SHARDS
Release debut single
Summer Sickness
Announce their debut album Find Sound
Released 30 August on Erased Tapes
Find Sound is the debut record from Shards, a London based vocal group led by singer, composer and producer Kieran Brunt. Combining voices, synths and percussion, Find Sound is an astonishing exploration of the human voice; using the concepts of sound and light as simple metaphors for gaining understanding. The album’s pieces are intended to be miniature sonic paintings, with each adding to an overall picture of the emotional confusion of early adulthood: the uncertainty, the excitement, the terror and relief.
pre order Find Sound here
Summer Sickness is the debut single from the group, it explores feeling anxious and depressed whilst everyone around you is seemingly happy and smiling. The unrelenting arpeggiated synth line seems upbeat and positive on the surface, but becomes unsettling and jarring on closer inspection; the harmonies are mostly lush but occasionally discordant.
| Brunt on the track: “I started with the idea of writing a version of the type of song you’d hear at the start of a teen movie, but with a jarring and unsettling feeling bubbling beneath the surface. I love songs which are superficially upbeat and positive, but reveal a darkness and uncertainty upon closer inspection. MIA is one of my favourites for this, an artist who slipped serious messages into the pop mainstream by using bright, colourful sounds and images as a disguise.” |
After collaborating with Terry Riley in 2016, Brunt was asked by the Barbican to form a choral group for Nils Frahm’s Possibly Colliding festival that summer. Following the success of the shows, Frahm invited Brunt to join him in Berlin to collaborate on choral arrangements for his recent album All Melody. Shards have since gone on to collaborate with other notable artists, including Michael Price on his recent LP Tender Symmetry.
Each of the singers in Shards brings a very distinctive musical personality to the group, something which Brunt was eager to emphasise on their debut record. Rather than aiming for a seamless blend or absolute precision when recording, the differences between voices has been intentionally highlighted — celebrating their unique textures and inviting the listener to hear their minutest details up-close.
Shards is: Kieran Brunt, Lucy Cronin, Sarah Latto, Bethany Horak-Hallett, Kate Huggett, Chris Huggon, Jack Lawrence-Jones, Rose Martin, Augustus Perkins Ray, Oli Martin-Smith, Josephine Stephenson and Héloïse Werner.
No Comments