quête:people

It's been a little over ten years since Hailu Mergia reemerged on the international music scene. Following the first in a series of his classic recordings reissued in collaboration with Awesome Tapes From Africa, Mergia assembled a band and began performing live again after many years driving a cab in Washington, DC. His first show back appeared on the front page of the New York Times along with a stellar review and he took off from there performing his flavor of Ethiopian jazz all over the world in the years since, including Radio City Music Hall and Montreal Jazz Festival. Finally, we have a recorded document of the keyboard player's powerful DC-based trio _ which practices each weekend in his basement _ featuring Kenneth Joseph on drums and Alemseged Kebede on bass. Beautifully captured at one of their fiery live shows at the venerable Brooklyn non-profit cultural center Pioneer Works on July 1, 2016, the concert was recorded by PW staff and mixed by Ted Young with mastering by ATFA's expert audio extraction collaborator Jessica Thompson. The performance clarifies what many people across the globe already know: in his fifth decade of music-making Hailu Mergia continues to push the boundaries of his remarkable abilities. Mergia and his veteran band energetically and playfully unpeel layer after layer of harmonic and rhythmic interest out of a spectrum of Ethiopian repertoire. Modern jazz demands constant reinvention and improvisation, night after night creating new works out of known modes and classic standards. This band is unstoppable when it comes to turning age-old melodies (like "Tizita" or "Anchihoye Lene") upside down and inside out until they emerge as molten new works, often spontaneously. Mergia's original compositions (like "Yegle Nesh") shine brighter than ever here as well. Moving from keyboard to organ to accordion to melodica, he deftly switches instruments _ often during the same song. Mergia at 77 years old seems to be working harder than musicians half his age. "Pioneer Works Swing (Live)" brings into focus the kind of onstage group improvisation and deadly solo passages that reach for places Mergia and the band have never gone, on festival and club stages across four continents. Now that Mergia has released two new recordings along with four classic reissues, he is eager to let everyone hear what he's been doing on the road since he re-took the global stage for his victory laps. So much more than an old act from yesteryear, Mergia balances his legendary Ethiopian recordings with good old fashioned sweat-soaked live concert triumphs such as the one we have here.

La preuve is a rearguard action. Most of the people who inspired it are dead or retired. Old teenagers flay their former loves. They bear witness to a bygone era, but happily embraced, digested and spat out. Everything was still possible. Or possible at last. Psychedelia opened the doors of perception. Romanticism wasn't relegated to a dull formatting, a cheese without a rind. The group Poudingue, which started out ten years ago, has some fine leftovers. These are the crumbs from purgatory.

The proof (la preuve, in French) is in the pudding (poudingue, in French) is an expression coined by Friedrich Engels meaning that the value, quality or truth of something must be judged on the basis of direct experience or its results. The expression is a modification of an old saying that makes the meaning a little clearer: the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Nicolas CHEDMAIL – vocals, guitar, bass, keyboard, trumpet, French horn, trombone, helicon, pipes, flute, siren, alto sax, harmonica, melodica, violin, cello, shahi baaja, sanza / texts 2 4 5 6 9 10 / music 1 to 10 Frédéric MAINÇON – guitar, vocals / texts 1 3 7 8 9 / music 3 4 7 8 9 Jean-Jacques BIRGÉ – synthesizer, sampler, effects, field recording, erhu, inanga, shahi baaja, waldteufel, vocals / music 1 3 4 5 9 Guest: Benjamin SANZ – drums

7A Records are proud to announce the release of Micky Dolenz Sings R.E.M., a 4 track EP released
on November 3rd. The EP is comprised of songs R.E.M. wrote throughout their career, all beautifully
reimagined by Dolenz and producer Christian Nesmith. The EP features fresh and completely new
arrangements of some of R.E.M.’s most memorable and catchy songs. As Dolenz says: “Once again,
this EP reaffirms my long-held conviction that a solid recording always begins with solid material. You
don’t get much solid than R.E.M. What a joy to, once again, bring these songs to life”.
R.E.M. Reactions to the EP:
“These songs are ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE. Micky Dolenz covering R.E.M. Monkees style, I have
died and gone to heaven. This is really something. Shiny Happy People sounds INCREDIBLE (never
thought you or I would hear me say that!!!). Give it a spin. It’s wild. And produced by Christian Nesmith
(son of Michael Nesmith), I am finally complete”. Michael Stipe
"That voice---one of the main voices of my musical awakening---singing our songs... It is beyond
awesome. Let's help make this as huge as we possibly can. I am beyond thrilled." Mike Mills
"I've been listening to Micky's singing since I was nine years old. It's unreal to hear that very voice,
adding new depth to songs we've written ourselves, and inhabiting them so completely." Peter Buck
"I am blown away! Micky and Christian just take these tracks to unexpected places”. Scott
McCaughey

