Booklet.indd

Hekate's Dance With Death

Booklet.indd

Totentanz: the “dance with death.” A metaphor for the passing of time and the great inevitability. After seven years of silence following Die Welt Der Dunklen Gärten, it seemed legendary neofolk troupe Hekate‘s own dance grew in speed and severity, but an unexpected return manifests as a reflection on their own artistic brush with death.

Though time’s arrow moves forward, Hekate’s brand of lush, post-industrial-tinged neofolk remains a refreshing constant. Darker and more rhythmic (the word in neofolk circles is “martial”) in comparison to their relatively recent works, the band’s rebirth exudes the wisdom of meditation in seclusion. Even as the albums most textured and orchestrated, Hekate’s music is masterfully compact and digestible, however shadowed. However traditionally “neofolk” and brightly strummed this album might appear on the surface, Totentanz slowly reveals its inner layers over time, unveiling a complex and worldly artistic collection of songs concerned with death, darkness, and uncertainty. Though Hekate’s own slumbering dance placed their own future in doubt and assumed despair, this new album contextualizes it and allowed them to spring forth from the obscuring shadows of time and death.

Totentanz will be released Friday, May 18th, on Prophecy Productions. Below, listen to the album in full.

From Axel Menz:

If there is one thing for sure, it’s that we are all going to die. Whether rich or poor, death will come to us all. Our new album Totentanz (engl. “dance of death”) deals with death in all its facets, and the topic was ever-present when composing the album. It is music from the heart united with this concept and the art of the symbolists Franz Stassen and Hermann Wöhler. Totentanz is, for me personally, the most important Hekate album since Sonnentanz.

Follow Hekate on Facebook.

Become an Invisible Oranges patron HERE.

Categories: