“Hatter’s Mad Emporium” is as mad and marvellous as the name suggests. A blend of whimsy and wonderment that combines all the best bits of quirky folk and Victorian music hall, skewed nursery rhymes and dark surrealism in a way that would have made The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band jealous.
Skirling trumpets and ticking beats, parping tubas and chiming ukuleles, shimmering sitars, and a wash of hazy vocal harmonies drift through, the perfect platform for Wendy DuMond’s strange lyrical narratives. Narratives that explore the darker corners of Lewis Carroll’s most famous and perhaps increasingly controversial creation.
At its heart is the theme of Alice being goaded into imbibing and eating various trippy substances, a part of the story that always had counter-culture connotations, even a hundred years before the phrase was coined. Quotes and images from the book are conjured and woven through the song – ravens and writing desks, clocks and consumables, pelts and felt – all adding to the mad imagery.
Bog Witch has woven a song from the images of a feverdream, from desperate and diverse sonic threads, from the repressed corners of Victorian society, from the underlying drug allusions which are found throughout Wonderland, and from the gothic underbelly of this most surreal of stories.
Where the music fits into the musical landscape is anyone’s guess, but that’s the point. Unique? That doesn’t even begin to sum up the music that Bog Witch makes. File under curiouser and curiouser!
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