01. Eurydice (05:29)
02. Small Trees (05:01)
03. Orpheus’ Head (04:36)
04. Joan (05:42)
05. This is a Dream (07:30)
06. The Unvisited Garden (03:22)
07. Where the Buzzards Fly (04:23)
08. Time is Broken (05:45)

“The dark sounds she produces have a strange beauty…a miasma of blues, greys and blacks.”
— The Arts Desk

Following her thrilling 2022 duo EP with Iggy Pop (The Dictator) Belgian composer/musician Catherine Graindorge returns with a luminous ensemble album. Collaborators include Simon Huw Jones (And Also the Trees) and Pascal Humbert (16 Horsepower, Lilium, Détroit).

Instrumental and vocal songs of life, love and death. Inspired by mythologies and elegies from the Greeks to the Beats.

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Stories and myths. They ripple like rivers through our lives, our cultures. Some are ancient, others more recent, but they all help to shape us, to guide and console us along the ways of life and love and death. They have a quiet power, and that’s what Belgian musician and composer Catherine Graindorge explores on her new album, Songs for the Dead.

Aptly, it all began with words.

“I had a residency at a venue here in Brussels,” she recalls. Graindorge had recently finished working on The Dictator, her widely-acclaimed EP collaboration with the legendary Iggy Pop, “and I had the chance to work on something new. I had a book by Allen Ginsberg, and I wanted to go deeper into his poetry.”

Ginsberg was the most acclaimed poet of the Beat Generation. But Graindorge explored beneath the obvious, well-known work and discovered a piece called “A Dream Record,” which provided the spark for Songs for the Dead.

“The poem touched me, it made me think about art and life and reality, so I decided to construct the album around it.”

In the work, a dreaming Ginsberg visits Joan, the dead wife of writer William Burroughs who killed her while allegedly trying to emulate William Tell and shoot a glass off her head.

The pair laugh and talk of mutual friends as if she was still alive. But the reality of the grave returns and the dream fades.

“I didn’t know anything about Joan Vollmer, but the poem says everything about our lives,” Graindorge explains. “Something can happen and there’s no return, except in our dreams, when the dead come to visit us. Like the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the eyes of Orpheus, Eurydice seems alive for a moment, but one look is enough for her to vanish into the world of the Dead. He wants to bring her back to life with his love for her.”

But only in dreams can love be enough to cheat fate.

Graindorge saw Ginsberg’s poem as the heart of Songs for the Dead. Recorded here as “This Is a Dream,” it explores the place where the veil between worlds becomes thin. The music she wrote for the tracks explores the beauty and loss, creating a floating, ethereal dialogue of music and voice that carries the listener forward.

Over the years, Graindorge has worked with an incredible cast of collaborators, including Iggy, Nick Cave, Hugo Race and producer John Parish (PJ Harvey). But for Songs for the Dead she wanted a small, tight ensemble, so she called on regular collaborators Simon Ho on keyboards, and bassist Pascal Humbert (16 Horsepower, Lilium, Détroit) who both know her and her music well. For a singer “I thought of Simon Huw Jones. His voice has a very theatrical quality, like a narrator. For him, literature is important; he’s attached to words. I sent him the Ginsberg poem and we talked about the Greek myth.”

Best known as the vocalist with And Also the Trees, Jones’s voice gives the lines gravity, a delivery between singing and speaking.
“I recorded demos of the music I’d written and sent them to him,” Graindorge recalls, “then he returned them with his ideas for the words. He understood what I was looking for.”

Things coalesced quickly, and by the time they went into the studio “almost everything was written, so we didn’t need to discuss much. We took six days to record the album, then another five to complete the mixing.”

All the mixing was analogue, Graindorge explains because “it’s warmer, and it makes more sense to me with my instruments and the way I write, acoustically on violin and viola. More like baroque music, in a way.”

Songs for the Dead is quite deliberately an album that gives space for the imagination, “where people can come and go in the music,” Graindorge says. And there’s plenty to explore in the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and Ginsberg’s dream meeting with Joan Burroughs. Myths ancient and modern. Legends and stories.

“I like to tell a story,” she says. “I come from theatre, and I’m also an actor. These are narratives, questions and answers that relate and connect to each other.”

One of the most powerful of these stories is the pure sadness of “Joan” – the only piece here for which she wrote both music and lyrics. It caresses its loss, something she “wrote to challenge myself. I’m not really a singer, but this was a story I wanted to tell.” Graindorge’s viola and voice offer a sonic elegy.

It all culminates with “Time Is Broken,” where Jones and Graindorge (with daughter Lula Rabinovitch) duet until the music tails away and the final lines conclude: “There is no more to say.”

Composed by Graindorge and Simon Ho, the song came from a small, simple source – a piano line that Ho played while the pair were working together in the Brussels residency.

