Last year, British avant-rock band Disco Inferno reissued their first five EPs from the 1990s. (Check out our oral history on the band here.) Now, the band's guitarist and vocalist Ian Crause (pictured left) has released his first piece of new music since 2001. "The Song of Phaethon" is split into three parts on his Bandcamp. Check out part one above and parts two and three below.
It's the first of two songs by Crause to tell the story of Phaethon. In an email, he writes that the track is "an allegory based on Britain's road into Iraq." Here's the description via Bandcamp:
The story, an ancient myth told in its definitive version by the poet Ovid, tells of a boy who discovers, through rumour, that his father is not a man called Merops but in fact the sun god Apollo. Upon discovering this Phaethon sets out to find the Sun's palace, which lies past India at the eastern edge of the world in order to meet his father and be accepted as his son.
The journey takes years but when he does finally arrive he decides to take advantage of his father's goodwill in granting him a wish by telling him he wants to carry out his father's daily task of flying the sun across the sky, despite this being expressly against his father's counsel as too dangerous an activity for mortals. In a clue to the allegory of the recording, Phaethon tells his father that he knows the story of the Sun falling into the world and the danger of this new journey upon which he is embarking so when Phaethon ignores his father's advice and holds him to his promise, Apollo, with great foreboding, lets the youth take the reins of the four horses and begin his ascent, which is where this first song ends.