MODERN NATURE
Announce UK headline tour in September
Debut album, How To Live, due 23rd August on Bella Union
Watch the video for new single, “Peradam”
Having recently announced the release of their debut album How To Live, available 23rd August via Bella Union, and shared a video to lead track “Peradam”, Modern Nature have today announced news of a UK headline tour in September. The band will also be performing at festivals including Port Eliot, Green Man and Freakender over the next few months. Upcoming live info below:
Friday 26th July – Cornwall – Port Eliot Festival
Sunday 18th August – Brecon Beacons – Green Man Festival
Friday 13th September – Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
Saturday 14th September – Flintshire – The Good Life Experience
Sunday 15th September – Glasgow – Freakender Festival
Tuesday 17th September – Manchester – YES
Wednesday 18th September – Liverpool – The Shipping Forecast
Thursday 19th September – London – The Courtyard Theatre
Friday 20th September – Margate – Elsewhere
Saturday 21st September – Bristol – Louisiana
The city and the country both have distinct, vibrant energies – but there’s something happening in between, too. As factories give way to fields, and highways drift into gravelly roads, the friction can be palpable, the aura electric. The lines between city and country were on Jack Cooper and Will Young’s minds when they named their new band Modern Nature. They took the phrase from the diaries of filmmaker Derek Jarman, written on the coast of Kent in his Dungeness cottage. Visiting Jarman’s home, Cooper was struck by what he calls a “weird mix of urban and rural” – such as the way a nuclear power station sits next to open grasslands. On Modern Nature’s debut album, How to Live, urban and rural cross into each other. Plaintive cello strains melt into motorik beats. Pastoral field recordings drift through looping guitar figures. Rising melodies shine with reflective saxophone accents, placing the record somewhere between the subtle mediations of Talk Talk, the stirring folk of Anne Briggs and the atmoshperic waves of Harmonia.
Throughout this continuous work, where no song ever really seems to end, there’s an indelible feeling of constant forward motion. It’s as if the band is laying down a railway and riding it simultaneously, and you can hear all kinds of landscapes passing by. The endless feel of How to Live was inspired by Cooper’s experience making his 2017 solo album Sandgrown. It was the first time he made a record with a defined theme – a suite of songs about his hometown of Blackpool – and imposing a narrative framework turned out to be refreshingly liberating. “When I started thinking about a new project,” he recalls, “going back to making an album of unconnected songs seemed as strange as making a movie with completely unconnected scenes.” As he began writing songs, Cooper was also tuning to the vibes of Earth Loop, an instrumental solo album by BEAK>’s Will Young (under the name Moon Gangs). For a long time, Cooper had hoped to work more with Young, who almost joined his first band, Mazes, and was in the touring version of his next group, Ultimate Painting. So he decided now was finally the time, as he puts it, “to make good on hundreds of late night ‘we should really do music together’ conversations.” “Over the next few weeks I started sending Will songs, and we began meeting up, working on ideas and formulating the bigger picture as it were,” Cooper recalls. “Approaching the album as a film or play made complete sense, and from that came the idea to have a very defined narrative, reoccurring themes and chord progressions, field recordings and a set palette of instruments and sounds. Each song came with pages and pages of notes, musical references, films, books, places, words and feelings.”
The richness of the ideas in these songs is matched by the resonance of the music. Cooper and Young’s organic compositions gain muscle through the thoughtful cello of Rupert Gillett, the insistent drumming of Aaron Neveu (of compatriot outfit Woods), and the expressive saxophone of Jeff Tobias, from Brooklyn jazz/rock juggernaut Sunwatchers. Each track on How to Live evolved as these creative forces joined the group, and it shows. The entire album courses with both precision and vitality, and is a work of surprising layers and limitless depths. Modern Nature may have been inspired by the line between urban and rural, but with How To Live they’ve gone a step further, and created their own complete world.
How To Live will be released 23rd August via Bella Union and is available to preorder here.
How To Live tracklist: 1. Bloom 2. Footsteps 3. Turbulence 4. Criminals 5. Seance 6. Nightmares 7. Peradam 8. Oracle 9. Nature 10. Devotee
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