We are very happy to announce & release on all digital platforms today - Angel Bat Dawid's Transition East - featuring two new pieces of music Angel created in response to Emma Warren's book Make Some Space - i.e. the critically-lauded 2019 chronicle of London DIY institution Total Refreshment Centre.

Angel Bat Dawid, who first met Emma Warren at Total Refreshment Centre in 2017, composed & recorded "Transition East" alone in her space on the Southside of Chicago, originally to be an accompaniment for the audiobook version of Make Some Space. Angel conceptualized & named “Transition East” in commemoration of the storied Chicago community center that was a hub for icons from the AACM & the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, and was recently revived by one of her mentors, Eliel Sherman Storey.

The B-side, titled "No Space Fo Us," was composed & recorded at a space in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where Angel travelled in February of 2020 with a crew of Chicago artists (including IARC label mates Ben LaMar Gay & Damon Locks) on a collaborative mission called Close to There (Perto de Lá). The track features Angel with Ben LaMar Gay and new Brazilian friends Edbrass Brasil, Romulo Alexis, Tadeu Mascarenhas, Nancy Viégas & Germano Estacio.

~ LISTEN ~

MAKE SOME SPACE FOR US
vinyl/book/poster
BUNDLE

International Anthem is proud to present these two beautiful pieces of music by Angel Bat Dawid inside a very special multimedia package, limited to 333 copies.

Available exclusively via our Bandcamp page, the MAKE SOME SPACE FOR US bundle is designed by Jeremiah Chiu, and includes three essential, interconnected artifacts:

(1) Transition East on a 7" piece of 45rpm Outer Space Grey colored vinyl inside a deluxe picture sleeve.

(2) the 2nd edition of Emma Warren's 2019 book Make Some Space, on paperback

(3) a typographic poster on a folded 17"x 22" broadsheet, featuring a "foreward" in the form of a screed written by Piotr Orlov which connects the book & the music to some critical themes in the current context of our human condition.

Here's a brief taste of Orlov's words, to get you in the mood:

~ ORDER TODAY VIA OUR BANDCAMP PAGE ~
bundle will ship by mid-June

MAKE SOME SPACE FOR US
words by Piotr Orlov

In case we didn't sell it hard enough... Here are a couple excerpts from Piotr Orlov's incredible foreward:

You hold in your hand documents of memory and belief, which double as manuals for attaining a new world through the power of musical creativity. They’re emotional and funky and potentially useful as to what happens to our community after the events of 2020.

The package contains words written by Emma Warren — in the form of a book called Make Some Space — and sounds performed by Angel Bat Dawid and fellow travelers on a piece of 7” vinyl featuring two tracks, “Transition East” and ”No Space Fo Us.” Both works take inspiration from a specific place — Total Refreshment Centre, a heavily influential and under-the-radar DIY venue for arts and music in London — to consider broader points about evolution and survival that may be an inspiration to our own lives.

They were created under each other’s influence, but not as commemorations. Emma’s writing and Angel’s music celebrate and excavate the magnetic pulse found at TRC, connecting that sonic spiritual oasis to the history of liberation music (often identified as “jazz,” but found in many other guises as well), and to local culture-building across the eras and around the globe, especially in Angel’s hometown of Chicago (birthplace of Creative Music, among other sounds).

By contextualizing their work within the continuum of such traditions, Angel’s music and Emma’s book also offer the potential to affect the future. They focus on the creation of purposeful cultural spaces — and the need to document the creation of these spaces. Their works are, in essence, guides to the power of true liberation — a power that we, who find ourselves quarantined from the sun of communal joy, are desperate to reclaim.

Imagine the value of these spaces. Also, imagine their values. For those afraid of a society being transformed, imagine the anxiety it stirs, the fear of their force. Centuries of laws and commandments have struggled with this conscious shift, to no avail.

The documents you hold in your hands are histories and celebrations of that struggle. To perceive their continued importance with the cloudy vision of 2020 is to recognize an old truth dawning around us: that it is the strength of a community that dreams new collectives and ecosystems into being; that this dreaming requires space and WERK (with a We, says Angel); that the conscious shift it produces is a large part of how whatever is next can be made to be better than whatever is now.

This is how we improve the world and refresh its meaning: with intention and passion and love.

