American composer and singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane and Roomful of Teeth (described by The New Yorker as a kind of lab experiment for the human voice) have announced Elevator Songs, a collaborative album due out April 3rd via Octoverse Media and Warner Music Group’s Arts Music. Co-produced by Kahane alongside Grammy-winning engineer Joseph Lorge (Feist, hand habits, Blake Mills/Pino Palladino), the album presents a singular, panoramic vision orbiting the eight singers of the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble.
With the announcement comes lead single Speaking In Tongues, accompanied by a video from Robert Edridge-Waks, a tenacious storyteller and longtime collaborator of Kahane. “To be honest / this hotel is kind of creepy,” Kahane sings, setting the stage for the album’s conceptual framework: an interdimensional hotel where laws of time and space dissolve into pure feeling. The song’s interludes showcase Roomful of Teeth’s signature ensemble work—murmurs, growls, plaintive cries building to a bone-shattering climax—while Edridge-Waks’s video offers pulsing schematic drawings and oversaturated hallways suggesting the impossible architecture at the album’s heart.
“[‘Speaking In Tongues‘] was written a year before the rest of the record,” Kahane explains. “We were doing a workshop at MASS MoCA, and I was staying at a hotel that was being renovated and rebranded; there were tarps everywhere, piles of concrete in conference rooms. In short, it was kind of creepy. When I started working on the larger piece a year later, I decided to trust the old adage of ‘first thought, best thought,’ and built around the idea of this hotel—except that as the album progresses, the hotel departs from reality and enters a world of speculative fiction, where this magical elevator transports us through time and space.”
Scored for Roomful of Teeth’s eight voices plus Kahane on keyboards and guitar, with additional colour from Eliza Bagg (violin) and Jodie Landau (vibraphone), the album was tracked in four days at Portland’s Flora Recording and Playback. Each song spotlights a different member of the ensemble, bookended by two tracks sung by Kahane himself, creating a collection of characters unified by fizzy hooks, slippery chord changes and bold production.
Pre-Order via Bandcamp: https://gabrielkahane.bandcamp.com/album/elevator-songs
