After recently announcing her new album, Baudelaire & Piano, set for release September 11 via SusannaSonata, Norwegian artist Susanna is sharing the second single from the record with new track ‘Burial’. “‘Burial’ was one of the first poems I re-worked for this project - I am deeply fascinated by the thrilling images Baudelaire is able to provide with such few words. A haunting short story.” Susanna says.

What would French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) have made of the events of 2020? An artist who took his disgust with life to the streets, who constantly shook his fist at authority, and a literary enfant terrible who suffered from disease most of his life. His poetry has been set to music by everyone from Claude Debussy to Ali Akbar Khan, and his uncompromising life and art influenced the music of The Doors, Bob Dylan and Scott Walker. Now his abject, decadent verse is the backbone of the latest release by Norwegian vocalist/composer Susanna.

Susanna’s 2019 album Garden of Earthly Delights (with her group the Brotherhood of Our Lady) featured musical interpretations of the surreal medieval paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Baudelaire & Piano – recorded at Atlantis Studio in Stockholm – is a tribute to another of her artistic heroes and mentors.

This is a record made in isolation, stripped back to just her expressive, soulful voice and skeletal, trancelike piano playing. The light touch allows the extraordinary qualities of Baudelaire’s writing to shine through. "I wanted to approach this material in an almost dogmatic way,’ she says, ‘to present the songs in a naked, stripped-down form, alone at the piano. These poems have so many layers and contain such rich expanding emotions to me."

Like much of Baudelaire’s work, Susanna’s music probes the limits of desire, and confronts the simultaneous wonder and meaningless of existence. He is often considered one of the first modern poets, whose urban observations frequently dipped into fantasy, sensuality, fevered imagings and eerie horror. Susanna’s selection of ten texts from his masterwork The Flowers of Evil (translated by Anthony MorCmer) cover the full spectrum of Baudelaire’s conflicted expression.

Here you’ll find a creepy cast of witches, pagans, wolves, perverts, thugs, ghosts, vampires and demons. The songs struggle with lust and saintliness, angels and demons, tenderness and sadism, and the relentless march of time, the destroyer. Beauty with an edge of strangeness. Sin as a swallowing abyss. In Susanna’s haunting settings and performance, the poetry of Baudelaire has found its ideal transmitter.

'Baudelaire & Piano' track list:

1. The Dancing Snake

2. Longing for Nothingness

3. The Enemy

4. Burial

5. Meditation

6. Obsession

7. The Vampire

8. The Harmony of Evening

9. A Pagan’s Prayer

10. The Ghost

Cabaret Voltaire have announced the first new album release in over 20 years. Shadow Of Fear is set for release on Mute on November 20. Shadow Of Fear is Cabaret Voltaire’s first release with Richard H Kirk as the sole member of the band and the result is an album that defies categorisation. The tone and personality of Cabaret Voltaire is ingrained into its core as it dances across techno, dub, house, 1970s Kosmische, and general esoteric explorations coupled with mangled vocal samples. It’s a voyage through the history of electronic music that arrives at a new destination.

Cabaret Voltaire has always been a group ahead of their time, even prescient at times, and this album carries on that evolution. “The album was finished just as all the weirdness was starting to kick in,” Kirk says. “Shadow Of Fear feels like a strangely appropriate title. The current situation didn't have much of an influence on what I was doing - all the vocal content was already in place before the panic set in - but maybe due to my nature of being a bit paranoid there are hints in there about stuff going a bit weird and capturing the current state of affairs.” Although, as with a lot of Kirk’s work, concrete meaning and narrative is ripe for interpretation rather than being spelled out. “Surrealism has always been really important to Cabaret Voltaire,” says Kirk. “And that's still present too.”

The genesis of the new album was the 2014 Berlin Atonal festival where Kirk played the first show on his own as Cabaret Voltaire. This began a new era for the pioneering Sheffield outfit whose influence across electronic, post-punk and industrial music remains an untouchable one today. Kirk explains “The mission statement from the off was no nostalgia. Normal rules do not apply. Something for the 21st Century. No old material.”

Kirk has since gone on to perform at festivals and concerts across Europe, shaping the sound of Cabaret Voltaire’s future. “I started developing tracks specifically for live performance,” he says. “Stuff that was quite stripped back and crude. Every time I would visit a new place to perform, I would write something fresh.”

Recorded at the latest location of Western Works, the studio used throughout Cabaret Voltaire’s history, Kirk toyed with upgrading his old set up to digital but after a computer failure he decided to retain his original equipment. “Making this album reminded me a bit of the old days with Cabaret Voltaire because there wasn't that much equipment, so you really had to use your imagination.”

That’s as far as the comparisons to olden days Cabaret Voltaire go. This is new music for a new era. “It's nice that people appreciate what you've done in the past,” says Kirk. “But it's a dangerous place to dwell.”

SHADOW OF FEAR TRACKLISTING

Be Free

The Power (Of Their Knowledge)

Night Of The Jackal

Microscopic Flesh Fragment

Papa Nine Zero Delta United

Universal Energy

Vasto

What’s Goin’ On