Featuring BJ The Chicago Kid, Raheem Devaughn, Karriem Riggins, & Al Skratch, Skyzoo's latest album "All The Brilliant Things" is a masterful work of art that showcases the Brooklyn rapper's lyrical
prowess and storytelling ability. The album is a 14-track journey that delves into Skyzoo's personal life experiences, reflecting on his upbringing, love life, and the everyday struggles faced by Black people in America. "All The Brilliant Things" is a testament to Skyzoo's growth as an artist and his ability to create timeless music that resonates with listeners. His lyrics are poignant and thought-provoking, tackling themes of love, loss, and perseverance. The album is a must-listen for any hip-hop fan, showcasing the best of what the genre has to offer. The album has over 400 million impressions on Tiktok, being featured on thousands of tiktok videos across the world

Featuring BJ The Chicago Kid, Raheem Devaughn, Karriem Riggins, & Al Skratch, Skyzoo's latest album "All The Brilliant Things" is a masterful work of art that showcases the Brooklyn rapper's lyrical
prowess and storytelling ability. The album is a 14-track journey that delves into Skyzoo's personal life experiences, reflecting on his upbringing, love life, and the everyday struggles faced by Black people in America. "All The Brilliant Things" is a testament to Skyzoo's growth as an artist and his ability to create timeless music that resonates with listeners. His lyrics are poignant and thought-provoking, tackling themes of love, loss, and perseverance. The album is a must-listen for any hip-hop fan, showcasing the best of what the genre has to offer. The album has over 400 million impressions on Tiktok, being featured on thousands of tiktok videos across the world

Thank You, I’m Sorry is the solo project of frontper- son Colleen Dow turned full band. Now joined by guitarist Abe Anderson, drummer Sage Livergood, and bassist Bethany Schreiner, the band crafts in- credibly relatable confessionals that everyone can connect with- struggles with love, working a job you hate, or just finding a place in the world. Songs that get to the heart of a young creative’s struggle in a destructive world.

On the third LP from Thank You, I’m Sorry, the band has found themselves continuing to write relatable songs penned by guitarist/vocalist Coleen Dow as they wield the pen like a soundtrack to your 20s. Each release has seen the band write tighter and more polished anthems that are sure to relate to people at an age where they need it the most. Don’t be surprised if this band ends up on The OC revival if and when that takes place.

Action Pact were a punk rock band from Stanwell, an isolated village right under the flight-path of London Heathrow Airport, inspiring this album title-song.àFormed in 1981 by guitarist Wild Planet, bassist & lyricist Dr. Phibes, and the then 15-year-olds drummer Joe Fungus and singer George Cheex, still school-kids when their Heathrow Touchdown EP was released in October 1981. BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel played the single many times and booked them for their first session, recorded February 1982.àSigned to Jungle's Fall Out Records imprint, Action Pact"s label debut Suicide Bag EP went to the top of the British punk chart in July 1982.àFive more singles entered the indie charts including Yet Another Dole Queue Song, and a reworked London Bouncers, along with two albums, 'Mercury Theatre - On The Air' and 'Survival of the Fattest'.àA second John Peel session in '82 and a David Jensen BBC session in '83 were also recorded and broadcast - all collected together here for the first time.

Other Half’s debut album, Big Twenty, is 14 songs of caustic post-hardcore exploring the unpleasant places people go to—and the nastiness they are capable of—in search of identity, community and belonging. The recurring characters that inhabit Big Twenty navigate changing social scenes and trends as they near the end of their twenties, teasing themselves with the past and spiralling in an unhealthy cycle of going out and coming down. The album’s narrative is semi-fictitious, reimagining first-hand experiences watching friends lose themselves to nostalgia, drugs and depression, whilst simultaneously celebrating the warmth of belonging, wherever it is found. Meeting in 2012 through a love of the UK DIY scene and their time split between previous outfits—including Maths, Ducking Punches and Manbearpig—Cal Hudson (guitar, vocals), Alfie Adams (drums) and Sophie Porter (bass, vocals) began writing songs together in Adams’ basement bedroom. From the indie rock cynicism of Archers of Loaf and Arab Strap, to the dischord and energy of bands like Hot Snakes and Unwound, the band have spent the past few years weaving their individual influences together and now deal in a confident, unique brand of scathing storytelling and abrasive punk.

