ENDURANCE by Mulo Muto / meanwhile.in.texas / Skag Arcade

" «Endurance» is the result of the collaboration between Mulo Muto (Switzerland), meanwhile.in.texas (Italy) and Skag Arcade (Italy, currently based in the USA).
The seeds of this work were sawed by the Swiss label Luce Sia, which has been releasing several records by all three projects. While listening to each other's works, we got in touch to express admiration for each other’s approaches and quickly came up with the idea of recording an album together.

We then decided on how to structure what we were already imagining to be a proper concept album, and finally agreed on the idea of having each project one track (in this respect, Skag Arcade & meanwhile.in.texas are here considered as a unique entity and have written one track only together, since they had already collaborated on two shared albums) and then a third track conceived, arranged and played by everybody.

The concept of the album revolves around the Arctic and Antarctic expeditions that took place at the beginning of the 20th Century. After some internal discussion on the topic, we decided to restrict the field of interest and to focus specifically on Ernest Shackleton's expedition. Hence, the title «Endurance», the name of the ship that Sir Shackleton used during his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917), which is considered to be the last major expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition's attempt to cross the Antarctic continent was eventually destined to a tragic fate. The ship Endurance, in particular, after having battled her way through a thousand miles of pack ice over a six weeks period in the unknown, desolate and mysterious Antarctic wastelands, broke up after being crushed by pack ice and sank below the ice and waters of the Weddell Sea on November 21st 1915, leaving the 28 men of the expedition isolated on the drifting pack ice hundreds of miles from land, with no ship, no means of communication with the outside world and with very limited supplies...

The 3 long tracks composing the album have to be experienced as highly evocative, unsettling and almost transcendental meditations about those trips, almost to evoke the real excursions that took place over a 100 years ago, and represent an homage, if not properly an elegy, to the mostly forgotten men that were involved in those extreme expeditions to the Poles, and that in many cases lost their lives on those remote, unknown places at the end of the Earth."

Skag Arcade is an experimental music project by Paolo Colavita.


The Outsider of the Outsiders

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