Legendary avant-garde master Scott Walker’s new album Bish Bosch is set for release on December 3 via 4AD, report Pitchfork.
It will be Walker’s first LP since 2006’s The Drift (though Walker did make an appearance on Bat For Lashes’ 2009 album Two Suns). The label hinted about the album a few months back, and now a release date and title have appeared on Amazon, accompanied by an untitled post on 4AD’s Tumblr, featuring the above image, presumably the album artwork.
UPDATE: More information has emerged about the album, with the label revealing that Walker has been writing new material since 2009, while he was scoring the Duet For One Voice ballet for ROH 2 at the Royal Opera House.
The label adds that Bish Bosch was recorded with co-producer Peter Walsh and Walker’s regular line-up of musicians Hugh Burns and James Stevenson on guitar, John Giblin on bass, Ian Thomas on drums and Alasdair Malloy on percussion, as well as receiving help from musical director Mark Warman, trumpeter Guy Barker and pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole and a full-blown orchestra for some tracks.
Head over to the album’s website and The Wire‘s contributing editor Rob Young has written an extensive preview, beginning with an explanation of the title:
"Bish (n. sl.), bitch
Bosch, Hieronymous (c. 1450–1516), Dutch painter
Bish bosh (sl.), job done, sorted
“I was thinking about making the title refer to a mythological, all-encompassing, giant woman artist.” Scott Walker"
It adds that Walker recorded the album with analogue and digital equipment simultaneously, cutting out the analogue for the silences, which apparently make up 20% of the album. Additionally, the songs jump about encyclopedic references with free abandon, particularly on ‘SDSS1416 + 13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)’, which references "two brown dwarves: one, the coldest sub-stellar body in the universe discovered so far; the other, Zercon, was a real-life Moorish jester at the fifth century court of Attila the Hun":
"’I was interested in this thing about someone trying to escape his situation – in this case Attila’s wooden palace, which he regards as an immense toilet – and achieve a kind of spiritual sovereignty, and a height beyond calculation. As the song moves forward he imagines himself at different stages of height: he imagines first that he escapes and finds himself surrounded by eagles; then there’s the mention of St Simon on his pillar; then he jumps to 1930s America where it’s become a flagpole-sitter…
"’At the end of the song he eventually becomes a Brown Dwarf, known as SDSS1416. As with the majority of my songs, it ends in failure, Like a brown dwarf, he freezes to death.’"
