A History Lesson

Belief in malevolent beings which haunt the air and the secret places of the earth stemmed from early man's instinctive fear of the unknown, the strange and frightening. In West Asia this common superstition expressed itself potently in a variety of ways: the Egyptians struggled against Am-mut, the ‘eater of the dead’, and the serpent Apophis daily threatened the sun god Re; the Babylonians attributed sickness and misfortune to demonic attack, while at night men were endangered by Lilitu, a beautiful, winged succubus; the Hebrews had to cope with a host of fallen angels under the crafty leadership of Satan and Beelzebub; the Arabs fought off the assaults of countless djinn, ‘hidden ones’, inhabitants of the world before man; the Persians, the hardest pressed of all peoples, faced in the dreadful creations of Ahriman nothing less than absolute evil. It was the impact of Persian dualism on the Hebrews, after the Babylonian Exile, that led to the crystallization of the Devil in the form we recognize today.

The Marionette Roulette's beginnings were much quainter. It all started one October evening in a foggy swamp. One by one, the shadows appeared, each clutching their own unique and bizarrely shaped object, and one by one they started to manipulate these objects to produce what could only be described as a glorious cacophony of buzzing, strumming, bellowing and bowing. The result thus far has been soulful, mysterious, exotic rhythms and melodies that conjure up images of distant and forgotten times and places. Times of sorrow and joy, of love and rage, of heartbreak and adventure. Places infested with pirates, hooligans, gypsies, swindlers, swashbucklers, delinquents, and every other kind of ruffian you can imagine. The type of places you'd instantly regret walking into after having done so.