Published
Broken Spectre
During that period I witnessed fires so vast they blacked out the sun. I watched illegal-loggers fell 700 year-old trees, and heard the unnerving silence of the forest that followed. I saw mercury poisoning rivers, and vast swathes of forest decimated for the promise of a few flecks of gold by young miners illegally seeking their fortune in Indigenous territories. I recorded volunteer veterinarians treating third degree burns on the paws of an anesthetised Jaguar; injuries inflicted by emboldened ranchers seeking to produce more beef for export on the smoldering remains of her wetland home. All because ‘man shall have dominion’.
We live in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
This album is ultimately a document of failure. A failure of our democracies, a failure of political will, a failure of imagination, and creatively, my own failure to communicate through sound the vast scale of the Amazon and the ongoing damage inflicted upon it by the policies of Jair Bolsonaro. This album is an indictment of his regime, but also of ourselves. It is a witness statement, an artwork born inside an artwork that draws upon a continuously inspiring, decade-long collaboration with Richard and Trevor, and is my best attempt at a tribute to the natural world from which it came and in that regard it may well be one of my better ones.