Darkest Heart started as a seed of sounds and literature I’d been exposed to all my life. The first visual I had came from "Call of Cuthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft written circa 1925. The book describes a Bacchanal in South Louisiana swamps with a group of primitives, jumping and roaring to dark drums in a scene that is shadowy, seductive and repulsive all at once. I read it in junior high imagining what the music might have been. Perhaps its the music that Darkest Heart is.
I want you to feel like you’re looking in on or hearing a ritual that you just stumbled into. Like you’ve just fallen upon something in a remote and dark place that you weren’t supposed to see or hear; that you were never aware existed. Not necessarily evil, but primitive; the feeling of looking through the forbidden keyhole.
After years of musical styles from elementary school bands to Middle Eastern music -- world fusion is the only term I can use to describe what Darkest Heart has become. Southern Rock is what I grew up on, along with musical soundtracks and everything of the 50’s and 60’s my parents listened to. I used to hate the war time swing and early Jazz to which my Grandparents listened and it is now some of my favorite; my CD player goes anywhere from Supultura to Al Green in one song. As it stands, Darkest Heart is a mixture of everything I’ve done up until now, leaning toward American Bellydance with its tribal influences...but really anything goes.
Darkest Heart is Shelly A. Plaisance, Jr.
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