Photo credit: Serena Toffett
NONPAREILS (aka Aaron Hemphill) has today released his new album, Rhetoric & Terror, on Mute. Listen to the new album HERE. Rhetoric & Terror is Berlin-based Hemphill’s second album since leaving Liars back in 2016. No stranger to reinventing his approach towards composition, Rhetoric & Terror feels like we are, perhaps for the first time, opening a doorway into Hemphill’s personal life, to his disparate sonic influences, his wide-ranging journeys through philosophy, and his own reflections on his role as an artist.
Embrace the untethered liberating beats of “Six Six Seven (Monsieur Faux Pas)” HERE. His wife Angelika Kaswalder is on vocals throughout the album and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson, a longtime friend of Hemphill’s since Henderson’s time in the post-hardcore band The Blood Brothers, adds woodwind. Nonpareils is no longer simply a solo project and it’s apparent in this openness.
Like different thoughts and feelings emerging in a state of meditation, Hemphill invites you to pause on one ‘scene’ for a moment before moving onto the next. There’s space to get lost here, both emotionally and in the color of the album’s wide-ranging textures, something already glimpsed on the tracks already released: “Strawberry Hill”, “Predictable Pan (Theme From A Book Of Perfectly Drawn Lines)” and the off-kilter melody of “Opening Chord”. The title of the album, Rhetoric & Terror, describes this split that Hemphill is making from the conceptual nature of his first solo album (2018’s Scented Pictures), and the new direction that he hopes to continue taking. The title comes from a chapter in Giorgio Agamben’s book, “The Man Without Content”, where he describes the concepts of rhetoric and terror to describe two different types of writers: the rhetorician and the terrorist. The terrorist is a misologist who is only into the feeling, the rhetorician is committed to logic and form. Hemphill comments: “With Rhetoric & Terror, I wanted to start with emotions and feeling. I was playing with my kids, listening to Cocteau Twins, I have a wonderful partner, and it seemed very contrary to any sort of growth to sequester myself from this life in order to get into character as a musician. Instead, I tried to remove the boundaries between my creative life and my responsibilities and have it all be one fluid thing. All things at all times, and trust that this will guide my music rather than more intellectual concepts or limitations.” Despite its catalysts being in philosophy and conceptual art, Hemphill has created an album that’s deeply “emotionally available”. It’s also helped him take a new stance on life that combines his life as a partner and parent in a kind of unity with his role as the artist. It’s plain to hear as a listener that Rhetoric & Terror, despite its intimidating name, is welcoming and playful, even during its most intense moments. Rhetoric & Terror is out today via Mute on vinyl, CD and digitally. Aaron Hemphill, born and raised in LA and currently based in Berlin, is originally known for his work with Liars, the band he co-founded with Angus Andrew in LA. Now recording primarily as Nonpareils, recent years have seen Hemphill collaborate with visual and recording artists such as Hildur Guðnadóttir (The Oath, 2016), John Wiese (performing with noise band Sissy Spacek and as the duo Strain of Laws), Spike Jonze (for the Where the Wild Things Are OST), with Jarrett Silberman (Skull Sküll), Caroline Parks (across several installations) and Markus Wambsganss. Ever evolving, his work with Liars between 2001-2016 spanned seven studio albums and one soundtrack before his amicable departure. Since then, he has released his debut solo, Scented Pictures (2018, Mute), an album that brims with poppy ideas and lush color, and is now set to release the follow up, Rhetoric & Terror (2024, Mute). | 
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