Zach Condon has announced a new Beirut, album A Study of Losses, which will be out April 18 via his own Pompeii Records. The album was commissioned by the Swedish contemporary circus Kompani Giraff and is an 18-song adaptation of Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, the novel by German author Judith Schalansky, and musically takes inspiration from Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs.
The new single from the album “Guericke’s Unicorn” and you can hear that Magnetic Fields inspiration in the gentle, pulsing, low-fi synthpop sounds he’s created. “Guericke’s unicorn is a supposed reconstruction of a fossil unicorn which was actually created from the bones of a bunch of different animals like the wooly mammoth and a narwhal,” says Condon. “It’s worth looking up the image.”
He adds, “I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of bizarre chapters and odd side notes of history, and I wanted to reflect the unorthodox / eccentric madness of that ‘unicorn’ in a more playful song that is somewhat disjointed from the rest of the album. I think my music can have that disjointed / chaotic tendency in general, but with the whole album otherwise being somewhat uniformly baroque inspired, ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’ really makes for an outlier on this record, having its origin in an old modular synth experiment of mine.”
The video for “Guericke’s Unicorn” features Kompani Giraff in all their acrobatic glory, and you can watch that below.
Beirut has EU/UK tour dates in May and those are listed below.
A Study of Losses
Disappearances and Losses
Forest Encyclopedia
Oceanus Procellarum
Villa Sacchetti
Mare Crisium
Garbo’s Face
Mare Imbrium
Tuanaki Atoll
Mare Serenitatis
Guericke’s Unicorn
Mare Humorum
Sappho’s Poems
Ghost Train
Caspian Tiger
Mani’s 7 Books
Moon Voyager
Mare Nectaris
Mare Tranquillitatis
Beirut Tour Dates
May 1 – Utrecht, Netherlands – TivoliVredenburg – Grote Zaal
May 2 – Utrecht, Netherlands – TivoliVredenburg – Grote Zaal
May 5 – Brussels, Belgium – Cirque Royal
May 6 – Brussels, Belgium – Cirque Royal
May 8 – London, UK – O2 Academy Brixton
May 9 – London, UK – Troxy