Malta born, London based multi-instrumentalist and producer Capitol K has been gifting us with iconic albums since the late 90’s. A big league producer in recent years, operating from his studio at London’s Total Refreshment Centre, he has been recording and producing incredible musicians including The Comet Is Coming, Rozi Plain, Flamingods, Ibibio Sound Machine and many more. Kristian Craig Robinson, the prolific man behind Capitol K, has also been busy making his new album, Goatherder. The record was written and recorded in a cave turned into studio in Malta and saw him using several bamboo instruments collected around the world, including his new lead instrument, an ancient Quecha reeded pipe. According to the press release, Goatherder also features “various resonating vessels and percussive objects including dry fennel storks collected from Punic troglodyte sites, and atonal flutes built from fresh cut farmland reed”. Capitol K explains:
“I’ve been collecting bamboo flutes, horns, pipes and percussion around the world for over a decade. Gathering together these naturally resonant forms I took them to my native Malta and built a temporary studio in a five hundred year old carved rock cave basement which was the former goat shelter of a farm dwelling. Some elements of all six of my Capitol K albums to date have been created in Malta and, wishing to expand on that rhythm, I chose to make a solitary concept album in Malta, drawing on my individual imagination of place and history. The idea was to create in the present a personalised and fictional re-imagining of a Mediterranean, particularly Maltese, diasporic music that fuses ancient and modern techniques. During days spent exploring ritualistic process and practice, field work and location experiences developed to awaken genetic memory, reaching back far beyond my present time and allowing me to freely interpret the opaquely resonant vibrations of the Maltese land and experience”.
Ahead of the album’s release on July 13th through Faith And Industry, Capitol K is enticing us with the first spellbinding single ‘Landlocked’. Take a listen now.
