The Everlasting Faint ~ Coming August 2025
My forthcoming album The Everlasting Faint takes its title from an 1897 murder case in West Virginia, known as the Greenbriar Ghost trial. A woman named Elva Zona Heaster Shue was found murdered in her home, and the court case held to establish the guilt of the murderer (Shue’s husband, unsurprisingly) is famous for allowing the testimony of Shue’s ghost into evidence. One of the more baffling things about the investigation of the murder is that George W. Knapp, the medical practitioner who examined the body of the victim, initially attributed Shue's death to ‘everlasting faint’, a diagnosis that he seems to have invented out of whole cloth as it appears nowhere else in US medical legal history. It’s such a peculiar and evocative term. Dr Knapp raises the possibility that a person might not be technically deceased, but instead, in a prolonged twilight state of absence - no longer inhabiting the world, and yet, not entirely gone from it either.
All of the compositions on The Everlasting Faint have been built around samples of resurrected audio material that has been languishing in obscure archives or boxed away in cupboards for many decades, relatively hidden away from the average person. It has existed in the twilight realm of an everlasting faint; no longer inhabiting the world, and yet, not entirely gone from it either.
~Peter