“He had the idea. That’s the heart of the piece and the lyric that grew into this song about loss and love.”

It ties everything together, moving from myth and into the lives of two people who are wrapped in the sadness and heartbreak of their lives coming apart.

Songs for the Dead is a quietly understated epic, with plenty of shade and light in the playing and the compositions. Yet throughout, it carries the creeping sense of foreboding and inevitability that befit its title. As a seasoned composer for film and theatre, Graindorge understands the power of atmosphere in music and uses it to the full here, especially on the instrumentals “Small Trees” and “The Unvisited Garden,” where her violin and voice create a trembling, fragile stillness. Melodies unfurl slowly, always lyrical, and the silences are as important as the notes.
“Musically, this album is an evolution for me,” she says. “I try to push myself where I haven’t been before.”

And these stories Catherine Graindorge tells are eternal. The music of love and grief, songs for the end of love and life. Songs for the dead who live on in hearts and memories

1. The Dictator (04:45)
2. Mud I (04:24)
3. Mud II (03:07)
4. Iggy (04:35)

A thrilling collaboration between the acclaimed Belgian composer/instrumentalist Catherine Graindorge and the ever-iconic Iggy Pop. Haunting string and electronic textures melding with Iggy’s baritone, cautionary tales.

A deep dive into the heart of these unsettled times.

“Iggy said to send him a track. I began to improvise, and came up with three pieces at home. We communicated and started to exchange ideas.” – Catherine Graindorge

“My contribution is to report, through words, the current threat and the longing for happiness and peace.” – Iggy Pop

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It all began with the radio. A pair of songs that triggered a collaboration between Belgian violinist and composer Catherine Graindorge and the iconic Iggy Pop. Together, they’ve forged a meeting of minds and spirits that’s resulted in the The Dictator. An EP that combines their talents: her music, his voice.

“He played two tracks of mine on his BBC 6 Music show last November,” Graindorge explains, “so I sent an email addressed to Iggy to the producer of the show, saying that I was very honored and that I’d be delighted to work on a track with him. It was completely spontaneous; I never thought anything would really happen.”

But it did. To her disbelief and absolute delight, a reply came two days later: Catherine, I would love to make a track, Iggy.

Graindorge is no stranger to working with others. During her career, in addition to solo work and being part of the band Nile on WaX, she’s worked with artists like Nick Cave, Hugo Race and esteemed producer/musician John Parish. Still, she expected nothing more than to add her violin to a song of his. Instead, she recalls, “Iggy said to send him a track. I began to improvise, and came up with three pieces at home. We communicated and began to exchange ideas.”

Her wish turned into a fever dream of creativity.

“Over Christmas I recorded another track that was more rock. That grabbed him. Then he wrote the lyrics for ‘The Dictator’ two months before Russia invaded Ukraine.”

His inspiration came from her sounds and musical structures, and the world he sees around us.

“There is a gothic masonry at work here, with a very old force abetted by very cunning structures,” Iggy observes about Catherine’s music. “My contribution is to report, through words, the current threat, and the longing for happiness and peace.”

Catherine wrote the lyrics for “Mud I,” while, as an answer, “Mud II” captures Iggy’s lyrical vision of a world increasingly mired in mud, his weary, totemic voice close to exhaustion as it struggles to find some salvation.

The EP closes with the disquieting menace of the song named “Iggy.” It’s the only one without the voice of the singer to whom Catherine dedicates the piece.

From unlikely beginnings, The Dictator blazes, two musicians inspiring each other. Graindorge’s admiration for Iggy – who was recently awarded this year’s prestigious Polaris Prize – has grown as they’ve worked together.

“He represents freedom,” she says. “There is something wild and fearless about him that is very inspiring.”

That respect is completely mutual. Graindorge’s music evokes “chalices, bodices, and old stones. It’s European romance and it creeps up on me like a fog; like winter in Venice, like a midnight wind,” Pop says, She’s an artist “as one with her continent and its canon.”

Never underestimate the power of radio.

01. Rosalie (5:46)
02. Lockdown (4:41)
03. Eldorado (6:37)
04. Ghost Train (5:14)
05. Sailing In The Air (2:12)
06. Butterfly In A Frame (3:58)
07. Before The Flood (0:48)
08. Kangaroos In Fire (6:08)
09. Eno (4:26)

Catherine Graindorge is a Belgian violinist, violist and composer. Produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Rokia Traoré), Eldorado is her second solo album and her first for Glitterbeat’s tak:til imprint. Gorgeous and haunting, Graindorge uses strings, harmonium and electronic treatments to explore intimate corners and widescreen vistas.

