Next month, on 23rd October, The Rheingans Sisters return with their new album Receiver. The album was recorded in the Welsh village of Llanbadarn Fynydd near Llandrindod Wells by producer Andy Bell (The Furrow Collective, Karine Polwart, Sam Sweeney). Receiver is their fourth album together and their first release since 2018’s Bright Field. It’s also their first release on the bendigedig label, the team behind Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita’s award-winning album SOAR.
bendigedig are known for carefully crafting one album per year, and the attention to detail on this release is exceptional. The artwork for the album is beautifully presented across a richly annotated 48-page booklet, a collaboration with visual artist Pierre-Oliver Boulant who is also a neighbour of Anna Rheingans, based in Toulouse.
Throughout the CD-book are a number of Boulant’s ‘solargraphs’, using lensless pinhole cameras made from everyday containers which he straps to his balcony, he tracks the path of the sun using very long exposures. Part of the magic of these creations is their unpredictable results as interferences such as moisture, dust and pollen, extreme temperature variations all play a part in the final creation. The care and attention that is given to these magical visual creations form the perfect parallel to the Rheingans Sisters music – on the one hand reflecting their patience and care and on the other, reflecting their personal awareness and response to external stimulus, being guided by this in natural and creative ways. The results are vibrant and rewarding as can be heard below.
Today, they are sharing a video for the opening track “The Yellow Of The Flowers”. The video was created and directed by Sam Wisternoff (Ill Spectre Productions), filled with the colour and sounds of a busy world and children playing…like Boulant’s solargraphs, tied together by that theme of “waiting and listening to the world.” You can read more about the song in their own words below.
The Yellow Of The Flowers is also our Song of the Day.
The Yellow Of The Flowers
In those moments between waking and being awake, it’s important to listen. There is the rushing of the morning, the arriving and the going, and at the same time, there are the flowers. In this instance, it was what they did, rather than what they were. Although they were habitual and still, they were also surprising. A slow-paced eternal renewal was the yellow which they described.
“This song is about finding the flashes of hope in moments of despair,” Anna says. “The everyday restraints and responsibilities, the rain and greyness, the rules by which we live, and then the flowers, what they do to the picture, punctuating it with brightness and hope.”
“There is a gentle irony, looking back, in the fact that we chose The Yellow Of The Flowers as the opening track,” says Rowan. “I wrote that song from a feeling of being trapped inside myself while watching the sort of monotonous everyday life of a city pour by the window and how the flowers shout life and vitality into that scene. Now, watching a bustling city moving past the window has an almost nostalgic quality to it – we long for a time when we took these things for granted. It’s a song which speaks to that loss, now, and also to the intrinsic push of life onwards, forwards alongside that loss”.
Receiver releases on 23rd October 2020 on the bendigedig label.
Pre-order now: https://smarturl.it/RheingansReceiver
https://www.rheinganssisters.co.uk
Photo Credit: Elly Lucas