Former Wild Beasts co-founder Hayden Thorpe has announced Ness, his third solo album, which will be released September 27 via Domino. The album is based on Robert Macfarlane’s 2019 book of the same name, and Thorpe collaborated with the author on it.
As Domino notes: “Ness is inspired by Suffolk’s Orford Ness, the former Ministry of Defence weapons development site during both World Wars and the Cold War. Acquired by the National Trust in 1993 and left to re-wild, it to this day remains a place of paradox, mystery and constant evolution. Thorpe’s Ness is an ode to Orford Ness, the physical place and the book it inspired.”
“I feel like I’m getting to work with Dylan Thomas or James Joyce whose sing-song prose is only ever a melody away from music. Rob is an extremely generous collaborator, which likely explains the impressive cannon of music he has been involved in,” says Thorpe. “After hearing the sketches, he empowered me with free rein over the words.”
Macfarlane adds, “My philosophy on collaboration is always find the people who are making extraordinary work, and then just trust them. Hayden had a beautiful phrase that really sang with me that he heard the language and the place as a kind of desert music. I was absolutely knocked over by his way of being in the world; that deep calmness, quiet grace that is very sensitive, compassionate, kind, thoughtful.”
You can watch the video for pretty first single “They,” which was shot at Oxford Ness. Says Thorpe, “For me, it’s Ness in summertime. Full of the lightness and looseness of a blue afternoon. Musically speaking, it’s a riff on our experience of time. The interweaving polyrhythms and delays are a play on that.” Watch the video below.
NESS:
1. Merman
2. WTF Is That?
3. In The Green Chapel
4. It
5. Gull
6. He
7. Hagstone
8. She
9. Song Of The Bomb
10. They
11. V.
12. As
13. Closer Away