Hard-hitting, outspoken West Coast metalcore trio MUGSHOT has announced plans to release a new EP, "Cold Will," on November 3rd with their new label Pure Noise Records. The furious 5-track, neck-snapping record is an uninhibited commentary on sociopolitical travesties infecting the country, set to the tone of merciless rage and crushing riffs. Commenting on the EP, the band says: "'Cold Will' is crafted by the pains of life: Abuse, depression, manipulation, trauma, and other existential themes that present themselves as the rudder that directionally steers this record’s “ship.” Lyrical themes are met by and married with the crushing weight of dissonant riffs and frenetic drum patterns that further push the listener into this mental space of this record’s daunting thoughts and overall aggression. The hardcore inspired metal record consists of a frenzy of chaotically heavy riffs, abrupt tempo changes, and pure unbridled anger that all coalesce into one definitive statement. This record serves as the callout to any abusive person that has manipulatively used their power or title to take advantage of another. And to the people who we’ve lost because of these types of actions – this record is dedicated to them. When one’s voice is lost due to the distortions of life – our responsibility should be to amplify their voice and bring awareness to it."

During the peak of Australia's post-punk scene, Melbourne's The Wreckery captivated with their darkly atmospheric rock, combining swamp blues, noir-jazz, and deadpan rock. Fast forward 35 years, and "Fake is Forever" resurrects The Wreckery's signature sound, featuring Charles Todd's baritone sax, Hugo Race's poignant lyrics, and Clayton-Jones' angular guitars. With Nick Barker and Frank Trobbiani providing a solid rhythm, this iconic band delivers an album that ranges from sarcastic and provocative tracks like "Smack Me Down" to romantic melodrama in "The Devil in You," all with a quieter yet equally menacing and intoxicating presence compared to their '80s brashness.

With a familiar 1, 2, 3…Elliott BROOD count in a new album cycle, Town & Country, that explores the people and places that shape our lives, wherever we call home. On part one, Town, Elliott BROOD rumble and rock over a map of the towns and cities that populate their experiences and imaginations. With their brand of nitty gritty city folk mixed with retro nods, be it classic country or 60s surf, Elliott BROOD take us on a highly entertaining trip. Who better to write an ode to Windsor, ON (“Rose City”) than the band that has become the city’s unofficial ambassadors. Over bridges and into barrooms, lose your way to find yourself in Elliott BROOD’s "Town".

As the front person of celebrated indie band Cymbals Eat Guitars, guitarist and singer Joseph D'Agostino spent over a decade setting autobiographical, emotionally vivid lyrics against a backdrop of soaring and compositionally ambitious rock. After four critically acclaimed LPs that solidified D'Agostino's reputation as a gifted songwriter, he chose to break from his long-term band and debut a new project: Empty Country. The project's second full-length is a thrilling affair, delivering an engaging and deeply moving rumination on time, family, and the disintegration of America. Although it is a record about the forces that drive Americans apart, it's also imbued with empathic love and an understanding of what binds people to family and country-in spite of the darknesses we encounter. The concept of a Great American Rock Album might scan as outdated in 2023, but with this sprawling and uncompromising epic, D'Agostino and Empty Country shatter ambivalence and confront the horrors with a community-minded sense of cautious optimism. "We may be staring into an abyss," says D'Agostino. "But we're all staring together." Despite the stoicism of its storytelling, Empty Country II cuts the darkness with beauty, humor, and an earnest belief in the transcendent power of rock music. Its sprawling and sonically adventurous arrangements range from luminous jangle-pop to scorching emo-punk to narcotized Americana. Empty Contry II featuring ome of D'Agostino's most danceable songs too. Legendary recording engineer John Agnello, whose previous collaborations with Cymbals Eat Guitars resulted in their 2014 high-water mark, LOSE, brought his trademark clarity and nuance to the process, helping Empty Country II crackle with a vital energy that imbues these stories with genuine lifeforce. RIYL: Silver Jews, Pixies, Husker Du, Wilco, Pavement, Superchunk, Modest Mouse. Ltd pink vinyl LP (500 copies ww)

Recorded between January-March 2023 across Europe (Amsterdam, Paris, Nijmegen, Utrecht, Barcelona, Madrid). CD: 2 x CD packaged in a cut out digipack with 3 insert cards to make your own customized sleeve.

