New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ AMP Publicity) Hiatus Feat. Shura: We Can Be
Ghosts Now, 29th April 2013We Can Be
Ghosts Now is producer Hiatus' anticipated reunion with singer-songwriter Shura, whose ethereal vocals became a beacon for bedroom electronica fans the world over after the pair released their lament to lost love, Fortune's Fool, in 2011.
WCBGN, set to a stunning video by award-winning stop-motion animator Tom Jobbins, is a more intricate and uptempo track than its predecessor - a slowly building structure of drifting strings, rusting music boxes and distant piano lines, the whole lot held in place by an abstract shuffle of percussion and eventually collapsing in a crescendo of rumbling bass.
And collapsing structures are a running theme in WCBGN, a track that from its first line - 'Bury everything you own on a hill in Peckham Rye' - conjures up images of London in the grips of an attack: roads blocked by fleeing cars, rivers running black and red, tracer fire scarring the sky.
Yet this is also a love song: the story of a couple trying to find each other amid the carnage of an urban end of days, and a project more than ten years in the making for Hiatus - real name Cyrus Shahrad - who wrote the lyrics.
"I've been returning to the subject of
September 11th in my writing and my music since the event itself," he says. "Trying to artistically represent the scale of that day's destruction is futile given the wealth of documentary footage, which is too powerful to allow for creative interpretation. But I do think there's a place for exploring the human stories that unfolded in the dust cloud, especially those guided by love on a day remembered largely as an act of overwhelming hate."
Shura had already collaborated with Hiatus on Tiny Doors, written to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the attacks in 2011, and felt a kinship with WCBGN from the start.
"I remember when Cyrus first played me the 20-second loop that eventually became the track," she says. "Even then I was haunted by this hypnotic beat and the sense of something altogether more mournful at its core. It's a song as sparse as it is rich, and the imagery of those two former lovers, now leading separate lives, finding each other again amid the chaos and collapse of everything they once knew… that's something I find irrevocably moving."
PRAISE FOR HIATUS
"I'm down."
James Lavelle
"A truly gorgeous album of uplifting electronica." Eddy Temple-Morris
"An unbroken wave of haunting electronica that allows you to forget - albeit briefly - that people like
James Blunt walk the earth." The Stool Pigeon
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• Insurrection (feat. Linton Kwesi Johnson) voted Steve Lamacq's single of the week on 6Music in March 2011, and used in Kibwe Tavares' futuristic re-imagining of the riots that inspired it, Robots Of Brixton, which premiered on Channel 4: https://bit.ly/WyATjD
• Hiatus asked to score Skateistan, an award-winning documentary on an Afghan charity helping kids escape conflict and poverty through skateboarding: https://bit.ly/VltUfj
• Hiatus and Shura booked to play gigs from London's
Cargo to Croatia's Soundwave festival and Symbiosis Eclipse in the Nevada desert, where they performed on the main stage; the pair also played live on BBC London's Late Show with
Joanne Good.
• Hiatus called in to remix artists including
David Lynch, alt rockers Spokes and breaking electro-folk outfit Mt Wolf; Hiatus' own-tracks repurposed by producers as wide-ranging as post-dubstep don Clubroot, DnB legend Ray Keith and techno prodigy Max Cooper.
• Hiatus' tracks played on BBC
Radio 1 (Annie Nightingale), 6Music (Huey Morgan, Tom Robinson, Nemone, Steve Lamacq) and XFM (Eddy Temple-Morris, who billed Hiatus as one of his rising stars for 2013 and had him put together a 20-minute spotlight mix).
• Video for We Can Be
Ghosts Now created by Tom Jobbins, a stop motion animation director whose debut feature My Face Is In Space was feted by the London, Leeds and Edinburgh film festivals.
• B-side to We Can Be
Ghosts Now, Shenidan (feat. Dariush and Hayedeh), to be featured on a compilation curated by Eddy Temple-Morris to raise money for research into tinnitus, a hearing condition that Hiatus suffers from.
• Over a 1.5 million combined YouTube and Soundcloud views and counting.
TRACKLISTING
1. We Can Be
Ghosts Now (feat. Shura)
