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CD
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FLED 3086CD
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Ten classics from the American folk song tradition receive a series of gorgeous remakes by the remarkable Snakefarm. It has been a long ten years since Anna Domino and Michael Delory made their debut with the widely-praised Songs From My Funeral. As a solo artist, Anna Domino released four remarkable albums and two EPs for the Belgian label Les Disques du Crepuscule, between 1984 and 1990. Those recordings are often cited as major influences on the British trip-hop movement centered around Massive Attack and Portishead. Yet, the glorious New York summer afternoon that Snakefarm crept into her consciousness, Domino knew she'd found a whole new musical window to leap through -- "I was waiting for the light" and said "We should take a bunch of those great old songs about murder and such, and start doing them with modern arrangements." The idea refused to sit still, and as soon as she returned home, Domino and Delory set to work on the experiment. "Just to see what would happen." Though subtle percussion and loops had distinguished her earlier recording, in Snakefarm, Anna wanted the beats to be more prominent, yielding percolating arrangements that could carry the narrative content of the words. It worked. "It was so much fun," confesses the singer, "the arrangements almost wrote themselves. What surprised me was how it didn't take any forcing at all." My Halo At Half-Light continues where the previous album left off and features scintillating arrangements that bring these stories from our collective past into the sunlight of today.
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