FEASTING WITH PANTHERS is a collaboration between Marc Almond and composer Michael Cashmore setting poems of Count Eric Stenbock plus unique translations by celebrated poet Jeremy Reed of poems by Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine – as well as Reed s own poetry – to music. ‘Decadent’ poems of thwarted love, ill-fated romance, decadence and death are woven with homoeroticism and laced with opium and are accompanied by Michael Cashmore’s haunting and melancholic music that gives the verses a feeling of yearning for beauty and a longing for a lost innocence and youth.
The album was recorded over several years sending music files by email and post, the artists never once recording together in the studio: Berlin based Michael Cashmore working at home to compose the music, playing all of the instruments and adding Marc s vocals from files recorded in London. The result is a glorious union, both in voice and music, complementing the texts.
The project began after Current 93′s David Tibet gave Marc a book of poems by the Baltic German poet Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock that he had published through the Durtro label. Marc was instantly attracted to the dark erotic and melancholic yearning in the verse and contacted Michael Cashmore who he had previously worked with on Current 93′s reading of Idumea. He felt Michael would have the right understanding of the verse with his intricate, beautiful musical compositions. From this, the project developed to include many of Marc’s favourite poems by some of his favourite ‘outsider’ poets with common ground.
Marc and Michael released a limited edition of Stenbock s Gabriel and The Lunatic Lover through Durtro and performed both songs at The Queen Elizabeth Hall in London with Current 93 (see YouTube) in 2008. The complete album is now released through Cherry Red/ Strike Force Entertainment.
