THE WEATHER STATION UNVEILS NEW SINGLE/VIDEO FOR “PARKING LOT”

WATCH AND SHARE “PARKING LOT” HERE

IGNORANCE OUT THIS FRIDAY FEBRUARY 5, 2021 ON NEXT DOOR RECORDS

PRE-ORDER IGNORANCE HERE

THE WEATHER STATION FULL BAND PERFORMANCE OF THE ENTIRE ALBUM RESCHEDULED TO MARCH 11. TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE

“Lindeman’s nimble voice moves from airy falsetto to an earthy alto with the grace and daring of a diving bird.” - New York Times

 "Ignorance suggests a new way to see the world, asking only that you release yourself to wildness and feeling, to the unanswerable questions and the world beyond yourself. It's all there — in the shifting clouds and the upward spiral of birds, in the opening flowers and the weeds that overtake them — just waiting to be found" - Exclaim!

“Amid Ignorance’s bustling arrangements, [Lindeman’s] lyrics have the impact of fireworks, sparks that zip upward and explode with scintillating brilliance.” - Pitchfork

“The music is frantic and gorgeous, a sensory overload.” - MOJO, 9/10 Album of the Month

“The album ends with the sound of a foot releasing the piano’s sustain pedal. Perfect.” - Uncut, 4/5 Album of the Month

Photo Credit: Daniel Dorsa // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

The Weather Station - project of Tamara Lindeman - will release her new album, Ignorance, this Friday on Next Door Records. Today’s new song/video “Parking Lot” is the latest in a string of singles that put Lindeman’s refined sound front and center: “Atlantic”, “Tried to Tell You”, and “Robber”. “Parking Lot” is another dynamic stunner in which Lindeman places a vulnerable love song to a bird against subtle disco. It crescendos from tempoed percussion and flitting keys to quickening chords and dramatic strings as Lindeman sings of inexplicable emotions: ‘Everywhere we go there is an outside, over all of these ceilings hangs a sky // And it kills me when I - you know it just kills me when I see some bird fly // It just kills me, and I don’t know why.’ In the accompanying video, spontaneously shot and directed by Lindeman and Adam Crosby, Lindeman walks across an expansive field, a lavender-tinted sky as the horizon. 

“‘Parking Lot’ is my strange gentle disco song about a humble encounter with a bird and being tired and being in love, and being heartbroken in ways I didn't quite yet understand,” says Lindeman. “I don't fully know how everything connects in this song other than it obviously does.  I wanted to make the recording very passionate and beautiful while also being very muscular while also being very gentle, and so I did.” 

WATCH AND SHARE “PARKING LOT” HERE

Through Ignorance, Lindeman has created a novel sonic landscape for The Weather Station. It’s as hi-fi a record as Lindeman has ever made, breaking into pure pop at moments, at others a dense wilderness of notes; a deeply rhythmic and painful record that feels more urgent and clear than her work ever has. The natural world is everywhere on this record, intruding with force and poignancy. For a deeper look into Ignorance, read the recent profiles in the New York Times and on Pitchfork.

The Weather Station’s full band performance is rescheduled to March 11th due to Ontario’s COVID restrictions. The band will play Ignorance in its entirety, tickets for the livestream are available here.

WATCH AND SHARE “ATLANTIC” HERE

WATCH AND SHARE “TRIED TO TELL YOU” HERE

WATCH AND SHARE “ROBBER” HERE

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IGNORANCE TRACKLIST
1.Robber
2. Atlantic
3. Tried To Tell You
4. Parking Lot
5. Loss
6. Separated
7. Wear
8. Trust
9. Heart
10. Subdivisions

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JOSEPH SHABASON ANNOUNCES UPCOMING LP, THE FELLOWSHIP, SHARES TITLE TRACK

JOSEPH SHABASON SHARES AUTO-BIOGRAPHY IN THE FORM OF INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC WITH NEW LP, THE FELLOWSHIP,  OUT APRIL 30, 2021 VIA TELEPHONE EXPLOSION & WESTERN VINYL

WATCH AND SHARE “THE FELLOWSHIP” HERE

PRE-ORDER THE FELLOWSHIP HERE

Photo Credit : Colin Medley // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Across eight tracks that mesh spacious, jazz-laced composition with fourth-world and adult-contemporary tonality, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason sketches an auditory map of the transcendence, unity, conditioning, and eventual renunciation of his upbringing in an Islamic and Jewish dual-faith household. The resulting album The Fellowship bears the name of the insular Islamic community Shabason’s traditionally Jewish parents belonged to from a  time before he was even born; a mental and spiritual push pull which continued shaping, even controlling, his outlook well into his adulthood. As a listening experience The Fellowship follows a chronological arc that spans three generations covering his parents’ early lives, his own  spiritual and physical adolescence, and his subsequent struggle to eschew the problematic habituations of such a conflicted past. 

