Will Samson has announced details of a brand new album, Active Imagination, his sixth studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Paralanguage. A collection of 9 bewitching pieces, on the album Samson continues to explore and merge folk, experimental and electronic music. In the works for a whole year, Active Imagination is described “a richly layered meditation on the idea of belonging, identity and the search for home in the most unstable of worlds”. Samson comments:

“My family tree spreads so far across the globe that I’ve often wondered if it is in my blood to be constantly moving, perhaps in a search to find a solid sense of belonging. With no real ancestral homeland (or rather, a multitude of them) it is easy to feel a conflicted sense of identity – even if just on a very subtle level. These feelings would sometimes appear as dreams, which then became songs”

Inspired by lucid dreaming, the album takes its name from Carl Jung’s method of dream analysis. “In order to help learn the technique, I wrote down my dreams in a notebook each morning – and took them to the studio to translate into songs”, Samson explained.

Active Imagination will see the light of day on May 6th (CD/DL) and on June 24th (LP) through Samson’s own Human Chorus. Ahead of it, he has shared the first single, ‘Arpy’. The track comes with an accompanying video filmed and directed by Daisy Moseley. Speaking about the video, Samson says:

“The Arpy video was filmed on 16mm film in a secret location during Summer 2021. On the first day of filming, we found a dead shark and the camera ate up the entire roll of film. It took us almost 10 months of planning and there were many times that I thought we would never be able to do it – due to lockdowns, seemingly inaccessible locations and bad weather. But the result is something that we are all very proud of. In the end, it really feels as though it was worth all of the effort and time.”

Watch the video now.