This is the first album of The Protagonist, a project from Magnus Sundström. It brings us beautifully arranged bombastic neo-classical music, mostly instrumental, with some guest-musicians, like Arcana’s Peter Petterson and Mark St. John Ellis of Elijah’s Mantle.
The album “A Rebours” is named after the French fin-de-siècle novel by J.K. Huysmans (1884) It’s not so strange that the opening track of the cd is called The eternal abjectness of life, with spoken word taken from another book by J.K. Huysmans. The other tracks on the album are also inspired by various literary and cultural sources: poems of Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe, a sculpture by Joseph Thorak, the work of Leni Riefenstahl (known for her impressive visualisation of Drittes Reich grandeur in `Triumph des Willens’). On two tracks Marcus Ohlsson plays cello, but most music is performed by Sundström alone. The production is also outstanding!
