The Agony in the Garden by London based experimentalband, Warren Schoenbright, is a meditation on a fractured vision of nature. The garden to which the title refers is a space that has been constructed using Foucault’s essay, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ as a blueprint. Foucault states that, “the oldest example of heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden.” A heterotopia is a site in which a myriad seemingly disparate spaces can coexist and thus a domain that is provisional, transient and interstitial may be conjured.The vivid, hyperreal simulacra of Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini’s Renaissance paintings both entitled, The Agony in the Garden are examples of such ‘contradictory sites’.
Within both depictions of Gethsemane, time and space have become pliable and one is presented with rendition of a space without origin. Multiple passages of time seem to be present and perspectival space appears to be on the verge of folding in on itself. Warren Schoenbright’s version of The Agony in the Garden explores similar interstices and incongruities with a weight and drama that sets it apart from their previous offerings. This collection of music ushers one through an imagined, ruined, half remembered and contested territory.
Released by Hominid Sounds, The Agony in the Garden is available on cassette and to download via Bandcamp.
