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DECADENT PLUS MUSIC

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Whenever we release a new album the publishers ask what genre the music is, which is always difficult because, our albums at least, touch on a wide variety of different genres, from rock to pop to blues to jazz to theatrical to electronic to avant garde. The question, what genre, is therefore quite a troubling one and it has made me ponder on the question of what kind of authentic label could be given to Madadkin’s music. With the release of THOU HAST BUT ONE HOUR TO LIVE however I think I can now see the answer quite clearly. Madadkin’s music is in the ‘decadent’ category. The songs are, after all, about the decadence of the civilisation we all belong to and because of that they also reflect that same decadence. Decadence as a genre, therefore, would involve all artists who are criticising the decadence from within the decadence, and a lot of those musicians are creating outside the system and producing their music from home with a basic mic, a keyboard and a DAW. We often hear how we are living in the information age, or now the AI age, but really these little titles are just subtitles for the general decadence that has dominated our lives since the 1960s in an incremental way unto this moment of extreme decadence, so perhaps we can call it decadent plus music, as the empire crumbles away beneath us.     

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The central artist behind MADADKIN is Paul David Adkin Sherwin. Adkin-Sherwin is a gebuine polymath: singer, composer, musician, novelist, writer of tales, inventor of aphorisms, philosophical blogger, director, dramaturg, video-artist and teacher. Primarily, his work explores the need for a radical progress change and it is deeply humanist.

 

Via a jazzistic post-rock style MADADKIN raises his voice clearly about injustice and alienation; politics and religion; about our technological world and the nightmarish plutocratic system that organises and controls our lives.

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MADADKIN sees the prime duty of his creative work to be variegated. He wants his music to amuse, to puzzle and to fascinate. He hopes his listeners will feel that they are savouring a complex imagination. His style could be labelled post-rock, or post-punk but he sees himself working in a new genre that he calls post-pandemic. 

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MADADKIN’s compositions are fused in a a very committed and defined personal style with a strong progressive and humanistic vision.

 

But the MADADKIN project is much more than music: it is theatre and performance art.

 

MADADKIN not only writes songs, he produces video-art those videos play an important part of the performances. Paul Adkin, with singer, dancer and actress Ariadna Santana, bring their theatrical experience to the concert stage to create a grotesque, tragi-comic style that attacks the senses from every direction.

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Ariadna has collaborated with Madadkin on several albums combining her hauntingly innocent and bright voice with the deep rasping tones of Paul Adkin to create dramatically discordant and totally decadent harmonies.