WATCH AND SHARE “THE FELLOWSHIP” HERE

“Life With My Grandparents” commences The Fellowship in overcast hues. A cassette recording of a child’s voice pops in and out of a murmuring brass tone as both elements drift like memories receding  forever into the past. “My parents grew up in really difficult households. Both of my father’s parents had just survived the Holocaust only six years before he was born.” Shabason explains, cutting right to the root of what might have led his parents to diverge from their inherited spiritual conventions. "My grandparents were deeply traumatised from having lost so many friends and family members, and even if the war hadn’t happened I don’t think they would have been particularly emotionally available.” Exchanging the gloom for tension, the anxiously experimental “Escape From North York” jolts the cadence forwards and backwards by way of skittering jazz percussion as a nauseated synth melody balloons into full-on terror, all while the melodic elements are ambushed from below by a flash flood of air rending texture. 

The title (a play on John Carpenter’s Escape From New York) refers to the area of Toronto where Shabason’s parents were raised, and rebelliously fled in their twenties against their own  parents’ wishes. The title track of The Fellowship swings toward relief and reflection, and buoys the mood up to something childlike. It is suffused with saxophone, upright bass, chorus-drenched guitar, and  digitized pan flute; the kinds of 90’s jazz timbres that mark a time in Shabason’s adolescence when the dilemmas of his family’s faith were still obscured by comfort, community, and a dash of the forgivable naivete of early youth. At the same time, the piece shows Shabason at his most melodically athletic, darting around chord changes with fervor for the subject at hand. 

From here the perspective moves from third to first person as Shabason unpacks his teenage years across a three song suite, the titles of which mark the exact years they are meant to sonically illustrate. Where the previous track floated ever upward on innocence and clarity, “0-13” dispenses with both by its final third at which point things have unraveled into aleatoric unease representing “the first chink in the armour,” as Joseph admits, “and the first time I really started to question everything I’d been taught.” By “13-15” the pendulum is fully back on the side of apprehension as galloping percussion, an unrelenting synthetic marimba, an off-key wood flute, and jittering electric guitar tell a story of doubt and anger, dressed in fourth-world atonality. “By that time,” says Shabason, referring to the age denoted in the track name, “I was smoking weed and really getting into my head. According to my religion, smoking weed was  gonna land me in hell, and all my friends who drank were also on the path to hell. The whole thing seemed totally absurd. The idea of a God that was that petty and vengeful made no sense. Those thoughts just swirled and created this background dissonance that existed all throughout my early teens. Middle school was fucked.” 

“15-19” is the sadness that follows outrage, when the dust settles and the pieces need putting back together, yet they simply won’t fit in light of a newfound perspective. As such, this final movement is bathed in tragic, futile optimism. Under a bed of half-tempo RnB, muted trumpets glow like dying embers catching the wind. Shabason elucidates, “at that point, I’d discovered punk and hardcore and decided to be straight edge. It provided me with a community and a great cover for why I didn’t drink or do drugs. It felt like this really cool disguise. It kept me from questioning why I was doing it in the first place, but underlying it all was sadness. Why were my gay friends going to hell? Why did women have to be modest and not men? Why did God want to punish me for so many things? Was I going to hell because I had sex with my girlfriend? None of it made sense, but I was so completely brainwashed that I never thought to seriously question it. Instead, I just slipped up more and more, did drugs, fooled around, and tried to put  the divine ramifications of my actions out of my head.” 

