Karda Estra
The Age Of Science And Enlightenment

The end of a love is a critical, devastating event, laden with contrasting and incomprehensible elements, that forever marks the delicate surface of a heart, etched so deeply by suffering, as to leave a permanent scar as proof of what has been and as a warning for what will be.

If, instead, it is not the feeling that dies, but the one who experiences it, what abominable pain must the surviving half of that relationship, now disastrously ruined, find itself facing? How much can the feeling of powerlessness and desolation of an individual, now devoted solely to the desire to end their life in order to reach the irretrievably lost lover, grow? How must the young and naive Laura have felt at the tragic collapse of her burning love for the ambiguous and fascinating Carmilla?

I think this last question also occurred to the multi-instrumentalist Richard Willeman, right after finishing reading the vampire novel by Sheridan Le Fanu from 1872, from which he undoubtedly drew inspiration for composing "Carmilla", one of the tracks from the recent "The Age of Science and Enlightenment" (2006), where the refined Gothic taste, soft and symphonic, but at the same time dark and mysterious, which has always distinguished the production of the English artist and his Karda Estra, is most evident. From the magical "Eve" (inspired by "L'Ève Future" by Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, from 1886) to the admirable "Voivode Dracula" (a concept on the immortal work of Bram Stoker from 1897), they have never hidden their passion for sensual, gloomy, and elegant atmospheres, born from the indistinct boundary between dream and nightmare, characteristic of nineteenth-century fantastic literature.

Despite Richard being in charge of piano, keyboards, bass, guitar, and percussion, it is Caron Hensford who stands out among all the band members, thanks to the romantic and evocative sound of her oboe, which first finds itself duetting with the alto saxophone of the wind player Zoë Josey, over an intense piano carpet ("Talos"), then with the flute, in delicate evolutions propelled by sweet guitar arpeggios ("The Age of Science and Enlightenment - The Red Room") and finally with the keyboards, producing subdued and melancholic tones, illuminated once again by the light touches of the string instrument ("Nocturne Macabre").

Ileesha Bailey enters the scene, exalting, with her vocalizations, a splendid instrumental plot, woven by the winds and the piano ("Carmilla"), while the keyboards and the flute dance on decided rhythms, suggested by the percussion and the dark sound of the bass ("Am I Dreaming You? Are You Dreaming Me?"), all before the fleeting appearances of Helen Dearnley's violin, in the most frantic moments of a long ride undertaken by the keyboard and the guitar ("Bones in the Moonlight"), later left behind in the concluding and elegiac march intoned by flute, voice, and oboe ("Second Star").

The uniqueness of this band's musical proposal somehow recalls the feeling we spoke of earlier, so pure and irrational, as to appear almost like a mythical creature hidden from the eyes of reason. A Jewish legend tells that Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, convinced the animals to eat it too, so as not to be the only one to have to leave the gardens of Eden. All fell for her deception, except the Phoenix, which, for its wisdom, was rewarded with immortality even in the material plane, rising from its own ashes every thousand years spent on Earth. Love, similarly, no matter how buried under anguish and frustrations, always preserves a small spark, perhaps imperceptible and hard to recognize, but impossible to erase or extinguish, just like the life of the sacred firebird.