Tony Wakeford
Not All Of Me Will Die

"Not All of Me will Die", what then will remain of our passage on this world?

Without a doubt, Tony Wakeford will leave a trace, if only for his millions of releases that have flooded the music market over the years. The latest in chronological order is this "Not All of Me will Die", a 2009 solo effort, a work dedicated to the Polish-Ukrainian poet Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917 - 1944), of Jewish origin, killed by the Gestapo in Krakow where she took refuge under a false name to escape persecution.

Tony Wakeford ages, has refined over the years Tony Wakeford, has become a cultured and reserved gentleman, the exuberance of his beginnings has faded, but the trauma of the End remains at the center of his artistic vision. Wakeford continues to speak to us about the End, a discourse more than twenty years long, uninterrupted, multiform, probably infinite.

"Not All of Me will Die" is a moving work, conceived and constructed with the usual passion and sincerity that characterize a master of the apocalypse like Wakeford. Defining his latest solo album with the label of apocalyptic folk is as reductive as it is inevitable, considering how certain moods and sensations have by now become part of the English artist's DNA, here more than ever director, even before protagonist, of an intimate journey through the icy and shadowy lands of the human spirit. Once again, Wakeford surrounds himself with skilled instrumentalists tasked with bringing color and depth to his desolate and haunting visions, an "orchestre noir" intent on describing the indescribable through an expanded, soft, and tentacled expansion of sounds. The focus remains Wakeford's acoustic guitar, his muted electric guitar strokes, his enveloping synthesizers, his primal bass, his archaic percussion. From this core blossoms Mark Baigent's tearful oboe, the violin of his companion Renée Rosen, David Negrin's clarinet, and many more.

Published by the Israeli label Eastern Front and recorded following a stay in Israel, "Not All of Me will Die" is covered with Middle Eastern suggestions and sounds echoing Slavic and Eastern European folklore, while not giving up the chill of the machines that, since the previous "Into the Woods", have returned with a certain incisiveness to stain the trouvère art of the invincible Wakeford. In this almost instrumental work, the evocative and solemn monumentality of the solo albums from the nineties ("The Croix" and "Cupid & Death"), the adventure of a classical composer matured within the project "L'Orchestre Noir", and certain more experimental solutions found scattered throughout more than twenty years of career harmoniously converge: as if Wakeford's art were a raging avalanche that over the years has been able to evolve incrementally, gradually incorporating new elements and systematizing them in an organic and coherent scheme.

"Not All of Me will Die" thus appears to us as the culmination of an entire career, of which it probably constitutes the impetus that more than any other aims at the Absolute: this work may be accused of prolixity or excessive indulgence towards certain formalism; Wakeford's qualities as a composer may not appear exalted, his melodies elementary, the whole may sound didactic, self-serving, merely descriptive and someone might rightly say: "Yes, all very nice, but then what remains?". What remains is the invincible, indestructible poetry of the minstrel who with his Sol Invictus has written fundamental pages in the history of apocalyptic folk, a skilled painter of remote feelings and archaic flavors, a narrator of legendary exploits and pure and uncontaminated scenarios, here more than ever close to a chilly November eden.

The colossal twenty-two minutes of the opening track "Non Omnias Moriar" are sublime: a long accumulation of ambient caresses, opened by the dark tolling of drums and closed by rivers of electric drones that overlap peacefully in a desolate drift of feelings. The verses of Ginczanka's poetry emerge among the plucked strings of the classical guitar and the loops of an electric guitar echoing in the distance, between a sinuous lament of oboe and the plunge into the abyss of a clarinet: it is Wakeford's tear-choked voice and aseptic female recitations that chant them, in one of the highest moments of Wakeford's poetry, here more than ever influenced by the bucolic ambient of his friend musician and painter Tor Lundvall.

In "Fullness of August", another pivotal track of the work, an extraordinarily clean male voice weaves a song of poignant and abstract melancholy so much that it seems to us sinking into the soft notes of a David Sylvian album; in the finale the electricity returns, almost recovering the more properly heroic component of the English artist. In the concluding portion of the album, between a ballet of strings and trails of drones wandering in the void, Wakeford's industrial vision is more fully realized, never grim and annoying, but rather elegant, desolating, archaic (it seems an oxymoron!), skillfully describing the anguish of absence, the dim light that in the distance indicates a possible, not certain, continuation in time of our limping journey.

In just over fifty minutes, Wakeford sketches the contours of what we might call Immortality, the immortality of art first of all, the imprint that, more generally, we leave along our journey on this world....