London supergroup Vanishing Twin have announced the release of their fifth full-length album. Entitled Archives, the record finds the trio of songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer and percussionist Valentina Magaletti, and bassist and multi-instrumentalist Susumu Mukai continuing to push the boundaries of their singular sound, effortlessly weaving together psychedelic pop, avant-garde, jazz, kosmische and experimental influences. As the press release describes, Archives is “a collage of postmodern songcraft that finds transcendence in the shared experience of creation”. The album’s title reflects Vanishing Twin’s distinctive creative process of assembling and reshaping recordings, improvisations and musical sketches into richly textured compositions. Lucas describes the process as “gathering material together, riffing with it, turning it around on itself, trying to put the pieces together and create a story with it”. With Lucas now living in rural France and Magaletti and Mukai based in London, the trio exchanged songs and instrumental fragments remotely before transforming them into a cohesive whole. The result is another shapeshifting record that embraces experimentation and collective creativity, with “concepts of authorship and ownership dissolv[ing]” as the three musicians swap instruments and ideas throughout the recording process. As Magaletti notes, “music is just an energy, it doesn’t belong to anyone. No one channels it. It is bigger than the sum of its parts.”
Archives arrives on October 29th through Fire Records and ahead of it Vanishing Twin have let loose two singles from it, the title track and ‘Bring Me The Axe’. Speaking about the latter, the band says it is “loosely based on the story of Lizzy Borden, famous for the 1892 Fall River Murders. It’s about extremes. Extreme acts, extreme heat, and sonic extremes, the folkloric and the industrial.”
Listen to both cuts below.
