A work of art, situated between experimental electronic music and avant-garde. The crowning glory of an album trilogy with an over-theme that couldn’t fit better into our time – change and transformation.
Following the celebrated solo albums “Je suis le Ténébreux” (2016) and “Paradise Lost” (2018) by Christopher James Chaplin, the London-based avant-garde musician and composer will release his third solo album “M” on June 19, 2020. It’s an epic and multi-layered composition for which Chaplin once again draws on age-old texts, whose power of content is timeless. For this special album project, he once more brought top-class guest artists into his studio: BRIT Award winner Finley Quaye, the exceptional Austrian musician and songwriter Mira Lu Kovacs and acclaimed artist and performer Aurelia Thierree.
Christopher Chaplin:
The M album is about change. The letter “M” refers to the Hebrew letter Mem, which, in the alphabet of Kabbalah, points to the origin of many words such as: mother, womb, birth, water, flood, death; and through its gematria (the number 4), Mem is linked to quarantine and transformation. The album consists of three tracks containing verses taken from three different poems: Metamorphosis by Ovid, Full Fathom Five by Shakespeare, and Mutability by Shelley.
I’ve been really fortunate, during the writing of this album, to have met Finley Quaye. It resulted in him contributing so invaluably to the track Metamorphosis. I’ve also been thrilled to feature the wonderful singing voice of Mira Lu Kovacs in the track A Sea Change as well as having Carl Michael von Hausswolff’s permission to use a sample from his sonic extraction of the HIV virus DNA chain. In the third and final track, Mutability, I am joined by Aurelia Thierree in speaking some lines from Percy Shelley’s poem of the same title. Its last line of that poem was the catalyst for this whole M album: ‘Nought may endure but Mutability.’
The British avant-garde composer and experimental artist Christopher James Chaplin studied piano in Vevey (Switzerland) before moving to London in the early 1980s.
In 2009, he was invited by Michael Martinek and his label Fabrique Records to work with the artist Kava on “Seven Echoes“ – a concept album released and first presented live at the art brut museum gugging in Lower Austria. There he encountered the pioneer of electronic music Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster, Harmonia), who later invited Christopher to participate in a “Late Junction” live session for BBC Radio 3. The result of this second collaboration eventually led to another album – “King of Hearts”.
In the following years, Chaplin and Roedelius performed all over the world: mostly improvised performances with Roedelius on piano and electronics and Chaplin on synthesizers and orchestral samples.