia theatrical stage show, adapted from Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, ‘Invisible Cities’. Released on their own Artificial Pinearch Manufacturing label, the album comes as part of an agreement with A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s current label, Ninja Tune. ORDER: VINYL | CD | TAPE CASSETTE : bit.ly/3hQLdVVĪ Winged Victory for the Sullen, the collaboration between Adam Wiltzie & Dustin O'Halloran, release their 2021 album ‘Invisible Cities’, the stunning score to the critically acclaimed theatre production directed by London Olympics ceremony video designer Leo Warner. A first rate illustration of growing musical ambition and inventiveness.NEW: AWVFTS X DAVY EVANS: LIMITED-EDITION PRINTS: /shop/ The sparingly-used vocals enhance the instrumentation that, itself, moves between the minimal and the more full-blooded. It’s a record of successful explorations of musical avenues. The languid piano introducing “The Divided City” leads to an arresting, wholly-convincing swerve in the strings that, in turn, dies away before the rhythm picks up in the following track emphasising strings more fully, and then a delightful Bach-style cello theme brings in “There Is One of Which You Never Speak” collapsing into a fierce electrical sizzle. The consistent delicacy of Dustin O’Halloran’s piano often contrasts with some threatening industrial-type effects or thunderous orchestral surges. That ambiguous area between the factual and the fictional is suggested from the outset on this album, as the swelling instrumental of the (significantly titled) “So That the City Can Begin to Exist” gives way to an angelic eight-voice choir sound of “The Celestial City” against a slightly discordant pulsing rhythm an uneasy balance of the kind that is so well handled across the record. This is echoed here, with the introduction of sound effects that are always interesting and never gratuitous, as they take themes and ideas in original directions. Calvino’s literary style is unorthodox, rarely offering a traditionally linear narrative instead, favouring structures and register shifts that call into question his readers’ usual assumptions. Such deliberately unsettling intrusions testify to AWVFTS’s willingness to go further beyond the more immersive that was a dominant characteristic of their earliest recordings. So, appropriately enough, “Thirteenth Century Travelogue” suggests a contrast between the real and the imagined (or between the genuine and the fraudulent), as the ambient texture is cross-cut by a slightly sinister metallic sound that uneasily breaks up the underlying majestic harmonies. The recognisable wide-angle instrumental soundscape now incorporates some intelligently-arranged vocal elements at key points, serving well to convey contrast and dramatic effects arising out of Marco Polo’s verbal images which have long exercised scholars’ views on the disputed matter of their truthfulness.
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