Alabaster DePlume - To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1jpg

It is our pleasure to announce; the next entry into the International Anthem catalogue, our first full length release by a British artist; our first 3-way co-release with Total Refreshment Centre and Lost Map; an album that has been a great source of peace to our internal ears over the last few months, and is sure to be for the world now as well: To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 by Alabaster DePlume.

The album's lead single "Whisky Story Time" is available to download/stream via Bandcamp and/or your favorite digital content silo.

Alabaster DePlume was one of the first characters we encountered when visiting Total Refreshment Centre for the very first time in London. He's a resident in the upstairs studios of the legendary Hackney art/community/collaboration hub; and just as he has been almost every time we've been back, at the moment of our first arrival he was smoking a cigarette in the main communal space of TRC. We greeted him and after a short hello, he dove right in and asked us "how do you like to make people feel?"

Having the opportunity to get know Alabaster and eventually work alongside him to present this beautiful, blissful collection of music is quite poetically appropriate because, in a way, it serves as our belated answer to his question.

There's a lot more to know about Alabaster and this music - which we feel is best discovered by writer Emma Warren's words below - but in the meantime, quickly...

Listen to the lead single "Whisky Story Time"
+ preview & pre-order the album on LP/CD/Digital
via our Bandcamp page TODAY

((( photo by Chris Almeida )))

Alabster DePlume - To Cy & Lee...
by Emma Warren

Alabaster DePlume is not doing things properly, and this makes him very happy.

DePlume is a Manchester-born, London-based bandleader, composer, saxophonist, activist and orator. He’s a resident at the legendary London creative hub Total Refreshment Centre, a recording artist for the off-grid, Scottish Hebridean island label Lost Map, and now the latest arrival into Chicago-based International Anthem’s growing family of progressive musical explorationists. Whilst much of his music contains vocals – often whispered imperatives – this is a collection of instrumentals, drenched in feeling and recorded over four albums and eight earth years in cities across the UK.

The music of To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 contains naturally elegant orchestration wrapped around something visceral and primordial. Swirled inside the 11 pieces are shades of Japanese Min’yo folk, Celtic folk, the Ethio-jazz of saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya and hints of the pan-human ‘ancient music’ that sat underneath Arthur Russell’s melodies on First Thought, Best Thought. The music is filled with space, inspired, he says, by computer games and Japanese animation, particularly Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack for Studio Ghibli’s Castle In The Sky.

The record combines new compositions alongside bygone instrumentals and understated lullabies that feel like they’ve been picked from between the cracks of civilisation. These songs were collected from albums Copernicus, The Jester and Peach – under-the-radar records that preceded his critically acclaimed 2019 release The Corner of a Sphere. The new tunes feature Dan ‘Danalogue’ Leavers of The Comet Is Coming and Sarathy Korwar alongside a host of London’s finest musicians.

To Cy & Lee… has a suitably individual genesis. DePlume was working for Ordinary Lifestyles, a charity in North Manchester which supports people with disabilities to live in their own homes and to live fulfilling lives. Specifically, he was working with the titular Cy and Lee. His job was to get the guys socialising and he did this by making up songs with them. They’d make up melodies together, humming tunes in the house when they needed something calm, or when they were haring round the city in a battered car. DePlume would record these impromptu sessions in his phone, then go to the studio and use the material as starting points for songs.

He also ran music sessions for Cy, Lee and their friends. “People would focus on a central point, tuning in to one another. There are things we can’t put into words, which can be expressed with sound and music. These guys have fewer words than us, some of them have none. When we put some feelings into a music expression – that’s liberation.”

It’s a method he uses in live shows wherever possible, placing himself and the musicians in the round. The aim is to maximise the creative benefits that a community of players and listeners can bring to the music. It’s a collectivist and humanist approach to making music that sits underneath everything he does. This is music made for a reason, and those reasons include – to paraphrase some of the catchphrases he uses both on stage and in conversation – mixing people up, asking everyone to be as much themselves as they possibly can and the hardcore encouragement expressed in his most popular line, shouted back at him by audiences wherever he goes: “You’re doing very well!”

Practically, he purposefully brings together players of different skill levels and different backgrounds so they have to interact differently, placing them in unusual situations in which to record. “I wanted to destroy the idea of correct so we were playing it different ways for fun. We had a very magical time playing the tunes”. This is activism expressed through gorgeous music that breaks down barriers by encouraging that most powerful emotion: connectedness.

One source of these gorgeous instrumentals is Peach, an album that later bestowed a name upon legendary monthly sessions he’d run once he’d moved to London. The music was recorded in the middle of the room at Antwerp Mansion, around a big dinner cooked for 60 people.

“The dinner made the air vibrate in the way it did. We did it a certain way, for fun, getting people to shout out instructions – ‘make it like a hangover!’ ‘Make it like a barrel rolling down the ice!’ And we did it that way. You’ve got people eating and drinking around you and they might shout out anything. You can let go and respond.”

The two new pieces were recorded at London’s now-famous Total Refreshment Centre with Danalogue (on piano) Sarathy Korwar (drums), Chestnutt (of Snapped Ankles, on synth), Donna Thompson (voice) and James Howard (guitar). They had a day to record, and DePlume was in post-gig exhaustion. His saxophone was as battered as he was and was failing to play certain notes. “When something is broken or absent or missing, you go around it and that’s what makes it good,” he says. “Then it belongs to that moment. I want to make things that belong to the moment.”

DePlume’s politics might be more evident in vocal songs from his live repertoire when he’s reshaping advertising slogans into a call to arms or encouraging activism on “I Was Gonna Fight Fascism,” but his commitment to the cause is as palpable through the instrumentals of Cy & Lee... This is music designed to respond to what Russian revolutionary poet Mayakovsky described as a “social command.”

“I like the idea that we’re not just doing frivolous decoration. We’re doing work for society. I like to listen for what needs to be said.”

“Years ago I played a bit of sax in other people’s gigs. I realised I was waiting for someone to give me permission to do my own thing. I noticed that no-one will ever give you permission to do your awesome shit, because they don’t know what it is. It’s impossible for them to give you permission. Who gave me permission to talk to you like this? I gave myself fucking permission.”

Alabaster DePlume is not doing things properly. Hallelujah.

To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 comes in a handsome vinyl package that hybridizes elements from all 3 labels behind the release, featuring artwork & design from Total Refreshment Centre's resident visualist Raimund Wong, with additional design by our man Craig Hansen. The 140 gram LP (pressed by Pallas in Germany) features a Lost Map compass on the B side center sticker and comes inside a Total Refreshment Centre generic inner sleeve, while the insert sheet & obi that bands around the jacket are in classic IARC style.

And of course we have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only, which is 444 copies of marbled purple/blue Winter Hibiscus Colored Vinyl.

Order a copy via our Bandcamp page today!

Distribution via RedEye for
US, Canada, North & South America

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. 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, Japan, Australia, and ROW

This album will be distributed by our friends at K7 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!!!

ALABASTER DEPLUME @ CHURCH OF SOUND
LONDON FEBRUARY 14th 2020

Alabaster DePlume performs and celebrates the release of To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 on February 14th in London at St. James the Great church in Lower Clapton, as part of the legendary Church of Sound series.

These CoS shows tend to sell out quickly so we recommend you get your tickets here ASAP!

If that's not enough incentive... we've also pressed a very unique very limited edition color variant of the To Cy & Lee vinyl that will be available direct from Alabaster at this Church of Sound show only.

Get those tickets!