INVENTIONS are the collaborative sum of longtime friends Matthew Cooper of Eluvium, and Mark T. Smith of Explosions In The Sky. Their 2013 eponymous debut album introduced an ambition to create music that was both challenging and comforting.

Currently premiering on Pitchfork, lead track “Springworlds” can be heard here:

Their new album, Maze of Woods, opens with a vocal sample declaring, “I wanted to do something that I don’t know how to do.” Using this as a mission statement, Inventions have crafted a complex and exuberant album from an array of instruments, samples, found sounds, beats, chants, and raw bursts of noise, with a much greater emphasis on strong vocal accompaniment in every song.

Two albums released in the span of 10 months speaks to the drive that these two have felt since they started playing together. Much like on the first record, they again mixed the album in a house on the Oregon coastline, with final mixing and production all done by Smith and Cooper.

Inventions have stated that much of the inspiration for Maze of Woods comes from the closing paragraph of Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams. In that paragraph, Johnson describes the non-verbal howl of a feral wolf boy, a pre-language that is yearning and instinctual; a statement of wordless distress and love. Maze of Woods is the product of two masters of their craft getting lost in the wilderness, “doing something that they don’t know how to do,” and emerging with something wholly unexpected and beguilingly beautiful.

Maze of Woods will be released 16th March on Bella Union.

Following their triumphant return last November with second album “The Other I”, sister duo 2:54 have premiered a visceral, gritty black and white promo video to accompany ‘Crest’, one of their rawest, punkiest, cuts to date. “We wanted to create a video that captured the energy of the song as well as our live show, and once again Charlie Robins, Chris Hugall and Daniel Castro have done an outstanding job of doing exactly that,” says frontwoman Colette Thurlow.

The video comes just ahead of their highly-anticipated imminent UK headline dates, the band having just announced that they’ll be joined for their London, Dingwalls show by special guests the Grumbling Fur, the acclaimed leftfield overlords who’s debut album featured in a number of End of Year polls. After that the band will then be making their long-awaited return to the US for an extensive tour that takes them coast-to-coast alongside the much-loved Scots, Honeyblood. UK live shows below:

Monday 2 February – MANCHESTER – Deaf Institute tickets
Tuesday 3 February – BRISTOL – Colston Hall tickets
Wednesday 4 February – LONDON – Dingwalls tickets

Bella Union are thrilled to announce the release of Pleasure Boy, the new album from Hannah Cohen, which will be available 30th March. Listen to “Keepsake”, the album’s sublime opening track below:

The album teaser is also viewable here.

Music often comes from a deep place, and in the case of Hannah Cohen’s stunning and heartrending second album, it’s very deep indeed. Mainly inspired by a painful break-up and the anxieties that loss can trigger, Pleasure Boy cushions its sadness in an exquisitely nuanced soundscape of aching melancholy and lush melody where Hannah’s vocal conveys all the different shades of heartbreak. Following the album’s completion, she’s survived the calamity and found a new level of happiness, but to paraphrase the classic Sixties hit, there will always be something there to remind her with Pleasure Boy.

‘Pleasure Boy’, like her debut ‘Child Bride’, was produced by Thomas Bartlett, aka Doveman, whose work with artists such as The National, Antony Hegarty and David Byrne singles him out as one of America’s current finest producers and collaborators, though he’s also a talented pianist. The dynamics of ‘Pleasure Boy’ was the result of Hannah and Bartlett, “bunkering down with my songs, experimenting with different tones and sounds, and layering them. My first record was so airy and roomy, I didn’t have patience for that again, I wanted more movement, something more mysterious and witchier, so we created this sound wall together.”

“I wanted the music to hurt, to have a visceral effect,” Hannah says. Her voice sometimes sounds delirious or icy; other times she recalls the vulnerable, piercing beauty of Harriet Wheeler (The Sundays) and Karen Peris (The Innocence Mission). But Pleasure Boy‘s sound wouldn’t exist without the vision that launched it. The album title arrived as the record took shape. “Pleasure Boy is a character of who it’s about, someone who represents gluttony and decadence and richness,” Hannah explains. She admits it was a tough record to make, given she was aiming to heal emotionally while feeling “devastated and hurt. But it wouldn’t be the record it is if I hadn’t done that.”

Pleasure Boy will be released 30th March on Bella Union.