Ancient Spirits

Claus Zundel (aka "The Brave") is a German composer, songwriter, producer and pianist. He has created several worldwide successful musical projects, most notable Sacred Spirit and B-Tribe (sold 20 million. copies combined), as well as more Indie projects such as "Moroccan Spirit", "Classical Spirit", "Divine Works", Ancient Spirit and his latest project "Tango Jointz". His music style is usually called as "The Brave Sound" as it considers a large number of music styles mixed in his special way. He often collaborates with musicians and singers from around the world and creates "The Brave Sound" projects with them.

The Amsterdam-based duo Wanderwelle return to Silent Season with their second album. Gathering of the Ancient Spirits is inspired by the last years of the life of Paul Gauguin, which he spent on the islands of French Polynesia. The album tells the alternative history of his search for a land that is untouched by modern society and whose inhabitants were still dependent on the gifts of nature and connected to their ancestors. During his stay, the painter encounters forgotten rituals and the primordial beings which haunt the islands since the dawn of time. In 2018, it’s exactly 115 years ago that Paul Gauguin passed away. This album is an ode to one of the greatest artists that ever lived.

Purcell’s fourth and last full-scale semi-opera, The Indian Queen, is often passed over in favour of its longer and more rounded predecessors, especially King Arthur and The Fairy Queen. The reasons are plentiful: Thomas Betterton, with whom Purcell collaborated, never finished his reworking of an early Restoration tragedy and even if he had torn himself away from his business interests in 1695, Purcell would not have been alive to set the remaining music for Act 5. As it happened, Henry’s brother Daniel set the masque from the final act after Betterton had hired an anonymous writer to finish his adaptation. No one can deny that neither verse nor music achieved the heights imagined in the original collaboration; given the quality of the masques in Purcell’s large ‘dramatick’ operas (including Dioclesian, of course), there is an undoubted sense of anticlimax.