3LP: 3 x 180 grams vinyl with printed innersleeves and specially packaged in a cut out sleeve so people can make their own frontcover. Limited edition colored vinyl with 3 colours per album! LP1: slightly gold, LP2: dirty pink, LP3: safari.

Recorded between January-March 2023 across Europe (Amsterdam, Paris, Nijmegen, Utrecht, Barcelona, Madrid). CD: 2 x CD packaged in a cut out digipack with 3 insert cards to make your own customized sleeve.

3LP: 3 x 180 grams vinyl with printed innersleeves and specially packaged in a cut out sleeve so people can make their own frontcover. Limited edition colored vinyl with 3 colours per album! LP1: slightly gold, LP2: dirty pink, LP3: safari.

It’s been a little over ten years since Hailu Mergia re- emerged on the international music scene. Following the first in a series of his classic recordings reissued in collaboration with Awesome Tapes From Africa, Mergia assembled a band and began performing live again after many years driving a cab in Washington, DC. His first show back appeared on the front page of the

New York Times along with a stellar review and he took off from there performing his flavor of Ethiopian jazz all over the world in the years since, including Radio City Music Hall and Montreal Jazz Festival.

Finally, we have a recorded document of the keyboard player’s powerful DC-based trio—which practices each weekend in his basement—featuring Kenneth Joseph on drums and Alemseged Kebede on bass. Beautifully captured at one of their fiery live shows at the venerable Brooklyn non-profit cultural center Pioneer Works on July 1, 2016, the concert was recorded by PW staff and mixed by Ted Young with mastering by ATFA’s expert audio extraction collaborator Jessica Thompson. The performance clarifies what many people across the globe already know: in his fifth decade of music-making Hailu Mergia continues to push the boundaries of his remarkable abilities.

Mergia and his veteran band energetically and playfully unpeel layer after layer of harmonic and rhythmic interest out of a spectrum of Ethiopian repertoire. Modern jazz demands constant reinvention and improvisation, night after night creating new works out of known modes and classic standards. This band is unstoppable when it comes to turning age-old melodies (like “Tizita” or “Anchihoye Lene”) upside down and inside out until they emerge as molten new works, often spontaneously. Mergia’s original compositions (like “Yegle Nesh”) shine brighter than ever here as well. Moving from keyboard to organ to accordion to melodica, he deftly switches instruments—often during the same song. Mergia at 77 years old seems to be working harder than musicians half his age.

Pioneer Works Swing (Live) brings into focus the kind of onstage group improvisation and deadly solo passages that reach for places Mergia and the band have never gone, on festival and club stages across four continents.

Now that Mergia has released two new recordings along with four classic reissues, he is eager to let everyone hear what he’s been doing on the road since he re-took the global stage for his victory laps. So much more than an old act from yesteryear, Mergia balances his legendary Ethiopian recordings with good old fashioned sweat-soaked live concert triumphs such as the one we have here.

The Sunset Tree is the ninth studio album by Mountain Goats, released in 2005 by 4AD. The album"s songs revolve around the house John Darnielle grew up in and the people who lived there, including his mother, sister, stepfather, friends, and enemies. The Sunset Tree focuses on his childhood, and a recurring theme is domestic violence. Darnielle was backed by Peter Hughes, Franklin Bruno and Eric Friedlander & Alec Decarville. And the record was prodced by John Vanderslice.

Naarm/Melbourne-based soul artist and proud Noongar woman Bumpy presents her new single, ‘Return Home’, it illuminates the transportive nature of BUMPY, guiding the listener through a world in which vulnerability is strength and power is quiet but self-assured.

Described by Bumpy as an ode to home and “the people, places and connections that make us feel grounded and at ease”, ‘Return Home’ is propelled by stirring strings arranged by Aaron Wyatt, who recently marked history as the first Indigenous conductor of an Australian state orchestra.

Well, we're two full months into 2017 and the world continues to burn like an avalanche of flaming biohazard material sliding down a mountain of used needles into a canyon full of rat feces. But hey, it's not all bad: Portugal. The Man has a new album coming out called Woodstock.


