It’s been quite a year for Die Wilde Jagd, raising the curtain with the ‘Lux Tenera – A Rite To Joy’ in collaboration with the Grammy-nominated Metropole Orkest, and bringing the curtain down with a new single, which came about as the result of a collaboration during a concert with four musicians from the Jena Philharmonic Orchestra. Oswald von Wolkenstein’s medieval song ‘Ach Senliches Leiden’ is treated to a new arrangement
Here, medieval vocal harmonies are flattened to a softly crooning, semi-spoken word delivery, almost a whisper at times, and the majority of recorded arrangements – obviously, none are contemporaneous with the composition – tend to focus on strings and other acoustic instruments, and place the layered, choral vocals to the fore, resulting more often than not in a classical interpretation. Here, elongated drones quiver and swell, until a couple of minutes in, when a subtle bass rolls in alongside piano. But it’s still the atmospheric synths which swirl like a cold wind which dominate the instrumentation, and carry the occasional draught of a far off-choir who sound as if they’re raising the roof of the church in the next village. This is unexpectedly bleak-sounding, and not only on account of the sparse arrangement. There’s something cold, and dark, about this rendition, evoking bleak moorlands in winter.
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