Photo: Mark Gregson
GoGo Penguin have just announced a brand new album and we couldn’t be more excited. The trio of Chris Illingworth, Nick Blacka and Jon Scott will release Necessary Fictions on June 20th through XXIM/Sony. Marking their seventh long-player, the upcoming record feels like both a return to their essence and a leap into bold, uncharted sonic territory. Over the last decade, they’ve consistently blurred the lines between jazz, classical and electronic music, and Necessary Fictions continues in that spirit, but with new textures and bolder moves. As Blacka puts it, they were trying to get to “our integral, authentic qualities at this moment in time.” One of the major shifts is the embrace of modular synthesizers, not as novelty, but as an extension of their sound. “There had to be a reason,” Illingworth explains. “And for us that was knowing that in places we wanted the character of the music to shift.”
Much of the record was written and recorded in their Manchester studio, which they reshaped into a creative sanctuary, with artwork and photos pinned to the walls for inspiration. Illingworth and Blacka were there nearly every day for a year, with Scott, who lives in London, joining in when the rhythm sections were ready for his input. There’s a real sense of joy in how they talk about the process – “I was very aware of smiling a lot in the studio while we were making it,” says Illingworth. “And I’m smiling now just thinking about it.”
The title, Necessary Fictions, comes from James Hollis’ book The Middle Passage, which explores ideas of the shadow self and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are. Blacka, who was reading the book, says it presents “very Jungian stuff about the shadow self, and hidden personae. You begin to think, ‘Hang on, there’s an authentic me, deep down in there somewhere!’” He continues:
“Musically, it’s been the same journey, the same process of ditching some of the things we’d got used to doing which were holding us back. We’d be writing tracks in the past where we’d be hesitant, like, ‘But what are people going to think? Aren’t we supposed to be this jazz trio who are not really jazz? Who play electronic-type music on acoustic instruments and it’s all very fast and frenetic?’”
Alongside the album announcement, GoGo Penguin shared the mesmerizing lead single ‘Fallowfield Loops’, an exhilarating first taste of what’s to come, and we can’t wait to hear the full album in June. Check out the video the accompanies the track below.
