Review | By Ed Pinsent / The Sound Projector
Merzouga | De Rerum Natura / Dance of the Elements
My Favourite Things – From 8th February 2019 we have the Merzouga team on Gruenrekorder. Eva Popplein and Janko Hanushevsky wowed the crowds with their 2013 release based on wax cylinders found in the Berlin Phonogram Archive, leaving us in no doubt as to their historical sensibilities and their thoroughness in surveying and sampling ethnic music from the early part of the 20th century. For De Rerum Natura / Dance of the Elements (GRUEN 185), they’re drawing inspiration from a work of classical antiquity, Lucretius’ epic “didactic” poem De Rerum Natura (On The Nature Of Things). In this work, the Roman poet Lucretius was attempting to explain to his readers the philosophy of the earlier (Greek) philosopher Epicurus. By modern writers and thinkers, Epicurus is now claimed as a an early “humanist” of sorts – he wanted to banish fear of the supernatural, free mankind from living in fear of the gods and deities that supposedly governed our lives, and to that end he started to explain how the universe came into being. […]