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THOM YORKE “OPEN AGAIN”
Last night saw the release of the acoustic guitar and vocal ballad “Open Again,” the fourth song to be released in advance of Thom Yorke’s Suspiria.
“Open Again” follows the release of Volk a synth-laden and creepy instrumental that harkens back to the sounds of new wave foreign movies and horror classics of the ’70s and ’80s (Consequence of Sound), “unsettling” (NPR) second track Has Ended and first single Suspirium by The New York Times as “sweetly chilling” and Rolling Stone as “peak Yorke, and scary good.”
Suspiria will be released October 26 on XL Recordings.
Suspiria… consists of 25 original compositions written by Thom specifically for Luca Guadagnino’s reimagining of the 1977 Dario Argento horror classic. The album is a mix of instrumental score work, interstitial pieces and interludes, and more traditional song structures featuring Thom’s vocals including the new “Open Again” and previously released “Suspirium,” the latter featuring the melodic theme that recurs throughout the film and its score.
As scoring a horror film presented Thom with altogether new challenges and opportunities, Suspiria stands apart from any of his other work. Piano/vocal ballads, Krautrock-esque modular synth work inspired by the film’s Berlin 1977 setting, multilayered vocals, and melodies that convey terror, longing and melancholy combine to create a chaotic yet cohesive musical spell.
Suspiria was written and arranged by Thom Yorke, recorded and produced by Thom and Sam Petts-Davies. The album also features the London Contemporary Orchestra and Choir, Noah Yorke on drums on “Volk” and “Has Ended,” and Pasha Mansurov on solo flute on “Suspirium.”
Suspiria (Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film) will be available across digital platforms, as well as 2-LP gatefold package pink vinyl and 2-CD physical versions.
Sylvan Esso Remixes TUNE-YARDS
The latest remix from Tune-Yards’ comes today in the form of ‘Heart Attack (SYLVAN_ESSO_REMIX_DOTFLAC)’.
Tune-Yards’ fourth album I can feel you creep into my private life was released earlier this year to widespread praise and features the singles ‘Heart Attack’, ‘Look At Your Hands’ and ‘ABC 123’.
A fully collaborative effort between Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner who co-wrote and co-produced the record, Garbus’ lyrics explore her place in the world, ruminating on race, politics, intersectional feminism and the environment.
More recently, Tune-Yards released ‘Mango’, a collaboration with Lakeith Stanfield’s musical project Moors. The duo connected with Stanfield through their work on the film Sorry to Bother You which they scored and stars Stanfield. The band performed singles ‘ABC 123’ on Jimmy Kimmel and ‘Heart Attack’ on Conan in January.
Previously released remixes were created by U.S. Girls and Suzi Analogue. The final remix of the project will be created by ET.PATXKEISHH.
KAMASI WASHINGTON DEBUTS “HUB-TONES” VIDEO
Kamasi Washington debuts the Jenn Nkiru-directed video for “Hub-Tones” today. “Hub-Tones” is taken from Washington’s massively acclaimed new album Heaven and Earth, released in June on Young Turks.
“Hub-Tones is me trying to connect my ancestors via music,” says Washington. “As an African-American, a lot of us don’t know the country of our origin, that’s why most of us take on the ideology of Pan-Africanism. I was trying to connect to my ancestors by connecting African rhythms with a Freddie Hubbard tune which gave me that connection in a different way.”
Meanwhile, director Jenn Nkiru adds “With the visual for Hub-Tones, I wanted to invoke the immediate ecstatic connection it gave me: There’s a traditional ceremony called Oboni in the Ikwerre tribe, my parents’ tribe — the tribe of my heritage. The idea is through repetition, instrumentation and movement, to channel spirit, going deeper and deeper with the changing of each tone within the music till it becomes hypnotic and transcendent. I felt this level of immediate connection to Hub-Tones plus with this being a Freddie Hubbard cover and him being the king of tones in jazz it all felt so symbiotic and fated. I then went about giving the women featured the choreography, movement and codes to take us deeper into that spirit-space. I was also thinking about what an abstract Pan – African connection could feel like so I included the Pan African Flag For The Relic Travellers’ Alliance by artist Larry Achiampong, make-up and crystal adornment in the style of Nina Simone and the lighting seen in the courthouse of the hearings of Anita Hill and of course — the call to Nation Time emblazoned on the sashes of each women. There are other hidden gems too but i’ll allow the audience to uncover them”
Among a host of acclaimed work, London-based director Nkiru recently collaborated on Beyonce and Jay Z’s much talked-about ‘APESHIT’ video. She is current a resident artist at Somerset House (more information HERE) and will celebrate the release of the “Hub-Tones” video with a real world screening at the studio on the evening of Wednesday 17th October.
Meanwhile, fresh from a summer of festival appearances and two nights at the Hollywood Bowl with Florence + the Machine, this autumn will find Washington on an expansive tour of North America, with stops at Brooklyn Steel in New York, D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre, Sony Centre in Toronto and many more. .
Powell Tillmans ‘Spoken By The Other’
On the 16 of November, XL Recordings will release Spoken By The Other, the first EP by Powell Tillmans. It’s a collection of recordings from two of the most interesting artists in Europe, and one whose short length belies its radical tenderness, sonic language and political ambition.
The first part of the partnership is Oscar Powell, the London-based electronic musician. The second is Wolfgang Tillmans, the Turner Prize-winning fine artist and musician who lives between Berlin and London.
After 25 years away from music-making, Tillmans began releasing his own vocal-led electronic tracks in 2016, with a series of EPs and collaborative visual mini-albums, with one track closing Frank Ocean’s Endless album.
Powell, meanwhile, has been releasing music since 2011, on his own label Diagonal and XL, drawing from the history of machine music to create a bold new language. They met at the Tate Modern, where Tillmans was programming a series of performances to coincide with his 2017 exhibition. Quickly the conversation turned to talk of a full collaboration, and following Tillmans’s video for Powell’s track Freezer, over the summer they got into the studio to begin making music.
Recording took place in Berlin, London and Turin, with Tillmans’s vocals working in tandem with Powell’s synthetic processes. Rather than a simple producer-vocalist arrangement, explains Powell, “Wolfgang’s voice and my sounds drive toward some sort of shape or feeling together.” These tracked were workshopped live at European festivals Atonal and Club2Club in the second half of 2017, and with no small number of emails and voice files exchanged, these ideas evolved into the final EP this year.
Across the record’s six tracks, Tillmans’s vocals drive and weave through the music. The lyrics serve as both poetically abstract snapshots like “All surfaces and all reflections,” on Doucement, and direct invocations to the listener, like “Lose your pride!” on Feel the Night.
Across the EP, Powell’s sounds are at once sharply focused and beautifully free. Each track represents another venture into the possibilities of computer music: composed with modular synthesisers and digital signal processing applications, these are etudes that glitter, shift and shimmer as they find themselves. Feel the Night uses a flickering pair of notes and Tillmans’s treated voice to slowly build an anthem. Tone Me – which Tillmans says is a semi-affectionate send-up of gym culture – plays with how low a bassline can go, a melody sketched above. Doucement (“slowly” in French) is an electro acoustic tone-poem. Rebuilding the Future swings, even as it journeys into static. On 445, a dinner party turns into a dazzling piece of music concrete. This is the sound of two artists pushing each other towards, well, freedom. Freedom to move. Freedom to play. Freedom to change. Freedom to be soft.
For Powell, working with Tillmans was liberating: “I think a lot of Wolfgang’s work is to do with vulnerability. He’s never been afraid to express that, or highlight it, or lift it up as something worth showing,” he says. “Recording the EP was almost the process of losing the expectations that might be placed upon myself. People have described it as a vulnerable record, and that transparency and honesty is how I felt making it. It made me feel very out of my comfort zone, but I think working with Wolfgang has pushed me to trust myself more. To feel more.”
Just as Wolfgang’s images draw profound truths from seemingly instant snapshots, much of his process depended on sending voice files and lyric-filled emails on the move. “After we spent time together in the studio, Wolfgang would send music and ideas as voice notes, sometimes just taken on his phone and sent from his stairwell. It’s very much like his pictures: ‘This is how I feel now’. The last track, 445, is a field-recording he captured at a dinner party, and I used it to trigger all the sounds around it.”
Wolfgang picks up this story. “I’m actually acting as a percussionist during this recording: I’m playing with the cutlery and the glasses at a family dinner, so although it sounds like a field recording, it’s also a musical injunction. This unclear nature of what exactly is being shown is something that I really take from my photographic work. People always want clean cut answers, and I’ve always found this not true: we can be both earnest and humorous; political and hedonistic.”
These aren’t opposing forces for Tillmans, whose support for the EU and migrants rights against the rising tide of nationalism has formed an increasingly urgent backbone of his work. “If everybody hardens up in this polarised world, we cannot come out of it in one piece. The solution is not to hit back all the time but make a new better alternative and which is not authoritarian and hard but is so kind, it’s combined into a love song. We can’t let the haters overtake our lives. We must keep on partying; we must keep on loving, and living.”
Spoken By The Other will be available across digital platforms, as well a Single Pressing Limited Edition 12” vinyl.
TRACKLIST
1. Feel the Night
2. Tone Me
3. Doucement
4. Speak Out (Version)
5. Rebuilding the Future
6. 445
SOAK RELEASES NEW MUSIC VIDEO FOR "EVERYBODY LOVES YOU”
SOAK has premiered the video for acclaimed new single ‘Everybody Loves You’.
Director Joseph Wilson explains the Everybody Loves You video as following SOAK whilst she “navigates through a world of temptation before eventually succumbing and accepting the chaos and love into her life.” He adds, “the video expands upon themes from the song, and plays upon the idea of rejecting something that deep down you know you want; flowing from a straightforward narrative into a visceral, dream-like state, emulating the journey from reticent caterpillar into technicolour butterfly.”
The video to ‘Everybody Loves You’ offers a window into the tightly-constructed world of SOAK’s second record, and also an unflinchingly-honest portrait of where Bridie (and, indeed, many of her generation who love easily, but struggle to love themselves) now arrive. Here is an artist often hypothesising over the future whilst simultaneously looking back to the past for answers to The Big Questions – on what happens next, when you have supposedly grown up and moved on; on how possible true change (internal, external) ever really is; and, perhaps, remembering those things that matter and you take with you always, as you embark on another adventure.
Still just 22 years old, ‘Everybody Loves You’ may firmly shake off any shackles of the skating teenage tomboy who first introduced herself with the timeless ‘Sea Creatures’, but it retains that alchemy of old-soul wisdom and youthful positivity which are quintessentially SOAK’s own.
‘Everybody Loves You’ is the first sight of new SOAK material since 2015’s debut album, Before We Forgot How To Dream. One of the Mercury Prize’s youngest ever nominees, the record also won the prestigious Choice Music Prize for Album of the Year, the Northern Irish Music Prize, saw SOAK shortlisted for a Q Award (‘Best New Act’), as well as taking home the European Border Breaker Award. With extensive global touring along the way – and extreme experiences which have taken her far beyond (but often back to) her close-knit hometown of Derry – Bridie has been hard at work on her forthcoming second album, which will see a release next year.
