Search Results for:

TRANSGRESSIVE RECORDS

Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane

The Moon Also Rises

    Johnny Flynn’s sixth album, and the second co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane gathers songs that Johnny and Robert have written together since finishing their first joint album, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021). At its heart are the oldest themes of all: death and renewal, darkness and light. The first five tracks are songs of burial, shadows and memory, while the final four are songs of awakening, light and love. The album turns around a central song, ‘The Sun Also Rises’, which stands with a foot in both dark and light.

    Fuses poetry, story, landscape, history, nature and myth into a series of rich, strange songlines that criss-cross time and place, joining winter to spring, ancient to present and birth to death. As the Sun sets, so the Moon rises as its echo; as one light dies, another, altogether different light is born.

    Partly recorded in an old Methodist chapel –now the home of Johnny and Rob’s friends, Cosmo and Flora Sheldrake.

    Produced by Charlie Andrew (Alt-J, Marika Hackman).

    BIOG
    Johnny Flynn is a singer, composer, musician and actor. His musical releases to date include the studio albums A Larum (2008), Been Listening (2010), Country Mile (2013), Sillion (2017) and Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021). He has released two full live albums, Live in Washington DC (2014) and Live at the Roundhouse (2018) and various EPs and soundtracks. As well as touring the world with his band, Johnny regularly composes music for film, TV and theatre –– including work for period instruments at the Globe Theatre. Johnny’s recent acting projects include Hangmen and True West (for which he also composed the music) on stage and Emma, Beast and The Dig on film. He is currently appearing as Richard Burton in Jack Thorne’s sell-out play The Motive and the Cue, directed by Sam Mendes.

    Robert Macfarlane is a writer of books about nature, people, place and landscape including Underland (2019), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012) and, with Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020). He also writes films (inc. Mountain and River, both starring Willem Dafoe), operas, plays and screenplays, and collaborates widely, including with artist Stanley Donwood, and musicians Cosmo Sheldrake, Jocelyn Pook and Karine Polwart. His work has been widely adapted for film, stage, television, radio, dance, music and performance, and his books have been published in more than thirty languages. In 2023 he was awarded the inaugural Weston International Award for Non-Fiction.


    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: A rousing collection of songs from the neo-folk troubador Johnny Flynn (whose Detectorists theme is forever etched in my brain) and frequent collaboration partner Robert Macfarlane. It's a warming, bucolic selection that's every bit as beautiful as 2021's stunning 'Lost In The Cedar Wood'.

    TRACK LISTING

    Side A
    1. Uncanny Valley
    2. Song With No Name
    3. Burial Blessing
    4. No Matter The Weight
    5. Coins For The Eyes
    Side B
    6. The Sun Also Rises
    7. The Wild Hunt
    8. Through The Misty With You
    9. Year-Long Winter
    10. River, Mountain And Love

    Julien Chang

    The Sale

      Baltimore’s Julien Chang writes music that tunnels toward a series of deeper truths, investigating everyday existentialism, love and life, art and the artist. Arriving in 2019 with his critically acclaimed album ‘Jules’, Chang set a precedent with his breezy, dreamy debut and is now exacting his focus on 2022 with forthcoming new music.

      Chang’s second album ‘The Sale’ testify to his talents as he wrestles with enviable grace across his new 12-track catalogue, the idea of estrangement and the problematics of artistic creation. Chang leans sonically into indie-pop, with guitar-driven instrumentation burbling across punchy drums and his layered, ethereal vocals. Yet the album is still replete with touchstones of the psychedelic popcraft that enamoured listeners on his debut.

      Recorded partially in his hometown of Baltimore and partially in his dorm room at Princeton, his new album ‘The Sale’ is a homegrown effort with Chang playing all instruments, bar the odd exception of a few notable cameos from Baltimore locals, classmates and old friends. Following his debut ‘Jules’ - which saw Chang earn praise from the likes of Pitchfork, Fader, The Guardian, NME, Loud & Quiet, DIY, Billboard alongside support from BBC Radio 1 & 6Music via Annie Mac Jack Saunders and Jamz Supernova - his new LP explores the discrepancy between two worlds, a struggle to get comfortable in either one of them, and ultimately an artistic fascination with this very struggle.



      TRACK LISTING

      1. Heart Holiday
      2. Marmalade
      3. Sweet Obsolete
      4. Snakebit Side
      5. Snakebit
      6. Time And Place
      7. Bellarose
      8. Ethical Exceptions
      9. Crossed Paths
      10. Queen Of Sheba
      11. Competition's Friend

      Beverly Glenn-Copeland

      Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined

        Earlier this year, Transgressive reissued American-Canadian composer and activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s 1986 masterpiece, Keyboard Fantasies, marking the 35th anniversary of its original release. Today, he announces, Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined - a collection of songs from the now legendary album, re-worked and re-imagined by a collection of creative kindred spirits.

        The remix album and reissue of the original work follows the Autumn 2020 release of Glenn’s album, Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Transmissions was a career-spanning album that includes compositions from his early works including selections from Keyboard Fantasies. It also included both new and archival unreleased tracks and live versions. This collection marked the first new release from Glenn-Copeland since 2004. The New York Times called it a “life-spanning mixtape that moves from the mournful torch songs of his youth to joyously soulful odes to survival.”

