Veil & Subdue Blog

I’ve just been commissioned to do an original musical score for Theatre Saint Augustine’s January production of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen!  The music will be available on a limited-edition CD around the same time. Stay tuned for more details…

Veil & Subdue
By Kara Pound

“Two local musicians conceptualize goth-rock opera”

Local theatre co-founder and musician, Paul Ramey, can’t pinpoint his inspiration. “All of my life I’ve been influenced by concept albums,” he said referring to the similarity of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” to his new goth-rock opera CD, “Veil & Subdue,” in which he wrote and performed most of the songs. “It’s a whole album telling a story.” Along with concept albums, Ramey’s work is also inspired by Greek mythology, Neil Gaiman’s dark comic book series, “Sandman,” and, most interestingly, a close friend’s nightly brush with a phenomenon called, “night terrors.”

Anna K. Meade, Ramey’s good friend for nearly a decade and fellow Theatre Saint Augustine co-founder, has experienced these medical and psychological episodes for most of her life. “This is not a very well understood phenomenon,” Ramey said. “There isn’t much help out there and it’s very debilitating.” Night terrors are explained as when a person is abruptly awoken from sleep to extreme terror and the temporary inability to regain full consciousness. Gasping, moaning and/or screaming can also accompany them.

“Instead of a medical explanation, I wanted to look at a possible mythic, god-like cause for night terrors,” Ramey said of the storyline for the opera in which he co-wrote with Meade. The two were curious about the mythological undertones of the episodes back two or three thousand years ago when there weren’t necessarily medical explanations for such things. They also always knew that they wanted to collaborate on a creative project together.

The result is a two-disc, 22-song rock-goth opera that chronicles the ill-fated love between the god of dreams (Morpheus) and a mortal woman. The self-funded, three-year-long project, classified by Ramey as darkwave or “a wide range of musical sounds with a gothic edge,” was recently released on his own label, Masque Records – ensuring total creative control.

Meade and Ramey have always had grand aspirations for their project – wishing that one day, it will grace a stage or screen. “The hope from the beginning,” Ramey said, “is to create a complete work and do as much as we can to make it real . . . so that someone theatrically trained can put [the production] on.” With recent success of their Theatre Saint Augustine productions like “Private Lives,” the two may not have to wait too long to see their dream become a reality.

Veil & Subdue is for sale locally at Needful Thingz, 215 W King St., and Music Matters, 196 SR 312, and online at www.veilandsubdue.com.

© The St. Augustine Record

See the review: http://staugustine.com/stories/100409/community_2027756.shtml

Hi guys! So, I’ve mostly been “hitting the internet streets” with Veil for the past week or two, sending email letters as well as mailing out hard copies of the CD, inviting various online goth zines to check out the stuff and maybe do a review. So far have gotten some good responses, and even some inquiries about the eventual stage production! I’m also scheduled to be interviewed for St. Augustine, Florida’s newspaper weekly entertainment insert, Compass, in the next day or two, which I’m very much looking forward to. Local exposure is very exciting!

In the midst of analyzing Michael Jackson’s legacy to music in general – and specifically to how he paved the way in crossing the “black/white” barrier in many areas of entertainment – I wanted to point out one other music genre that he was the first to cross: Goth music.

 Michael was pop and funk and flash, but he was arguably also one of the first mainstream entertainers (let alone one of African-American descent) to bring the camp/horror aspects of Goth music into the radios and TVs of mainstream America. For what else would you call the song and accompanying mini-movie-video called Thriller, a work of entertainment that dealt not only with a metamorphosis into a werewolf-like creature (“I’m not like other boys,” he said to his unsuspecting date), but also included a sublime and chilling narration from the Late Goth god Vincent Price as well?

 That Michael was aware of the line he was walking is evidenced in the warning he insisted be included at the beginning of the video; that he basically didn’t go for all that occultish stuff, and that he was sorry for scaring everyone. Wink!

 Michael may have been the King of Pop, but he was also a Lord of Goth…camouflaged in red jacket and sequined glove. Hell, how could someone who owned “Elephant Man” John Merrick’s bones not be Goth? The lad was dark, my friends.

 As we say goodbye to the man and embrace the eternal myth…let us give proper respects to a man who safely and deftly brought a slice of good old-fashioned Goth sensibility to the masses.

 You will be missed.