Following fine reviews for new album Every Mover, out now via Bella Union, Hilang Child has shared a hypnotic Tusks remix of earlier single and LP standout “Anthropic (Cold Times)”. Tusks is the moniker of multi-instrumentalist and producer Emily Underhill. Originating from electronic beginnings, Tusks weaves cinematic soundscapes with ethereal vocals and dark production to create her eclectic sound, which has seen her release two albums so far on One Little Independent Records (Bjork, Asgier), gain over 18 million streams and counting on Spotify and be championed by the likes of Lauren Laverne, Annie Mac, Rolling Stone, MixMag, DIY, MOJO, Wonderland and more.
Of the remix Ed Riman aka Hilang Child says: “Anthropic (Cold Times) was originally supposed to be an introspective yet optimistic ‘note-to-self’ rounding up the message of my new album. However, in the wake of the ‘new normal’ caused by the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the heightened public consciousness of ongoing global fights for equality, 2020 has given the lyrics a completely different meaning to me, which I never foresaw. I see it now as a general statement of hope for a future in which we break through difficult times and find unity, making space to live in the moment, cherishing those we hold dear and loving ourselves and others for who we are. Prior to lockdown Tusks and I were booked to play a show together in London. In the lead up she produced this amazing remix bringing to mind night-time drives and sci-fi soundtracks. Although the show was cancelled we’re happy this track came from it.”
Tusks adds: “I loved reworking this track and heard the new bass line in my head as soon as I’d isolated Ed’s vocals. His harmonies are so beautiful, I wanted to highlight them and use them as the climactic point in the remix.”
“Hilang Child blends the blissed-out and the bittersweet on this follow-up to 2018’s Years… Rich and melodic, there are hints of MGMT in the upbeat ‘Good To Be Young’ and Sigur Ros in the looping, hymnal ‘Steppe’, yet his own voice remains a consistent throughout.” Electronic Sound
“A vast, almost swaggering, swathe of sound… Play Til Evening bustles with Polyphonic Spree-style uplift while Earthborne is balm for unsettled times.” MOJO
“With cool atmospherics and a clear knack for pop hooks, Ed Riman weaves his magic with a combination of emotional intensity and much needed positivity.. A reassuring soundtrack to our troubled times that summons beauty in the face of adversity.” The Sun
“Shimmeringly fuses anthemic, gospel-edged singing and surging instrumentation with a Philip Glass pulse and a trance-like throb.” The Arts Desk
“Sounds especially fresh while providing some much needed hope and optimism amid the ongoing sense of disillusionment… emotive and mountain-scaling” Music OMH
To celebrate the release of his new album Every Mover, out today on Bella Union, Hilang Child has shared a visually stunning video for the track “Pesawat Aeroplane (English)”. The video utilises drone footage shot in Indonesia supplied by Tobias Brent and Lifted Imaging and edited by Hilang Child to create something beautiful and otherworldly. Of the video Ed Riman aka Hilang Child says: With the song being loosely about my dad moving to the other side of the world, when writing it I kept envisioning that first plane journey he’d have taken and the view from the window as it passed above the landscape. I used those visions as the basis for the song’s visual, imagining those scenes as if they appeared in a distant memory, or a dream.”
“The greatest thing about being a musician is experiencing it with other people,” says Ed Riman, the Brighton-based Eurasian singer, songwriter and sound-scapist who records as Hilang Child. “Whether that’s playing with others, creating together, sharing a vision, whatever, I just think in all aspects it’s a totally elevated experience when you’re not alone.”
Proof rings out with force and feeling on Hilang Child’s superlative second album, Every Mover. In 2018, Riman delivered a serene, textured debut album in Years, rich in sound and feeling. Lauren Laverne, Q, MOJO and others lavished praise, but the “isolating process” of making the album left Riman hungry to find alternative ways of working. Meanwhile, the “lonely, pressured” aftermath of Years found Riman grappling with “rough self-esteem and anxiety issues”, amplified in part by social media’s ‘fulfilment narratives’. Duly, he set out to navigate and overcome these mindsets, drawing deeply on his own insecurities and those he recognised in others.
These themes converge emphatically on Every Mover, an album steeped in everyday emotional states and crafted for cathartic, communal performance. Drawing on a rich spread of collaborators, sounds and themes, Riman uses his frustrations as the impetus to transform the brimming promise of Years into upfront and expansive new shapes. “I wanted it to sound a bit gutsier than the first album,” he says, succinctly, “heavier and closer to the kind of stuff that hits me when I go to shows or blast music in the car. I started out in music as a drummer playing for pop or beat-driven artists and grew up listening to louder stuff, but a lot of the music I’ve made as Hilang Child has been more ethereal. I wanted to bring it back to a place that feels more ‘me’ and make more of a thing of having big hypnotic drums, aggressive bass, ripping distorted instruments and a general energy to it.”
