Feastwine and Penge!

In October 2017, my musician friend Tyler Burns asked me to make him a costume for the cover art of his album Penge, which he was working on.  I made him first a pair of pieced leather trousers, then a modified motorcycle jacket, then a stenciled cape.  He took the costume and continued working on the album with another friend, Alec Eagon.  Now, two years later, they've completed a music video and released the album! 

It is very gratifying to see my friends' hard work and creativity come to fruition.  Read on for links to their art! 

Album Cover for Penge (2019)

"FEASTWINE" MUSIC VIDEO

The music video is for the song "Feastwine".  It was shot on Super 16mm film, directed by Alec Eagon.  You can watch it on YouTube or Vimeo.  The people who made it care deeply about the visuals, so watch it in 4K if you can!  YouTube has the 4K option if you're using Chrome; Vimeo 4K is available using any browser.

Still from Feastwine music video. (The nightgown worn by the young lady is not my work.)

In the video, you can see the costume I made Tyler, particularly the jacket and cape.  The trousers are harder to see, being obscured in the chiaroscuro of Alec Eagon's painterly filming.  

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THE ALBUM

The album is called Penge, taken from the name of the manor house in E. M. Forster's Maurice.  Tyler Burns takes the name as inspiration for the theme of his album.  In contrast to a surface view of life, where we have conflicts with other people and struggle against circumstances, his Penge is a place where moral conflict is the primary conflict, where good and evil exist plainly and are known.  He imagines a haunted castle of imprisoned spirits and evil captors.  Outside the castle, things are murkier: people temporize, rationalize, and miscall their motives.  A vampire hunter arrives, clad in once-fine but now-battered leather armor.  He enters the castle to do battle with evil, to fight something that those outside the castle don't even believe exists.  Along the way, he battles temptations and struggles with the good and evil inside himself.  

This scenario--the castle Penge filled with spirits like something from a Sir Walter Scott poem--is a framing device for the album.  Just as a spiritual castle is invisible in daily life, so it is invisible in the lyrics.  The songs describe not the clanging of swords nor shrieking of spirits in durance vile, but a modern American experience: what moral quandary, compromise, or battle can look like outside the castle.  The castle Penge isn't in the lyrics, it underlies them.  The medieval aesthetic is in the concept and in the visual art, but the sound is modern and the words are of this century.  

It's hard to say whether Penge explores mundanity through a lens of the spirit, or spirituality through a lens of the mundane.  Either way, give it a listen!  

Penge (LP)
℗ 2019 Tyler Burns
Produced by Alec Eagon & Tyler Burns

Listen now: Bandcamp - iTunes - Soundcloud - Spotify - GooglePlay
(Hi-Fi listeners can download 24/44.1 files on Bandcamp if they choose a lossless format: aiff, flac, or wav.)