Frits Wentink & Erik Madigan Heck - Safe Passage

February 15, 2021 - Dekmantel

Frits Wentink and Eric Madigan Heck’s latest project, Safe Passage, with contributions from Tilda Swinton, pays homage to Heck’s deceased mother. In an album that could turn irreproachably dark and melancholic, Wentink and Heck instead produce a composition of intense pensiveness. Their often peeled back instrumental repertoire conveys pilgrimage and hope passing through the many vectors of feeling, most harrowingly grief and suffering; passing to the other side, either unearthly or tantrically vibrant. 

The album opens with an introduction from Swinton, “I am the half-collected soul that treads the hallowed circles of your wells.” Presumably, she represents the voice or the spirit of the album, the music as her coattails in passing. The whole project blusters with mystery, a breathy otherworldliness that is most often reserved for chamber halls and amphitheaters. Autumnal chords dilate and contract with ghost notes providing minimal linearity. 

Taking full advantage of the concept of a concept album, the songs abide by little other than emotion and aura. ‘Under the Shadow of a Gnarled Thorn,’ a title that originally struck as heavy handed and nosensicial, evolves into a jubilant interlude underwritten with the poignant of a life passing, its tides both joyful and wistful. The track is forty-two seconds long. Swinton’s lines feel cosmic, as the elegiac strings broaden the theme to entropy at large. Much of the album smacks of an overwritten quality at first glance. But the weight is there. Only our sense of already knowing takes the substance aways from something entering us. Luckily, Wentink and Heck’s composition expertly picks the lock to the hardened heart. 

In funeral fashion multiple artists pay their respects in the form of remixes. Matthe Herbert, The Soft Pink Truth, BvDub, East of Oceans, and Frits Wentink himself all deliver their own recollection of what’s represented in the original efforts.

Safe Passage accomplishes much with little. “Should you close your eyes when the stars have just begun?” Swinton asks at the beginning of ‘An Infant’s Dream.’ Each piece is a clear movement onward yet inextricably tied together as one long exhale of holistic grief, which is to say a grief that acknowledges the beauty from which it comes and to which it returns. ⛰️