quête:redwing

Multi-Award winning, hugely influential musician Feist returns with Multitudes, her sixth solo album and first since 2017’s Pleasure.

Multitudes was produced by Feist with longtime collaborators Robbie Lackritz (The Weather Station, Bahamas, Robbie Robertson) and Mocky (Jamie Lidell, Vulfpeck, Kelela). Blake Mills (Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius) and Joseph Lorge came in to mix, with Mills as a co-producer in the final stages.

Multitudes took shape soon after the birth of her daughter and sudden death of her father, a back-to-back convergence of life-altering events that left the Canadian singer/songwriter with “Nothing performative in me anymore.” As she cleansed her songwriting of any tendency to obscure unwanted truths, Feist slowly made her way toward a batch of songs rooted in a raw and potent realism which is touched with otherworldly beauty.

Largely written and workshopped during an intensely communal experimental show of the same name through 2021 and 2022, the songs on Multitudes developed in parallel with and were deeply influenced by the mutuality of the unconventional experience. The production, developed by Feist with legendary designer Rob Sinclair (David Byrne’s American Utopia, Peter Gabriel, Tame Impala) was formulated to bring people together as they re-emerged from lockdown while providing an outlet for connection between artist, art, and community.

Over the last decade-and-a-half, C Joynes has ploughed a singular furrow through solo guitar, with a body of work incorporating English folk-tunes alongside North & West African music, and lifting proto-minimalist and improvised techniques from the European classical and avant-garde traditions.

His new release, ‘Poor Boy On The Wire’, is his first full album dedicated wholly to the electric guitar. Through a typically wide-ranging set, Joynes exploits the instrument’s potential by placing intricate parlour music alongside overdriven garage blues throw-downs, wiry electric folk and the brittle ringing tones of free improvisation. However, these explorations of the tones and timbres of close-mic’d guitars and amplification retain an overall coherence and unity through the deliberate use of a limited palette of budget instruments and vintage equipment.

With ‘Poor Boy On The Wire’, Joynes has released 9 albums to date, including ‘The Borametz Tree’ (2019), recorded with long-term fellow travellers Dead Rat Orchestra, and ‘The Wild Wild Berry’, a collaboration with singer Stephanie Hladowski (MOJO Top 5 Folk Albums 2012, fROOTS Editors Choice Album Of The Year 2012). He has played extensively across the UK, Europe and the USA, sharing bills with performers including: Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Marc Ribot, Alasdair Roberts, Richard Dawson, Jack Rose, Josephine Foster, Sir Richard Bishop, Six Organs Of Admittance and 75 Dollar Bill.

“As much Conlon Nancarrow and Ali Farka Toure as Blind Lemon Jefferson, the compositional mind at work here can take apparently disparate threads of modernism and ethnic tradition and treat them as though they were all archaic blues styles learnt from dusty 78s.”
BRUCE RUSSELL, THE WIRE

“An inheritor to Davy Graham; a lone operator prone to unexpected collaborations, with a repertoire that crosses continents and timezones with consummate ease, and dashed off with a phenomenal, yet lightly applied technique.”
ROB YOUNG, THE WIRE

“His epigrammatic re-castings and re-readings of widely-travelled folk melodies and rhythms from a variety of traditions suggest shared memories that might be intensely universal while seeming strangely out of reach.”
KEVIN MACNEIL BROWN, DUSTED MAGAZINE

Highly recommended. About the album Blind Emperor Through wetland, winters, rubble and fallout come horizons new; civilisation shattered under a vengeful cataclysm, eventually led to dawn from the light of a blighted leader. Every action has a reaction, and those who wish to prosper must first be willing to offer something of intrinsic value. As one empire crumbles, another takes its place. The struggle for a fleeting utopia comes at a cost, and those who strive towards golden gates must trek along a solemn valley. The Allegorist Berlin-based artist, The Allegorist, has been meandering through stories with her purposeful and introspective take on electronic music. Each release explores themes that require joint participation from the listener as they look to flood your mind with images of fabled characters and places through her artistic soundscapes. Her carefully build worlds that straddle sci-fi and fantasy, feeding off of the light and dark dualism are the perfect blend of reflective contemplation and storytelling. As a holistic artist, Anna Jordan (The Allegorist) encapsulates a myriad of her talents within her work. Her previous albums, Hybrid Dimensions I. and Hybrid Dimensions II., established her aesthetic and detailed fictitious stories, along with the language ‘Mondoneoh’, a language to unite all nations. Her latest endeavour, and 4th album, The Blind Emperor, portrays the essence of a mythical land that tells of struggle that will lead to prosperity. The protagonist, Blind Emperor, leads the charge into a brighter tomorrow. Like chapters from a novel, each track allows the listener to be carried by the story. It is an epic, cinematic, choral, ambient techno album. The album combines her depictive, written and musical storytelling with a concept portrayed visually, orally and audibly to deliver another saga in her ever-evolving figments of fantasy. It comes as an entire artistic project, as The Allegorist created the album art, wrote the included story and composed a poem that all combine to tell the tale of Blind Emperor.