TEHO TEARDO
GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

Cillian Murphy of Peaky Blinders fame gives an astonishing performance in Enda Walsh’s adaption on Max Porter’s award-winning novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, a hear-wrenching meditation on love, loss and living. For Teho this is the third episode of this ongoing wonderful collaboration with Irish writer and director Enda Walsh and there’s more coming soon! It’s the story of a crow, two motherless children and their dad. Dad is haunted by both terrible and funny memories. Crow just wants to take care of them all and won’t leave the house until he’s done. Music has such a strong role on this play because it evokes their dead mum, it passes through the walls like in a membrane and becomes something else, it’s not what you hear, it’s what you think you’re listening to. Music becomes the sound of thoughts, like sonar echoes it measures loss and grief. On “A Bit About Ghosts” the wall of sound of cellos that opens the album is a continuous dialog between strings and electronics, percussions and slide guitars. Track after track Teho investigates several possibilities of interaction between strings and electronics, completely dependent on each other: one is wave and the other is shore. Strings aren’t a matter of arrangement, they build a powerful structure. Nothing needs to be adorned here, no embellishments here, it’s about grief. Even when the music evokes mum, her warmth and safety are delivered through distant voices full of debris, like a dark matter whose limits we don’t know. This is probably Teho’s darkest work to date, an emotional lesson in survival where all elements involved are waiting for their reinstatement into the sphere of light.