“Good to be Young” serves swift notice of this leap, its banked synths and twinkling sound clusters leading to an assertion of fresh force when the main beat lands and a congregation of friends – AK Patterson, Paul Thomas Saunders, Dog in the Snow, Ellen Murphy, members of Penelope Isles – unite for the gang-vocal refrains. “It’s all iridescent colour I’m on,” Riman exults, a claim lived up to on the full-flush folktronica of “Shenley”. A reflection on spiralling insecurity, “Seen the Boreal” ups the ante again with its monk-ish chorales, looping samples, spectral woodwinds (from multi-instrumentalist John ‘Rittipo’ Moore, of Public Service Broadcasting and Bastille previous) and ecstatic chorus, Riman transforming a meditation on hindsight’s limiting effects into a spur to look forwards. And surge forwards he does with the glittering synths, spacey guitars, and Krautrock propulsion of “King Quail”, developed in jam sessions with dream-pop wonder Zoe Mead (Wyldest) in her basement studio.
Riman’s sounds are enriched wherever you turn, from the epic prog-tronica of “The Next Hold” to the vocal release and layered arrangement of “Play ’Til Evening”; a kind of summit meeting between Surrender-era Chemical Brothers and Fleet Foxes in the high church of ecstatic sound. The treated chorales of “Magical Fingertip” and naked lyrics of the festival-sized new single “Anthropic (Cold Times)” showcase a fertile push-pull of lush arrangements and wide-open emotions in Riman’s sound; on the latter, Rittipo’s horns brim with expressive power.
Brought to a sublime close with “Steppe”, the resulting album projects its own epiphanic force. The birth was not always smooth: due to Covid-19, tours were cancelled and studios closed. Thankfully, most of the main parts were recorded pre-lockdown between East London, Gateshead, Brighton, Wandsworth and elsewhere, before mixing proceeded remotely. Meanwhile, alongside indie-pop trio OUTLYA’s Will Bloomfield (percussion/co-production on ‘Play ’Til Evening’), visual design collective Tough Honey (accompanying videos) and other collaborators, Riman’s bond with co-producer JMAC (Troye Sivan, Haux, Lucy Rose) proved crucial. “It felt freeing to work collaboratively and have that push-and-pull of ideas,” says Riman. “Even the moments where we didn’t see eye-to-eye made it feel like I wasn’t alone, with someone else working just as passionately on the project.”
That sense of passion lights up Every Mover, an album that hymns the redemptive qualities of richly expressive music crafted in simpatico unison with friends. “I get told I’m quite an openly emotional person,” says Riman, “and I suppose the extremes in this album reflect that! But I also wanted the album to roughly follow the mental flow of feeling worthless, then recognising it, then accepting your shortcomings and trying to work on it, then coming out unscathed on the other side. I’m still not fully out of the spiral. The Covid apocalypse, alongside some personal life changes, have definitely caused it to resurface. But I’m glad I made this album as a kind of cathartic primer on trying to deal with it.” Now, time for other people to experience it too.
With his new album Every Mover due for release 8th January via Bella Union, and having previously shared videos for the tracks ‘Good To Be Young’, ‘Seen The Boreal’ and ‘Anthropic (Cold Times)’, today Hilang Child shares a distinctive video for new single “King Quail”. Of the track Ed Riman aka Hilang Child says: “King Quail is about taking a step back and realising the absurdity of modelling one’s life and appearance around what you think others want to see, rather than living for yourself. It’s about learning to be comfortable the way you are, breaking away from that fear of rejection and the feeling that we have to exaggerate ourselves into some showpiece to gain the validation of others. The song started one night in Wyldest frontwoman Zoe Mead’s basement studio in Greenwich. I had this OP-1 loop and a motorik 808 beat, which I’d been messing around with for a while. We spent the night jamming over it and shaping it into a psychedelic, krautrocky pop-song with Zoe adding spacey guitar and myself reworking the drums, allowing the groove to loosen up. We ended up using a large chunk of the demo in the final version with my co- producer JMAC (Troye Sivan, Haux, Lucy Rose) adding some finishing touches to hone the song.” The video, directed by Riman and filmed by Elliot Tatler, can be viewed below…
“The greatest thing about being a musician is experiencing it with other people,” says Ed Riman, the Brighton-based Eurasian singer, songwriter and sound-scapist who records as Hilang Child. “Whether that’s playing with others, creating together, sharing a vision, whatever, I just think in all aspects it’s a totally elevated experience when you’re not alone.”
