Ingenius Northern Irish composer and producer Hannah Peel is set to release her new album, Fir Wave, later this month, through her own label imprint My Own Pleasure. At the heart of Fir Wave is the “process of re-sampling and generating her own new digital instruments”, as the press release described, “allowing for fresh inspiration in pioneering, experimental electronics from the early 1970s”. Speaking about what prompted the album, Peel explains:
“The specialist library label KPM, gave me permission to reinterpret the original music of the celebrated 1972 KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, the music of Delia Derbyshire and the Radiophonic Workshop.”
Ahead of the album’s release on March 26th, Peel has already shared two singles, ‘Ecovocative’ and ‘Emergence in Nature’. The latter comes with accompanying visuals created by Dan Conway.
After enticing us with the poignant and beautiful lead single ‘Stories’, boundlessly inventive composer and violinist Sarah Neufeld has shared a brand new single, ‘With Love and Blindness’, taken from her upcoming third album, Detritus. Like the album, stemming from a collaboration with dancer/choreographer Peggy Baker, ‘With Love and Blindness’ was originally written for Baker’s choreography and performed live onstage by Neufeld and her Arcade Fire bandmate Jeremy Gara, along with “four women moving in meditative harmony, as if in secret communication”, as she explained. Neufeld re-worked and arranged the piece to what would become the album version with the addition of vocals. “The vocals on this track, and on other tracks on the album”, describes Neufeld, “are moments of catharsis, sweetness rising above pain, pushing forward into a sense of mystery.”
‘With Love and Blindness’ is offered with a video made by longtime collaborator Jason Last. Speaking about it, he commented:
“My ongoing creative collaboration with Sarah has always been an instinctive process. Because we know each other so well, and have worked together for so long, there is a lot of knowledge and trust that goes into the inspiration.
For With Love & Blindness we decided to shoot our experience in Corsica in June of 2019, where Sarah had been invited for a mini residency and to perform live. The video is an exploration of our time there, surrounded by the rugged nature of this Mediterranean island that lends so well to the energy behind her music.
Somewhere between documentation and fantasy, we captured Sarah in these environments, which later came together to visualize this powerful song from her new record.”
Detritus will land in all its resplendent glory on May 14th through Paper Bag Records in North America and One Little Independent Records in the rest of the world. Now wrap your ears around the enchanting and bewildering ‘With Love and Blindness’.
French multi-instrumentalist and composer Cecile Schott, known under the moniker Colleen, is back with The Tunnel and the Clearing, her first full-length album in three years following A flame my love, a frequency. An album that finds her “at her most vulnerable and confident”, The Tunnel and the Clearing was written during a transformative period. Schott began working on the album in 2018 when she experienced extreme fatigue from a previously undiagnosed illness, eventually leading her to relocating to Barcelona where lockdowns and a breakup followed. In her own words, The Tunnel and the Clearing “is a sonic translation of the highly emotional state and the heightened sense of perception that come in the wake of a breakup and a period of great changes, with the subsequent necessary reconstruction this entails.” She added, “Never before had I felt so profoundly the power that music has, through harmony, melody, rhythm and sound itself, to express the whole range of human emotions.”
To bring the album to life, Schott embraced a self-imposed rule on her setup, restricting herself to analog electronic instruments like the Elka Drummer One, the Roland RE-201 Space Echo and Moog Grandmother synth, as well as the Yamaha organ keyboard and select Moog effects.
The poignant and wonderful ‘Gazing at Taurus – Santa Eulalia’, named after the patron saint of Barcelona, is the first single to be let loose from the album. Take a listen below and grab the album when it’s out on May 21 through Thrill Jockey.
Daniel Miller, founder of Mute, and Gareth Jones, legendary producer, engineer and artist, have been friends and collaborators for four decades. They have worked together on a plethora of projects, including Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again in 1982. Back then, after the day sessions would finish, the pair would carry on working on their own material. They continued this practice, and Sunroof came to life first as a remix project, reworking bands like Can, MGMT, To Rococo Rot, Kreidler and Goldfrapp. Miller and Jones met before a György Ligeti concert at London’s Barbican in 2019 and spent a couple of hours improvising with modular systems, which they recorded and decided to finally make a record together. “We decided to get together to do a bunch of improvisations,” explained Gareth. “We said we’d work in a number of different physical spaces but always together, in the same room. We were keen to do shorter pieces because we were both very inspired by Chris Carter and Martin Gore’s electronic music projects, where the pieces were very concise and compact.”
