« Fifteen years ago we started accumulating homemade recordings of songs, sketches and improvisations. A few of these made their way into the studios and became album songs. Countless others remained in the shadows of our archives, unfinished, unheard, forgotten. Yet these recordings have their own kind of magic: they bear witness to the process of collective songwriting; they capture the ephemereal instant of the birth of a song: elusive moments full of doubt, grace, and fragility. Epiphanies.
For years we have wondered if, and how, we could share these forgotten songs with the audience…
Then, a year ago, as we were touring for our album Epitaph, we initiated a strange ritual: on the road, along the way, as we encountered places that seemed to resonate with the themes of our lyrics (travelling to the Afterworld, dancing with the Devil, talking with the ghosts and the spirits…) we decided to bury our forgotten songs in the ground. We stored them on USB flashdrives, sealed them inside bottles or tin boxes filled with little objects gathered from the tour, and hid them at precise spots in the earth, or behind rocks. It was like as if the songs belonged to these mystical places, these doors and thresholds to the Otherworld… And it felt like a strangely liberating, symbolic rite of passage: burying the music, so that one day it could resuscitate.
After a year of touring, we ended up with a network of fourteen caches, scattered around the world in seven coutries. And we realized that all those hidden songs formed together an underground album, a collection of lost songs that we named « Epiphany ».
How can people hear this music now, how can they find these buried songs? …
We wrote a series of enigmas leading to the exact spots where the bottles and boxes had been buried, using the tracklist of our album Epitaph as a treasure map, along with all the hints embedded within its lyrics, illustrations and films.
Now it’s up to the listeners to decipher the enigmas, travel to the hiding places in the middle of deserts, fields and forests, at the heart of foreign metropolises, and unearth these songs.
Everytime a song has been found, we will switch on its light on the map. And only when the fourteen lights have been turned on, like a multiple keys lock, will the album be unveiled and published on our site: a collection of songs at once virtual – streaming on an online musical map – and physical – embedded deep within the real world. »
Yours truly,
C., A., T., R., V., E. & Z. Moriarty
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