Tadzio is an avant-death-pop ensemble of Philadelphia/D.C. based musicians who share an interest in creating evocative sonic landscapes that blend warm acoustic tones (harp, piano, flute, percussion) with electronic instrumentation. The project, in its current manifestation, is spearheaded by Ross Lipton (pianist) and Shaina Kapeluck (vocalist) with an ever-changing cast of closely linked musicians (Including members of Hallowed Bells, Br’er & Luna Honey).
The group’s new single “Death and the Lady”, WL//WH is very pleased to premiere, is a harrowing yet cathartic interpretation on the traditional British ballad collected in 1946 by Francis M. Collison from Mr Baker of Maidstone, Kent, which becomes a classic of the English Folk Revival of the 1960s and 1970s, sung by the legendary Shirley Collins in 1970, as title track of her and her sister Dolly‘s album “Love, Death & the Lady”, and by The John Renbourn Group in 1977 on their Transatlantic Records album “A Maid in Bedlam”, through to the present day by Norma Waterson & Martin Carthy in 2002, with somewhat different verses, on their fourth album “A Dark Light” and re-interpreted by Shirley Collins on her 2016 sublime album “Lodestar”.
The dark, somber ballad, deftly coalescing warm neo-classical swells with whirring analogue electronic tones, amplifies the already pervasive uncanny qualities of the original, entails on the mysterious and persistent coexistence of life and death, amidst in an array of slightly dissonant, ominous, and penetrating sounds that wax and wane, with relentless hypnotic and droning intensity, echoing a clear, haunting voice that glides throughout with understated passion and pain, simultaneously poignant and heartfelt and truly mesmerising in its agonizing tragic intensity and aching beauty.
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