New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Alex Henry Foster shared the exclusive stream of his upcoming LP, Windows In The Sky via Glide, praising, "A riveting collage of soundscapes and narratively styled instrumentals that make for its own unique brand of symphonic therapy. Foster allows the listener to dive in headfirst and let this spine-tingling musical journey fill the void and answers questions."
Foster will be performing in a 60-minute special tomorrow, May 1st, at 9AM in a live performance from The
Upper Room Studio. The virtual concert was featured in NPR's list of live virtual concerts during the coronavirus crisis.
Readying their international debut with the ADISQ & iTunes Canada Top charting album "Windows in the Sky" on May 1st, Alex Henry Foster & the Long
Shadows are not backing down on releasing their opus, which was due out earlier this year, and needed to be postponed because of the current crisis.
Foster never shied from being at the avant-garde, from the beginning of Your Favorite Enemies when broadcasting on Myspace before YouTube existed, up to writing his album in self-isolation following the passing of his father back in 2016, when we didn't know what it meant as much as we do now.
Following the significant response for his latest single "The Hunter (By the Seaside Window)" released with a live broadcast of a performance and with Alex being fairly aware of the current world state of emergency, he decided to go with an official album launch through social media:
"I was wondering if I should do that live broadcast, but after talking with a lot of my friends, they told me how important it is to keep on embracing life regardless of what's going on. I'm very supportive and sensitive to all who may have lost loved ones, and I know that people are struggling with losing their jobs and that there's a lot of confusion right now, so I thought it would be my way to bring a little bit of brightness and light through it all, with a very modest and humble intent." - Alex
His last single reached 100k views over its first three days of being released. Alex Henry Foster's short film "The Hunter (By The Sea Side Window)" premiered with American Songwriter and included an exclusive interview on the upcoming album.
On the video Foster shared, "I wanted to experience the bewilderment of losing control on the narrative of my own work and wanted to explore the freedom that comes with pure creative abandonment," says Foster of the piece." The interview also included topics on COVID19, exiling to Tangier, Windows In The Sky, mental health and more.
Windows in the Sky is the first solo album from Alex Henry Foster, lead singer and songwriter for the Juno Awards nominee post-rock band, Your Favorite Enemies.
In the likes of Radiohead, Swans,
Mogwai and Nick Cave, AHF's delicate and stormy musical journey embodies a singular mix of art rock, shoegaze, noise, psych and krautrock, and is defined by a blend of intimate voicing and introspective spoken poetry. It is an 8-track cinematic voyage that incarnates a distorted voice trying to make sense of its fading echoes, exuding the last pieces of its self-preservative make-believes, trying to hold onto the deceptive views of every shadowing ghosts reflections it is fighting to keep alive, in order to suppress the painful image of the person it might have become, freed from the distorted narrative it was bound to in order to avoid suffering any longer.
Foster describes his first solo project as a contemplative and reflective landscape where purposelessness, vulnerability and disarray press for an honest examination of the true character of your personal spirituality, the distress of your life's failures and the everlasting sense of regret that keeps on blooming as you try to survive the implacable bewilderment of loss and the mourning reality of your own impermanent existence.
"For years, I've been looking for deep personal emotions to be channeled within the safe and elusive context of a band's dynamic, so I wouldn't have to be exposed through their real colors, wouldn't have to assume any intimate implication. I simply hid behind the thick curtain of distant screams and uprising noises. It's only when my father passed and that I slowly started to work on the songs that would ultimately define the spirit of "Windows in the Sky" that I had to admit that unless I would be willing to tear that bleak veil of fears down, I wouldn't be able to let any of those vivid emotions be, wouldn't be able to free them from my exultant struggle to stand into the light... and therefore to have my depressive soul emancipated through the honest embracement of those hidden emotions... one glimmer at the time... which is exactly how the album would finally come to life."
Entirely recorded in early 2018 at the
Upper Room Studio - Your Favorite Enemies' Catholic church turned professional recording studio facility - Foster invited his bandmates to contribute to the final stage of a few songs' musical arrangements as he concluded the album's self-production.
Windows in the Sky was made available in Canada on November 9, 2018, through Hopeful Tragedy Records / Sony
Music Entertainment / The Orchard.
