We’re as happy as a clam about the freshly announced new album from ingenious and thought-provoking spoken word artist, bandleader, composer, saxophonist and activist Alabaster DePlume. Entitled A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole, it follows last year’s EP Cremisan: Prologue To A Blade, which he recorded in Palestine, and his poetry book Looking for my value: Prologue to a blade. Arriving on March 7th through the ever wonderful International Anthem, A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole is described as an album of “songs of agency and survival and presence; of confronting life’s pains rather than trying to avoid them; of banishing escapism.”

Speaking about the album’s title, DePlume comments:

“A blade, because a blade is whole, it has forgiven itself, and because it will take a small piece of our opposite, for us to be complete. A blade has marked out these former selves on my hand, a blade made the lines that divine us and the blade is whole. A blade. While I forgive myself, and heal, and lead us in healing. We can only forgive each other once we forgive ourselves. We can only heal each other while we heal ourselves.”

Alongside the album announcement, DePlume has shared the utterly beautiful and delicate lead track ‘Oh My Actual Days’, and an accompanying video directed by artist Rebecca Salvadori. The title refers to a London colloquialism usually used to express surprise or excitement. DePlume adds:

“We can, if we choose, read this phrase as a call to the divinity of the moment we are in. Wherever we are, whatever is happening, it is our own life – a life that is made up of the time (the days – the actual days) that we spend. And we call to this – the only real thing that we have. Our time. Whatever we are experiencing it belongs to us, it is the ‘actual’ moment we are in. And it is divine. This is the introduction to the album.”

Now wrap your ears around ‘Oh My Actual Days’.