Eldorado. People believed it was the city of gold. A fable, a legend that pushed the conquistadors further and further across a continent in search of riches. A myth. A grail. Eldorado was all of those things and more. Over the centuries it’s become a word weighted down by so many meanings, layer upon layer of possibility and expectation. But it can also be a place to find hope and solace and discover dreams. That’s the music of this Eldorado, the second solo album from Belgian violinist and composer Catherine Graindorge.

Although she’s best-known for her collaborations – with a range of artists from Nick Cave to Mark Lanegan, as well as her work as part of Nile on waX, and for the music she’s written for film and theatre – Graindorge had been intending a second solo release for years. But Eldorado had a much longer gestation period than she expected.

“After my first album, The Secret of Us All, in 2012, I had been planning to release another. But when my father passed away in April 2015, I decided to create and write a show about him that would combine text, images and music. The creation and performances took three years. I also released a pair of albums with my trio and another with Hugo Race. It was only in 2019 that I found time to imagine this new album.”
That period paid dividends. The music, she says, became “like a diary,” and each page brings new reflections and resonances. She worked with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey, Rokia Traoré), who played various instruments on the album, including the guitar on the homage “Eno.” Graindorge had sent him her first album, and they built a friendship that led to her recording most of this disc at his studio. Artistically, it was a perfect match.

“I loved working with him,” she explains. “Not only is he an excellent musician but I love his relationship with sound and music: he is curious, always looking for sounds, there is a rough and direct side to his approach to music that I liked. I wanted this new album to be more radical, a hybrid and raw like our thoughts and emotions, perhaps less ‘smooth’ than the first one so it corresponded more to what I feel today.”

Like a series of secret paths, the music of Eldorado takes curious twists and turns, ranging from stillness to frustration. Things aren’t quite as they seem; even the violin is disguised, shapeshifted by electronics, so the only certainty and continuity are the emotions Graindorge expresses.

It’s intensely personal, a record brimming with tales and reminiscences, like “Rosalie,” a track she composed after reading of the death of a Rwandan woman in Belgium. Rosalie had come to Belgium with her husband to escape the genocide in her homeland in 1994, and Graindorge’s lawyer father had befriended her.

“They built their life here and had two children. Most of Rosalie’s family had been murdered, and in her home village the remains of her family’s bodies were finally found in 2019. She left with her daughter and husband to offer them a burial and a ceremony. Three days after her return to Belgium, her heart stopped. She was 51 years old.”
The piece is both celebration and a remembrance, the dark foreboding opening up into autumnal, sorrowful tones – a piece of spare, 21st century chamber music, filled with echoes of life and death twined together.

“Rosalie,” like so much of the music on Eldorado is earthy, caught among the tangled, breathing shadows of the harmonium and the creak of strings, before slowly breaking free towards the light. Yet at other times here, Graindorge’s compositions carry a wispy ghostliness, as on “Ghost Train,” where softly spoken words peer through the swirling fog of sound.

There can also be a very physical weight to what she’s doing. It’s apparent from the very first notes of “Lockdown,” as the solid drone of the harmonium creates a foundation for her violin.

During the first lockdown, she was trapped in Belgium, unable to travel to Parish’s English studio for the album mixes. The confinement of the pandemic was frustrating, claustrophobic. To relieve that, Graindorge and her daughters would play music in the gardens of nursing homes. It gave them a family project and brought some joy to those who were truly isolated. Out of that came “Lockdown.”
“I had to borrow a harmonium; mine was still in England,” she recalls. “When I was a child, we had a big harmonium with pedals and registers, so playing it connected me to that time. Then the contact with the seniors and all the long moments at home pushed me to open the cupboards and to go back into memories.”

It’s a slow build, the music exploring the texture of notes, like layers of memory gradually rising to the surface. But looking into the past that way also touched the present in other ways.

“I came across some slides from 1959 that I’d collected from my grandmother after her death. There were beautiful shots of the forest where I still walk regularly. They’d turned sepia magenta over time. I’m very attached to these traces left by the disappeared. I used them as visuals for my album and for the “Lockdown” video which Olivier Pestiaux, a visual artist, sublimated beautifully.”

With the music here shaped by her life, it’s no surprise that Graindorge’s vision of Eldorado is also coloured by her own experiences.

“In December 2017, I decided to host migrants,” Graindorge explains. “Through a hosting platform set up by volunteers, we welcomed Filimon and Seleshi, two young Eritreans aged 20 and 17, into our family. I decided to accompany them to the end of their quest: Seleshi to England, and we convinced Filimon to apply for asylum in Belgium; he now has a home, a new life. Eldorado represents their quest for a better world; but it is also about Rosalie who escaped from barbarism in Rwanda. And our concern about climate change and the destruction of our earth.”

A dream. A better future. A hope to arrive at that city of gold. Eldorado.