Proof rings out with force and feeling on Hilang Child’s superlative second album, Every Mover. In 2018, Riman delivered a serene, textured debut album in Years, rich in sound and feeling. Lauren Laverne, Q, MOJO and others lavished praise, but the “isolating process” of making the album left Riman hungry to find alternative ways of working. Meanwhile, the “lonely, pressured” aftermath of Years found Riman grappling with “rough self-esteem and anxiety issues”, amplified in part by social media’s ‘fulfilment narratives’. Duly, he set out to navigate and overcome these mindsets, drawing deeply on his own insecurities and those he recognised in others.
These themes converge emphatically on Every Mover, an album steeped in everyday emotional states and crafted for cathartic, communal performance. Drawing on a rich spread of collaborators, sounds and themes, Riman uses his frustrations as the impetus to transform the brimming promise of Years into upfront and expansive new shapes. “I wanted it to sound a bit gutsier than the first album,” he says, succinctly, “heavier and closer to the kind of stuff that hits me when I go to shows or blast music in the car. I started out in music as a drummer playing for pop or beat-driven artists and grew up listening to louder stuff, but a lot of the music I’ve made as Hilang Child has been more ethereal. I wanted to bring it back to a place that feels more ‘me’ and make more of a thing of having big hypnotic drums, aggressive bass, ripping distorted instruments and a general energy to it.”
“Good to be Young” serves swift notice of this leap, its banked synths and twinkling sound clusters leading to an assertion of fresh force when the main beat lands and a congregation of friends – AK Patterson, Paul Thomas Saunders, Dog in the Snow, Ellen Murphy, members of Penelope Isles – unite for the gang-vocal refrains. “It’s all iridescent colour I’m on,” Riman exults, a claim lived up to on the full-flush folktronica of “Shenley”. A reflection on spiralling insecurity, “Seen the Boreal” ups the ante again with its monk-ish chorales, looping samples, spectral woodwinds (from multi-instrumentalist John ‘Rittipo’ Moore, of Public Service Broadcasting and Bastille previous) and ecstatic chorus, Riman transforming a meditation on hindsight’s limiting effects into a spur to look forwards. And surge forwards he does with the glittering synths, spacey guitars, and Krautrock propulsion of “King Quail”, developed in jam sessions with dream-pop wonder Zoe Mead (Wyldest) in her basement studio.
Riman’s sounds are enriched wherever you turn, from the epic prog-tronica of “The Next Hold” to the vocal release and layered arrangement of “Play ’Til Evening”; a kind of summit meeting between Surrender-era Chemical Brothers and Fleet Foxes in the high church of ecstatic sound. The treated chorales of “Magical Fingertip” and naked lyrics of the festival-sized new single “Anthropic (Cold Times)” showcase a fertile push-pull of lush arrangements and wide-open emotions in Riman’s sound; on the latter, Rittipo’s horns brim with expressive power.
Brought to a sublime close with “Steppe”, the resulting album projects its own epiphanic force. The birth was not always smooth: due to Covid-19, tours were cancelled and studios closed. Thankfully, most of the main parts were recorded pre-lockdown between East London, Gateshead, Brighton, Wandsworth and elsewhere, before mixing proceeded remotely. Meanwhile, alongside indie-pop trio OUTLYA’s Will Bloomfield (percussion/co-production on ‘Play ’Til Evening’), visual design collective Tough Honey (accompanying videos) and other collaborators, Riman’s bond with co-producer JMAC (Troye Sivan, Haux, Lucy Rose) proved crucial. “It felt freeing to work collaboratively and have that push-and-pull of ideas,” says Riman. “Even the moments where we didn’t see eye-to-eye made it feel like I wasn’t alone, with someone else working just as passionately on the project.”
That sense of passion lights up Every Mover, an album that hymns the redemptive qualities of richly expressive music crafted in simpatico unison with friends. “I get told I’m quite an openly emotional person,” says Riman, “and I suppose the extremes in this album reflect that! But I also wanted the album to roughly follow the mental flow of feeling worthless, then recognising it, then accepting your shortcomings and trying to work on it, then coming out unscathed on the other side. I’m still not fully out of the spiral. The Covid apocalypse, alongside some personal life changes, have definitely caused it to resurface. But I’m glad I made this album as a kind of cathartic primer on trying to deal with it.” Now, time for other people to experience it too.