        TRACK LISTING

        Ever New (Reworked By Bon Iver & Flock Of Dimes)
        Fastest Star (Julia Holter Remix)
        Let Us Dance (Arca Remix)
        Old (New) Melody
        Ever New (Kelsey Lu’s Transportation)
        Sunset Village (Blood Orange Remix)
        Ever New (Reworked By Joseph Shabason & Thom Gill)
        Ghost House (Performed By Jeremy Dutcher)

        Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane

        Lost In The Cedar Wood

          ‘Lost In The Cedar Wood’, Johnny Flynn’s much-anticipated fifth album, is co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane.

          Johnny and Robert began work on the album in the first weeks of the pandemic, wanting to make music that sang of those dangerous, disorienting spring days; when birdsong was brighter –– and the sense of bewilderment more powerful –– than any of us had known before.

          They drew inspiration in part from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of world literature; an epic poem from Ancient Mesopotamia that contains the earliest version of the Flood Myth. To Johnny and Robert, Gilgamesh resonated eerily with the present moment –– and it catalysed their song-writing.

          For Gilgamesh is a story of friendship, love, loss, grief, bad governance and good dreaming; of natural disaster and environmental crisis. It also contains the first recorded act of human destruction of the natural world: when Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Sacred Cedar Wood, slay the guardian spirit of the forest, and cut down the trees with their axes, thereby bringing catastrophe upon themselves.

          Johnny and Robert wrote the album between March 2020 and February 2021, during a year in which we all wandered unsure of our path, lost in the cedar wood. The songs were composed in large part as a correspondence, through a back-and-forth of notebook pages, voice-recordings and WhatsApp-messages, at a time when lockdowns made meeting in person impossible. The first eight songs were recorded in an off-grid cottage deep in a Hampshire forest, with the sounds of chainsaws felling trees drifting in through the windows along with the birdsong.

          The result is an album at once urgent and ancient, which fuses poetry, landscape, myth and music into something unique. These are songs that ring with hope, love and sadness –– and one need not know anything about The Epic of Gilgamesh to be touched by them.


          STAFF COMMENTS

          Barry says: A beautifully evocative and wonderfully weighted collaboration between two of the most talented voices in folk music today. Both Flynn and Macfarlane are right at home here, crafting warm melodies and richly woven harmonies around a solid instrumental core.

          TRACK LISTING

          Side A
          1. Ten Degrees Of Strange - Johnny Flynn
          2. The World To Come - Johnny Flynn
          3. Gods And Monsters - Robert Macfarlane
          4. Bonedigger - Robert Macfarlane
          5. I Can’t Swim There - Robert Macfarlane

          Side B
          6. Nether - Robert Macfarlane
          7. Flood In The Desert - Johnny Flynn
          8. Tree Rings - Johnny Flynn
          9. Enkidu Walked - Robert Macfarlane
          10. Home And Dry - Robert Macfarlane
          11. Ferryman - Robert Macfarlane

          Debut solo album from Dave Okumu - who you probably don't know from producing and guesting on projects with Arlo Parks, St. Vincent, Tony Allen and Jesse Ware (amongst others). You might recognize him as singer and guitarist from the Mercury nominated band, The Invisible.

          However this isn't anything like anything he's made before. An ode to early electronica, downbeat and instrumental hip-hop, it combines elements of glitch, boom-bap, and warped sample heaven to create something with soul, identity and, more important, something that'll sound amazing in your living room as the dark nights draw in.

          Playing with a tantalizingly organic palette of sounds, it's jazz-indebted, with lots of dusty piano, upright bass and brushed drums strung up with an elastic, head-bobbing groove which I can't workout is some expert MPC trickery or some other kind of beat-production voodoo. Either way it pulls you in and out, fast and slower as it nods through its movements and is a guaranteed H I T for anyone with penchant for stoner, instrumental hip-hop in the vein of Madlib, J Dilla and Your Old Droog. 


          TRACK LISTING

          Intro
          Son Of Emmerson
          Ballpark
          Trouble
          New Dawn
          Brother
          Reprise
          RTN
          Don’t Die

          The Antlers release ‘Familiars’, their fourth studio album and first since 2011’s ‘Burst Apart’. (In between, they released the ‘[together]’ and ‘Undersea’ EPs.) ·

          ‘Familiars’ was recorded, produced and engineered by the band at their Brooklyn studio and mixed by Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Future Islands, Beach House) and follows 2011’s critically lauded ‘Burst Apart’, which The Sunday Times described as “some of the most beautiful music in years” and The Independent heralded as “a spine tingling triumph.”

          STAFF COMMENTS

          Andy says: Absolutely gorgeous, mellow record.

          TRACK LISTING

          1. Palace
          2. Doppelgänger
          3. Hotel
          4. Intruders
          5. Director
          6. Revisited
          7. Parade
          8. Surrender
          9. Refuge


          Latest Pre-Sales

          158 NEW ITEMS

          E-newsletter —
          Sign up
          Back to top