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Orestiana Overtures: I. Agamemnon ("Long Live the King, Long May He Reign, The King is Dead")

from The Indigo Saint by Nicholas Tristan

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Anne Carson's An Oresteia is not THE Oresteia, as many critics and fellow translators and poets were eager to point out in their usually mixed, often baffled, sometimes downright hostile assessments and reviews of her translation of the Classical Greek tragedy cycle. It cuts through the elevated, distant canonical nature of the Classical works and reveals the lurid, cynical, witty, melodramatic, sarcastic, broadly funny words underneath, presented in gruff vernacular, with anachronism gleefully piled upon anachronism, with irony and recurring gags and Simpsons-esque comedic timing jarringly placed alongside the horrors of murder and a family destroying itself.

I wanted to do some kind of an adaptation of the work -- I don't know what, I don't have the rights or anything, but for now there is just a concept: cut through the classical yet again; no strings, no noble horns, no libretto of poetic beauty. But instead: skunge.

Crackling tube amps bleating out old electric pianos, cheap early synthesizers, an electro-acoustic mallet stringed instrument designed in Reaktor I pretentiously called the Lyrnaet (sorry), and tuned in Ancient Greek Pythagorean equal temperament (sorry again) are used here to attain maximum skunge.

This is not a criticism on Anne Carson's work, which I adore, but rather an acknowledgement that these Classical lesson players now only teach us a lesson of absurdity, the cruel and fickle nature of the Greek Gods destroying life after life for, by Apollo's own admission in the truly hilarious Deus Ex Machina ending of Orestes, no reason at all.

The human response to this stunning admission of casual cruelty? "No choice but to obey". There is no problem too big for the Gods to solve, because they likely caused the problem in the first place.

lyrics

From "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus, translated by Anne Carson:

KLYTAIMESTRA: I am fearless and you know it.
Whether you praise or blame me I don't care.
Here lies Agamemnon, my husband,
a dead body,
work of my righteous right hand.
That's how things stand.

credits

from The Indigo Saint, released April 23, 2022
Track written, performed, recorded/programed, mixed, and mastered by Nicholas Tristan

Instrumentation:
RMI Spectra Keys (Electric Piano)
Suzuki Omnichord (Digital Synthesizer)
Arturia Minibrute (Analog Synthesizer)

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Nicholas Tristan Victoria, British Columbia

Nicholas Tristan is a Victoria-based composer, producer, arranger, writer, and gadfly.

Nicholas has produced or written arrangements for artists as diverse as Guided By Voices, Jully Black, We Are All, and Hilario Duran. His work has been performed at festivals and conferences from Los Angeles to Leipzig.

He is also an electronic musician and producer -- check out his work at nicofantasy.com ... more

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