Clodagh Simonds’ collective Fovea Hex has released a new single’s worth of beautifully, chilly composition, perfect for adding an extra dose of cold to an unseasonably warm festive weekend.
Made available digitally this Wednesday December 21st, to coincide with the longest day of the year, I:I:XII Hail Hope finds Simonds working with long-running collaborator Michael Begg and a host of others. The results are lovely: ‘Lullaby (Debris Mix)’ is an ice cold winter torch song, a remix of a song originally put out last year, and ‘Carol’ is sharp, windswept ambient. Both will be available as a CD single from 1st January, and <a href="http://foveahex.bandcamp.com/album/i-i-xii-hail-hope
" target="out">you can listen/buy digital/buy the CD single at Fovea Hex’s Bandcamp site now.
Watch out for an in-depth interview with Simonds on the Quietus in the new year. In it, she talks about Hail Hope:
"I think most of us agree that we’re approaching a massive collapse of stability. It’s pretty obvious we’re reaching some kind of nadir, and that nobody is really at all certain what’s going on – we’re quite literally "in the dark". It’s happening on so many different levels. That could be scary and dismaying, but on the other hand, we could welcome it. I seem to be more or less celebrating it, and we’re releasing a cd single on January 1, called Hail Hope!. It’s remix of a recording from last year, which was download-only. There are two songs, a Carol and a Lullaby, and both of them are essentially about the fact that the darkest hour, the nadir, can be a good place – because that’s where you can find Hope.Â
"If everything is going along just fine, there’s no need for Hope to appear – it can’t be invoked artificially, just by thinking about it – it can’t exist where it’s not needed. It’s a real force, I believe, but it has to be dark for it to emerge. Surely that’s what lies behind the whole phenomenon of celebrating the darkest point, the midwinter point – you can’t go any darker, and you’ve arrived at a tipping point when the light is going to start returning.
"The Lullaby is something I wrote more than 20 years ago, when I was living in New York, and I used to rent a room with a piano in it by the hour, at the music school on East 11th Street. It was one of those rare pieces which emerged almost intact in the space of about fifteen minutes, and I felt it was one of the strangest things I’d ever written. I had no idea what to do with it, it didn’t seem to belong anywhere, or to fit with any of my other work. I didn’t at that point in my life feel I was anywhere near a nadir, I was very happy, and having a really good time, so it just made no sense to me, this bizarre little ironic-sounding, rather sinister lullaby. I never recorded it, and didn’t even play it to anybody for at least twelve years. When I did eventually run it past a couple of people, it was still sounding pretty peculiar, so I just put it away again.
"Last year, for the first time, I began to feel it was beginning to make sense – it began to ring a bell, just as we are arriving at this place of very deep uncertainty. Last year we released it as a download-only single, and Matt Waldron added some voices, and mixed it. This year, it feels more timely than ever, so we’ve added even more voices, Michael has remixed it, and we’re getting it pressed up right now – finally, it becomes solid!"
<a href="http://foveahex.bandcamp.com/" target-"out">More on Fovea Hex here.
