photo by Rhett Muller
words by Chance Solem-Pfeifer
Eros, said the deceased American writer and psychonaut Terence McKenna, is something we know only in the popular culture as a cheap but everlasting sale of sex and romance.
I’d heard of it only as the Greek word for the Roman god Cupid, whom we also know only as someone who sells us heart-shaped boxes of chocolate.
But use the word in its fuller sense, as McKenna did in a series of famous lectures in which he talks about Eros’ relationship with death and a pancultural idea of the end times (or eschaton) — and you're talking about something else. Eros, used this way, refers to an organic and inorganic unity of life from water molecules to human beings and all other life in between.
Think about it for a second: a singular force binding billions beyond billions of organisms.
Well, it’s that oneness combining the many that’s not unlike a song from the band Eros and the Eschaton.
On their debut album, Home Address for Civil War, you could say the duo of Adam Hawkins and Kate Perdoni constructs walls of sound. But that doesn’t quite do justice to the fact that when you listen, you’re standing in the wall. With all its sweetness. With all its cobwebs. Inhaling all the scattered dust of ambient scores of keyboards and guitars.
Adam and Kate, formerly It’s True and Katey Sleeveless, are former Nebraskans who now hail from Greensboro, North Carolina. The husband and wife say that they wrote this record together on the fuel of experimentation and a partnership that has always been built around a pact of creation — whether we’re talking about their endlessly layered music or their young son and tourmate Lio.
You can see Eros and the Eschaton in conjunction with a rare solo performance from It’s True tonight at Omaha’s Barley Street Tavern. That’s a Hear Nebraska Presents show, but in the meantime, listen to the band’s live in-studio session on HNFM:
Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska's staff writer. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.