Mike Lindsay and Anna B Savage collaborate on new single table – the latest track to be shared from Mike Lindsay’s debut solo album ‘supershapes volume 1’ – out June 14th via Moshi Moshi Records.
One half of LUMP with Laura Marling and co-founder of pioneering UK acid folktronica band Tunng, elsewhere Mike Lindsay is known for producing Speech Debelle’s Mercury Music prize winning album ‘Speech Therapy’, along with his work with Jon Hopkins, DuBlonde, Songhoy Blues and more recent production for Dana Gavanski, Meadow Meadow and William Doyle.
Lindsay’s newly announced debut album is the first instalment in a series of solo records that will explore “the miraculous in the mundane”, with ‘supershapes volume 1’ looking widely at “everyday domestic objects, the daily rituals that shape us, heavily focusing on the majestic in the domestic”.
On new single table, Lindsay’s 120-year-old dining room table – at which he built the foundations of the new album – is pulled into focus. Watch the video clip for table via YouTube below.
“Who else sat round this perfect rectangle, with kids and hopes and friendship? / And who else smeared errant gravy off it with their fingertips?” sings Anna B Savage, amidst floating synth arrangements and subtly danceable percussion. From an ordinary household object appears a rich seam of history and emotion, the table given its own agency, and a century’s worth of secrets…
On collaborating with Mike Lindsay on table and the new album, Anna B Savage said: “I asked Mike to send me a big email with his current preoccupations and niggling thoughts. He sent back a tome, with a section about panpsychism. Panpsychism is (to put it horribly simply, forgive me) the idea that every object in the world has a consciousness of some sort, no matter how ‘unimaginably simple’ that consciousness might be. Mike had been thinking about this phenomenon particularly in relation to a dining table he bought second hand. He said it was one hundred and twenty two years old, “so for 122 years people have sat around… and shared stories, or experiences with each other”. Obviously this is a fantastically evocative thought, so when I came in to record I ran with that, imagining a series of vignettes around the table. Hopefully evoking the real beauty in the mundanity of a life around an object. And then at the end, the table is afforded a more specific consciousness: “what does the table think of you?”
Working with Mike on his supershapes project will forever be one of my favourite endeavours. Any excuse to work with him more was gonna be leapt on by me, and in particular to think he wanted me to work on something is just too much for my little heart to handle. We had (and have) so much fun. What more could you want.”
New single table is accompanied by a suitably mind-expanding, homeware-themed video created by Lindsay’s close collaborator Ben Edwards (aka Benge), using a combination of modern computer software, vintage analogue and early digital video hardware.
On the video, Mike Lindsay added: “There’s something brilliantly bizarre about Benge’s video for table. It first captures the nostalgia of all the table scenarios that Anna is singing about with wonderful found footage, but then suddenly, alongside the cacophony of Robert’s sax clusters, we are smashed with the pure joy of VHS digi colour tables flying at us from every angle.. sizzling with potent sorcery !! Totally tabletastic!”
At first, Mike Lindsay had thought ‘supershapes volume 1’ would be purely instrumental album. As time went on though, Lindsay felt the songs were still missing a voice, as he explained: “The more the songs developed as instrumentals, the more I could imagine the tones of Anna B Savage. I had already worked with Anna on her album in|FLUX which was a wonderful experience. She is a true poet of the everyday emotions. Over four or five days together in my new studio in Margate, the supershapes started to come alive!”
Then Lindsay would bring in multi-instrumentalist Ross Blake, adding breathy woodwind and soft saxophones which weaved through the analogue polyrhythmic shapes. “I had also just worked with Robert Stillman on the Nick Drake cover of ‘Saturday Sun’ I did with Guy Garvey,” Lindsay recalls. “Robert is an incredible saxophone player and musician. He has this beautiful thick and warm wild tone. I asked him to come in for a couple of days to bring his magic to the shapes.”
Others came on board too, including drummer Adam Betts, who Lindsay had seen play as part of Three Trapped Tigers, Squarepusher’s Shobaleader One, and his own Colossal Squid solo drum show in Margate. “I thought perhaps he could bring something to the shapes, which of course he did, weaving in and out of the sampled objects.”
Lindsay built the foundation of ‘supershapes volume 1’ at his 120-year-old dining table. Inspired by his wife Lily’s MA studies in fine art, Lindsay mulled over the idea that objects have memories and their own consciousness.
Other influences included: “contemporary productions like Foodman’s ‘Yasuragi Land’, a Japanese experimental manic scatter sample electronica artist who blows my mind. Kate NV: I love her bass sounds and twisted melodic rhythms. Also, I was listening to Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s ‘Keyboard Fantasies’” Lindsay continues.
“This record is one that I’m very proud of,” he concludes. “I hope that people are immersed by the record and feel the journey. I hope that they give their own table some love.”
Mike Lindsay’s new solo album ‘supershapes volume 1’ is out June 14th via Moshi Moshi Records. New single table is out now. Mike Lindsay will tour the album this September, dates below.
Live dates
14th June – Rough Trade East, London
15th June – Where Else?, Margate
10th September – South Street Arts, Reading
11th September – Strange Brew, Bristol
12th September – Belgrave Music Hall, Leeds
13th September – Mono, Glasgow
15th September – ICA, London
‘supershapes volume 1′ track list
pre-order: https://bio.to/mikelindsay
1. lie down
2. ruins in reverse
3. table
4. pretender to surrender
5. kachumber
6. two blues
7. it’s all for you
8. do what
9. content
10. i was the thief
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