The Little Unsaid unveil their video for Surfacing. The track is from their new album, Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier, currently one of our Featured Albums of the Month, which is out now on all platforms via Carbon Moon Records. In his album review (read it here), Thomas Blake described Surfacing as “all pent energy and fuzzed, fraught vocals – an exercise in barely concealed potential…kind of funky, in a bone dry sort of way.”
The band’s frontman, John Elliot, shared:
“Surfacing is a song about crossing a scarred landscape in order to reach some kind of transcendence. It’s about embracing that brutal journey, the necessity of it to reach a new chapter, and seeing the beauty in it. We improvised the track from start to finish on a big red boat in the River Thames – an incredible floating studio called Lightship 95. Sonny Johns, our engineer, was playing a prepared piano, shoving paper between the exposed strings and plucking them with a plectrum. I played Alison’s viola – which I don’t know how to play, of course, but was plucking out weird, delayed rhythms with no specific melody. Alison was busy bowing Tim’s cymbals while he pounded this tribal beat. Mariya played an autoharp rammed through loads of weird synths and FX. We trimmed what was a twelve-minute jam down to all the best moments, then overlayed Alison’s amazing string arrangement, and I wrote the words and improvised the vocals in one brief session. It crystallised the instinctive process behind this whole album for us, trusting ourselves in the moment and just letting each creative decision move us on to the next.
“Playing the track on our recent tour was one of my favourite moments of every show. It took on this raw, primal energy live as we found our way around the song’s jagged edges. We filmed us playing it at every venue by attaching a GoPro to different bits of the stage – including my microphone – and that’s what the video is cut together from. It’s a snapshot of every gig we did and captures something about that tour that really carried a lot of energy and emotional weight for us as we celebrated our tenth year as a band.”
We have a special feature coming up later this week about tour life over the last fifteen years, but also a kind of tour diary of their recent jaunt.
The Little Unsaid features John Patrick Elliott, Mariya Brachkova, Alison D’Souza, and Tim Heymerdinger.
Surfacing is from the new album Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier, out now on all platforms via Carbon Moon Records. Order here: https://ffm.to/stayfragile
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