EVE LIBERTINE RELEASES new recording I Am That Tempest – A Portrait next month – the CD will be the latest release for Penny Rimbaud’s Caliban Sounds label, brokered by One Little Independent.
Libertine provides a “wild vocal interpretation” of the titular poem authored by Rimbaud, backed by “improvised, experimental jazz” performed by a “band of stellar musicians”.
Artist, musician, poet, and activist Eve Libertine returns with ‘I Am That Tempest – A Portrait’, a visceral vocal performance backed with improvised, experimental jazz, released by Penny Rimbaud’s Caliban Sounds.
Eve Libertine rages back into the spotlight with her wild interpretation of Penny Rimbaud’s poem ‘I Am That Tempest’, which he describes as a “showpiece for Eve’s staggering vocal range”. Joined by a band of stellar musicians, Eve weaves herself around a forest of improvisational responses, making a mincemeat of conformist pretensions. “The meaning is in the doing of it,” offers Rimbaud as some sort of an explanation, “it’s an itness rather than an ifness. It has its own life”.
Libertine and Rimbaud have been pushing musical boundaries together ever since their now classic 70’s track, ‘Reality Asylum’, which introduced the avant-garde to the unlikely ears of Crass’ mainly punk audience. “I love working for and with Eve,” says Rimbaud, “her sense of inflection is second to none, and her ability to make sense of my sometimes-obscure lyrics somehow enables me to better understand the meanings of my own work. Muse?” he asks, “maybe,” he responds, with a wry smile.
When asked to add to the above, Libertine came back with, “Mad or what? Any think can be made sense of, it’s what we do in our daily struggle to make sense of the senseless. It allows us to wend our weary ways thinking that we belong here. But sometimes it’s good not to FIT but rather to FLY high amongst the clouds of senselessness where we can truly belong”.
Eve Libertine is best known for her role as co-lead vocalist in Crass. Libertine wrote and performed most of the songs on the group’s third album, ‘Penis Envy’, which concentrated exclusively on feminist issues and featured only female voices.
After Crass disbanded in 1984, Libertine concentrated on developing her vocal range and then went on to release her first post-Crass album, ‘Skating The Side Of Violence’ which she toured in the West Coast of the US, supporting folk-hustlers Chumbawamba. Continuing to collaborate with Penny Rimbaud, she then featured, both recorded and live, in his spoken word ‘opera’, ‘The Death of Imagination’. Throughout this period, Libertine also worked extensively with A-Soma, an avant-garde electro-pop artist and musician with whom, amongst other works, she recorded ‘Last One Out Turns Off the Lights’, a theatre piece featured at the ICA and Richard DeMarco Gallery during the mid 90s and remains to this day a demanding and compelling work.
— One Little Independent
Eve Libertine. 2024. I Am That Tempest – A Portrait. Caliban Sounds. Released on 12 July 2024. Available for pre-order from One Little Independent.
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