12" Vinyl Album & 48 Page Booklet
Published by Dekmantel Records, 2021
It is often said that the best art comes out of adversity, and so it is that Erik Madigan Heck, Tilda Swinton, and Frits Wentink have collaborated on Safe Passage- an audio-visual project born out of loss consisting of classical, choral, and electronic music in three movements.
The gatefold album is presented by Dekmantel with a 48 page booklet of photographs and paintings by Heck and his mother; as well as remixes from Matthew Herbert, The Soft Pink Truth, BvDub, and East of Oceans.
This project initially began with Frits Wentink attempting to musically illustrate Heck's photography- but midway through the project Erik's mother was hospitalised due to breast cancer complications and eventually contracted Covid-19. By her bedside, and as a means to ease her passage, Heck repetitively played the first portion of the score, and then, once she passed, he decided to commemorate the music's function as a soundtrack for her transition by naming it Safe Passage. The involvement of Academy Award–winning actress Tilda Swinton has lent the music an extra dimension of spirituality: throughout the album, she interjects whispered fragments of Heck’s poetry, blurring the lines between one phase of music and the next.
The music has three movements across two sides: Side A, Safe, has a sense of hope and reflection as it undulates from minimalist string and brass arrangements to ambient and dissonant classical piano. Side B, Passage, then depicts the start of the transition into the afterlife as the voices of a choral madrigal ensemble gradually diverge, then break down entirely before a grand tonal expansion leads into a frenzied crescendo of choral vocals, hardened dub techno and anxious rhythms that convey the violence of the soul’s exit from this world. Finally, a cathartic Epilogue resets and bids farewell with the gentle sounds of a piano.
Because of the global on-going loss of life as a result of Covid-19, Safe Passage has become a soundtrack in which many people will find solace as they remember the sad transitions made from this life to the next during this unprecedented time in history.