Alabaster DePlume - Come With Fierce Grace /// LP, CD, Digital album out September 8th
*announcing* IARC0070
Alabaster DePlume
Come With Fierce Grace
LP, CD, Digital album out September 8th, 2023
In what's been shaping up to be a truly historic run of creative output amidst a seemingly endless live schedule... the Mancunian troubadour Alabaster DePlume returns today with a new album of mostly instrumental material... Open, honest, and true... these merely lightly-fined by-products of collectivist compositional process are from now-legendary sessions at Total Refreshment Centre, and they are titled Come With Fierce Grace.
((( photo by Chris Almeida )))
In order to record the compositions in his critically-acclaimed 2022 release GOLD, Alabaster DePlume instilled a culture of creativity by leading his ensembles in spontaneous composition and development. To allow them to be present, he kept the musicians constantly creating across several weeks of sessions at London creative hub Total Refreshment Centre. This process resulted in an abundance of material, much more than he could fit onto the initial double LP. After spending most of 2022 touring in support of GOLD, Alabaster spent much of early 2023 revisiting the additional material from those Total Refreshment Centre sessions – adding, subtracting, producing and arranging – resulting in an entirely new album, Come With Fierce Grace.
Come With Fierce Grace is an album made of authentic and unstipulated – yet welcomed – human interaction. It is for the most part an album of instrumentals, with exception of a few vocal features by Momoko Gill, Falle Nioke, and Donna Thompson. However the instrumentals on this album are much more embryonic and unfiltered than the lush orchestrations heard on Alabaster’s beloved 2020 album To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1.
Come With Fierce Grace is perhaps the most raw and candid portrait of Alabaster’s creative compositional process we’ve yet to hear, as he’s captured vividly in the room with his collaborators – stretching, exploring, working to deepen and expand the emotions underlying his melodic and poetic frameworks. Regarding the process, Alabaster cites a similarity to how elements in nature contribute to shared work and beauty without a collective motive – a bee’s own motives result in the delivery of pollen. As he says: “The great thing wants to happen, let us allow it to happen.”
Regarding the origin of the album’s name: On his first trip to perform in the US in March 2022, Alabaster collected messages from individuals, as he asked them if there is anything they would like him to share with his audiences. One message (from a person who preferred to remain anonymous) asked Alabaster to encourage people to “come with fierce grace.”
((( photo of Momoko Gill by Enid Valu )))
On the album’s lead single “Did You Know” – which is out today on all digital music platforms – singer and drummer Momoko Gill (aka MettaShiba) takes the key poem from GOLD and translates it into her own lyrics. Gill had already delivered the message of the poem and sang it across tons of shows with Alabaster - but with her performance on “Did You Know” she lays out her own meaning for the words. In the background of “Did You Know,” you hear Alabaster playing the key melody that accompanied the original poem on GOLD; but here the feeling is re-established by the improvisers who were recreating the arrangement in the moment, purely for the sake of enjoying each other at the time.
((( photo by Chris Almeida )))
Alabaster DePlume ON TOUR
!!! UK, EU, and USA !!!
Following a run of European shows opening for Bon Iver, and a major performance on the legendary stage of Glastonbury Festival, Alabaster’s tour dates continue to expand (note: a whole month of shows spanning the United States, including two nights in Chicago!!!). Full list of shows below.
UK & EU DATES
7 Jul 2023 - Rotterdam, The Netherlands @ North Sea Jazz - Tickets
9 Jul 2023 - Lausanne, Switzerland @ Festival de la Cité
14 Jul 2023 - Ghent, Belgium @ Boomtown - Tickets
15 Jul 2023 - Paris, France @ Paris Jazz - Tickets
5 Aug 2023 - Eigg, Scotland @ Howlin' Fling - Tickets
11 Aug 2023 - Dorset, UK @ We Out Here - Tickets
19 Aug 2023 - Buckinghamshire, UK @ Stowaway - Tickets
20 Aug 2023 - Brecon Beacons, Wales @ GreenMan - Tickets
7 Nov 2023 - Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club
8 Nov 2023 - Manchester, UK @ Band On The Wall
9 Nov 2023 - Nottingham, UK @ Metronome
10 Nov 2023 - London, UK @ KOKO, Pitchfork Music Festival
11 Nov 2023 - Bristol, UK @ Strange Brew
12 Nov 2023 - Brighton, UK @ Chalk
US & CA DATES
26 Aug 2023 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Getty - Tickets
27 Aug 2023 - Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon - Tickets
29 Aug 2023 - San Diego, CA @ Whistle Stop -Tickets
30 Aug 2023 - Ojai, CA @ Deer Lodge - Tickets
1 Sep 2023 - Modesto, CA @ The Speakeasy at Greens on Tenth - Tickets
2 Sep 2023 - San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel
3 Sep 2023 - Santa Cruz, CA @ Kuumbawa Jazz Center
5 Sep 2023 - Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall - Tickets
6 Sep 2023 - Seattle, WA @ Sunset Tavern
8 Sep 2023 - Boise, ID @ Neurolux - Tickets
10 Sep 2023 - Denver, CO @ Ophelia's
15 Sep 2023 - Chicago, IL @ Co-Prosperity - Tickets
16 Sep 2023 - Chicago, IL @ Co-Prosperity - Tickets
17 Sep 2023 - Toronto, ON @ Rivoli - Tickets
18 Sep 2023 - Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz - Tickets
20 Sep 2023 - New Orleans, LA @ Music Box Village
22 Sep 2023 - Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere Hall - Tickets
follow Alabaster on Bandsintown
for up-to-date tickets & info here
Deluxe *Greek Honey* color vinyl
Come With Fierce Grace is on a 140-gram vinyl LP (lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST, EU/UK orders pressed at Pallas in Germany, US orders pressed at Smashed Plastic in Chicago) inside a heavyweight reverse-board jacket, with a two-sided insert sheet and dome-patterned inner-sleeves.
And, as always, we have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only, which is 555 copies of *Greek Honey* color vinyl.
For fervent collectors of our catalog...
Including New Future City Radio, and the recently announced albums by jaimie branch and Carlos Niño & Friends, by the first week of August we will have announced a total of six new albums on IARC. As an experiment aimed for those of you who collect the whole catalog and have been asking about some sort of subscription offering for ease of ordering / savings on shipments... today we are offering this SUMMER MONDO BUNDLE which collects all six of our upcoming albums into a single parcel. Save money on shipping PLUS an addition 10% on the retail value of the albums as an extra *thank you* for your faith in our output. Bundles come in color vinyl, black vinyl, and CD (no mix and match, sorry).
More info and details on the bundles via order links below >>>
Order the Summer Mondo Bundle on limited edition color vinyl here.
Order the Summer Mondo Bundle on classic black vinyl here.
Order the Summer Mondo Bundle on compact disc here.
Distribution via RedEye for US, Canada, North & South America
Come With Fierce Grace is also available on Compact Disc (in a deluxe 4-panel digipack), and Classic Black Vinyl (same specs as listed above). Retailers in the United States or Canada or anywhere else inside of North, South and Central America... Please reach out to your sales rep at RedEye Worldwide if you are interested in making wholesale purchases of this album, or any other album in our catalog. Don't yet have a RedEye rep? Please just reach out to us and we'll get you hooked up!
Distribution via !K7 for Europe, UK, Australia, Japan and ROW
On all the same formats mentioned above, this album will be distributed by our good friends at !K7 and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Australia, Japan, and everywhere else in the world outside of North & South America.
If you are a retailer or store with questions about wholesale or are just looking to get some of our records... we'd like to make things as easy for you as possible, please do not hesitate to reach out!!!