Having recently shared videos for the tracks ‘Good To Be Young’ and ‘Seen The Boreal’, today Hilang Child announces the release of his new album, Every Mover, out 8th January via Bella Union and available to preorder here. To mark the announcement Hilang Child has shared a video for new single “Anthropic (Cold Times)” of which he says: “Anthropic (Cold Times) is a summary of the album’s message: a pledge to break free from the chains of insecurity and social comparison, instead learning to love and appreciate the beauty around us and, most importantly, in ourselves. The chaos of 2020 has breathed a new meaning into it for me, which I never foresaw; I see in it a general statement of hope for a future in which we leave behind these difficult times and find unity. The DIY video features my brother Harley Riman and close friend Jack Dunn skateboarding on a couple of warm days back in the summer. It was edited by Jack and myself.”
“The greatest thing about being a musician is experiencing it with other people,” says Ed Riman, the Brighton-based Eurasian singer, songwriter and sound-scapist who records as Hilang Child. “Whether that’s playing with others, creating together, sharing a vision, whatever, I just think in all aspects it’s a totally elevated experience when you’re not alone.”
Proof rings out with force and feeling on Hilang Child’s superlative second album, Every Mover. In 2018, Riman delivered a serene, textured debut album in Years, rich in sound and feeling. Lauren Laverne, Q, MOJO and others lavished praise, but the “isolating process” of making the album left Riman hungry to find alternative ways of working. Meanwhile, the “lonely, pressured” aftermath of Years found Riman grappling with “rough self-esteem and anxiety issues”, amplified in part by social media’s ‘fulfilment narratives’. Duly, he set out to navigate and overcome these mindsets, drawing deeply on his own insecurities and those he recognised in others.
These themes converge emphatically on Every Mover, an album steeped in everyday emotional states and crafted for cathartic, communal performance. Drawing on a rich spread of collaborators, sounds and themes, Riman uses his frustrations as the impetus to transform the brimming promise of Years into upfront and expansive new shapes. “I wanted it to sound a bit gutsier than the first album,” he says, succinctly, “heavier and closer to the kind of stuff that hits me when I go to shows or blast music in the car. I started out in music as a drummer playing for pop or beat-driven artists and grew up listening to louder stuff, but a lot of the music I’ve made as Hilang Child has been more ethereal. I wanted to bring it back to a place that feels more ‘me’ and make more of a thing of having big hypnotic drums, aggressive bass, ripping distorted instruments and a general energy to it.”
“Good to be Young” serves swift notice of this leap, its banked synths and twinkling sound clusters leading to an assertion of fresh force when the main beat lands and a congregation of friends – AK Patterson, Paul Thomas Saunders, Dog in the Snow, Ellen Murphy, members of Penelope Isles – unite for the gang-vocal refrains. “It’s all iridescent colour I’m on,” Riman exults, a claim lived up to on the full-flush folktronica of “Shenley”. A reflection on spiralling insecurity, “Seen the Boreal” ups the ante again with its monk-ish chorales, looping samples, spectral woodwinds (from multi-instrumentalist John ‘Rittipo’ Moore, of Public Service Broadcasting and Bastille previous) and ecstatic chorus, Riman transforming a meditation on hindsight’s limiting effects into a spur to look forwards. And surge forwards he does with the glittering synths, spacey guitars, and Krautrock propulsion of “King Quail”, developed in jam sessions with dream-pop wonder Zoe Mead (Wyldest) in her basement studio.
Riman’s sounds are enriched wherever you turn, from the epic prog-tronica of “The Next Hold” to the vocal release and layered arrangement of “Play ’Til Evening”; a kind of summit meeting between Surrender-era Chemical Brothers and Fleet Foxes in the high church of ecstatic sound. The treated chorales of “Magical Fingertip” and naked lyrics of the festival-sized new single “Anthropic (Cold Times)” showcase a fertile push-pull of lush arrangements and wide-open emotions in Riman’s sound; on the latter, Rittipo’s horns brim with expressive power.
Brought to a sublime close with “Steppe”, the resulting album projects its own epiphanic force. The birth was not always smooth: due to Covid-19, tours were cancelled and studios closed. Thankfully, most of the main parts were recorded pre-lockdown between East London, Gateshead, Brighton, Wandsworth and elsewhere, before mixing proceeded remotely. Meanwhile, alongside indie-pop trio OUTLYA’s Will Bloomfield (percussion/co-production on ‘Play ’Til Evening’), visual design collective Tough Honey (accompanying videos) and other collaborators, Riman’s bond with co-producer JMAC (Troye Sivan, Haux, Lucy Rose) proved crucial. “It felt freeing to work collaboratively and have that push-and-pull of ideas,” says Riman. “Even the moments where we didn’t see eye-to-eye made it feel like I wasn’t alone, with someone else working just as passionately on the project.”
