LUMP, the collaborative project from Laura Marling, the Grammy nominated, Brit Award winning singer-songwriter, and Mike Lindsay, the founding member of Tunng and Throws, and a prolific, Mercury Prize winning producer, today share a second cut from their upcoming album, LUMP (released on 1st June 2018 via Dead Oceans). ‘Late To The Flight’, the album’s opening track introduces an atmospheric transcendent soundscape bookending the thematic content of LUMP. On it Marling evocatively explores the notion of lucid dreaming and the hyper reality of being trapped within a public persona. “Paint dots on your wrists to see me in your dreams” is a technique used to expose a lucid dream.
‘Late To The Flight’ follows the release of ‘Curse Of The Contemporary’, described by CLASH as “a deft combination of two fine songwriting voices”. The video for the track is the second creation by the motion graphics designer Esteban Diacono, where the narrative is the prequel of “Curse Of The Contemporary”, giving another insight into LUMP world.
LUMP was born of good timing and predestined compatibility. It began one night in mid-June 2016, when Lindsay was introduced to Marling after her show supporting Neil Young in London. On meeting, Lindsay and Marling discovered they had long been admirers of each other’s work.
Lindsay had been busy for some months composing an intricate, ambitious new sound cycle. His compositional style had evolved over the course of years of musical experimentation with Tunng, and during his time spent producing other people’s records while living in Iceland. He had arrived at a remarkably visual, colourful sound – a heady blend of wonked-out guitars, Moog synths and pattering drums, set against droning, coiling clouds of flutes and voices.
With the project in need of a lyricist and vocalist, Lindsay and Marling’s meeting of minds seemed all the more fortuitous. He quickly invited her to step into his world, and a few days later they retreated to his subterranean London studio to unite their energies and create LUMP.
That world turned out to be somewhere Marling felt instinctively at home. Inspired by early-20th-century Surrealism and the absurdist poetry of Edward Lear and Ivor Cutler, she wanted to slice through the apparent emptiness of contemporary life. Her resulting creation is a bizarre but compelling narrative about the commodification of curated public personas, the mundane absurdity of individualism, and the lengths we go to escape our own meaninglessness.
The composers are keen to stress that LUMP is a creation that passed through them, and they look upon it parentally. It is their understanding that, now it has come into being, LUMP is the artist, and it will continue to create itself from here on. Lindsay and Marling will assist it as necessary.
Watch the official video for ‘Curse of the Contemporary’ below.
LUMP tracklisting
1. Late To The Flight
2. May I Be The Light
3. Rolling Thunder
4. Curse Of The Contemporary
5. Hand Hold Hero
6. Shake Your Shelter
7. LUMP is a Product (credits)
For more information on LUMP
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