David Whyte

The Rheingans Sisters: Start Close In review – a radical leap into darkness

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The Rheingans Sisters

With their golden voices, fertile soundworlds and evocative influences from across Europe, the Sheffield duo’s fifth album is admirably confrontational

 

By Jude Rogers

An infernal, harrowing scrape begins Rowan and Anna Rheingans’ first album in four years: a bow gnashed against a tambourin à cordes (a traditional Pyrenean strung drum) joined by a distorted and octave-pedalled viola, creating a frightening undertow. The song is Devils, inspired by singer Frankie Armstrong’s 1978 version of the folk ballad The Devil and the Farmer’s Wife, in which she celebrates a woman taken to hell who fights back. The sisters’ voices sound golden against the frantic clamour: “The women are much better than men / Can go to hell and come back again.”

Five albums into a garlanded career, the Sheffield sisters’ work is getting more radical by the release. Inspired by the physicality, energy and intimacy of performing live, Start Close In is produced by contemporary composer and progressive metal artist Adam Pietrykowski, who helps shape its spacious but strangely fertile soundworlds. Its instruments and influences coil from across Europe, from Livet Behöver Inga Droger (Life Needs No Drugs), summoning up memories of a Swedish folk festival that mixes feasting and night-swimming, to the propulsive Si Sabiatz Drolletas, an Occitan-sung bourrée (a French dance) that tells women not to get married as they’ll regret it.

Moments of softer beauty come even when their subjects are heavy: in the marriage of guitar and voice on Over and Over Again, about a need to find medicine to cope with witnessing war and genocide unfold; in Daniel Thorne’s saxophone beautifully bursting into Un Voltigeur, a song about tending a garden sung by polyphonic groups in the Pyrenees that’s actually about finding love and trust. Taking its title from a David Whyte poem about engaging fully with the present and the immediate, this album twitches and gambols with life, very fittingly, from start to finish.

Source: The Rheingans Sisters: Start Close In review – a radical leap into darkness

Faith

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I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

from Where Many Rivers Meet
© 1990 David Whyte

Book Review: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Reaching Beyond Our Limiting Beliefs About What We Deserve

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“if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t because finally after all this struggle and all these years you simply don’t want to any more, you’ve simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love”

BY MARIA POPOVA

Few things limit us more profoundly than our own beliefs about what we deserve, and few things liberate us more powerfully than daring to broaden our locus of possibility and self-permission for happiness. The stories we tell ourselves about what we are worthy or unworthy of — from the small luxuries of naps and watermelon to the grandest luxury of a passionate creative calling or a large and possible love — are the stories that shape our lives. Bruce Lee knew this when he admonished that “you will never get any more out of life than you expect,” James Baldwin knew it when he admonished that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and Viktor Frankl embodied this in his impassioned insistence on saying “yes” to life.

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