PTM's last album came out over three years ago—a long gap for a band who've dropped roughly an album a year since 2006. And in true, prolific band fashion, they've spent almost every minute since 2013 working on an album called Gloomin + Doomin. They created a shit-ton of individual songs, but as a whole, none of them hung together in a way that felt right. Then John Gourley, PTM's lead singer, made a trip home to Wasilla, Alaska, (Home of Portugal. The Man's biggest fan, Sarah Palin) and two things happened that completely changed the album's trajectory.

First, John got some parental tough love from his old man, who called John on the proverbial carpet or dogsled or whatever you put people on when you want to yell at them in Alaska. What's taking so long to finish the album' John's dad said. Isn't that what bands do Write songs and then put them out' Like fathers and unlicensed therapists tend to do, John's dad cut him deep. The whole thing started John thinking about why the band seemed to be stuck on a musical elliptical machine from hell and, more importantly, about how to get off of it.

Second, fate stuck its wiener in John's ear again when he found his dad's ticket stub from the original 1969 Woodstock music festival. It seems like a small thing, but talking to his dad about Woodstock '69 knocked something loose in John's head. He realized that, in the same tradition of bands from that era, Portugal. The Man needed to speak out about the world crumbling around them. With these two ideas converging, the band made a seemingly bat-shit-crazy decision: they took all of the work they had done for the three years prior and they threw it out.

It wasn't easy and there was the constant threat that the band's record label might have them killed, but the totally insane decision paid off. With new, full-on, musical boners, the band went back to the studio—working with John Hill (In The Mountain In The Cloud), Danger Mouse (Evil Friends), Mike D (Everything Cool), and longtime collaborator Casey Bates (The one consistent producer since the first record). In this new-found creative territory, the album that became Woodstock rolled out naturally from there.

Remember that mountain of burning needles we were talking about Good. Because Woodstock is an album (Including the new single Feel It Still') that—with optimism and heart—points at the giant pile and says, Hey, this pile is fucked up!' And if you think that pile is fucked up too, you owe it to yourself—hell, to all of us—to get out there and do something about it.

Repress!

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.

Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.

Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytumcomosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”

But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.

The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.

“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.

Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.

Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’snew renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

Artist and multi-instrumentalist Flaer looks to the landscape to explore pastoral melancholy on debut release, Preludes.

Ensconced in his family home in rural Leicestershire in the early months of 2020, painter and musician Realf Heygate (b. 1994) picked up his childhood cello for the first time in several years and began to play. Setting himself parameters to only record onto 4-track tape with acoustic instruments – cello, piano and acoustic guitar – he assembled a suite of instrumental compositions that form the basis of Preludes, his debut album as Flaer and the inaugural release on Odda Recordings.

Channelling the tension and unease between the pastoral idyll of the English countryside and the darkness which lurks beneath the surface, the mini-album draws inspiration from the analogue aesthetic of 1970s folk horror films, weaving field recordings of birdsong, church bells and the natural environment into chimerical melodies that reflect on Heygate’s childhood experiences of rural England.

“It was really important not to isolate the sound from its environment,” he explains, describing the compositional and recording process as “site-specific”. Developed over a series of intuitive musical enquiries, the mini-album’s uncanny quality emerges from combining raw demo takes with overdubs of almost orchestral grandeur.

Heygate points to the final track as indicative of the work as a whole: “‘Follow’ really is the mantra for the release and embodies the practical approach I was taking to music making: not to force the music but see where it takes you.”

As a painter, Heygate’s practice takes artefacts through sequences of reproduction that embrace the fluctuating materiality of the copy. Since obtaining a degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2017, he has exhibited solo at Peter von Kant and Springseason galleries in London, and has participated in group shows at Saatchi Gallery, Cob Gallery and Senesi Contemporanea.

Describing his artistic practice as one of self-erasure, music instead provides Heygate with a more personal and autobiographical outlet. Where the two worlds combine is on Preludes’ striking artwork, which features paintings of 13th century stone carvings from the font of the church in the town where he grew up.

Speaking to a time where people were connected to the land in a more profound way, each symbol is assigned to a track on the album, which Heygate likens to giving them a title.

“To add that one juxtaposition might open a whole new interpretation or language that might be hard to find otherwise,” he explains.“Over time it might reveal itself to you, which is why I'm excited about it being released. To throw them out there and see what comes of it.”