Dude, remember chilly-ass last fall when we were super on the gloom-and-doom BALL in telling you all about the impending release of Swans guitarist and spooky-atmospherics-conjurer-extraordinaire Normal Westberg’s solo album on the Room 40 label?
Well… good, because like ALL OF THAT STUFF basically re-applies. Except this year, it pertains to ANOTHER solo record from the “sprawling and restless” mind of Mr. Westberg. This one’s called MRI, and it’ll cringe and writhe in the cool, bright light of day on April 1, 2016 when Room 40 re-releases it on the “sprawling and restless” formats of CD and digital.
Initially recorded back in the much sunnier, halcyon days of 2012 (when Mitt Romney was scarier than Donald Trump, and gas was a thousand dollars a gallon, like it oughta cost!) and self-released by Westberg, apparently the record just really needed to wait until 2016 for the proper dystopian context to come along. It’s comprised of “a collection of reductive rolling guitar pieces that are embedded strongly in the American Minimalism tradition,” but this new edition (which has also been “newly mastered” and “post-produced” to match the doom-and-gloom of our shitty lives in 2016) also features a new composition, “Lost Mine,” which was recorded in 2015 “as an echo of the processes that led to the original recordings.”
While we wait for the new/semi-new goods, though, treat your bleak self to this chilly offering from last year’s album, and check out the tracklisting down below. Oh, also — Westberg’ll be playing several shows in Australia in April, which marks his first solo tour outside North America. You might wanna go see him play, even if you don’t live there, since gas is so eerily, cataclysmically cheap and all.
MRI tracklisting:
01. MRI (15:35)
02. 410 Stairs (20:23)
03. Lost Mine (18:26)
Australian dates:
04.14.16 - Brisbane, AU - MONO.21 - Institute of Modern Art
04.16.16 - Melbourne, AU - Monash University Museum of Art
04.17.16 - Perth, AU - Babuskha Leederville
More about: Norman Westberg, Swans
