Constellations Compromised, Volume One: New Songs of Love Arrested by Space and Time is the first of a three volume cubist trans-genre rock opera from filmmaker, novelist ("Sweet Piece") and composer-singer Silvanus Slaughter: cinematic in sound and scope, sardonic yet sentimental, jarringly honest, and without musical boundaries.
Already enjoying college airplay due to the Johnny Cash-meets-Ennio Morricone stunner, "Sometimes I Weep for the Devil," and Slaughter's punk tribute to a friend's suicide, "Christ Did It All Before You," Volume One is trans-genre, and chronicles three decades of growing up alongside music and loss. It's a non-stop, hypnotic, 70-minute trip through one poet’s adventures in the bondage of space and time, loss and love, as lived and sung through three American decades of riveting music celebrating rock, jazz, funk, pop, samba, rockabilly, rave and western.
Tight, propulsive mini-movies with piercing lyrics, infectious rhythms fleeced with suspense-film argeggios, and a new, deep haunting voice who evokes singer-poets of a previous generation such as Lou Reed, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Thom Yorke, Boz Scaggs, and Charles Aznavour, while encapsulating influences as varied as Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Caetano Veloso, Johnny Cash, Tom Jobim and film score masters Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann. At once universal and original, Silvanus Slaughter’s Constellations Compromised, Vol. I engages heart, mind and body in its chronicle of a man who fell in love and found his love arrested. A man who fell to Earth.
Recorded entirely in the 'Blood Done Signed My Name' town of Oxford, N.C. in The Old Granville County Jail, and hailed by The News and Observer’s David Menconi as “a work of genius, madness or both. Silvanus Slaughter does not think small. There’s simply no telling where this may all end up.”
Constellations Compromised, Volume 2: The World, The Flesh and the Piercing of the Heart arrives Spring 2008 from the wildly prolific Slaughter, and ventures further into Slaughter's poetic, twilight realm of serpentine jazz-blues vocals, dance floor bass, and undulating cine-funk percussion.
Miracles and Light, Volume 3 will follow, then a four-CD quartet, Symphonic Jazz Abstractions 1-4, a breakthrough fusion of interlocking themes with silky jazz vocals, dance rhythms and cinematic excursions blended with old-school passion and modern sounds, featuring "Why Did You Have to Be So Gorgeous?" and "Twilight Time (Austin's Theme)".
6 PANEL DIGIPAK 24 PAGE COLOR LIBRETTO WITH ALL LYRICS
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