“Comparative World Religions” is a caffeinated gamelan named for the college course that caused Joseph – and so many other young people engrossed in inherited repressive ideologies – to see the irreconcilable nature of his beliefs from the outside in. Like the class itself, it stands apart from the  backdrop of The Fellowship by replacing the seesaw of religious ecstasy and uncertainty with the type of  transcendence that can only be arrived at through factual illumination. Using mournful brass and glassy keys, the aptly titled “So Long” represents the slow walking away that Shabason had to do mentally and emotionally, even long after the illusion had been cracked open. “It took me at least another twelve to fifteen years to fully deprogram myself from all the guilt and shame that was bred into me by religion, but I think that I’m finally free from it,” says Shabason of his present-day outlook. “This song is a final goodbye  to that life… an exhale and deep inhale before I start a new chapter.” On The Fellowship, as on prior albums that bear his name, Joseph Shabason does what only the best instrumental music makers can: tell a story with emotional clarity that conveys even the subtlest of feelings, all without singing a single word. As wordless as ever – with as complex a theme as ever – this album may be his most emotionally articulate yet. Most importantly, those lost in the woods of repression and self-doubt that organized religion can be at its worst now have The Fellowship to help guide them into a softer light. 

PRE-ORDER THE FELLOWSHIP HERE

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THE FELLOWSHIP TRACKLIST
1. Life With My Grandparents: 4:51  
2. Escape From North York: 3:38 
3. The Fellowship: 5:14  
4. 0-13: 2:37 
5. 13-15: 5:10 
6. 15-19: 7:01 
7. Comparative World Religion: 3:00 
8. So Long: 7:07

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STEVEN WILSON SHARES VIDEO FOR “SELF” FROM THE FUTURE BITES

NEW STEVEN WILSON VIDEO FOR “SELF” PREMIERES VIA NEW YORK TIMES SQUARE BILLBOARD THIS MORNING

WATCH AND SHARE “SELF” HERE

THE FUTURE BITES AVAILABLE TODAY VIA ARTS & CRAFTS

BUY / STREAM THE FUTURE BITES HERE

Steven Wilson has released a mind bending video for the track “SELF”, taken from his just released album THE FUTURE BITES. Directed by longtime visual collaborator Miles Skarin, the video uses similar deep fake technology (DeepFaceLab) to that used in Channel 4’s Alternative Queen’s Speech. In the clip, Steven’s face is warped into those of a series of iconic (and occasionally infamous) celebrities including (among others) Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Zuckerberg, Brad Pitt, and David Bowie (to name a few). The effect is equal parts mesmerising and disturbing, questioning the nature of identity in an age where everything is so easy to fake. 

The video for “SELF” premiered today on a digital billboard in Times Square (corner of Broadway and 7th and 43rd) at 7am EST and went online everywhere at 1pm GMT. 

WATCH AND SHARE “SELF” HERE

Steven Wilson: “‘SELF’ is about our new age of narcissism and self-obsession, one in which a human race that used to look out with curiosity at the world and the stars now spends much of its time gazing at a little screen to see themselves reflected back in the mirror of social media. In that sense everyone now can take part in the notion of celebrity, and has the potential to share their life with an invisible mass of people they will never meet. The video take things further by exploring the idea that anyone can now project a version or ‘self’ that has no bearing on reality, and by using only well known faces the deception is made transparent.”

Miles Skarin (director): “In our early discussions about the ‘SELF’ video, we were talking about the concept of identity in the digital age, how your face is not only your key to a lot of the media you consume, it represents who you are - or who you pretend to be in your online personas. One of the most intriguing new developments in recent years have been the ability to create deepfakes, where a computer runs a machine learning algorithm to predict what one face would look like in another’s pose. Anyone with the right tools and ability can now turn themselves into anyone else, so what does that mean for identity?”

BUY / STREAM THE FUTURE BITES HERE

THE FUTURE BITES was released on January 29, 2021 to huge acclaim:

“Wilson’s strongest outing to date... The Future Bites is guaranteed to weather the ravages of time” Record Collector 5*

“OK Computer for the Amazon age... one of the boldest and best albums Wilson has made” Prog 

“The Future Bites is a great, grown-up pop record - knowing and self-aware, but never too much for its own good” Mojo 4* 

“A beguiling pop rabbit hole” Uncut 8/10 

"Pink Floyd’s Welcome To The Machine if Rick Wright had been given free rein with the synths and Nick Mason had programmed a drum machine” Electronic Sound 

“Wilson has never before paced such a rollercoaster ride into a single album…another triumph” Classic Rock 9/10

WATCH / SHARE “PERSONAL SHOPPER” HERE

WATCH / SHARE “KING GHOST” HERE

WATCH /  SHARE “EMINENT SLEAZE” HERE

WATCH / SHARE “MAN OF THE PEOPLE” HERE

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STEVEN WILSON ONLINE
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