Domenica Diavoleria’s Flicker Statue Eyes began as a live score for The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan’s surreal 1984 film adaptation of Angela Carter’s dark, dreamlike reimagining of fairy tales. What appears here is not a simple documentation of that performance, but a careful reconstruction: a work reshaped, refined, and reimagined into a standalone album.
In preparing the score, Diavoleria immersed herself in Carter’s writing, allowing its lush, sensual, and often unsettling language to guide the music’s emotional and aesthetic direction. Carter’s world, where beauty and menace intertwine and transformation is constant, becomes a kind of gravitational force throughout the record.
That influence is palpable. Flicker Statue Eyes moves like a waking dream—ornate yet shadowed, intimate yet uncanny. Textures seem to flicker in and out of focus, melodies emerge only to dissolve, and a sense of tension lingers just beneath the surface. There’s a tactile quality to the sound, as if the music itself is shifting shape—mirroring the film’s themes of metamorphosis and psychological unease.
Importantly, Diavoleria approaches the source material with reverence rather than replacement. The original score remains untouched; this work exists alongside it, offering a parallel interpretation rather than a substitution. What began as a one-time live accompaniment—performed at the Olympia Timberland Library—evolved over the course of a year into something more cohesive and self-contained.
“A friend in the early 2000s first introduced me to the film The Company of Wolves… I considered it one of my favorite movies ever since,” Diavoleria recalls. “I chose it not to replace the original score, but because it was designed to be a cool event… I took the original score I wrote and spent a year refining it and molding it into a cohesive whole.”
The result is an album that is both literary and cinematic, rooted in its source yet unbound by it. Flicker Statue Eyes stands as a translation rather than an adaptation—music that captures the spirit of Carter’s world while speaking in its own distinct voice.
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