On the verge of a major month-long headlining tour of the EU and UK, Alabaster DePlume shares a new single, “Naked Like Water,” featuring Donna Thompson, drummer/vocalist and member of his touring ensemble. It’s the third and final preview from his forthcoming album Come With Fierce Grace (out September 8th on International Anthem).
“Naked Like Water” was recorded late in a two-week run of sessions, with the band deeply locked in, existing in a pure, trusting, unselfconscious zone. Donna Thompson’s voice takes the lead here, coaxing the group out of a kosmische-meets-spaghetti-western lockstep and into a freer, open, and unknown space. The title is taken from a poem in Alabaster’s 2022 album GOLD:
I will not be safe. I will be naked like water. It’s the best place to be. It’s the worst place to be. It’s where we are anyway. I will be there. I am there. I will be.
About the single, Donna Thompson says:
whilst we were making this music a lot of different stories and energies were swapped. I feel like this particular moment in the session was about choosing to develop our decisions both on and off the tape and it was like a summoning to say ‘Right, this is where we go next’, something that is not always an available statement when dealing in our day to day.
UK & EU DATES
19 Aug 2023 – Buckinghamshire, UK @ Stowaway
20 Aug 2023 – Brecon Beacons, Wales @ GreenMan
7-Nov-2023 – Leeds, UK @ Brudenell Social Club
8-Nov-2023 – Manchester, UK @ Band On The Wall
9-Nov-2023 – Nottingham, UK @ Metronome
10-Nov-2023 – London, UK @ KOKO, Pitchfork Music Festival
11-Nov-2023 – Bristol, UK @ Strange Brew
12-Nov-2023 – Brighton, UK @ Chalk
ABOUT THE RECORD
In order to record the compositions in his critically-acclaimed 2022 release GOLD, Alabaster DePlume instilled a culture of creativity by leading his ensembles in spontaneous composition and development. To allow them to be present, he kept the musicians constantly creating across several weeks of sessions at London creative hub Total Refreshment Centre. This process resulted in an abundance of material, much more than he could fit onto the initial double LP. After spending most of 2022 touring in support of GOLD, Alabaster spent much of early 2023 revisiting the additional material from those Total Refreshment Centre sessions – adding, subtracting, producing and arranging – resulting in an entirely new album, Come With Fierce Grace.
Come With Fierce Grace is an album made of authentic and unstipulated – yet welcomed – human interaction. It is for the most part an album of instrumentals, with exception of a few vocal features by Momoko Gill (aka MettaShiba), Falle Nioke, and Donna Thompson. However the instrumentals on this album are much more embryonic and unfiltered than the lush orchestrations heard on Alabaster’s breakout 2020 album To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1. Come With Fierce Grace is perhaps the most raw and candid portrait of Alabaster’s creative compositional process we’ve yet to hear, as he’s captured vividly in the room with his collaborators – stretching, exploring, working to deepen and expand the emotions underlying his melodic and poetic frameworks. Regarding the process, Alabaster cites a similarity to how elements in nature contribute to shared work and beauty without a collective motive – a bee’s own motives result in the delivery of pollen. As he says: “The great thing wants to happen, let us allow it to happen.”
Regarding the origin of the album’s name: On his first trip to perform in the US in March 2022, Alabaster collected messages from individuals, as he asked them if there is anything they would like him to share with his audiences. One message (from a person who preferred to remain anonymous) asked Alabaster to encourage people to “come with fierce grace.”