Eve Libertine releases album 'I Am That Tempest – A Portrait'

Eve Libertine   Album ‘I Am That Tempest – A Portrait’ out now via Caliban Sounds   Smartlink Spotify

Artwork Press images   “Ferocious, laceratingly intelligent, resolutely feminist… [she] set the template for Riot Grrrl a good decade early” – Soundblabs   Artist, musician, poet, and activist Eve Libertine has returned with ‘I Am That Tempest – A Portrait’, a visceral vocal performance backed with improvised, experimental jazz, released by Penny Rimbaud’s Caliban Sounds.   Eve Libertine rages back into the spotlight with her wild interpretation of Penny Rimbaud’s poem ‘I Am That Tempest’, which he describes as a “showpiece for Eve’s staggering vocal range”. Joined by a band of stellar musicians, Eve weaves herself around a forest of improvisational responses, making a mincemeat of conformist pretensions. “The meaning is in the doing of it,” offers Rimbaud as some sort of an explanation, “it’s an itness rather than an ifness. It has its own life”.   Libertine and Rimbaud have been pushing musical boundaries together ever since their now classic 70’s track, ‘Reality Asylum’, which introduced the avant-garde to the unlikely ears of Crass’ mainly punk audience. “I love working for and with Eve,” says Rimbaud, “her sense of inflection is second to none, and her ability to make sense of my sometimes-obscure lyrics somehow enables me to better understand the meanings of my own work. Muse?” he asks, “maybe,” he responds, with a wry smile.   When asked to add to the above, Libertine came back with, “Mad or what? Any think can be made sense of, it’s what we do in our daily struggle to make sense of the senseless. It allows us to wend our weary ways thinking that we belong here. But sometimes it’s good not to FIT but rather to FLY high amongst the clouds of senselessness where we can truly belong”.   Eve Libertine is best known for her role as co-lead vocalist in Crass. Libertine wrote and performed most of the songs on the group’s third album, ‘Penis Envy’, which concentrated exclusively on feminist issues and featured only female voices.   After Crass disbanded in 1984, Libertine concentrated on developing her vocal range and then went on to release her first post-Crass album, ‘Skating The Side Of Violence’ which she toured in the West Coast of the US, supporting folk-hustlers Chumbawamba. Continuing to collaborate with Penny Rimbaud, she then featured, both recorded and live, in his spoken word ‘opera’, ‘The Death of Imagination’. Throughout this period, Libertine also worked extensively with A-Soma, an avant-garde electro-pop artist and musician with whom, amongst other works, she recorded ‘Last One Out Turns Off the Lights’, a theatre piece featured at the ICA and Richard DeMarco Gallery during the mid 90s and remains to this day a demanding and compelling work.   At the beginning of the millennium, Rimbaud was asked to stage a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank, ostensibly in opposition to the mounting threat of war in Iraq. Seeing this as a possibility to gather together the by now diverse characters who had made up Crass, Rimbaud and Libertine founded The Crass Collective specifically for the event. Buoyed by the success of the concert, Rimbaud and Libertine then decided to expand on the Collective, calling on the many jazzers whom they had got to know at London’s Vortex Jazz Club. Taking on a monthly residency, they were able to present a huge volume of new works, some of them recorded. Two major albums came out of this, ‘Savage Utopia’ featuring Libertine’s voice alongside programming by Matt Black of Coldcut and a band of jazz’s leading front liners, and ‘Sea’ which was recorded by the BBC in 2003 at the Vortex as part of that year’s London Jazz Festival, but which was never broadcast. For some time, the tapes lay unlistened to and unmixed until 2012 when Rimbaud rescued them from obscurity. Libertine continues to work with Rimbaud within this largely jazz based format.   Alongside her work with Rimbaud, Libertine has worked with the Vocal Constructivists, a group dedicated to performing works by the likes of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew. She has also collaborated extensively with Charles Webber, an electronic artist and composer. With him she wrote ‘Listen, Little Man’ which, drawing on the writings and research of Wilhelm Reich, is a semi-improvised performance piece for voice and signal generators working from a back-projected graphic score. Their next project together was a chamber opera based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, ‘Room of Worlds’, for which Libertine wrote the libretto, directed and performed in. Webber and Libertine worked together on Rimbaud’s ‘Kernschmelze II’ - a cantata for improvised voice’ released in 2017.   This year, Crass announced the release of ‘A Pictorial History’, a book documenting their infamous career across more than 300 pages of images, handouts, posters, record covers and more. The release is accompanied by events at Rough Trade East and The Horse Hospital in London, and White Columns in New York.   Art credit: Eve Libertine & Gee Vaucher   Track listing   Morning Session Interlude (feat. Penny Rimbaud) Afternoon Session   Music credits   Eve Libertine – Voice Louise Elliott – Sax & Flute Kevin Davy – Trumpet Alcyona Mick – Piano Nemo Jones – Guitar Terry Day – Percussion Penny Rimbaud – Voice (track 2)   Recorded and mixed by Paul ‘Pdub’ Walton At Livingston Studios and The Loft Studios Lyrics & Overall Production by Penny Rimbaud   Follow Caliban   Facebook Instagram X   Follow OLI    Website Facebook Instagram X