Much has already been made of the role of the circus as metaphor for transcendental transgressions, arriving at the edge of town and luring folk away from their shacks into a hypnotic assault on the senses, exposing concepts of time, religion and physics as an allusion that the folk back in their shacks are addicted to sustaining, whilst providing a forum for those ready and willing to escape stagnation on board a big and bright, yet supernaturally moving, target…
There was a hell of a lot of people in church on Saturday night, April the 5th, pondering Eller’s invitation to abandon convention as if as common sense as taking a breath; a lethal agent of evolution, holding every transgression just long enough so that the rules and regulations abandoned outside start to seem a little less reliable.
His voice has been honed by many years of funerals, burlesque reviews and bars, his songs hallucination as revisionist history, where the downtrodden are the great and gold of Hollywood old, with Eller weaving himself into an alternative mythology encompassing heavyweight champions of the world, presidents and their assassins and, of course, the clown away from all the laughter, left with nothing save all the pills and something Irish to wash them down, a dead actress and a trial by Randolph Hearst and Will Hays…
Another vote for our reality being cyclical, as oppose to the linear model advertised by those barons bequeathed the land on which stand those shacks, was the mighty Sieben, layering sound in support.
Matt’s conjured landscapes, where myth and magic are tradable commodities, provided the ideal misty marshland from which to watch those multi-coloured wagons encroach…
One of the best things about the music of Big Boulder Promotions has been the way each performer has taken the archetypes and intention of roots music a few steps further down the road, so it was fitting that Mr Howden, and Mr Eller and his American Circus, a neon hobo riding a black-and-white boxcar if ever there was one, should bring the Heeley Institute curtain down for a while, as Big Boulder Promotions focuses on the 2014 Heeley festival and the 2014 Big Boulder Live Music and Arts Festival, both pitching up at the Millennium Park this summer…
Curtis Eller – American Circus Tour
Sieben
Sieben
