Elijah’s Mantle

Elijah’s Mantle may be the productive alter ego of London-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Tag Ellis, frequently in cooperation with Brendan Perry of Deceased May Dance, with whom Ellis sometimes appears privately. Elijah’s Mantle is really a project of nearly obsessive specificity of theme, a style which can just be described by way of a line in the group’s press package: “The legacy from the gnostic heretics as well as the supplanation from the ideals and idols from the traditional globe by repressive Christian theology.” All the Elijah’s Mantle information feature Latin along with other dead-language text messages sung and chanted by users from the Dublin Philharmonia and also have similar-sounding titles. Not just that, but all the recording covers follow the very same artwork design template, very much as produces on Creed Taylor’s CTI Information experienced in the past due ’60s. Having said that, as it happens that these information are nowhere near as eye-rollingly pretentious because the above explanation sounds. Ellis is undoubtedly a gifted composer and arranger, as well as the atmospheric creation, generally by Perry, is definitely dark and strange and generally quite lovely. The whole lot is rather just like a much less naff version from the horribly misguided Enigma, with obvious antecedents including severe English composers like Gavin Bryars and (specifically) John Tavener. Elijah’s Mantle started having a full-blown visual with 1993’s Angels of Perversity. 1994’s Remedies in Heresies and 1995’s Sorrows of Sophia adopted, with 1996’s Betrayals and Fantasies and These Wings Without Feathers, 1997’s Poets and Visionaries, 1998’s Psalms From Invocations, 1999’s The Spirit of Romanticism, and 2000’s Legacies of Problem carrying on and amplifying the styles. Together with his audio produces, Tag Ellis collaborated with filmmaker Daniel Faoro on Beliefs Having a Hammer, a brief film finished between 1993 and 1995 and released on video in 1995; the film assiduously explores Christian symbolism from the Renaissance and beyond by showing tableaus in the way of Caravaggio and La Tour to some soundtrack by Ellis and Perry.