Brooklyn’s black metal band Liturgy and experimental violin and harp duo LEYA were due to tour together last April before the pandemic hit. In support of that tour, the two outfits had teamed up for a collaborative single, ‘Antigone’, which they unveiled earlier this month. Mighty and otherwordly, ‘Antigone’ is named after the heroine in the Greek tragedy of the same name by Sophocles. As Liturgy put it, “it’s sort of a LEYA song inside a Liturgy song”. Take a listen below.
There’s a new album on the way from LA-based experimental composer and harpist Mary Lattimore. Entitled Silver Ladders, it is set for release on October 9th through Ghostly International and follows her acclaimed 2018 Hundreds of Days, which she toured extensively internationally. In one of her shows at a festival, Lattimore met Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, and invited him to produce the upcoming album. “A friend introduced us because she knew how big of a fan I was and Neil and I had a little chat… The next day, I just thought maybe he’d be into producing my next record, ” Lattimore explained. “I flew on a little plane to Newquay in Cornwall where he lives with his lovely partner Ingrid and their baby. I didn’t know what his studio was like, he’d never recorded a harp, but somehow it really worked.”
‘Sometimes He’s In My Dreams´, a track she wrote collaboratively with Halstead, is the first sublime single to be let loose and Lattimore had this to say about it:
“It’s a song borne from a long improvisation – it was a section we both liked out of a longer piece. After I finished playing, Neil shaped it and looped part of it and then added his dreamy guitar line. What started out as simple meandering solo harp with a ricocheting delay got a little deeper and more fully formed with Neil’s help. It’s probably my favorite part of the record because it’s nothing I would’ve thought to do, having made a lot of music on my own on the past. Plus, that guitar!”
Listen to ‘Sometimes He’s In My Dreams’ below.
Formed in Norwich in 2012, instrumental trio Mammal Hands caught our attention in 2018 when they played a mesmerizing live show at London’s Field Day. Brothers Nick and Jordan Smart and Jesse Barrett tantalise the senses with their contemporary jazz compositions, flirting with a lot of genres from electronica and classical to folk, ambient and world music and cite influences such as Pharoah Sanders, Gétachèw Mekurya, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Sirishkumar Manji. The trio have announced the release of their fourth album, Captured Spirits, touching on themes of existence and displacement. Jesse commented on the making of the album:
“I think with this record, there was a strong and renewed sense of collective enjoyment and appreciation for the process and each other’s contributions. After a long period of touring and a slow build up to the actual recording sessions we were able to mull over ideas for long periods, build on lessons from the past and pull our playing connection to an even deeper place. Realising each other’s visions for the whole and clearly understanding how they intersect”.
We´ll have to wait until September 11th for Captured Spirits to be out through Gondwana Records but we can already hear the magnificent first single ‘Chaser’. Here it is.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, we love Laurence Pike. And we are absolutely thrilled with his third solo album, Prophecy, arriving next week. The incredibly inventive percussionist and composer recorded the album as a reaction to the catastrophic wild fires in his native Australia.
Following the first single ‘Nero’, Pike is enticing us again with a new track called ‘Death of Science’, described as “an abstract rumination on politics trying to deny the nature of the universe, in which broken voices and muted drums attempt to spin around the certainty of the physical world.” Take a listen below and grab Prophecy when it’s out on July 24th through The Leaf Label.
Photo: Baha H. Danesh
Multi-instrumentalist and composer Julie Carpenter has worked and recorded with various artists including Brian Jonestown Massacre, Eels and The Autumns. Less Bells, her ambient orchestral project, was ignited by her move from LA to Joshua Tree, and in 2018 she released her debut album Solifuge. Two years on, Carpenter presents her somophore album entitled Mourning Jewelry. Set for release on August 21st through Kranky, Mourning Jewelry circles around the feelings of loss and grief and the resulting change. As the press release describes, the album “stir[s] ornamental laments born from a need to “create beauty out of grief.” Weaving together strings, synthesisers, and choirs, the pieces on Mourning Jewelry “ascend and descend in grand, glimmering arcs,” delivering an emotive and haunting palette of beautiful and delicate orchestral textures.
Lead single ‘Fiery Wings’ is now available to stream and it serves as a sublime introduction to the album. Take a listen now.
Following 2018’s Persona, Rival Consoles is releasing a new full-length album later this month. Entitled Articulation, the album is named after Gyorgy Ligeti’s classic electronic composition Artikulation and its accompanying non-traditional graphic score. Unlike previous albums, Ryan Lee West, the London musician and producer behind Rival Consoles, encompassed the creative conception of the album through a visual way of thinking. West “drew structures, shapes and patterns by hand to try and find new ways of thinking about music”, explains the press release, “giving himself a way to problem-solve away from the computer.”
After sharing the title track, Rival Consoles has offered another preview of the album in the form of ‘Vibrations on a String’. He had this to say about it:
“’Vibrations on a String’ was one of the earliest pieces I made for the record. The title is a direct reference to the behaviour of the main synth: I was trying to mimic playing a guitar string both softly and aggressively. I think a part of me is often trying to mimic the physical world with synths. There is something mindful about observing things and making sense of them, and once you try to recreate something in a different medium it feels like there are new opportunities to explore.”
Listen to ‘Vibrations on a String’ below and grab Articulation when it’s out on July 31st through Erased Tapes.
