Announcing IARCS030: Alabaster DePlume - Visit Croatia

Released July 20, 2020
Available digitally via our Bandcamp page

Prominently sampled on Bon Iver’s recent track “PDLIF,” “Visit Croatia” is the title track from a new mini EP by Manchesterborn, London-based bandleader, composer, saxophonist, activist and orator Angus Fairbairn, aka Alabaster DePlume. It’s taken from the album To Cy & Lee Instrumentals Vol. 1 (available on vinyl and via digital services now) which was released to tremendous acclaim in February by International Anthem in collaboration with Scottish label Lost Map and our old buds Total Refreshment Centre in London. The artwork for the “Visit Croatia” mini EP was made in the Alaskan wilderness by IARC artist Jaimie Branch.

“One day, I realized I was waiting for someone to give me permission to make this,” says Alabaster of “Visit Croatia.” “And at the same time, I realized – no-one could ever give me permission to make this. Not because they thought it was a bad thing. But because they didn't know what it was. I can’t give you permission to do your awesome s**t. But someone else on this earth can. And I don’t mean Cy & Lee, and I don’t mean Bernie Sanders, and I don’t mean Karen either.”

Of the EP’s two previously unreleased tracks, “The Good Wine” and “Black Drifts,” Alabaster writes: “They are two of the pieces prepared around the release ‘Peach’. Created in (optional, pre-lockdown) isolation, with the aim of celebrating human connections through the sheer act of yearning for them. I love music, and words and performance, but it will never be as good as people. So, if I’m going to get my work done, I must sometimes go away from people. In the middle of a heavy gigging schedule I chose to take two cassette recorders somewhere I could be unreachable, for a week. I made many things there, including these tunes. It was winter. I chopped firewood. A chinook flew over my head. I gradually came to trust myself, to be sincere.”

The follow-up to Alabaster’s critically-acclaimed 2018 album The Corner of a Sphere, To Cy & Lee… draws together 11 different instrumental tracks, some old and some brand new, recorded over eight years in cities around the UK together with a coterie of collaborators, including Dan ‘Danalogue’ Leavers of The Comet Is Coming and Sarathy Korwar. A gently uplifting celebration of connectedness, community and that special way in which music can break down barriers, transcend language and empower expressions of the otherwise inexpressible, it’s a record drenched in pure, righteous humanity.

To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 is titled in tribute to Cy Lewis and Lee ‘Shredder’ Bowman, whom Alabaster met while working for Ordinary Lifestyles, a charity in Manchester which supports people with disabilities to live in their own homes and enjoy fulfilling lives. As an exercise in helping them learn to socialise better, Alabaster would devise and sing improvised vocal melodies with the two men, recording their impromptu sessions on his phone. He later began to use these scratch improvisations as templates for fully realised recordings.

“The music of To Cy & Lee contains naturally elegant orchestration wrapped around something visceral and primordial,” writes journalist and critic Emma Warren, author of the book Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre. “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 panhuman ‘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.”

“Named in honour of my original collaborators,” says Alabaster DePlume, “the two men I was employed to support, who taught me the best things I know. Cy, a percussionist and un-guessable alto, sign-language inventor and chef, owned the car we drove around while chanting out what became some of the best of these melodies. Lee, the famous rascal, the great showman of villainy, hero of dissent and one of the bravest men I know, curated this material, even as it was written, through his personal requirements of what he found helpful, music-wise, to stay at least a little bit calm, in this world of demands, threats and madness.

“These tunes were not composed in response to the lives of my friends Cy and Lee, they are products of the times we had, while supporting each other through difficulties, and learning from one-another, about courage, people, and life. They’re an impression of what we found was needed, to exist, and a celebration of communication that’s free from the demands of words.”