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SECOND LANGUAGE

Piano Magic

Closure

    The aptly-named, ‘Closure,’ is the 12th and final official album by cult London-based Anglo-French self-proclaimed "ghost rock" group, marking their 20th year of existence.

    This final album, ‘Closure,’ album includes a guest vocal appearance from Peter Milton Walsh, singer of acclaimed Australian chamber pop band, The Apartments. Audrey Riley, go-to cellist for the likes of Nick Cave, The Smiths, The Cure, The Go-Betweens, Muse, Coldplay (to name but a few) provides luscious string arrangments on many of the tracks here.

    Forming as a lo-fi electronica trio in 1996, their first EP, ‘Wrong French’ was a favourite of John Peel’s (they later recorded a Peel Session for him) and a Single Of The Week in Melody Maker. By 2000, they’d become a full, touring alternative rock group, recording 2 albums for 4AD Records : the soundtrack to Spanish director Bigas Luna’s ‘Son De Mar’ film and ‘Writers Without Homes,’ most notable for featuring the first recording in 30 years of long-lost folk doyenne, Vashti Bunyan. The album also saw the band’s second collaboration with John Grant, back then far from the critically acclaimed torch singer of today. Further collborations throughout the years included Low, Dead Can Dance, Cornershop, and Tarwater.

    Often described as darkwave or coldwave, Piano Magic prefer the label, “ghost rock,” an emotive combination of post-rock and haunting ethereal electronics – a blend that has proved particularly popular on the Continent.

    Five years after her previous widely - acclaimed album, 'Les Ondes Silencieuses', Cécile Schott (aka Colleen), returns with a stunning new opus maximus, 'The Weighing of the Heart' - her first for Second Language.

    Singing for the first time on record, and to dazzling, numinous effect, the dexterous Spain-based Frenchwoman deploys violas da gamba, guitar, woodwind and Moondog-inspired percussion across a litany of finely wrought tableaux vivant songs. The combined influences of Arthur Russell, Moondog, Brigitte Fontaine and the musics of the African continent loom large in her new work, an absorbing fusion of the delicately spun and the rhythmically persuasive, embracing a pastoralism that is both lyrical yet rooted to the earth; at once hazily baroque yet accessible and universal.

    Colleen has released three albums on The Leaf Label, and also released a live recording in the Mort Aux Vaches series on Staalplaat in 2006, and an EP made entirely with music boxes (the result of a commission by national French radio station France Culture) in October of that year. In 2007 she also completed her first dance score for Franco-Swiss choreographer and dancer Perrine Valli.

    Both the CD and 180gram vinyl are packaged in beautiful artwork by the renowned Italian illustrator, Iker Spozio. The gatefold vinyl includes a free mp3 download code of all the tracks from the album plus an 8 page lyric booklet. The CD is the 4th in the highly-collectible Second Language Library Series - beautifully designed CD albums in hardback book - style packaging.

    TRACK LISTING

    01. Push The Boat Onto The Sand
    02. Ursa Major Find
    03. Geometría Del Universo
    04. Humming Fields
    05. Break Away
    06. Going Forth By Day
    07. The Moon Like A Bell
    08. Raven
    09. Moonlit Sky
    10. Breaking Up The Earth
    11. The Weighing Of The Heart


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