Poet Rick Holland and producer Old Man Diode are set to release a new collaborative album, The King Krill (artwork above), out on March 26 via WW Records – have a watch of the video for single ‘Open Blue’ featuring Beth Rowley below:
The track’s scattershot, polyrhythmic beats and new wave synth embellishments, all reverberating within acres of hard-edged space, are a good preview of what to expect from the record.
With Old Man Diode producing the music, Holland, who worked with Brian Eno on 2011’s Drums Between The Bells LP and Panic Of Looking EP, wrote the words in collaboration with a cast of vocalists, including Chris James of Stateless, Roni Size associate Onallee, Andrew Plummer and IamFYA. He and OMD told us a bit more about the album, with the video for the Chris James track ‘Still Silver’ following:
How did you first come to work together?
Rick Holland: I met him after becoming friends with a mindblowing musician called Wayne Eagle (now of IROK and Crystal Xulu). Old Man Diode was called Jo back then, and was studying music. I was introduced to a lot of very talented young musicians all at once and we all had seventeen different projects on the go at once. One of them was the show I first met Brian Eno at. Jo and I went on to meet up in various musical set ups over the following years, and decided in 2010 to make this album.
Could you give us a bit of background behind the words you’ve written for the album?
RH: The words were either written by me in response to OMD’s beats, and then interpreted and selected by the featured singer, or written together with the featured singer from conversations we had during recording in the studio. In these ways every track was a three way writing process. Some very clear threads emerged after the event, but the words were always just pertinent to the time the track was being written and recorded, over two and a bit years.
Were there any specific influences you were looking to, either poetically, musically or both?
Old Man Diode: A lot of the influences came from the artists we worked with, so it is a genuine mixture of styles and approaches. It was real time influences at work in live collaboration. That is what is so exciting about the project.
It is interesting that so much that was oceanic emerged, and senses of mass culture and disconnect or dislocation, somehow that experience exists between us, rather than one person putting it in.
