About this item

“I remember Gareth Sager just marching onto stage, picking up his guitar and bursting into something without looking at any amplifier or anything like that. It was just this unholy, manic, violent, paranoid, painful music that came out. It was just one of those moments when you feel the cogs of your mind shift and your life is irreversibly changed” Nick Cave

“I entered Studio One, Abbey Road as a piano playing punk, I had the biggest studio in Europe at my disposal with one of the greatest pianos, and a few hours, time was of the essence. I felt the gods had opened the doors to me to be in that studio at that time so I could express the feelings of ghosts, time lost, emotions found. I was given the chance to totally express the inexpressible. This sort of venue encourages that, a brew of Erik Satie and the third Velvet Underground LP!” Gareth Sager

Gareth Sager, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and the founding member of The Pop Group, Rip Rig & Panic and Head announces the release of his first solo piano album. 88 Tuned Dreams will be released through Freaks R Us on Friday October 6th 2017. The self-produced album, comprised of fourteen melodic classical improvisations was recorded in one miraculous session at arguably the world’s most distinguished recording space; Studio One, Abbey Road.

88 Tuned Dreams is an extraordinary affirmation of the liberated punk ideals that have continually inspired Gareth Sager throughout his career. Evoking a liminal world of uncanny yet warm atmospherics, the album is pervaded by impressionistic contemplation, revealing the roots of Sager’s early connection to the works of Erik Satie, Frédéric Chopin and Claude Debussy.

Only on Savage Sea, an astonishing high point of The Pop Group’s seminal debut Y, and Echelon, the desolate closing track on their 2015 return record Citizen Zombie, has Sager’s piano playing been as intimately and sublimely focalized as it is here. Withholding an introspective quality and invested with his own improvisational energy, these fourteen piano works are stunning low-lit invocations from one of post-punk’s most unpredictable and exploratory pioneers.

As post-punk provocateur in The Pop Group, ringleader of avant-garde jazz / art pop collective Rip Rig & Panic, and an exponent of unruly folk balladry in Head, Sager has always given free rein to artistic impulse and embraced the unexpected. An industrious collaborator and a prolific solo artist in his own right, Sager has been an unremittingly restless and versatile force throughout the post-punk era and beyond, both a dynamic presence and a true originator.

TRACK LISTING

1. Chapel Perilous
2. Old Haunts New Scenes
3. Shipwrecked Rusty Birds
4. Oblong Malfunctions
5. The Touch Of A Strangers Skin
6. Black Crow In A Slow Snow
7. The Bells That Banish The Devil
8. Waltzing In An Ill-suited Chest Of Honours
9. Eulogy To Lost Elegance
10. Everything Is A Blessing
11. Apparently (It’s The Way He Looks In Your Eyes)
12. Chagrin In Madrid
13. Slaughtered Science
14. The Showgirl Is Not Past Her Prime