~ BUY THIS BUNDLE ON BANDCAMP ~

Transition East
stand-alone 7" on black vinyl
in stores June 19th

Transition East is also available on black vinyl via our Bandcamp page as a stand-alone item, sans-bundle (for all those averse to the written word).

The black vinyl version of the Transition East 7" will also be available in stores worldwide, with a retail street date of June 19th.

Retailers interested in wholesale purchases, please reach out to:

RedEye for North & South America
tim@redeyeworldwide.com
or
K7 Records for UK, Europe, Japan, Australia and the rest of the world
adam@k7.com

Angel Bat Dawid on
Rough Trade Transmissions

13 May 2020 @ 18:00 UK

Tune in to Rough Trade this Wednesday May 13th at 6pm UK time to see Angel doing Angel for their Transmissions series.

And while you're in their sphere, you can pre-order the black vinyl version of the Transition East 7", and/or Angel's IARC debut LP The Oracle, and/or any of the other items from the International Anthem catalogue that are currently on sale, discounted via Rough Trade's web store through the end of May.

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT RECORD STORES
& get yourself that grey vinyl

If you already own Emma Warren's essential book, aren't in the mood for Piotr Orlov's sceed and don't have any walls to hang Jeremiah Chiu's poster on, but ALAS you are in the market for a copy of Angel's new 7" on colored vinyl...

Well you're in luck because we've partnered with a few good friends / great independent record stores across the Western World to make a very limited amount of those Outer Space Grey vinyl 7"s - which will otherwise only be found inside the aforementioned MAKE SOME SPACE FOR US bundle - available for purchase as a stand-alone item via the online mail-order (or call-in pick-up) safely socially-distanced shopping experiences of the following fine folks:

606 Records
in Chicago, USA

World of Echo
in London, UK

Balades Sonores
in Paris, FR

Dig It! Records
in Utrecht, NL

Get'm while you can!

Angel Bat Dawid
bio by Joe Darling

From age 11, music has been the backbone of Angel Bat Dawid’s life. Her journey, however, has been anything but typical. But what is typical? The piano, clarinet and voice have been a constant for Bat Dawid as her principal disciplines, though a career in music has not been. Of music, she told the Chicago Reader’s Leor Galil that “it’s always been my best friend. It ain’t ever let me down.” It’s been merely within the past year (at the time of this writing in early 2020), however, that her incredible companionship with music has finally connected with a global community of attentively attuned spirits.

Born Angel Elmore to missionaries in Atlanta, Georgia, Bat Dawid grew accustomed to moving as her parent’s ministry mandated. From Georgia to Kentucky and Kenya, the family finally settled in Chicago’s south suburbs where she would go on to study clarinet and music education at Moody Bible Institute and Roosevelt University, respectively.

Since 2014, Bat Dawid has recommitted herself to a life in music. Giving up her day job, she began following in-roads through Chicago’s experimental music community with touchstones like David Boykin’s Sonic Healing Ministries sessions and Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble along the way. She soon formed her own improvisationally-focused collective known as The Participatory Music Coalition and developed a unique performance residency at Elastic Arts dubbed the Mothership 9 Multimedia Series.

Inspired by everything from the poetry of Margaret Burroughs to the music of Yusef Lateef and even Mozart, Bat Dawid made her debut, The Oracle, with International Anthem to wide acclaim in 2019. Eschewing conventional labels, even those as open-ended as “jazz,” Bat Dawid describes her work in no uncertain terms: "This is Black Music.” On The Oracle, she echoes ancestral agonies that she translates to blues and spirituals, a conversion theory she attributes to the late Milford Graves. Though the joy of survival never overcomes the inequity and deep-seated injustice imposed on black life in America, Bat Dawid is outspoken in her commitment to telling the stories that will eventually turn the tide.

Though her introduction in 2019 was nothing short of an explosion onto the scene, it is the future of her artistry that has us most thrilled. When asked what’s next, Bat Dawid is lucid. “I have really big artistic goals and hope to expand compositionally. I’ve always wanted to write a symphony and I’m really interested in film scoring.” A new voice has rumbled forth with clarity and intention from Chicago’s Southside, reminding us that the past is still the present and the future is full of radical hope.