Come May 21st, Sunroof’s debut album is finally materializing with the release of Electronic Music Improvisations Volume 1 on the Parallel Series of Mute. The album is a collection of eight improvised modular pieces which the two recorded as live performances in several studio spaces across London in the spring and summer of 2019. As for their approach to the sessions, they were set on differentiating an improvisation and a jam session as Miller explained:
“With modular systems, you can just go on and on forever and never actually complete anything. Sometimes that’s okay – part of the joy of a modular is that you can just keep going indefinitely. But with this we were keen to actually finish something, so setting that timeframe became a really important rule for us.”
An edit of opener ‘1.1 – 7.5.19’ serves as the first enthralling taste from the upcoming Electronic Music Improvisations Volume 1. It comes with an accompanying video with visual direction by Jeff Courtney.
There’s a new album on the way from Japanese master vibraphonist, multi-percussionist, and composer Masayoshi Fujita. Entitled Bird Ambience, it follows his 2018’s Book Of Life. Drawing from influences he’d kept separate until now, his acoustic solo recordings, the electronic dub releases under his El Fog moniker, and his experimental improvisations, Bird Ambience sees Fujita embrace a new sonic direction. Unlike previous works where the vibraphone was the signature instrument, on his upcoming album the marimba takes centre stage alongside drums, percussion, synths, effects and tape recorder.
“The way of playing the marimba is similar to the vibraphone, so it was kind of a natural development for me and easier to start with, yet it sounds very different”, Fujita explained. “The marimba bars are made with wood and it has a wider range than the vibraphone, which gives me a bigger sound palette with more possibilities. I play the instrument with bows and mallets, and sometimes manipulate it with effects.”
Fujita also commented on his approach to improvisation:
“I prioritised trying to capture the wonder which happens during those occasional magic improv moments. Sometimes the mic-ing and placement of instruments was pretty rough; things weren’t perfect and everything was done quickly, but it turned out as the final recording. Overall when I couldn’t decide between two takes, I told myself to go with the first.”
Bird Ambience arrives on May 28th through Erased Tapes and we can already hear the gorgeous and delicate lead single ‘Thunder’. The track was inspired by Anna Akhmatova’s poem You Will Hear Thunder. The single comes with a fittingly stunning video directed and shot by Ryo Noda in the mountains near Hyogo where Fujita now lives.
Earlier this year Xiu Xiu announced the release of their twelfth album, OH NO, and shared the first taste from it, ‘A Bottle of Rum’, featuring Grouper’s Liz Harris. A duet album, OH NO is a collection of duets that sees singer and songwriter Jamie Stewart collaborate with an array of artists, also including Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr, Chelsea Wolfe, Owen Pallet, Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, Twin Shadow’s George Lewis Jr., Sharon Van Etten and many more. Another stellar guest contributor is Liars’ Angus Andrew, who features on the latest single to emerge, ‘Rumpus Room’. Xiu Xiu’s Angela Seo, who directed the video for lead single ‘A Bottle of Rum’, takes the director’s seat for this one too. She commented about it:
“Does everyone have a deep personal childhood association with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, or just me? One of the first things I shoplifted as a kid was a bag of FHC. I once bet my cousin I could finish an entire Party Size bag in one sitting; I won the bet but lost my sense of taste for a couple days. I was a latchkey kid and would ditch school and often go to the 7-eleven by our apartment, where some 20 year old kid who didn’t give a crap would be working and watch me play their single arcade game- Marvel vs. Capcom – in the corner as long as I bought a slurpee and FHC. Sometimes in my old teenage journals, I find flamin’ red dusted fingerprint smudges among melodramatic poems and fake runaway notes. All that intersected perfectly with the “Rumpus Room” song, and part II story of the video trilogy (1st being “A Bottle of Rum”).”
