Hell for Leather

In 1936 Antonin Artaud took peyote with the Tarahumara in Mexico. ‘Hell for Leather’ could be the soundtrack to a lost imagining of Artaud’s fevered return across the border on horseback into the past - “a hole where madness grows”. Servant’s tales take us into the demented cantinas and desert circuses of an existential (Eastern-inflected) Western where he and his Long Distance Callers are the travelling house band, a chorus of lost souls kicking against the pricks “from Mexico to Arizona”. Sonically celebratory, it poses the question “What’s the use of looking on the gloomy side of everything?” when fate has already been ordained.