THE ACCLAIMED ALBUM FROM THE ICONIC DUO IS OUT NOW VIA ARTS & CRAFTS
WATCH / SHARE “LUSTRE PARFAIT” HERE
BUY / STREAM LUSTRE PARFAIT HERE
Built from hours of material created between 2009 and 2017, the Tragically Hip leader's collaboration with uber-producer Bob Rock bursts with vitality, buoyancy and bliss. It's not a sombre entrée — it's a lustre parfait. - Exclaim!
A stunning thrill ride that features Downie at his rocking, passionate best and Rock sculpting the perfect musical foundations around his lyrically cryptic musings.” - Toronto Star
“Lustre Parfait” Video Still
Today, Gord Downie and Bob Rock are sharing the new visualizer for the title track from their widely celebrated collaboration album, Lustre Parfait, recently released after years of speculation and anticipation. The “Lustre Parfait” video incorporates AI in the creative process. Using machine learning to interpret thousands of photos of chandeliers as the source material, director Matt King created an algorithm to teach a program to produce its own images of chandeliers. Swirled with Gord Downie's handwritten song lyrics and Matthew Cardinal's iconic album cover photography, the video is an abstract and incandescent response to the music, spotlighting a place close to Gord's heart – where art inspires art.
“In making this video, we wanted to manifest the spirit of Lustre Parfait (or 'perfect chandelier') and the shimmering electricity of Gord and Bob's music,” says King. “We wanted to bring people into the art, and create something inspired by it – so without giving too much context, we put a call out for fans to submit their own images of chandeliers. We then gathered these submissions (many of which can be seen during the intro of the song), combined them with Matthew Cardinal's stunning album cover photography to make a dataset of images. We put this dataset into an Artificial Intelligence program and asked it to create new images based on what it saw. What came out is hundreds of unique images based on the original chandelier pictures. Some images looked fairly realistic, some were a little off, while others looked like a total mess. Once we stitched them all together and put them to the song, we felt good about how they reflect the joyous cacophony of Bob Rock's production, while honouring Gord Downie's lifelong strive to create something that is beautifully strange and entirely unique.”
WATCH / SHARE “LUSTRE PARFAIT” HERE
MORE ABOUT LUSTRE PARFAIT
Lustre Parfait, is the long mythologized album by The Tragically Hip's legendary late frontman Gord Downie and iconic multi-platinum Grammy Award and Hall of Fame producer Bob Rock (Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Michael Bublé). Downie and Rock’s relationship began when they worked together on The Tragically Hip's World Container (2006) and We Are The Same (2009). Inspired by their union under the spell of rock n’ roll, it was after the second outing that Downie asked if Rock had music he could write lyrics for. The sonic spaces that Rock provided led Downie into the depths of his notebooks, armed with the musical clues to navigate the brilliance mapped therein. Recording sessions between 2009 and 2016 in Maui, Vancouver, Toronto, and Los Angeles, featuring a multitude of seasoned Rock collaborators, led to Lustre Parfait – the ninth album to bear Downie's name outside the Hip, and the first album to bear Rock’s beyond the role of producer and engineer.
Songs like the title track “Lustre Parfait” and “The Raven And The Red-Tailed Hawk” showcase the boundless energy and heedless pace found within, both rave-up radio rockers that brim with glinting guitars, galloping drums, and combustive choruses. Steeped in their shared affinity for rock classics and pop punk abandon, heard before in The Tragically Hip’s “Fireworks” or Rock’s work with The Cult and The Payolas, Lustre Parfait is a striking contrast to the raw intimacy of Downie's posthumous solo releases – 2017's Introduce Yerself, and 2020's Away Is Mine – and the natural grain of his earlier solo albums like Coke Machine Glow and The Grand Bounce.
“First and foremost Gord was my friend, and having the opportunity to work with him on these songs was one of the biggest highlights of my professional life,” Rock says. “I am grateful that I got to witness his genius in such close proximity.” Watch Bob Rock talk more about Gord and Lustre Parfait with Ian Hanomansing on CBC TV’s The National HERE.
WATCH / SHARE “THE NORTH SHORE” LYRIC VIDEO HERE
From the raucous opening bars of “Greyboy Says” through to the exhale of the closing track “There Goes The Sun,” Lustre Parfait is a gift and invitation to eternally “gather in the dark.” As Bob Rock tells it: “Lustre Parfait is a reminder that even through the darkness, there is the joy of making music.”
BUY / STREAM LUSTRE PARFAIT HERE
Album Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
LUSTRE PARFAIT ALBUM TRACKLIST
1. Greyboy Says
2. The Raven And The Red-Tailed Hawk
3. Lustre Parfait
4. The Moment Is A Wild Place
5. Something More
6. Camaro
7. The North Shore
8. Is There Nowhere
9. To Catch The Truth
10. Let Me Howl
11. HellBreaksLoose
12. The Safest Day Of The Year
13. In The Field
14. There Goes The Sun
Photo Credit: Gordon Hawkins / Austin Nelson // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
GORD DOWNIE ONLINE
LUSTREPARFAIT.COM
WEBSITE
TWITTER
FACEBOOK
YOUTUBE
INSTAGRAM