Gawain and The Green Knight – Fingers (Spotify)
“Very smooth quality song and original music that you like listening with great interest, again and again. It reserves an unusual experience for those who first come in contact with that kind of music. Magic... not otherwise.”
“Очень ровная по качеству материала и весьма оригинальная музыка, которую слушаешь с большим интересом вновь и вновь. -Fingers- оставляет необычные впечатления для тех слушателей, которые впервые соприкоснулись с подобной музыкой. Магия, не иначе.”
-Nagamag.com
Leading up to the June 11th release of their new EP, A Sleeping Place, Gawain and the Green Knight have released the single, “Fingers.” Filled with allegory and inspired by literature and mythology, the duo calls their sound, “folk for people who like to listen to music while pacing mournfully yet poignantly through the streets, pretending they’re the protagonist in a very beautiful film.” Listen to “Fingers” HERE.
“Fingers” is “a love song for my soon-to-be husband [bandmate Mike O’Malley], simple as that,” says singer/guitarist Alexia Antoniou, and one of her only auto-biographical songs. She found inspiration in an unusual place - on an airplane, when they were unable to get seats together. “I had been reading Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and finished it mid-flight and was just completely emotionally devastated. I wasn’t just teary-eyed, I was outright weeping- so much so that the woman next to me took one look at me and started turning up the volume on her little headrest TV,” Antoniou recalls. “I managed to make meaningful eye contact with Mike across the aisle, and with a few gestures of the head, he agreed to meet me near the airplane toilets so I could cry some more on him. ‘Fingers’ was inspired by that whispered conversation.”
O’Malley produced the song with that same intimate, hushed atmosphere. “I wanted to ride the line of all-the-way-in-love and all-the-way-scared. And I wanted Alexia to sound like she was alone in the dark with a torch,” he says. “Sparseness and reverb seemed the order of things - a little Rhodes piano here, a little bowed bass there.”
Inspired by the etymology of the Greek word for cemetery, which simply means “a sleeping place,” the EP sits comfortably in the deep, sometimes dark, parts of the subconscious, arranged in such a way that you remember why life can be so joyful in the first place, its tempo anything but sad. “I think of this EP as a love letter, full of desperate affection, to anyone who has ever been alive and been scared to die,” Antoniou states.
“Death is loud, but it doesn’t mean you were never heard.”
A Sleeping Place will be released on June 11, 2021.
www.gawainandthegreenknightband.com/
www.instagram.com/gawainandthegreenknight/
www.facebook.com/GawainandtheGreenKnightBand
Reviewed by Nagamag on May 26, 2021