Githead New Album Waiting For A Sign out December 8th on Swim
Single "Bringing The Sea To The City" Streaming at The Quietus
Waiting for a Sign marks the return of Githead after a five-year break from recording and is set for release on December 8th via swim~ to coincide with the band's performance at this year's
DRILL Festival in Brighton.
Although Colin Newman, Malka Spigel, Max Franken, and Robin Rimbaud have been pursuing their own successful creative ventures during their extended sabbatical, the lure of unfinished Git-business has eventually proven too hard to resist.
Fans will recognize many of the classic Githead tropes here: present and correct are the hypnotic, motorik repetition, the weighty bass lines, and the dreamy melodicism that have come to define the band's aesthetic.
But Waiting for a Sign isn't about sticking with a proven formula: Githead are forward-looking musicians, committed to reinvention rather than recycling. Indeed, this album attests to considerable sonic evolution and transformation, staking out a diverse range of new territory for the band.
This is never more prevalent than on the record's first single 'Bringing the Sea to the City', a song that iterates the record's recurring theme of relocation, establishing a dialectic between a sense of place, or rootedness, and a sense of movement, an interplay between the two contrasting ideas.
Githead are Colin Newman (Wire), Malka Spigel and Max Franken (Minimal Compact), and Robin Rimbaud (Scanner). But who they are is far less important than what they are: a band, rather than just a collaboration between individuals, each with their own highly regarded creative resume.
They formed in 2004, for what was initially intended as a one-off performance at the Swim record label's ICA-hosted 10th anniversary event. Over the course of preparations for the gig, though, it quickly became obvious to all involved that there was a natural and rare chemistry between them, one that held the potential for significant organic development.
As previous releases such as Art Pop (2007) and Landing 2009) show, Githead's forté has increasingly been to bring the synergy and inventiveness of their live performances to bear on the studio process. For this album, however, they upped the ante, arriving at the studio without any written material and trusting that their response to each other's extemporization, as well as to the mood and the surroundings, would get the creative juices flowing.
"There were no songs. Nothing," says Spigel. "We didn't talk about it at all, we just stood in a room and played."
Newman adds: "How the material turned out is at least in part because there was no plan as regards the actual music. The time in the studio was simply the frame; there was no discussion at all as to what kind of thing we'd be playing."
They couldn't have chosen a more stimulating setting for the first round of recording sessions: the legendary Rockfield Studios near Monmouth on the Welsh-English border, an establishment with a deep rock tradition, having hosted everyone from Freddie Mercury to Lemmy. The presence of these past visitors lingers, and there's also a special energy to the place and its equipment - machines such as the studio's vintage echo chamber housing their own creative spirits, with which Githead communed, coaxing out unusual and arresting sounds.
Ultimately, this is another way of framing Waiting for a Sign: Newman, Spigel, Rimbaud, and Franken approached the project as something of a blank slate, their minds free of predefined ideas and open to the creativity fostered by their encounter at Rockfield. Waiting for a Sign is their most accomplished release thus far. It's the work of a band that's unable to take the easy option and unwilling to repeat itself; it's a testament to their continued capacity for invention and their ability to surprise their listeners - and themselves.
Githead will perform tracks from Waiting for A Sign for the first time at DRILL : BRIGHTON - Wire's festival already in its 3rd and most ambition incarnation. The Festival takes places in venues across the city between December 4th - 7th 2014. For more information visit: For more information visit: http://drillfestival.com/
Waiting for a Sign track list:
1. Not Coming Down
2. Bringing the Sea to the City
3. To Somewhere
4. For The Place We're In
5. Air Dancing
6. Slow Creatures
7. Today
8. What If?
9. Waiting for a Sign
Discography:
* Headgit (Nov 2004)
* Profile (June 2005)
* Art Pop (May 2007)
* Landing (November 2009)
Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment