The God Of Crossroads

Released at September 24, 2012

Release date:

September 24, 2012

Length:

3:20

Status:

Official

Lyrics

In the one spot where all roads meet he is bound. He sees that there are more points to the compass than the heavens can hold. Curved behind his back, the universe encloses him. All roads dissolve into the dusk. He has deep Mongolian eyes that stay open as long as sight remains. He sees the light broken into small fragments before his very eyes, shattered into a thousand colours that can never reassemble. All our desires converge in him, our longing to find the way, the one way. He can hear our questions, but he cannot answer. He stammers and falls silent. Under a coffe-brown sky he has lost his sense of time and direction, in the dwindling windless light. Above him there is a clashing of clouds, the rain soaks him and his feet are cold. He pases, without direction, waiting to be replaced. He is dreaming of a long holiday, a heavenly break, he would prefer to leave all responsibility to a senior official in a grey suit. He dreams of cycling off on an upright placid bicycle of unknown make, cycling into green roadless woods and disappearing.

Uncommon Deities poem (Punkt 2011) on music by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré.

Music by Bang, Honoré, Endresen
Poem by Paal-Helge Haugen

Poems by Paal-Helge Haugen and Nils Chr. Moe-Repstad

The CD release of Uncommon Deities isnÂt a document of the installation, but a reinvention: the poems and Sylvian’s readings are placed in new settings by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. The cofounders of the Punkt festival and close collaborators on the original installation, Bang and Honoré draw on new performances by the deeply sympathetic trumpeter Arve Henriksen and the startling, elemental singer Sidsel
Endresen. These improvisations join live material captured at last year’s Punkt events, in a production that’s spacious and atmospheric, somber and escapist, light-hearted and steeped in history – a recording as rich as the ancestry of the work that inspired it.

Sidsel Endresen / vocal
David Sylvian / voice
Eivind Aarset- guitar
Erik Honoré -samples
Jan Bang – samples
Dai Fujikura – string samples