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What is Empyrean?
A planned solo Fringe performance of an abstract rap-opera by young theatre designer Freya Webb, who recounts the story of how he quit theatre following an atrocious experience producing a show called "Empyrean."
Play/download Empyrean's tracks (some lyrics NSFW) from the playlist below...
...or click any track's title to view that track (and it's lyrics) on SoundCloud. To learn what these complex songs are all about, keep reading!
What do you need to know about Empyrean?
Freya is employed by director Stewart McClory to work as a designer of sound, lighting and video-projection for an adaptation of the oldest Greek play in history, an adaptation McClory names "Empyrean." Freya is initially encouraged to challenge McClory and present a bold, new form of theatre design that speaks to a modern audience, a task he knows he can excel at.
Reading the script, Freya sees no point in a literal re-telling of Empyrean, which serves only to promote trivial God-worship at the expense of women's liberties. Seeing the societal origins of patriarchal oppression in the script, Freya pushes to frame Empyrean within the context of modern gender issues and use the play to deconstruct the world's present political landscape. McClory, at first, supports this idea.
Across it's three-month development, Empyrean plunges Freya into absolute misery. McClory threatens to fire anyone who doesn't meet his outrageous, costly, constantly-changing stream of production demands, enforces creative decisions that make the show painfully unwatchable and has the staff of the show work unmanageable hours on false promises of pay. Freya is forced by McClory to research and provide new footage of animal and human torture each day to give McClory ideas for the show's visual content, ideas McClory has scrapped the week the show opens.
Amidst all this, Freya attempts to keep McClory in line and produce what he can to make the show worth watching for the audience and worth slaving over for it's cast and crew. This plan soon backfires however when McClory makes a purchase that loses the show fifty-thousand pounds of it's budget, then turns the entire company against Freya by falsifying proof that Freya was responsible for the purchase. This drives Freya to a nervous breakdown.
Empyrean becomes, for it's audience, a three-hour travesty. For Freya, it becomes a three-month nightmare.
I began work on Empyrean following a ROUGH time in my life. I had just graduated from a degree in Theatre Design and Production. I was already six years into a theatre career at this point, two years as an actor, four in design/management, and only a month after gaining a genuine theatre qualification, I quit theatre work for seven years (and counting). Empyrean was to be my explosive tirade at theatre as I stormed out of the door.
My time in theatre was spent working for employers who had cheated me (and many others) out of money, made me the scapegoat of budget-damaging production problems (thus wrecking my references and connections) and actively sabotaged the creative output I was starving myself to provide them with. The year I graduated was the worst in this regard, as I worked on the particularly hellish production that I would base Empyrean on. I had concluded that theatre was a hideously mismanaged, exploitative, ego-fuelled, creatively-inhibiting, audience-resenting, soul-destroying moral wasteland of an industry, where art goes to die. Hire me, theatre industry!
Like Filth and Nine Circles, I channelled my inner-torment to write a constructive story. Empyrean would, using the tale of Freya Webb, serve as an evaluation of what we in the theatre industry are doing to each other, to our audiences and what we SHOULD actually be doing.
Why use rap and abstract beats as my forefront means of storytelling? Freya as a character wanted to present bold, new forms of storytelling to McClory, which rap layered over a cacophonous wall of polyrhythmic textures would certainly qualify as for him. Rap, as first demonstrated by BDP and Public Enemy, was powerful as a tool for activism. Freya aimed to play into this, looking to equate the rallying cries of Empyrean's ancient Greek populace with those of today's world calling for societal change. As the story progressed, this sense of activism would blend into Freya's internalised rebellion against McClory's immoral practises and his cries for help as the production slowly destroys him.
The biggest advantage of using rap as a form was the ability to create tracks that would attract an online audience for Empyrean whenever the show wasn't being performed in the flesh. Rap suits an internet audience, eager to deconstruct each rhyme for it's details, keen to discuss each song's meaning over comment threads and able to stay engaged with the rich story of Empyrean amidst their routine-sharing of savvy new rap tracks across social media. Rap granted me a major advantage as a sole Fringe-theatre producer in his efforts to promote his first show.
Musically, my goal with Empyrean was to create a deep, dark, fractured work of despair-driven chaos like NIN's The Fragile or Radiohead's Kid A. Since Freya felt little comfort working on Empyrean, I wanted to tear the listener's sense of comfort completely to shreds, but still offer them a sense of welcoming, but frail, frightened and endangered humanity with which to stay connected to Freya. Most importantly, the music had to always offer rap's power to command a hypnotic level of attention, with underlying melodies as catchy as the best works of Dr Dre.
Ultimately, I made three Empyrean tracks before the project was sidelined. Chronologically, "Obey" is the first song of the three. Happening early in the performance, Obey covers Freya's initial reading of the Empyrean script. As the oldest Greek story in history, Freya fails to see anything in the script of meaning or value to a modern-day theatre audience, writing off the play as a limp affirmation of God and man's 'superiority' over women. Freya only sees Empyrean's relevance when he relates modern-day notions of toxic masculinity and a regressive patriarchal society to the play's outrage against the "Mother" character and the oppression of the all-female group known as "The Backlash."
"Flap" is the second song of the three, taking place in the second half of the performance. Flap tells of a heated fallout between Freya and the head of Empyrean's design team, Declan. The two had been at each other's throats throughout Empyrean's production, but this moment is particularly devastating to Freya, as Declan takes whatever faith the production staff has in Freya and tears it to shreds in front of them.
"Karoshi" is the finalmost song of the three, coming towards the end of the performance. "Karoshi" means "death by overwork" in Japanese, which Freya feels like he is suffering from. He can feel his mental and physical health deteriorating as the relentless production schedule of Empyrean catches up with and crushes him. The song concludes with Freya knowing he cannot do his job satisfactorily anymore and deciding he doesn't care.
Empyrean was intended for the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but the production costs became too high for my then-sources of income to keep up with (and to be clear, I built Empyrean from the ground up in such a way that it would cost about a fifth of what a typical first-Fringe show would cost to produce. THAT'S how non-frivolous I was with my money!) Not letting lack of funds hinder my progress, I began to re-work Empyrean into an online-only production.
As my research on how to promote via YouTube deepened, I decided it would make sense to develop a new project that was purpose-built for YouTube, use it to gain an audience, THEN come back to Empyrean. By the time that happened and the Noakes Channel was gaining speed, I felt it better to apply Empyrean's societal commentary to more accessible music. The result? Man's Worst Fear (Just Some Queer).
Want more music from the soul of Freya Webb? Please go to patreon.com/lenaray - That's..
...and donate to look after me more than my theatre employers did!
Any questions, confusion or compliments about Empyrean? Leave a comment below!
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