Photo: Steven Légère and Gaëlle Beri
We’re only a couple of days away from the release of Remain Calm, the debut collaborative album from Mica Levi and Oliver Coates. The pair had already enticed us with the staggering first single from the album, ‘Barok Main’, and they have teased it again with another magnificent track, ‘Dolphins Climb Onto Shore For The First Time’. It comes with a video made by Leah Walker and you can watch it below.
Remain Calm is out on November 25th via Slip.
Royal Canoe have shared a fantastic new video for ‘Walk Out on the Water’, taken from their recently released second album Something Got Lost Between Here and the Orbit. The video was directed by Dan Huiting, and it features Anton Sokalski with choreography credits to Kaja Irwin.
In support of the new album, Royal Canoe are crossing the Atlantic again for a string of European shows, starting in Hamburg on January 25th and including a stop in London at The Slaughtered Lamb on February 1st.
Something Got Lost Between Here and the Orbit is out now via Nevado Music worldwide, Embassy of Music in Europe and Moorworks in Japan.
New releases from artists on Constellation Records are always welcomed with huge anticipation and excitement, and that couldn’t be more the case with the just announced new album from Avec Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche. Pas pire pop, I Love You So Much follows their 2014 glorious debut album Zubberdust! and it will hit stores on January 20th.
On their upcoming record, and as the album’s blurb describes, the Montreal quartet “deploys a panoply of buoyant musical ideas, subtly sumptuous sonic treatments, and joyous stylistic nods — while remaining fundamentally devoted to working the groove, from however many angles.”
Avec Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche have shared the album’s excellent and electrifying first single, ‘Alizé et Margaret D. Midi moins le quart. Sur la plage, un palmier ensanglanté. II’ and it makes us really look forward to the album.
In other related good news, and to celebrate the album’s release, the foursome are embarking on 4-week long European tour, kicking off in Hamburg on February 13th. We’re keeping our fingers tightly crossed for some UK dates to be added.
Now listen to ‘Alizé et Margaret D. Midi moins le quart. Sur la plage, un palmier ensanglanté. II’. Again and again.
Composer, artist and Room40 founder Lawrence English is gearing up to release a new album in the new year. Entitled Cruel Optimism, the record follows on from his 2014 Wilderness Of Mirrors and it will see the light of day on February 17th. Taking its name and origins from a book by American theorist Lauren Berlant also called Cruel Optimism, Lawrence’s upcoming album “meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility”, describes the press release. Lawrence outlined the book’s influence:
“In Cruel Optimism, I found a number of critical readings around the issues that have fuelled so much of the music I have been making recently…particularly her writing around trauma I found deeply affecting. It was a jumping point from which a plague of unsettling impressions of suffering, intolerance and ignorance could be unpacked and utilised as fuel over and above pointless frustration”
He elaborates further on the album’s themes:
“As I have worked through Cruel Optimism, what seemed an unimaginable future just a few years prior, began to present as actual. Over the course of creating the record, we collectively bore witness to a new wave of humanitarian and refugee crisis (captured so succinctly in the photograph of Alan Kurdi’s tiny body motionless on the shore), the black lives matter movement, the widespread use of sonic weapons on civilians, increased drone strikes in Waziristan, Syria and elsewhere, and record low numbers of voting around Brexit and the US election cycle, suggesting a wider sense of disillusionment and powerlessness. Acutely for me and other Australians, we’ve faced dire intolerance concerning race and continued inequalities related to gender and sexuality. The storm has broken and feels utterly visceral. Cruel Optimism is a meditation on these challenges and an encouragement to press forward towards more profound futures.”
To bring the record to life, Lawrence enlisted the help of several artists, including Mats Gustafsson, Norman Westberg and Thor Harris from the Swans, Tony Buck and Chris Abrahams from The Necks and the Australian Voices ensemble.
February seems like a long way away but we can already hear a first cut from the album, the otherworldly and ominously beautiful ‘Object Of Projection’.
While the year may be coming to an end soon, there’s still several exciting album releases to look forward to. ///// EFFECTUAL, the new solo album from renowned jazz drummer and percussionist Jamire Williams, is one of them. Slated for a December 2nd release via Leaving Records, ///// EFFECTUAL was pieced together over three different recording sessions and locations, as the press release explains, “all of which embodied a specific time period and environment to help translate a feeling within Williams”. He used a kit from the 19th century in one session, a digital kit in a second one, and a hybrid of both in the last session. With Carlos Niño on production duties, the album also features longtime collaborator Chassol, and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.
For a taster of the drumming magic Williams has in store for us, take a listen to the extraordinary first single ‘Children Of The Supernatural’.
Photo: Max Parovsky
If you don’t have Joy in your life yet, you are missing out. The fourth album from Berlin acoustic dance trio Brandt Brauer Frick came out at the tail end of last month and we’re digging it immensely. The band have shared a spectacular live video for the entrancing and galvanizing ‘Away From My Body’ featuring Canadian poet-singer Beaver Sheppard and a 13-piece orchestra. Watch it below and check out the album version straight after.
Joy is out now via Because Music.
