And here, in the footsteps of Virgil and Ovid, inspired by Rilke and Steiner, come Peter Blegvad and Andy Partridge, former luminaries of Slapp Happy and XTC respectively, with a mini-album glossing the story of the minstrel of Thrace, the son of Apollo and Calliope, whose lyre could move the very stones and charm a passage through the gates of Hades.
"Another day dawns on the savannah," Blegvad begins, his perfectly modulated tones emerging from the first of a series of striking soundscapes. "The wind sighs in the antlers of a few static deer, a coyote howls." For Hades, in this account, read Galveston. The present is the past, and the past is the immediate future. Fulfilling the gods' command to build a city in a day, Orpheus threatens to short-circuit the power supply on Olympus. As Eurydice fades back into the underworld, her lover takes a bullet from an unknown shooter.
Beautifully presented in a paperback-sized booklet, this one could make even the drive to the supermarket seem like a journey.