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There's Water There

by New Pope

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1.
Consonants 17:24
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2.
Locus 04:10
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3.
A Bleeding Thing 11:18
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4.
NASA Update 07:26
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about

New Pope’s second album integrates musings about space and the future of life into the band’s distinctive blend of postpunk bytes, minimalist melancholy, and easy-yet-epic drone elements. Bobby and Clara started writing the record in 2017, thinking about the pros and cons of life on Mars, and recorded the two shorter tracks LOCUS and NASA UPDATE with Abe on accordion. In 2021, they collaborated with Michael Gallope (IE) to complete the album in a spurt, building large scale improvisations over the hijacked beats of the album’s two longer tracks.

CONSONANTS, The first track on Side A, interweaves Latham’s ethereal voice and Gallope’s jumpstarting melodies with Thacher’s jagged bass line and cloudy inharmonics. In LOCUS, Thacher and Latham pound keyboards in a futile attempt to keep time with the Rhythm Ace, while the accordion overlays sentimental missives in counterpoint with R2D2 like keyboard speak. A BLEEDING THING begins Side B, evoking an emptied out high school prom on an endless freeway drive. Tinseled vocals and pithy melodic fragments adorn an ever-present heartbeat while sweeping dissonance grows jarring, never reaching its denouemont. Central to the album’s mission, the final track NASA UPDATE is set en route to Mars. Latham’s insistent claim “so long, forever, there’s water there” is lost and found amidst a stubborn pulse, glissandi, and oceanic yearnings.

///

New Pope began in 2015 while Clara Latham and Robertson Thacher (Bobby Matador of Oneida) were watching Super Bowl XLIX – the first time they met. Clara, a composer working in devised-theater and punk rock, knew of Bobby from Oneida, and while Clara’s former band Starring was similarly Brooklyn-based, the two happened to be living less than a mile apart in Roslindale, a quiet, creative neighborhood in Boston. They began writing and playing together regularly in Bobby’s home studio, developing a practice based on minimalist compositional concepts and ecstatic/autonomic flow.

In July 2016 Michael Gallope joined Clara and Bobby for a weeklong recording session resulting in MEET THE NEW POPE (Shinkoyo, 2017). Mike played with Clara in Starring before becoming keyboardist and eventually manager for Sierra Leonean singer Janka Nabay (Luaka Bop) from 2010-2018. Gallope was also a longtime fan and friend of Oneida, a band that took a deep interest in long and experimental forms of repetition and improvisation. In 2021, Mike took time away from his current Minneapolis band IE to collaborate on THERE’S WATER THERE. Similar to the group’s earlier approach, these tracks developed through improvisation and continue to evolve live.

THERE’S WATER THERE also adds veteran accordionist Marié Abe to the band’s mix. Marié plays in a dizzying range of contexts that encompass free improvisation and various other vernacular musics from African to Balkan, Mediterranean, and South American traditions.
Among her many projects, Marié has performed with Fred Frith’s Gravity, Carla Kihlstedt’s Necessary Monsters, and Debo Band, the celebrated Boston-based Ethiopian groove collective.

credits

released June 2, 2023

Clara Latham (vocals, Guild Starfire, Telecaster, Pro-one synth); Robertson Thacher (Yamaha YC-30 organ, Pro-One synth, Rhythm Ace); Michael Gallope (Acetone Top-8 organ, Yamaha Reface DX synth, Casiotone MT-65, Roland 808), Marié Abe (accordion).

Recorded and Mixed by Kevin Micka at the Berwick. Additional vocals recorded by Elliott Sharp at Studio zOaR - NYC. Mastered by Colin Marston at Menegroth the Thousand Caves.
Cover photo by Lindsay Metivier.

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SHINKOYO / ARTIST POOL

SHINKOYO is the ectoplasm connecting a group of composers, visual artists, improvisers, instrument builders, thinkers, scholars and conceptual artists exploring a new synthesis of sound and vision.

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