Hidden Shoal News
New Craig Hallsworth Solo Album Out Late October
We’re excited to announce that the inimitable Craig Hallsworth (Tangled Star, The Slow Beings, The Bamboos, The Healers and beyond) will release his debut solo album, What’s The Story With This Hole?, via Hidden Shoal on October 24th. With over 30 years of songwriting experience under his belt, Craig Hallsworth makes What’s The Story With This Hole? feel effortless yet boundless. Recorded and produced with long-time collaborator Al Smith (DrAlienSmith, Bergerk Studios), the album represents the most musically developed and fully realised recording the pair have delivered to date. The first single from the album, ‘We’re Too Far Away (My Other Future, My Other Youth)’, drops on the 13th of September.
Joe Sampson and Nathaniel Rateliff Perform ‘Songbird’ (Video)
It’s a little less than three weeks until Joe Sampson‘s beautiful new EP drops and we’ve shared the first single, ‘My Love‘, from Songs of Delay and now it’s time to share some more! This time it’s an extra special treat as we have a fantastic, intimate video of Joe performing the lead track, ‘Songbird’, with the imminently talented Nathaniel Rateliff (who also provides vocals on the recorded version). Nathaniel should need no introduction but in case you’ve been living in a cupboard these last few years, he fronts the chart busting outfit Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats.
Check out the video for ‘Songbird’ over at YouTube ahead of the release of Joe Sampson’s Songs of Delay on the 12th of September.
Memorybell’s “Obsolete” Live Album Launch
Memorybell‘s stunning Obsolete will be officially launched next week (1st September) at Syntax Physic Opera, Denver, Colorado. Anyone in or near Denver must get down to this. Head to the event’s Facebook page for more detail.
Here’s the official word from Syntax,
Classically-trained pianist Grant Outerbridge of the late, great Denver band The Very Hush Hush performs Memorybell’s debut album “Obsolete’ in it’s entirety. Helicopter Copter’s sublime “Whisper Down the Lane” will be screened beforehand. It will be an evening of ambient instrumentalism, great food and drinks, and made all the better if you come help celebrate.
Read more about Memorybell and stream/buy Obsolete here.
New Slow Dancing Society Album Out Now!
Hidden Shoal is excited to announce the official release of The Wagers Of Love And Their Songs From The Witching Hour, the stunning new album from American atmospherist Slow Dancing Society.
On his seventh full-length release as Slow Dancing Society, Drew Sullivan’s sound continues to evolve. This 19-track epic meshes the warm, rich SDS sound with a new set of textures, bringing these musical snapshots into vivid definition. Trumpet and saxophone nestle amidst lyrical guitar lines, pulsing rhythms and expansive synths, creating an immersive and melancholy listen, tempered with rays of hope.
Sullivan’s work is as cinematic as ever, yet here he’s scoring a more personal film. Profoundly influenced by Sullivan’s experience of becoming a father for the first time, the album took shape around the creation of single ‘The Color of Despair’. The track distilled his anxieties about his new life and responsibilities, and became ground zero for the album’s sound and production, with many other songs on the album evolving out of its instrumentation and feel. The ambient lyricism present here is a testament to the narrative possibilities of instrumental music, resulting in a strikingly complete-sounding album.
The Wagers Of Love And Their Songs From The Witching Hour is available now via iTunes and BandCamp. The first single from the album, ‘The Color of Despair’ is also available as a stream and free download. The full Slow Dancing Society catalogue is also available for licensing across film, tv, games and compilation so please contact us if you’re working on a project and you need that luscious, warm SDS sound then please do contact us.
Antonymes Wins Award For “Breathless” Soundtrack
The utterly beautiful short film Breathless, featuring the music of our very own Antonymes, recently won the award for Best Background Music at the Kolkata Shorts International Film Festival! Breathless also took out the award for Best Cinematography at the festival so congrats to the team all round. We’re excited to share the film with you once the film has finished the festival circuit.
In the meantime be sure to check out Antonymes latest works here.
Antonymes Featured on New Le café abstrait Compilation
The gorgeous Antonyme‘s track ‘La fin de tout’ has been featured on the new Le café abstrait, curated by Raphaël Marionneau. Volume 11 in the Le café abstrait series is available digitally via iTunes and in digital and CD formats via Amazon.
‘La fin de tout’ is originally lifted from Antonymes’ debut album, Beauty Becomes The Enemy Of The Future. Be sure to check it out along with the rest of Antonymes’s amazing catalogue of works. All works are also available for licensing (film, tv, games, compilation) so please do contact us if you have any projects you’d like to talk to us about.
