Photo: Gregory Wikstrom

One of our favourite albums released last year, New Topographics, came from the hands of ingenious Brooklyn based multi-instrumentalist and composer Matt Evans, so we’re delighted to know he’s ready to follow it up with a new album. Entitled touchless, the forthcoming album was written between 2019 and 2020 after the loss of his partner, sculptor and eco-feminist artist Devra Freelander. A moving creation that reflects and transmutes grief and loss into a work of art, the album came to life as “a way for Evans to externalize his experiences and make them real outside of himself” and “crystallize some sentiment from the last few years” as the press release describes. “Ultimately, it’s his way of reaching through the void to touch something lost, and to remember how real those experiences are.”

touchless will see the light of day on June 25th through Whatever’s Clever Records but we can already wrap our ears around the first single ‘Arcto 2’, a delicate, poignant and beautiful track. It comes with a striking video made by Evans, featuring landscape footage shot by Devra in 2017 in Norway. Through the video, “Evans questions the phenomenology of touch, reaching to transcend the boundaries of the physical to embody touch (of landscape, of those we’ve lost) while being touchless.” Here it is.