New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Brighton avant-pop artist Nick Hudson announces the release of his new album 'Kanda Teenage Honey' on CD. Complementing an expansive 16-track collection, this 4-panel CD digipak comes with an 8-page full colour booklet containing artwork by Nick Hudson and Berdia Arabuli and photography by Carl Solomon, Jack Hubbell Rosene and Kenneth Anger.
With recent coverage in Billboard, this album was recorded largely in a huge former Soviet movie studio in Georgia under the shadow of the Ukraine war. Born of geographical explorations amidst musical territory that is hardly touched on, this record was previewed by the singles 'For My Silence' and 'Khevsureti'.
Mixed by and featuring Toby Driver of Kayo Dot, this album involves numerous talented guests, including Mogwai's
Stuart Braithwaite,
Stuart Dahlquist (Asva, Burning Witch, Sunn O))), Lizzy Carey (Bat For Lashes), Robert Wyatt collaborator Alfreda Benge,
Christopher Nell (legendary German performer and collaborator of US theatre visionary Robert Wilson), and soprano prodigy Poppy Efemey.
Recorded with Ilya Lukashev at Leno Studio and Sano Studio in Tbilisi, this album was mastered to analogue tape by Paul Pascoe (Barry Adamson, Beat Hotel, Sleaford Mods) at Church Road Studios in Hove, Hudson collaborates with some incredible Georgian musicians and his friend Seva, a Russian dissident who fled the FSB, having worked for Navalny. Hudson explains, "He contributes a poem narrating his thoughts on exile, through which I've layered field recordings of the recent Tbilisi and Paris protests, where many of us got tear-gassed."
"Russia attempted to invade Georgia most recently in 2008 and we've seen a vast influx of Russians fleeing the conflict and resettling in Tbilisi (which endures and suffers a pro-Russian government ideologically in conflict with most of its citizens). This geopolitical tension has inevitably made its way into the lyrical and musical texture of the record via the songs 'Hollow Man' and 'Sky Burial While Alive'. It also contains oligarch-hexing magic realism and a tribute to that vastly-neglected demographic - the old-school homosexual. Musically it encompasses art rock, black metal, ambient music, agitprop folk, charred goth rock, symphonic vastness and piano ballads -all infused with the energies and landscape of Georgia," says Nick Hudson.
In 2021, Hudson released his 'Font Of Human Fractures' album and the 'K69996ROMA:EP'. His band The Academy of Sun released their opus album 'The Quiet Earth' the year before. He's collaborated with such legends as Wayne Hussey (The Mission), Matthew Seligman (David Bowie, Tori Amos, Morrissey),
Massive Attack's Shara Nelson, plus
David Tibet (Current 93) and queercore icon GB Jones. His vast output also encompasses painting, film and a novel.
"As an album, 'Kanda Teenage Honey' explores ideas of preserving the sacred from the corrosively kleptocratic institutions of church and state: spiritual and material kleptocracy. The title itself refers to a very real preservation of innocence derived from a story I heard of a local villager whose teenage son was shot and killed: the father had his son's body preserved in honey. As such, there are secular hymns for peace and lucid stillness, tales of saints de-martyring themselves and falling in love free of judgement from anachronistic scrutiny - a thinly veiled parable of queer love. Two very close friends died within six months of each other during my first year in Georgia - there are requiems in the songs 'Archipelago' and 'Bardo', plus an acappella tribute to the Siberian husky that helped me grieve them during a retreat to the sublime mountainous region of 'Khevsureti' by the Chechen border, where despite being an ostensibly Orthodox country, pagan traditions are still passionately observed. I dreamed eighty-percent of 'Bardo' in the energised serenity of this beautiful region while mourning my friend Jesse. Patrick, honoured in 'Archipelago', was one of my earliest mentors and a dynamically brilliant pianist. They are much missed," explains Nick Hudson.
"'Ortolan' references the summer of 2021, when I fled to the same Isle Of Wight monastery at which Scott Walker had sought refuge in the sixties, as my mental and physical health hit a nadir and I was forced to leave the city I'd called home for twenty years. 'This Heat' refers to a return journey from a plague necropolis at the Chechen border, where giddily drunken park rangers piloting a 4X4 hurtled us passengers down a treacherous mountain pass and I briefly thought it might be the last song I'd ever write. Since then, I've come to learn that Georgians are some of the virtuosic drivers in the world, even drunk, and I need not have feared."
'Kanda Teenage Honey' is out now, available everywhere digitally, including Spotify, Apple
Music and Bandcamp, along with his new book 'The Land Exists So The Seas Don't Argue', showcasing a decade of lyrical output in five albums plus ephemera with a foreword by renowned Scottish author Chris Kelso.
TRACK LIST:
1. Khevsureti
2. For My Silence
3. Sky Burial While Alive
4. Hollow Man
5. This Heat
6. Hachiko
7. Archipelago
8. Bardo
9. Hunters
10. Unspent Youth
11. Seva
12. In Praise Of Venerable Jorge
13. Catherine In The Curate's Garden
14. Ortolan
15. Bad
Ghost Vs Good Boy
16. Danube Blues
