Album Notes

“Mother, I am hungry for some musical theater! I long for acoustic guitars, medieval melodies and operatic librettos! I would hear stories of the idle rich, humanoid anomalies, and criminal geniuses of the early nineteenth century! I need to observe the melodious consumption of fruit and the sifting through of old newspapers and listen to the prattle of simple minds and the banter of their superiors! I crave songs that deliver me into new worlds from far away, from long ago, and introduce me to characters I’d be, otherwise, afraid to know! Mother, I am hungry for some theatrical music!” “My dear! What you want is… the Deadfly Ensemble!” Cinema Strange frontman, Lucas Lanthier, was out strolling through the woods a few days ago when he tripped over a tree root, falling face-first into the earth and scattered leaves. After regaining his feet and adjusting his cravat, it became perfectly clear that it was time to start a theatrical folk-infused chamber music project, and the Deadfly Ensemble was born. After completing the debut album just this morning, he reflected, “I never knew that tree roots and a face full of fallen foliage would have such a profound effect on my creative work, but here we are, about to have lunch, with a full album of cabaret cankers to be stimulated by and to help aid digestion.” The “cabaret cankers” in question are cerebral and colorful operettas, curious and wondering, but nevertheless consumed by wide-eyed urgency. The Deadfly Ensemble evokes the quiet moments between the tides of roiling brain juices, where every fraction of time embodies the intensity of the affliction, even if the fingers are paused in their normal pursuit of the dissection of little things, living or not so much so. The Deadfly Ensemble is quite interested in asserting the fact that vaudeville, community theater, performance art, and prohibition-era nightclub musical numbers can be summed up and delivered at an efficient rate and in a manner that implies that their headquarters must be in an abandoned opera house orchestra pit where the bites of spiders inspire the next few measures of musical imagination.