Arthur King announces Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg) out April 16 on Dangerbird Records’ experimental imprint AKP Recordings
Accompanying immersive installation opens April 30th bringing video, audio, and spatial experience to Los Angeles
WATCH: Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg) trailer here
STREAM: “Laig Beach (excerpt)” here
photo credit: Aaron Farley
Los Angeles multidisciplinary art studio Arthur King have announced their next full-length record, Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg), will be released on April 16th, 2021. Along with the record comes an accompanying experimental documentary short film, and immersive audiovisual gallery exhibition which opens in Los Angeles on April 30, 2021.
Pre-order the album Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg)
Purchase a ticket to the immersive Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg) Gallery Exhibition
About Arthur King’s Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg):
Arthur King’s Changing Landscapes series can be defined by two factors: process and location. The process, or artistic methodology, is focused primarily on field recordings, and is the unchanging framework that allows the location to truly serve as the focus of the art. Because of this standardized approach, each project in the Changing Landscapes series has the location uniquely embedded into it. For this installment of the series, Arthur King traveled to the Isle of Eigg in Scotland.
Invited to team-up on a weeklong artist residency with Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, Arthur King and their newly-inaugurated member spent a week exploring the island, collecting a vast amount of photographic, audio, and video source material. Arthur King recorded the sounds of sheep, wind turbines, streams, waves, the local pub, rain, and wind. They pointed their cameras at souvenir shops, ferry landings, locals tending their gardens, electrical transformers, birds, and cows.
After a week far afield, the members united for an improvised performance. The performance brings the artists’ solitary experiences together in a collective collaboration. Gathered around manipulated video projections that were filmed throughout the week, the group performed at a small house on the island. In addition to more standard instrumentation, Arthur King focuses on utilizing audio material collected from the location, abstracting music in real-time from field recordings. Starting off simply with a single image, a lone field recording, they began to layer their collected artifacts on top of one another, finding associations and breathing life into emerging rhythms and melodies. The improvised performance also doubled as the recording session for the full-length album, creating a lasting musical composite of the remote sonic landscape of the Isle of Eigg.
The finished album opens with a shimmering tremolo synth pad as a medley of field recordings weave in and out. Half-intelligible conversations, a vague rustling, wind, a rooster’s cawing. The pulsing thud of a kick drum slowly creeps in like a heartbeat. The song culminates in a swirl of drum machine and guitar feedback before dissipating into the quiet, plaintive musings of a small church piano that Lytle stumbled across. Raindrops fall on the roof overhead. This palette reaches climactic heights in the album’s opus “Eigg Electric,” a fever pitch of industrial electronic percussion, synthetic drones, and crashing waves. The journey reaches its conclusion in “St. Franny’s,” where an elegiac string synth procession commences as birds chirp and sheep bah in the distance. The album closes with the reverberant trail of a lone dove’s call.
Arthur King
Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg)
(AKP Recordings)
[pre-order the LP here]
Street Date: April 16, 2021
Track List:
1. An Sgurr
2. Laig Beach
3. Aigg Electric
4. St. Franny’s
Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg) Gallery Exhibition opens at 3801 West Sunset Blvd. on April 30th (purchase tickets here). Gallery participants will enter a spatial interpretation of the Scottish Isle of Eigg. Brought to life through projected video, amplified audio and spatial design, participants will enact their own unique lucid dream experience through an amorphous soundscape and visual field. Participants will also be able to preview an experimental documentary short, which was filmed throughout the group’s time on the Isle of Eigg. Led by founding artist Peter Walker, Arthur King has gathered a team of artists, musicians, designers, sound engineers, and filmmakers to transform an office designed by architect Barbara Bestor into a pop-up, immersive gallery. The show runs through May 28th.
Changing Landscapes (Isle of Eigg) is the third installment of the Changing Landscapes series. Explore more at www.whoisarthurking.com
