Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Lankum Industrial Complex is producing at peak capacity at the moment — from Cormac MacDiarmada playing with the female vocal quartet Landless to Radie Peat singing with the doomy folk group ØXN to Ian Lynch soundtracking the horror film All You Need is Death.So it’s a surprise to have a release from the actual band, albeit a live album culled from three nights last May at Dublin’s Vicar Street, their home from home. “This is very, very serious business, a very complex and involved ritual,” Ian Lynch tells a whooping crowd. “What we’re trying to do is rend a ginormous tear in the very fabric of space and time itself.”Any attempt to rip the veil of existence could do worse than to feature Lankum, whose aesthetic is Cthulhu-on-craic, with shuddering bass moans and invocations that subside into contemplations of the infinite. The songs are appreciably longer than their recorded versions. “Go Dig My Grave” begins with Peat singing a cappella: “Go tell this world,” she keens, “that I died for love . . .” After a verse or two, she is joined by arbitrary plucked and struck notes from her bandmates, as if other inhabitants of the Bardo were offering welcome — or a threat. As she stops singing, after four minutes or so, a gong splashes, introducing seven minutes of instrumental coda; strings trace a slow siren glissando and there’s an organ wash like the shine of a crazy diamond. At the end of the song, a single note is held for a couple of minutes. Vicar Street holds about 1,500 people; it feels as every one of them is holding their breath.“The Pride of Petravore” transitions from slow-moving bowed guitar to pipes — and then, at the end, unexpectedly, we hear a chorus belted out from Sting’s “We Work the Black Seam”. Elsewhere, there’s a bleak reading of “Hunting the Wren”, the concert favourite “The Rocky Road to Dublin”, finally captured on record, and a wheezing final rush through “Bear Creek”.★★★★☆‘Live in Dublin’ is released by Rough Trade
