Sonic Youth co-founder Thurston Moore and Bonner Kramer, producer for Low and Will Oldham, have announced They Came Like Swallows — Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza. The album will be released May 1st and lead single “Urn Burial” is out now.
“I had composed and recorded a few pieces at my home studio over the course of a couple weeks,” Kramer said in a statement. “Thurston was spending the winter in South Florida, so I flew down and spent a few days recording his guitar parts in his home there. Watching him spontaneously compose his parts was pretty astonishing, to say the least. Once we’d finished working on those pieces, we began improvising and following wherever the music pointed us, and another few pieces were born.”
Moore added that the project “should exist as a prayer to the war-torn souls of the families of Palestine continually decimated by the brutality of genocide. We agreed beyond words to offer our music as a sonic activism and as a beneficent energy. This album is our duo-exchange for human dignity, it is our soul music for any semblance of a peaceful planet.”
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First offering “Urn Burial” is a wordless experiment inspired by John Cale and Terry Riley. It comes with a music video directed by Kramer, and you can check it out below.
The tracklist for They Came Like Swallows — Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza is full of literary references. They Came Like Swallows is the name of a 1937 book about a family torn apart by the 1918 flu epidemic. Another track, “The Redness in the West,” seems to reference the subtitle of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Urn Burial is both a 1987 sci-fi novel and a well-known 1658 overview of funereal customs. Pre-orders for the album are ongoing.
They Came Like Swallows – Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza Tracklist:
01. Urn Burial
02. The Redness in the West
03. The Third Migration
04. They Came Like Swallows
05. The Living Theater
06. The Oceans Are Crying
07. Insight
They Came Like Swallows – Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza Artwork:
