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ARCA SHARES “MEQUETREFE” MUSIC VIDEO
Today Arca has premiered a music video for “Mequetrefe,” conceived, produced and directed by Carlos Sáez, Arca and Kynan Puru Watt over the period of the global quarantine.
The video arrives in unity with the release of Arca’s new album KiCk i, which is available digitally worldwide via XL Recordings tomorrow, with vinyl to follow next month, July 17th.
In the recent lead-up to KiCk i’s delivery into the world, Arca shared two singles Mequetrefe and KLK featuring Rosalía.
The music video for “Mequetrefe” was conceptualized and created while in lockdown. Arca approached the creative process for the video not through the lens of circumstance but as an exercise in agency – acting as stylist, make-up artist, and performer to dream up the playful variations of her self-states. In collaboration with her partner artist Carlos Sáez, the two produced and filmed the homemade video in Barcelona and then brought in animator Kynan Puru Watt based in Shanghai who fed about 10000 frames of Arca into a neural network for an extended period of time to allow for layers of CGI to interact with each other.
Bing & Ruth: New Single 'The Pressure Of This Water' Out Now
Released today, ‘The Pressure Of This Water’ is the third single to be taken from Bing & Ruth’s forthcoming album, Species.
Clocking in at a meditative 10-minutes, Bing & Ruth’s ringleader, David Moore says of ‘The Pressure Of This Water’, “it’s the first song I wrote on my Farfisa, and it’s stuck by me through all the time since. The accompanying visuals here are from Michael Speed who, faced with the impossibility of actually travelling to the desert, chose to collage publicly available stock footage into a video that reflects the arid nature of the track itself.”
Bing & Ruth is the ever-evolving project helmed by New York composer David Moore. The group’s fourth studio album, the 7-track, 49-minute Species, will be released on 17 July.
While on a surface level, Species is an exploration of the sonic possibilities of the Farfisa organ, aided only by a clarinet and double bass (played respectively by founding members Jeremy Viner and Jeff Ratner), it was inspired by two recent loves of Moore’s: the desert and long-distance running. Briefly relocating from his New York base to Point Dume, between the Pacific Ocean and the desert, Moore was able to indulge in both passions, which in turn provided stimulus for new work. Species is a study of suspended time and trance; not just a steady movement from A to B, but as something that flows, meanders and eddies, like water. Moore says, “I’d found myself in places unfamiliar enough that I could easily lose all sense of direction, size and, more than anything, all sense of time. The music I was making became a kind of reflection of these intentional detachments – and a place to mirror that feeling of trance that had pushed them out in the first place.”
Green Gartside's first new music in 14 years
Rough Trade Records are excited to announce the first new music from Green Gartside of Scritti Politti for 14 years.
Available digitally and as a 7” single, Tangled Man’ b/w ‘Wishing Well are two covers of songs by the seminal English folk singer Anne Briggs.
Below, Green explains the background to this single;
“Recently, in an interview for a forthcoming book about art and music in Leeds in the 70’s and 80’s, the author asked me, as an aside, if it were true that I was wearing Morris Dancer’s leg bells at the 1976 gig there by the Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned and Heartbreakers as other interviewees present that night had reported. My DNA was reconfigured that evening so my memory is hazy but it is very likely that I WAS wearing the leg bell pads made for me by a school friend some years before. In fact I may well have gone to the gig straight from the evening Morris dancing lessons I attended at Leeds university.
Because before punk gave me the liberty and license to make my own music I was geekily obsessed with ‘folk’. When I was fourteen I was enraptured by the Fairport Convention album “Liege and Lief” and became an underage regular at Dublin Moran’s folk club at the Castle, a very insalubrious pub down Newport docks. It’s there I was made aware of the Topic record label and the music of the Watersons, Martin Carthy (who I subsequently stalked . . . ask him) and Anne Briggs. The beautiful melodies Anne sang unaccompanied were profoundly affecting, her unornamented voice a precursor to the anti-professionalism of DIY. For a long while I walked about dressed like a 19th century farm labourer (with a bit of eyeliner) in a kind of hypnagogic reverie to an inner soundtrack of Northumbrian pipe tunes, Wassailing songs and Morris dances. Jesus.
Forward some 40 odd years and my friend and Scritti Politti bandmate Rhodri Marsden had been contacted to do an arrangement of an Anne Briggs song for a project with which he was involved. Knowing I was a fan he suggested maybe I’d like to take on the task. I was dead keen and recorded myself at home playing and singing my versions of a couple of the very few songs Annie had written many years ago. Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee at Rough Trade heard the stuff and liked it.. so here we are. . .
Right I’m off to find a couple of hankies and have a quick caper to Lads A Bunchum and The Shepherds Hey. See you soon.” Green Gartside
Pixies - Bossanova Limited 30th Anniversary Red Vinyl Edition
To celebrate Bossanova hitting its third decade, 4AD are releasing a limited red vinyl edition with the original 16-page booklet being reinserted, having previously only been available with the initial UK LP pressing.
Featuring the singles Allison (a tribute to jazz and blues pianist Mose Allison), ‘Dig For Fire’ and Velouria, plus the first cover to feature on one of their albums ‘Cecilia Ann’ (originally by The Surftones), Bossanova showed a less primal side to the band, with surf and space rock rising to the fore. Lyrically, Black Francis is even more cryptic with a recurring sci-fi theme running throughout, which in turn influenced Vaughan Oliver’s classic planet design for the sleeve.
The band continued to work with Gil Norton after collaborating to such success on their platinum-selling second album Doolittle; this time choosing to record in Los Angeles over their native Boston (the track ‘Blown Away’, however, was recorded at the Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin during a European tour in 1989). Their third album in as many years, 1990 was a particularly fertile time for the band with Kim Deal also having success with The Breeders, who released their debut album Pod just a few months prior.
Andrea Valle Shares New Single 'Wild'
Philly-based vocalist and songwriter Andrea Valle shares her new single Wild along with a video directed by Sarah Nicole Francois.
‘Wild’ is the lead single from Valle’s forthcoming Lovergirl’ EP, due for release on June 25th.
“I think it’s the most dominant on the project,” Valle explains of the single. “It’s saying: are you meeting my standards? Are you meeting my worth? This is what I need and what I require to be in this love.”
The single launches today with visuals designed and directed by Sarah Nicole Francois. Known for her otherworldly 3D humanoid designs, Francois’ take on the video sees Valle’s avatar dance in VR club backrooms and swim through a glistening black oasis. The track was produced by acclaimed duo Nicky Davey. “Making the track with them was so surreal,” she recalls. “The vibe in the studio sat with me and carried its way through.”
Elsewhere on the EP, Valle expands on her blueprints that “sit in the sweet spot between R&B and neo-soul” (i-D). Themes of love, closure and self-worth run through the 7-track EP, almost entirely penned by Valle save for a feature from Brooklyn rapper AJRadico.
Launching off the back of international heat from her most recent single ‘Think About It’, Valle’s new single is the latest addition to a growing collection of summer-ready singles that have garnered support from titles like i-D, Fader and Wonderland, dubbing her “Philadelphia’s next champion”. Stay tuned to find out why they’re right.