Kramies Covers Jane’s Addiction on New French Comp
The ever wonderful Kramies has contributed a fantastic, haunting cover version of Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Summertime Rolls’ to the latest volume of French webzine À Découvrir Absolument’s series of compilations. The original, from 1988’s Nothing Shocking, was already a pretty sparse and spacious track, lending itself beautifully to Kramies’ beatless, weightless interpretation for voice, acoustic guitar and synth.
Check out the compilation here and stream the track on YouTube.
Forthcoming Todd Tobias Album – Video Teaser
Hidden Shoal and Tiny Room Records is proud to announce the forthcoming release of Gila Man, the new album by American instrumental soundscaper Todd Tobias (Guided by Voices producer, Circus Devils), which includes new single ‘Pollen Path’ (featuring Chloë March). The album will see daylight on the 18th of October 2016 preceded by the first single ‘Pollen Path’ on September 6.
Gila Man is a discrete, surreal world – a wordless musical novella that merges a psychedelic Western with shadowy science fiction. It simultaneously evokes the wide-eyed wonder of discovery and the creeping dread of what horrors may lurk around the next corner. Featuring the stunning voice of English songwriter Chloë March, the album is at once beautiful and unsettling. Gila Man’s individual songs vividly evoke characters and scenes within the album’s imaginary narrative, casting dusty projections onto the mind’s eye. Wherever this music ventures, the listener is compelled to follow.
New Joe Sampson Single – Stream and Download
We’ve been waiting to share this amazing first taste of the forthcoming Joe Sampson EP, Songs of Delay, released via Hidden Shoal on 12th September. On ‘My Love’, Joe Sampson musters maximum emotional resonance from the sparest of musical ingredients. Held together with just acoustic guitar, bass and double-tracked voice, the song exudes an impending finality. Seemingly both disconsolate and resolute, Sampson wrings so much from so little – all in just under two minutes.
Songs of Delay is a sublime five-track EP of consummate songcraft. Across its 13-minute run-time, Joe Sampson patiently unfurls a perfectly formed suite of acoustic vignettes, each song exuding a gently mesmerising beauty. Stripped back in both instrumentation and execution, with additional vocals by Nathaniel Rateliff on ‘Songbird’, the EP leaves its raw, emotional core exposed, evoking the comfortably sad acoustic tones of Nick Drake or Leonard Cohen. Ornamented with often darkly humorous lyrics, intoned in a soft yet road-worn baritone, Sampson’s intimate, emotive songs draw you in, gradually weaving their subtle magic.
Stream ‘My Love’ at SoundCloud or grab a limited time free download over at Bandcamp. Read more about Joe Sampson here.
Arc Lab “Anthem” Out Now + New Music Video!
Hidden Shoal is proud to announce the release of Anthem, the brilliant new album by Arc Lab. To coincide with the release we also have the wonderful new music video for album track ‘The Refracting Glass’ to share with you.
After years away, Medard Fischer’s Arc Lab project returns with Anthem, a retrofuturistic sci-fi travelogue. Folding classic analogue timbres and detuned FM ambience over fragmented radio broadcasts, forgotten NASA program materials and layers of deep space noise, Anthem is in turns menacing and contemplative, forbidding and epic. The album shifts between claustrophobic tension and widescreen, cinematic expanse. Crushes of static and thundering percussion sit alongside diminutive synth studies, all plotted against an almost palpable narrative of anxiety, struggle and, ultimately, salvation. It’s the grandeur of classic space opera, refracting darkly through a contemporary lens.
“…one of the most original releases in the IDM field in some time…confounding the set-in-stone rules of a stagnant IDM genre” – [sic] Magazine on Arc Lab’s The Goodbye Radio
Arc Lab is Hidden Shoal artist Medard Fischer’s primary vehicle for musical experimentation – a blank-slate platform on which he has released a diverse catalogue of emotive, conceptual work. Eschewing easy genre classification, Fischer’s output as Arc Lab effectively blends IDM’s technical sophistication with the moving and poignant character of neo-classical ambience and a finely tuned ear for electroacoustic pop. Anthem comes after an almost 8-year hiatus following Arc Lab’s brilliant 2008 album The Goodbye Radio (n5MD), described as “‘genre-defying’ or, perhaps most appropriately, ‘genre-transcending’” (Textura) and as “one of the most original releases in the IDM field in some time” and “downright ingenious” ([sic] Magazine).
Anthem is available now via BandCamp and all good online stores. Check out the beautiful music video for ‘The Refracting Glass’ over at YouTube.
Hidden Shoal MixTape
