Album Notes

"Dad, when you gonna be home?" says the voice on the answering machine. "I really, really, really wanna put on a show." And with that a little girl with angel's wings tells a story-her father's story, a journey through 4,000 years of Western civilization. Sylvarluxe has created an ethereal soundtrack to this beautiful bio-epic that touches on everything from Egyptian, Greek, and Norse mythology to the French Revolution and World War II, and then on to September 11. As I listen to this soundtrack I conjure images of a post apocalyptic world as a child tells me what went wrong. "Don't look back," our young Virgil warns us, quoting Eurydice-or Pennebaker-but of course we do. Obliquely inspired by Finnegan's Wake, Richard Sylvarnes' second feature film contemplates desire and greed, hope and dreams, and love and death. "The most merciful thing in the world," says the angel-winged child, "is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." The film itself is entirely composed of stills, most of them photographed in the style of nineteenth-century tableaux photography, manipulated through stop-motion animation, flicker, and rotoscoping, H.C.E. plays like an early magic lantern show, as if Eadweard Muybridge had gotten his hands on Final Cut Pro. Additional ethnic guitar music by Pietro Russino rounds out the album. A truly inspiring soundtrack.