That sense of passion lights up Every Mover, an album that hymns the redemptive qualities of richly expressive music crafted in simpatico unison with friends. “I get told I’m quite an openly emotional person,” says Riman, “and I suppose the extremes in this album reflect that! But I also wanted the album to roughly follow the mental flow of feeling worthless, then recognising it, then accepting your shortcomings and trying to work on it, then coming out unscathed on the other side. I’m still not fully out of the spiral. The Covid apocalypse, alongside some personal life changes, have definitely caused it to resurface. But I’m glad I made this album as a kind of cathartic primer on trying to deal with it.” Now, time for other people to experience it too.
As a first taste of a new studio album due in early 2021, Hilang Child has shared a hypnotic video to a dazzling new track titled “Good To Be Young.” The video was directed by Tough Honey using Notch VFX and motion-capture technology and features a dance performance by Rachel Laird and Hazel Sutton.
Of the track Ed Riman aka Hilang Child says: “Good To Be Young is the first in a chain of songs exploring the relationships myself and others have with the validation-led world of modern social connection. A concept that feels even more significant now, with the global coronavirus pandemic having forced a transition to almost exclusively online communication over the last few months. The song was written using Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers’ iOS app ‘Bloom’ as a musical instrument; I created an ambient bed using the app alongside a number of other textures, then wrote my way up through vocals, drums and heavy bass. I wanted to convey a sense of there being a narrator looking into a crowd of people, pondering over what’s going through their heads as they awkwardly pretend to be having the time of their lives for the camera, hiding their anxious reality and true personality beneath a false version of themselves. To sing the gang-vocals which represent this crowd I enlisted some friends to be my choir for a night – among them are Jack, Lily and Sowy from Penelope Isles, Paul Thomas Saunders, Alex Patterson (AK Patterson), Ellen Murphy (Balaami/El & Del/Nitework) and Hannah & Zoe from Lonely Fire. The song was co- produced by myself and JMAC (Troye Sivan, Haux, Lucy Rose).”
Ed Riman is the Eurasian songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist behind the Hilang Child moniker. His first album Years was released on Bella Union in 2018, earning plaudits from the likes of Lauren Laverne on BBC 6 Music and reviewers across including Q, MOJO, and The Line Of Best Fit. Notable tour dates when promoting Years included SXSW in Austin, TX, Iceland Airwaves festival in Reykjavik and a run of concerts in Indonesia in collaboration with the British Council and Greenpeace. Not one for sitting still, he also regularly finds time to tour as a bandmember with other acts, spending a year singing with Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde’s new project Lost Horizons (including mainstage slots at Green Man and Bluedot Festival) and as a session drummer with London collective Outlya, labelmate Dog In The Snow and Big Dada alumni Elan Tamara.
Hilang Child had been praised for the serene nature of his debut album but the intervening period has seen a brasher, more upfront aesthetic enter his songwriting. Opening his mind to more collaboration, co-writing and communal performance, a new sound is beginning to emerge from Hilang Child which displays a true evolution on Riman’s creativity. The new songs have a noticeable confidence and feeling of congregation, whether it’s massive gang vocal reprises, aggressive bass-synths and hypnotic drums, or the juxtaposition of a pumping, heavy groove with ethereal woodwind textures. Despite hold-ups owing to the global Covid-19 pandemic (Hilang Child had tours cancelled and a forced transition to completing new material remotely, unable to get back in the studio to finish what had been started), the new songs are a significant step up from what came before and will be trickling out in 2020 alongside visuals created by London collective Tough Honey.
Taken from his 2019 Stripped.Rebuilt EP release, Hilang Child today shares the striking new video for ‘Chaturanga Rebuilt’. With ‘Chaturanga Rebuilt’ being a new version of the first song Ed Riman (Hialng Child) ever wrote and in keeping with the idea of freshening it up he handed it to director Jonjo Lowe to interpret the song visually, delivering a new take on the piece. Lowe had the following to say on his work: “The song offers passage from despair to nascent optimism. I wanted the video to explore the togetherness that binds communities as they push forwards through catastrophic events; rituals that reinforce our sense of being, bodies running parallel to one another, occasionally colliding, and the silent ecstasy of intimacy which illuminates hope in new beginnings.”
Hilang Child will perform a co-headline show at London’s St. Pancras Old Church tonight alongside Paul Thomas Saunders. Following that you can catch Hilang Child in Glasgow and Leeds this summer. Full details below…
