*announcing* BEN LAMAR GAY - Open Arms to Open Us // co-release w/ NONESUCH RECORDS out 11/19/21

*announcing*
IARC0051

Ben LaMar Gay
Open Arms to Open Us

co-release with Nonesuch Records
LP/CD/Digital out November 19th 2021

preview & pre-order TODAY

Today, the last day of Summer 2021, we are very happy to share details and the first bit of music from a brilliant new collection of sound by composer, singer, instrumental polymath, Southside Chicago native & hometown hero Ben LaMar Gay.

The album is called Open Arms to Open Us, the cover features a painting by Ayanah Moor, and it will be released via our partnership with Nonesuch Records on November 19th 2021.

The first offering from the album is a pulsing melodic bellow featuring OHMME singers Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, titled “Sometimes I Forget How Summer Looks On You.”

According to Gay the song is “inspired by the preparation one makes for another when it’s time for them to enter or exit an embrace, a memory or a life."

The song comes accompanied by a video directed by Gay with Chris Strong, featuring jumpers Dana Powell, Summer Powell and Tiffany Merrills.

Watch the video for
“Sometimes I Forget How Summer Looks On You."

Highlighted last week in the New York Times’s Fall 2021 preview, Open Arms to Open Us is a dispatch from “postmodern folklorist” Gay’s current place in space, filled with imaginative arrangements and his “wise and confiding baritone.”

Produced and recorded at International Anthem Studios in Chicago between March and June of 2021, across sixteen tracks Gay fluently interweaves jazz, blues, ballads, R&B, raga, new music, nursery rhyme, tropicalia, two-step, hip-hop and beyond in a beaming expression of his signature omni-genre “Pan-Americana” brew.

Alongside his own sizable toolkit of instruments (cornet, keyboards, synthesizers, flutes, percussions), Gay surrounds himself with steady bandmates (including Tommaso Moretti on drums, Matthew Davis on tuba, and Rob Frye on woodwinds), while also shining the spotlight on female artists from his cast of regular collaborators (including OHMME singers Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, bassist/vocalist/arranger Ayanna Woods, multi-disciplinary Rwandan artist Dorothée Munyaneza, poet A.Martinez, cellist Tomeka Reid, and vocalists Onye Ozuzu, Gira Dahnee, and Angel Bat Dawid).

Preview & Pre-Order
Open Arms to Open Us
!!! today !!!

This latest project is the follow up to Gay’s 2018 critically-acclaimed debut album Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, which was a compilation of previously-unreleased material composed and produced by Gay over seven years. It was heralded by Pitchfork, NPR and The Guardian, the last of which called it, “a record of endless depth and unpredictability.”

But Gay’s work is not limited to album releases. He has composed for dance troupes (including the Ruth Page Civic Ballet) and architectural features (including a duet with the DuSable Bridge in downtown Chicago), and also has done extensive film score work (including Beija Films' Tribeca Film Festival award-winning documentary, The Good Fight). In 2019 he debuted ‘Hecky Naw! Angels!’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, using video art and choreography to explore the shapes and sounds of Chicago’s Black social dances.

*Deluxe Vinyl Package*
CHICAGO SUNSET COLOR VINYL

Open Arms to Open Us in vinyl form is a 33rpm 160 gram LP (pressed by Smashed Plastic in Chicago) in a heavyweight matte jacket, with insert sheet, IARC obi strip and dome patterned inner sleeve.

And, as always, we have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only, which is 777 copies of Chicago Sunset color vinyl.

Order a copy via our Bandcamp page today!

International Anthem x Nonesuch Records
North & South American distribution

Open Arms to Open Us is marketed & distributed in North & South America via our partnership with Nonesuch Records.

Following Jeff Parker's Suite For Max Brown (released in January of 2020) and Rob Mazurek / Exploding Star Orchestra's Dimensional Stardust (released in November of 2020), Open Arms is the third of at least six albums we'll be co-releasing alongside Nonesuch (i.e. the half-century-old label that's housed the likes of Steve Reich, Caetano Veloso, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Ry Cooder, the whole classic suite of Buena Vista Social Club artists/albums, and many more).

As Nonesuch is part of the Warner Music Group, Open Arms to Open Us will be distributed in North & South America by WEA. Stores, retailers, folks interested in wholesale purchases: please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions about where/how to stock these releases.

Distribution via K7 for
Europe, UK, Japan, Australia, and ROW

This album - and all of our albums - are distributed by our friends at K7 Records and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Japan, Australia, Asia, 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!!!

All photos of Ben LaMar Gay
at the 35th St Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, Chicago,
shot by Alejandro Ayala