It’s not every day I get to indulge my two biggest passions – folk music and film photography but both are fulfilled with Receiver, the new release from The Rheingans Sisters. 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. Boulant is something of a master when it comes to ‘solargraphs’ which are created using lensless pinhole cameras made from everyday containers which he straps to his balcony to follow the path of the sun using very long exposures. Like the music contained within, they are magical and revealing on more than one level.
‘After the Bell Rang’ is the second single from ‘Receiver’ (watch the first – The Yellow of the Flowers – here), releasing 23rd October 2020 on the bendigedig label. The video was created and directed by Sam Wisternoff (Ill Spectre Productions) featuring illustrations by Holly McIntosh.
The Rheingans Sisters give some insight into the song :
‘After The Bell Rang’: “We’re at that age when our friends are starting to have children. And, like it has done many times before now, the world feels a volatile place in which to do that. We could see it as a futile or perhaps even damaging act, or perhaps it is implicitly hopeful to bring new life into this world. But as children begin to delight in the beauty and curiosities around them, how much do we tell them about human destruction? For how long should we protect them from the sorrow of this world?
The line ‘we can’t see everything from up here’ was buried in one of Rowan’s notebooks for a long time. More recently, she read a story in a magazine about the bell that was rescued from the rubble of a cathedral in Nagasaki, after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city in 1945. Since then the local people have hung it from a special frame and ring it to symbolise survival and continuity. It might be foolish to hope for a peaceful world, sometimes, but if hope is not there we can only know the destruction.”
Receiver 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.
Pre-order now: https://smarturl.it/RheingansReceiver
https://www.rheinganssisters.co.uk