London-based poet, singer and saxophonist Alabaster DePlume will be celebrating the launch of new double album GOLD, the anticipated follow-up to 2020’s acclaimed ‘To Cy & Lee’, at Village Underground on Sunday 1 May. The great players who feature on this unique new album will join Alabaster, fresh back from his US tour, for two full sets of live music, with special DJs TBA, on this occasion that can never be repeated or imitated.
Earlier this month, Alabaster DePlume shared a two-song lead single(s): “Don’t Forget You’re Precious” b/w “The Sound of My Feet on this Earth is a Song To Your Spirit” and which has received support from the likes of Pitchfork, Stereogum, Clash, Vinyl Factory, Mary Anne Hobbs, Gilles Peterson and Jamie Cullum.
GOLD (out April 1 via International Anthem, Lost Map & Total Refreshment Centre) is the follow-up to Alabaster DePlume’s widely-acclaimed, 2020-released cinematic instrumental LP To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1, introduces the world to the artist’s truest self. That is… though DePlume’s now known across the globe as the saxophonist who created that collection of wonderful, wordless music, he’s most known to fervent fans in his home zone of London, UK, as an outspoken poet and orator, beloved for his inspiring words of encouragement and sing-a-long-able songs about vulnerability, humanity, and courage.
Recorded across 2 weeks at London’s legendary Total Refreshment Centre, GOLD is a sprawling double album that finds DePlume expressing both sides of his artistic character beautifully: (1) an articulate singer and songwriter who invokes the melodious crooning of Donovan as much as Devendra Banhart or Syd Barrett, whose tunes are almost like mini-sermons, full of existential comedy and spiritual enlightenment; and (2) a brilliant composer of simple, soothing, and viscerally nourishing instrumental melodies, with a gift for expanding them into intrepid collective improvisations, led by a delicate and distinguished saxophone tone that conjures the fluttery sweetness of the great Ethiopique Getatchew Mekurya.