Epitaph

Description

Moriarty’s fourth album picks up where The Missing Room (2011) left off: we reopened the trunks full of fragments accumulated over the years, dug through the unfinished pieces born of endless tours and side projects. There were dictaphone recordings of songs improvised once and then lost, captured backstage in theaters, in bedrooms and basements. In the attic of a farmhouse, tucked away at the bottom of an Alsatian valley, we had written and recorded stories of tragic women. While cycling through Kyoto, we had improvised at the top of our lungs the story of a fallen man, then recorded a version of that song with the Cajun sorcerers Mama Rosin. There was also the musical adaptation of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a radio play, which gave birth to six new tracks. Finally, after three years on tour, we settled in Paris and let new songs emerge. -- Once again, we were surprised to find that these songs revolved - more or less closely - around the theme of the afterlife, of passing from one world to another, of the invisible dance between the living and the ghosts. Often we laugh at our own uncontrollable tendency to write funeral songs, to turn music into Totentanz, into a tragicomic dance of the dead. So we decided to call this album Epitaph, to mock death, and to believe that one can dance with it. Then, as is our habit, we let the songs mature on stage, in contact with the audience, during a tour of 22 small venues in France and Switzerland, before presenting them at Philharmonie 2 in Paris on January 24 and 25, 2015. Epitaph was recorded and mixed by Renaud Letang at Ferber studios in Paris.