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‘Hi man, really appreciate your tunes big up from across the pond
Just wanted to ask what the song Walpurgis Night is about dont get me wrong it’s my favourite tune of yours, but never really understood the meaning behind it 🙂 ‘
(from:Â Joel – Boston,US)
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hi Joel,
how lovely of you to send a message! hope you are staying safe with your family 🙂
it’s been a while since i released the track and i must say i am very grateful to all the people included – my manager at the time, the great work of Oscar Fogelström from Sweden and lovely italo-disco duo Hard Ton with whom i started the track from scratch. the process of creating the track was definitely one of the most inspiring. as my dad was a disco / funk DJ in the 80s i wanted to pay respect to all the music support he’s given me by creating a funk driven, Nile Rodgers-esque track and travelled to Bologna, Italy to begin the process. we’ve recorded the guitars in Venice and furthered the production in Stockholm, Sweden.
regarding the theme – back in high school we had to read all kind of literature, but the thing that struck me the most was a passage in Goethe’s Faust that spoke about the night of the witches where they gather to ‘enjoy’ group activities and celebrate what is there described as the devil’s deeds. i was fascinated by how one can enjoy celebrating something so evil and then a couple of years later i realised that sometimes we are connected to something vicious to what we keep coming back to, so i wrote a piano poem about escaping your enchantingly abusive love on one night that it isn’t watching and tricking them. it then turned into a more of a pop song.
the music, apart from the funky guitar, has a hard ongoing bass inspired by one of the darkest techno clubs in Belgrade where i was dancing with my friends in enchantment and got the idea for the melodies. 5 of my close friends at one point held our hands and danced in pentagon shaped circles – and there i got the lyric ‘in the pentagons i’m spinning’. it all seemed to come together quite nicely.
the video was a bit of a detective cyber punk take on Faust and Walpurgis Night, where I was the protagonist (Faust) and my handsome guitarist was Mephistopheles (the devil in the book) and we come to get young girls carefully packaged for us by the hotel mistress with the pet black dog (one of the devil’s shapes in the book) and you can see my friend Lea (a gorgeous youtuber from Serbia) as a hotel guest symbolising that the celebrities are also included in the group activities worshipping the dark side of the world. we take the girls to the bonfire to bring them out of being drugged and enjoy those group activities only to be destroyed in the end (the same fate that the book had) only i wanted to destroy the devil as well in the video tricking it that it’s gonna win.
i really hope i haven’t made this letter confusing, but i really appreciate your question and as it has been a song widely not understood so i wanted to try and explain it thoroughly. x
love,
Luke Black